yours, mine, and ours

So many years ago, when making a documentary of our life seemed like such a good idea, our investor (B3*) -- who came up with the idea in the first place after seeing a documentary on iconic lesbian folk singer and Tupperware lady, Phranc -- bought us all the makin's for the movie, cameras, editing equipment, mini-DV tapes, plane tickets to LA for a weekend class in Final Cut Pro.

After the experiment of documenting our lives was over, the idea of working on the editing of the film seemed to me akin to getting a full-body sea salt scrub by a Russian woman after falling asleep naked on the beach for two hours on the sunniest of days. In other words, I didn't want to have anything to do with it. (Plus, it was a one-person job.) S1 took the footage and all of the equipment and went to New Jersey and spent months just logging the 300+ hours of footage; I went to Florida with the van we'd bought because that seemed like the most logical thing to do, though I grew to hate it because things kept going wrong and I was responsible for paying to get it fixed as well as the monthly payment, which was something like $460. I was living off of credit cards, and Steven was living on a budget provided by B3.

Eventually, S1 took the van off my hands and was able to sell it to a band in San Francisco, but I still haven't recovered from the financial disaster our life together had become during living on the road in a travel trailer with the Act and the time after that when I didn't know what I was doing, blinded by an early mid-life depression, sinking deeper into debt with no co-commiserator.

When I was in Nashville, because he didn't need it, S1 sent me the Apple laptop (the first of the computers B3 bought for the editing of the film; eventually a desktop had to be bought because the documentary was too big a project to create on a laptop). I thought I would use it, but I didn't really; I stored it somewhere, moved a couple of times, and when I left Nashville for Austin, I couldn't find it and eventually decided it had been stolen. The original dress I wore in the Act, as well as other costumes, had definitely been stolen; the guy I lived with had a lot of shady characters for friends, cross-dressing crystal meth addicts with AIDS (seriously), so it seemed likely that that was where the computer and costumes went. However, the last time S1 and I visited Nashville, L3 -- with whom I lived first in Nashville -- said, "I found your laptop computer!" She had done some home remodeling and it showed up in a bedside table.

I said all that to say this:
I just started a volunteer job for a theater company here, and the sound designer is going out of town and was trying to find another Apple laptop to put the sounds on for the run of the show. I asked S1 if it was okay if I used the laptop B3 bought us. He said yes, "just bring it home every night." This morning he asked how it went last night at the dress rehearsal and I told him about the technical issues mostly related with the two projectors I'm running (I'm not doing anything with the laptop, just volunteering it for the run). I said something to S1 along the lines of "Our computer worked fine; the program the sound designer put onto it is called QLab... maybe it'll be useful down the road."

S1 is going to school to get his undergraduate degree, and then plans to go to film school. I'm sure he'll be using all of this equipment and more. But it gave me a weird feeling in the next moment when he said something using the phrase "my computer," meaning the laptop. I bristled internally, like he had excluded me in some way, from ownership of something that was originally bought for us, or maybe from ownership of the life we had together. I don't know.

I sat with the discomfort for a while, thought I should say something to S1 -- What, that it hurt my feelings? -- and decided to just let it be. (He'll read this blog eventually, so he'll hear it, but hopefully he won't feel like I'm attacking but rather that I'm trying to work it out for myself.)

This was one of the earliest issues in our relationship, this ownership thing, this idea of who's what belongs to whom? What is yours? What's mine? What does "ours" mean? When we were working on the faux-autobiography of the characters we played onstage in the Act, I did most of the writing and rewriting and S1 did most of the editing. The story was told from my point of view, so I suggested putting on the cover "By JDJB with S1," not to lessen his creative part of it but to go along with the more tongue-in-cheek aspect of the book, being that it was a faux autobiography. But S1 was adamant that the book should be clearly created as being by both of us. I didn't fight it too much.

More recently, I call the truck I drive "mine." S1 borrows it, asks me "Can I borrow your truck?" But that seems right to me; I paid a lot of money for it! We both call the washing machine ours (I think -- there aren't really a lot of opportunities to discuss ownership of the washing machine!), even though I paid for it; but maybe that has something to do with the fact that he's paying me back for half of it on a monthly basis. The neighbor's cat that I adopted is mine, but that's because S1 doesn't want a cat, doesn't want a pet, and (even though he doesn't ask for it) he makes a little money off of feeding him when I'm away for 24 hours or more. (I wouldn't likely be inclined to do that if Timmy were our cat.)

I want my own life. I was very insistent about getting financially untangled from S1. When he moved to Austin, I made it clear (to myself if not to him, though I think he understands my need for this perfectly well) that I pay my own bills and he pays his. He's probably as broke now as I was when I moved to Florida, and I don't know if I feel the urge to treat him to a meal or a movie or something nowadays because I'm more generous than he was then or because he and his poverty are right under my nose. And why do I find myself fighting the urge to be generous? Is it because I feel like he didn't seem to have a lot of concern about my poverty when he was living high on the hog, or is it truly because I'm still working on getting out of debt?

I think of the day when I don't have anymore debt. I can work about half as much as I do now and would still have money to save. I could save up and take a trip around the world, could take a month or more off to do that if I wanted. I picture myself being able to treat S1 to things that I don't (and can't) treat him to now -- a trip somewhere with me, regular outings to restaurants. I don't know if I'll do these things. By the time I'm out of debt S1 might have a career in film or writing music for plays or something. And when I say "career," I mean making money at it. All I hope for is that he'll get me free tickets to see what he's worked on!

I didn't even bring up R4 (haven't brought him up in the blog at all so far). He was "our" lover. He brought S1 and me back together. We both say now that had R4 not come into our life, we probably wouldn't be friends now. After the Act, R4 and I tried a few times to get together on our own. I really wanted to but felt that it would have been a betrayal of S1 if I ended up with R4 (but not because I thought S1 and I would ever be a "couple" again, nor did I even want that), and so I kept punking out on R4. I regret that on occasion. Sometimes I think that's the reason I haven't been able to find love again since the end of the Act (and the subsequent end of our varied relationships), because I hold everyone I'm interested in up to the Idea of what R4 and I had, or what it seemed like we had, or what I believe we could have had. But now R4 has his own life, quite separate from me and from S1. And there's no question in my mind that he has doesn't have any rights to our laptop computer.