Lenny

Sometimes Lenny is gone, he’s just not around, but I don’t even notice and I wish I would notice so that I could take stock and revel in his blessed absence a while. Lenny has been around for so long that it makes me sad to think that that’s how things are now; not since my early 20’s can I recall and relish in a time when he didn’t just constantly rear his brutish head, when I could claim he was banished, a time, by the way, when I had so many friends — not imposters like Lenny — so many places to be, the world pregnant with options, buoyant with expectation, each day chock-full of connection, when I was sought out and the phone rang non-stop, when never a thought cropped up about old Lenny, and it was only when he skulked back at some point, who knows exactly when, that I realised what a horrible pest he is because he hadn’t been there and now I noticed the marked difference.

When I think back on those days in my 20’s, when I reminisce gladly, I can’t believe I was actually happy and I realise now with conviction that it was because Lenny wasn’t there.  And I don’t know or didn’t care where he was because he didn’t cross my mind. I had this bulwark of not having to encounter him or be subjected to his whim. Now when I look back I feel that I should have been more thankful for it, this freedom of being; but how could I have been thankful when I was unaware of being free — and I was unaware. How can you be thankful for something not in your purview? And who should I have been thankful to in the first place, when it wasn’t as if he was making a deliberate effort to keep himself away knowing he was unwanted. I mean I don’t think he has a concept of people not liking him; more likely that it would never cross Lenny’s mind and no one dares tell him different.

But there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Lenny. He looks and talks like any rational human being. Perhaps he’s a touch eager, a bit over-enthusiastic, a bit overbearing, exuding this sense that he’s just going to take over at any moment come what may, however many strong-willed people are in the room at any one time, that he will and always just manages to ride roughshod. But this is his only sticking-point really, there’s nothing else that marks him out as malevolent or wrong.

There’s a pattern then. When Lenny isn’t around you don’t think about Lenny. When Lenny’s there, he’s got you by the throat. It seems natural to be concerned with a person if they’re in your presence, but this isn’t always the case. I’ve been in the same room as people and hardly noticed they’re there. But with Lenny he might not even be in the same room; he might have spent the last ten minutes in the toilet, or be behind a crowd at the front of the queue for the bar, he might have even left the whole place entirely, and yet he seems to be there right by you, touching you, picking at you, breathing at you, his presence is all-embracing, unyielding and shrill.

Lenny is not constant though. He’s not predictable, he’s got many facets to him, many ways of being, can do accents, speak in multiple tongues. He's nuanced. He knows Latin and Greek or at least thinks he does. He’s sometimes hard to fathom, to understand. He doesn’t always get straight to the point and make perfect sense. He can make you work, run rings around you. But there’s no pay-off and you wonder why you bother. The point is that it’s hard to know how you feel with Lenny, how exactly you feel if he’s getting to you, which he inevitably is, it’s hard to know why the things he does exert their effect and make you feel small. You cannot directly trace back to an ultimate cause.

But it’s the times when I’m with Lenny that I really want to talk about Lenny1 because I feel I might then be able to get a handle on him and find out what makes him tick. 

But you can hardly talk about him when he’s there in your face, put him down and malign him, I mean it’s not that I’m scared of comeuppance — it’s not that at all — I don’t really know what it is; he might make a disapproving face at worst. Maybe it’s more that I don’t want to draw even more attention his way; I feel it just drags everything down into a vortex and sustains him, makes him more wilful, more full of himself and his poor stories and jokes. 

So talking about Lenny is the hardest, because it’s hard to find the words that carry the feelings, the exact feelings I feel when I’m with him, and I so want to be precise so that you can empathise, so that you can even feel those feelings as you read. But maybe it’s more because I don’t want to talk about something that’s going to make me feel uneasy — the understandable human protection mechanism — so instead of actually conveying the experience, I’ve just spent another paragraph skirting it.

But ok I’ll try, even though I think he might be right here with me:  its fuzzy, above all it’s something fuzzy, like being sucked into the void, slipping into non-existence, and your belly feels blown-up and bloated — it all starts in the belly — and then the energy seems to get sucked out so that you feel you are dying, you feel weak in your legs, you are dying, all just because of Lenny, little old Lenny, and you feel suffocated and your breath starts to gets shorter and you can’t think straight, that’s a big one yes, you can’t think about anything — who wants to be deprived of clear thinking— there’ve been so many times when I’ve gone through two sides of a book without taking a single word in2, that’s Lenny, Lenny-absorption; when someone else is here talking to me and I don’t initially comprehend what they’re saying — LENNY — when someone calls and I can’t squeeze out my ‘hello’ at the pre-requisite time, pausing in bewilderment as if held hostage, they don’t know I’m with LENNY, oh and this is also a big one: when a friend opens his front door and I’m a bit stuck because I’m with LENNY and my energy is diverted and I’m trying to stop him from taking over, trying to muster up my greeting with a degree of enthusiasm3, but the harder I try, the more boisterous he is — LENNY — so it always seems that the most counter-intuitive approach works best, pretend he’s not there, but that’s precisely the thing that your whole being is revolting against and so you don’t do it and LENNY gets the better of you and everyone thinks it’s you and not LENNY because they don’t see old LENNY even though he’s right there before them and they’ve got him to deal with as well, they just don’t give you much credit and you come across as a bit stiff.

And so I’ll finish; I’ll end it right here. I wouldn’t so much mind if people made allowances for Lenny, for the havoc he wreaks, but they don’t, and I feel ashamed, I feel short-changed. Then he just steps out of the room, vanishes into thin air and it’s like he’s never been there and all this talk about Lenny feels wasteful, it feels like I’ve been barking up the wrong tree. It feels, actually, like I don’t know my feelings, don't assimilate them as well as I thought. Do I misconstrue deep discomfort as excitement? Am I unwilling to bear up to those true visceral sensations, felt as something grotesque, almost alien?  Is that the scaly finger of death I refuse to acknowledge, a touch that sets my meagre pulse racing? A foretelling of the ultimate surrender? Isn't this our old friend fear and then what are we running from?

 And with the above realisation in mind I have I have to confess after all these years to a tolerance, at least a fresh way of perceiving it. I can admit Lenny's right to exist. He can be here now if he wants to, that’s his choice. And it’s in those moments of recognition, when he sees my acceptance that he might unexpectedly come up with an excuse, say he has to go somewhere, mumbling under his breath, stumbling out, almost as if he were apologising for the intrusion, almost - dare I say it - as if to display some sort of self-awareness that he was never wanted in the first place, and do you know what, it’s then that I really don’t mind if he goes, I’m altogether easy.

Death isn’t the end anyway now, is it.

¹I can’t talk to Lenny, NO, no, no, this apparent sensible course of action is off the cards because he doesn’t interact like that one-on-one, he doesn’t converse, he just wants to play to the gallery and have it all for himself so don’t fall into the trap of trying to  remonstrate, to get the answer from the horse’s mouth.

²It all comes to pass more subtly than this, an indescribable concoction of such complexity so hard to pin down 

³Sometimes they don’t even let Lenny in, one look and he’s sent on his way, and it’s like the whole thing never happened, my awkwardness, his perkiness, wondering what I’d have to do with him while I’m there. But then there are times when he just comes in notwithstanding, and although no one else seems to be noticing his presence, he’s on my case like a dog at your heels like a child wanting to play.