34 - guess what?

Then there is the phone call that every single man dreads to get.
Guess what?‌

Before she had called, I was waking to a baby crying every night and though I thought it was in my dreams it could have easily been a neighbour or two expressing him or herself. Nonetheless it unnerved me, and I used to tell Randy and Cheryl I was waking to a baby crying and it sounded like it was next to me and they would laugh and say I probably got someone pregnant along the way recently. I knew that was not true because I assumed I was sterile with the only supportive evidence that I had was that I had read people who had taken a lot of LSD and done a lot of speed were sterile and my proof that I was, was simply that no one had gotten pregnant from me. That I knew of – of course. I think Beverly and I had talked about it and maybe she was not on anything and I had a couple of other girlfriends that had indicated they would not have minded having a child with me.

As for me, I had wanted to be a parent for a long time but not with anyone. I had investigated adoption when I was in Maryland and I figured if I was sterile then I would adopt a baby and raise him or her alone. I never considered having a child with someone in a relationship and raising the creature together with another adult.

When Lesia had voiced concerns that first night of us being together in Towson, I assured her there was nothing to worry about because I was sterile – I used to tell that to everyone. Not because I was being mean or evil or even lying – I just assumed I was. I had never been tested except by the fact that no one had gotten pregnant from me that I knew of. It is a strange thing I do sometimes, just to freak myself out, look at someone and wonder if I am their father. Of course, intuitively I do not believe I have had any more than the two that I had – though by the time we get to the end of this story it will be obvious that my level of intuition is not very sophisticated.

A week later I was at the Honolulu Airport collecting Lesia

Instead of her casual attire that she had on when we were traveling across America she had on a suit. Her hair was short in a business-like manner and she barely greeted me. I jokingly asked her where her sister was. In the week or maybe it was two – between the time she had called and her arrival, Randy, Cheryl, and I had gotten another house because there was only one bedroom where we were and after spending one night with Lesia in the snow in Colorado in my tent I did not think she would find it very romantic to do a pregnancy in it in Hawaii.

Randy did not like Lesia from the moment he met her and he took me aside saying I should just send her back to Australia the next day. On the first night together I tried to be affectionate with her and she said ‘I don’t want to get into having to have sex every night just because we are going to have a baby’. We did not have sex for weeks and I don’t know when we did or even if we did. I spent as much time as possible either working at Queens Medical Centre or painting with Randy. Not only was Lesia pregnant but soon after Lesia got to Hawaii Cheryl discovered she too was pregnant and according to Japanese custom there is some cosmic bond between two pregnant women who live together. Our children would be soul mates on some level according to Cheryl.

It never occurred to me that she could be pregnant from someone else. I just believed her. I have never had any tests to prove it either. However, seeing my sons and people saying they look like me and surely Sacha has a lot of my DNA I just accept I was the one.

Lesia and Cheryl seemed to get along with one another and Randy and I snorted cocaine and drank a lot of Tanqueray Gin every evening. Lesia did not like Randy and she did not like me getting high and being drunk every night so there seemed to be constant tension in the house. Leisa had come on a visitor’s three-month visa and her visa was running out in August. Randy and I were in hopes that she would go back to Australia but I think I wanted to have her stay and have the baby. We did not talk much about the future. We discussed going to California a few times. She wanted to go to some TM school in San Francisco and I would get a job wherever. I had dreams of being a writer still and fancied myself a bit of the poet. I was doing my picture-poems and displaying them wherever I could. I thought it would be a good idea to go to Southern California and work in a mansion for some rich person and I would work on my novels or stories or do picture-poems when I was not working but we only discussed that once as it was quite a stupid idea according to Lesia. Though of course I always thought it was brilliant.

Lesia tried to get her visa renewed but the fine people at the United States consulate would not renew her visa. They said she was trying to get into the country outside the normal channels and our argument was that she could not get a fiancé visa because we did not know whether we wanted to stay together or not. We had a lot of visits to the U.S. Consulate and a lot of pleading until finally we were told that if we got married Lesia could stay in the States. This was a shock to me as I had never considered getting married at any time ever, especially at such a young age, I was not even 33 yet and here I was going to surrender my life. I also opposed marriage because I have always seen it as a male dominated custom to control women. I also had problems with the religious aspect of it.
However, having now done the dastardly deed twice I am not really in a position to say much of anything. And as life seems to always go in cycles for me I have now married two Australian women and both times had to go through American consulate bullshit and incredible hassles just to be with someone.

The next problem was that we did not like each other’s surname and combining them sounded very stupid. Lesia was born in a war camp in Germany in February 1947 and had some long Russian Ukrainian name that I never could pronounce nor spell.

We spent several evenings trying to come up with a new name – one that would not only represent us but which would also be a good family name. The whole family thing totally terrified me – not because of being a father, I was excited about that, but being part of a family that had this person I knew I would never get along with in it made the whole concept of family seem very fractured and dark. We looked in phone books and tried making up names that would be successful based on numerology. One evening as we were struggling with the name issue and Randy and I were drinking more and more gin and smoking more and more marijuana, Randy started to laugh:

“You two think you are such new-age people why not just call yourself newage?”

We did not dismiss it and we looked at it numerological and did not like it with a ‘w’ in the middle and changed the ‘w’ to ‘u’ and that was it. Neuage – would be our name. We looked in phone books of New York City, Los Angeles, London and several other cities and no one had such a name. We would start the Neuage dynasty.

In 1980 there were two eclipses. The first eclipse was on February 17th, which was Lesia’s birthday, and the next one was on August 11th and my birthday is on August 10th. We thought this was some sort of omen and surely if for no other reason it was close to a statistical improbability. Most people never have an eclipse on their birthday and to have two people have an eclipse on their birthday in the same year and the two of them to be giving birth that year seemed cosmic for some reason.

The ugly little matter of getting married reared its diseased socially warped head and we started making plans. Lesia made the plans and I worked and got stoned and tried to block it all. It was her idea to get married in a Ukrainian Church – something about pleasing her parents and ‘doing the right thing’. This ‘doing the right thing’ seemed to come up quite frequently though what is the right thing at any given moment seems to be in the mind of the controller or he or she who wishes to control. St. Cyril and Methodius Mission in Honolulu, right over there at 931 Hausten Street was the place ‘of the act’.

Here I was in Hawaii once again, with a lover or sort of a lover – though back in December 1969, Carol Ann had already had her child, and once again I was looking at how to escape. In my astrological chart I put the declination lines on a world map I have. My Moon MC (Mid Haven) line goes through Hawaii and I have these life time commitment things happening when I am involved with women when I am in Hawaii. I decided to do an astrological chart for the best time to get married. I made a chart that would favour me and I made it for the day of the eclipse, August 11, 1980 – one day after my birthday. In the marriage chart I have the Moon (female) separating from the Sun (male) in the marriage seventh house and of course the eclipse is in the seventh house – this was going to be one disaster of a marriage and that was fine with me.
Maybe I will write a book someday of great marriage disasters and the astrological aspects that made them go so stupid. I never told Randy that we were going to get married as I thought he would either prevent me from doing it or just make so much fun of me that I would not do it.

Of course, in hindsight….

On the day of the awful deed I put my clothes that I was going to dress up in, in a bag and walked out the door so Randy and Cheryl would not see me. (I was getting a taste for this kind of caper; I put my suit for a high school prom in a bag when I was living with my parents because they would not let me go dancing. I had to hitchhike to Troy, go to the prom with my girlfriend and stay overnight in her basement. I also used to put my street clothes, jeans or whatever in a bag when I would leave the Order in my priest-suit and change when I got around the corner from the Order center so I could go into Waikiki to pick up girls.) Lesia’s parents had sent $200 for me to get a suit so I bought a velvet name-brand suit for the big day.

Lesia told the priest that I was a Catholic for us to get married in the church – the fact that I was not a Catholic and had rarely ever been in a Catholic church and had no intention of ever being in one again did not seem to matter to anyone. The priest had been to or had lived in the same war camp as Lesia’s parents in Germany during World War II so there was some connection that seemed to gloss over my ‘lack of faith’. On the way to the church our car stalled at an intersection. I think the battery went dead and some passer-by helped us get to the church, on time. I have a couple of photos of me in my suit at the church still and they seem like some other person.

The whole ceremony was done in Ukrainian and Lesia poked me whenever I was to agree to say something in confirmation. What I agreed to I will never know and I liked being in the dark of the situation – what I don’t know won’t hurt me which I thought would protect me from what lay ahead but I suppose it did not.

Life was not comfortable living with Randy and Cheryl as Lesia did not like Randy and she wanted a place of our own. This made sense, living in a foreign country on someone else’s homeland as well as living with their friends would be tough on anyone and to be pregnant at the same time would make the mix more emotional and difficult. Lesia did not know anyone in Hawaii and even though I have never been pregnant I could imagine that it would be a very lonely experience not knowing anyone when all that was wanted was to nest and have a friend to talk to or maybe even, if I had been close to my
family, family to talk with. I did not realize this at the time and I could not understand why she was grumpy all the time.

The reason I started to write this – years after thinking I should write about my life to you two in hopes that you would have a glimpse into what life in your beginning was like based on my experiences long before you two came into my life. I knew by writing this I would myself gain insights into why I am the way I am and the way I affected you two and why all our lives are so unsettled and difficult. I have an insight here that I did not have before. Lesia, your mother, perhaps came to Hawaii believing being barefoot and pregnant in Hawaii would be a romantic and beautiful experience.

Granted she arrived in a business suit and I was dressed in Hawaiian drag when I met her – shorts, sandals, unshaved, long hair – stoned.

She wanted more than to live with the likes of Randy and me. She wanted a home to prepare for birth in and all we did was argue. I did not understand that a pregnant woman could be different than when she was not pregnant. Now writing this, more than thirty years later I understand what I did not then. Lesia was difficult and emotional because her imagined fantasy of the way it would be did not come close to equalizing reality as it was. I have no idea what she expected coming to Hawaii and I never asked her in the decades to follow. I never even considered that back then, back in the summer (Northern summer) there was a problem. I was it.

We had known each other so briefly and awkwardly:

Not only was her being pregnant an enormous life change for the two of us but we were in a strange place – a foreign country for her, and a new home far from my family in New York and we had very little money and she did not know anyone. I knew Randy – a friend of mine from the past who I had known for more than a decade and who I had gotten stoned with many times and who I had joined a religious cult with.

Now, more than twenty-years after the fact, for the first time, I realize this would have been an incredibly difficult time and a period of insecurity for Lesia. Lesia fancied herself as higher society than me, she had her university degree and it would take me until I was forty-seven to finally get my first degree. She owned a home – something I had yet to do and in fact did not do until the age of fifty-five; by now, age 69, I am in my fifth home and now fully paid for home. She had a career, having had her job already for a decade when we met, and to this day my longest held job is my second year of teaching at university that I am up to now at the age of.

I brilliantly and steadfastly crushed my old employment record recently by working for three- years at the same job. Dalian American International School in Dalian, China. So at the young age of 68 I finally have those bragging rights that shit-faced lesser humans have and proudly can say that I too have worked a long time (three-years) at the same job. Of course, I have no intentions of ever breaking that. I will be amazed if I am still alive in thirteen months at age 70. Now 74 here I am on my 74th birthday…

I had lots of debts and I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. The fact that I was thirty-three and was at about where most people are at when they are in their early twenties did not occur to me. There seemed to be a lot of misconnections between where we were in our own lives and where we perceived the other individual should be. Who is right? It was more an issue of lifestyle than of whether I was mature or your mother was too strict, too straight, too unwillingly to live a different life.

Society proclaims we should be a certain way at a certain time and I disagree. I have always disagreed with whatever society I am in.

Society is nothing more than the adjustment of evolution to maintain a species.

It just is a fact that current human society is the stupidest of all living societies. No society in the universe would come up with such a mind-numbing waste-of-time product as Facebook where people post endless photos of their children, talk about what they ate, and/or post the stupidest crap available then push the ‘like’ tab of someone else’s incredible lame post; especially of cats and dogs. If I were the God of this solar system I would wipe this non-creative creation just based on that. Bees and ants and all other species on earth do their society much better than humans do.

Therefore, it is safe to say, humans are the lowest form of society this planet has ever evolved. It is the only society capable, ever, to destroy all life, and it will be successful at that. Millions of years of evolution – then along comes humans and the earth turns to shit. If I am fifty and want to live on the beach what is wrong with that? AHH what is wrong with anything is that we live life with someone else and if the two lives are nowhere near what the other expected then there is this clash that Lesia and I had. We were a clash of cultures, a clash of ideals, a clash of expectations, a clash of power, a class of idiots.

And now - Sunday, February 15, 2004, 6:50 PM – I realize how unaware I was back in August 1980. In my defence I can only say that we must learn it all in life. To further that my brainwaves give me the same random thoughts I can say now more than ten-years later; 17 March 2015 I believe the same. Holy cow! I must be in a mental rut. I hope to be still conscious a year from now when my progressed Mercury will be conjunct my natal Jupiter. Be funny if by then I actually; with that dumb-ass aspect, believe in astrology. To believe in anything would be nice.

We are born stupid and most of us die years later just as stupid and totally unaware of our actions as we are when we begin this trek through this life – but I now may have a kernel of awareness that I did not have twenty-four years ago. And I am not going
to write Lesia an apology – what good would it do now?

I have been informed that she was diagnosed with beginning Alzheimer more than a year ago. Some examples, the police impounded her car told her she could never drive again -she keeps looking for her car. Another example, for years she has believed the neighbours have been cranking up their air conditioner at three in the morning, so she puts on loud music on her balcony to drown them out. She was tested found she had tinnitus in her ear that would make ringing sounds. Oops.

She lives in town 45 minutes away – we have not had any contact since August 2003 at the funeral – see book 2.

Truly there are times in life when it is too late to consider the past, especially when there is no way to negotiate the moment or the future into a harmonious frame.

Current knowledge cannot undo the past for the past is done and healing through knowledge only works if there is anything left to heal. Of course if I could have made life easier back then for the two of us I would have but I did not have the skills to do it. Besides I could not stand her so why would I?

The solution at the time to change our lot in life was to move out on our own. We looked at houses and apartments only to find it was all so expensive that we could not afford to live on my wages anywhere decent. Someone at work at the hospital mentioned some people who lived in a large estate and they were looking for someone to care- take their house and gardens in exchange for a place to live. We moved in and we had our bed, an old sofa and a crappy wooden table and some crappy chairs. We were in a rain forest and it was lush and the main house was huge and there was a winding road to our place. It was only half an hour from where I worked and to Waikiki and Honolulu. I loved our new home. Lesia did not like it. I was off to work eight hours a day and often I worked extra shifts and sometimes I painted with Randy. Where we lived seemed to constantly rain. We could drive down the hill toward Waikiki and it would be sunny but not where we lived. My job was to keep the
lawns mowed and they were quite extensive. Lesia’s job was to clean the main house every day. I suppose when one fancies herself from a first world or is Australia a second world country? middleclass and a home owner and a university graduate the idea of making beds and washing dishes and cleaning toilets in someone else’s home whilst pregnant is not a good thing. To me it seemed like she was contributing toward our life and I still believe it was a good thing. I know many women who worked right up until the day they delivered and we were both contributing toward our future – and paying off the past (debts that I had). After all, Lesia was only about six or seven months pregnant and I was supportive. We took birthing classes together as I was going to do the husband assisted birthing experience.

Our rain forest home – above.

We had found a small hospital at the northern end of Hawaii in Kahuku and our doctor was Dr. Branch. I did not want Lesia to give birth in the hospital that I worked at – it was huge and did not seem homey or loving like the small Kahuku Hospital did. Kahuku is a small town. Across from the hospital is the Kahuku Sugar Mill that had been abandoned long ago and sugarcane fields surrounded the hospital. Dr. Branch said he would deliver under almost any setup. Apparently a lot of hippy folks had given birth there and there would be chanting and candles and various ceremonies but all we wanted was a small quiet place and to give birth under water which was the latest craze in the birthing process.

Sometime in October or November of 1980 Lesia managed to get herself into a bit of a car accident. I was at work and she was driving along our narrow road between where we lived in the rainforest and town. She went head-on into a tourist van that was trolling along through the rainforest to show the tourists the sights of Hawaii – off the beaten path. She was taken to the same hospital that I was in and we were thankful after her short stay there that we were not having a baby there. There were several women screaming nearby and like any large general hospital, it all seemed so impersonal.

Lesia was x-rayed, probed, and prodded and after nothing was found wrong I took her home. We sued the tourist company a million dollars saying they were on the wrong side of the road and of course, they said Lesia was on the wrong side but to avoid bad publicity for the tourist company our lawyer said they were willing to settle out of court. There was a lot of back and forth as there always is in these situations. Our lawyer was running for some political office in Hawaii and he didn’t want to rock the ship of state, which in Hawaii is that tourism is king as well as queen and even God.

When all the dust had settled we only collected $10,000 years later, which Lesia would get all of later on in our messy divorce. The big thing in our miserable little existence was that we did get one thing out of the tourist van people – we moved to an apartment in Waikiki and part of the settlement paid for our move and the apartment – because of Lesia’s mental-being we could no longer live in the rainforest meaning she no longer had to clean house. We moved into an apartment on the thirteenth floor of a 17-story building though it was not called the thirteenth floor, the numbers skipped from 12 to 14 and therefore we lived on the fourteenth floor because of some superstitious person that at some point numbered the floors. Lesia seemed much happier there, as everything was clean and new and we had a balcony or lanai as they call them in Hawaii.

One moment that stands out with the balcony, and balconies are something, especially that high up, are something I have always stayed away from. Not because I feared jumping off but I wondered how secure they were – would the thing come crashing down? Though by August 16th 2004 I was able to look over a fifteen story balcony to the street below and the distance did not seem that far – maybe just two or three seconds away. That is how long Officer Malcom said on August 17th, 2003, that Leigh took.

We used to keep the sliding doors from the living room to the balcony open to let in the tropical breeze that would come out of the mountains and pass us on the way to the sea – we had the mountain view (Mauka ‘mow-kah’) and not the sea view (Makai ‘mah-kigh’). We were told that flies and other insects did not come that high and it seemed a good way to keep the apartment cool.

I always have liked cooking. One evening I was baking bread in the oven and forgot about it. I saw the smoke coming from the stove and ran over and grabbed the burnt loaf of bread. I meant to throw it across the living room onto the balcony but the smoking hot loaf overshot the balcony and went over the side and as gravity would have it the loaf hurdled down the thirteen stories below, probably in less than four seconds. Next to our apartment building there were several two story apartments, and there were people – locals, Hawaiians or Islanders – having a barbeque outside. The loaf of bread crashed into the middle of their picnic. I know there was beer involved because I had looked over the side earlier and they were playing guitars and singing Hawaiian songs and they seemed quite happy. However, from the middle of my living room I could hear the yelling and swearing aimed toward our apartment building. I hoped that there were other apartments above and below me that showed signs of life so it would not be so obviously that it was our apartment that was the source of the ‘loaf from heaven’ and they would come up and beat the shit out of me. Lesia and I thought it was all pretty funny but we did not go near the balcony for many hours or close our glass doors in fear of being

identified as being home at the time and being blamed for hurtling a smoking loaf of bread into the midst of their party. I could only imagine where it landed, whether it hit someone, knocked over the remaining beer or even worse, knocked over a plate of cocaine or hash or pot.

We attended our husband-assisted birthing classes and I worked a lot of extra shifts at the hospital and occasionally I painted houses with Randy though it became more infrequent during November, then stopped all together in December when Randy and Cheryl moved to Santa Barbara, California. Our baby was due around Christmas time and we had not picked a name or really made much of any plans. Lesia liked the name Natasha and we thought we were having a girl. Natasha means ‘child of Christmas’ in Russian so we thought we were all set for a name. We made frequent trips to Kahuku Hospital on the North Shore and I do not remember but I think we sort of got along for those couple of months but I still had no idea or vision of the future. I do not remember being excited or worried or in anticipation of any kind. I did a lot of astrological charts trying to predict the birth.

Christmas 1980 Honolulu with wife number one

35. End
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Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 78.