The CTM Chronicles - Orlando

I haven’t written about Chuck T. Miller lately though my old friend has been on my mind. The cell phone number he gave me the last time we talked has been disconnected. He may be in Phoenix still, waist deep in domestic difficulties, though I’d bet he ditched that scene in favor of a quick run to Cabo San Lucas or Cozumel. He’s no doubt hooked up with another woman by now. For years Chuck joked that all he wanted was a young, sexy trust fund baby, preferably a natural blonde with a forty-DD chest and long legs, with limited emotional baggage and free of psychotic ex-boyfriends or overprotective parents. “She’s out there,” Chuck always said, “and someday I’ll find her.”

An advertisement in the Independent about Patricia Simmons is what made me think of Chuck. Patricia Simmons, renowned psychotherapist and author, frequent guest on Oprah, and a hit on the lecture circuit, was appearing at UC Santa Barbara to promote her new book, The Canine Prophecy: A Field Guide to Training Men. Patricia’s first book, the one that made her reputation, was called, Breaking Chains: A Woman’s Guide to Escaping Bondage. Years ago, before fame and fortune, when she was known as Patricia Capriati, Patricia was Chuck’s main squeeze.

He met her in Orlando, Florida, where he was managing the Gypsy Rose Funeral Parlor and Family Fun Center, an oxymoronic combination of enterprises that fit Chuck perfectly. Out back of the funeral parlor was a nine-hole golf course and water park, both owned by a mysterious woman from New Orleans – a bonafide “voodoo witch” in Chuck’s words – whose motto was, “The dead can’t hurt you. It’s the living you have to watch out for.” You could bury your dead at Gypsy Rose’s, then go out back and improve your short game. Chuck handled the grieving customers, sold them deluxe coffins and overpriced flower arrangements, mowed the fairways and greens, repaired the water slides, while Patricia, only a few months out of high school, answered the phones and kept the books.

Patricia was a refugee from a sadistic German-born mother and an ex-GI father who walked out with a fishing pole on his shoulder and never came back, never wrote, never called, just vanished from her world, leaving her with unanswered questions and misplaced guilt that his disappearance was her fault. How we battle the wounds of childhood! We heal, but the scars remain, reminders of unhappy times. Breaking Chains was a stunningly specific account of a life gone off the rails, of abuse, neglect and sadism. Chuck figured prominently in the book as well, the portrayal less than flattering: “In the heart of this man, as in all men, lurks an evil streak.” Chuck’s version of his time with Patricia was very different -- the moment he hooked up with her he knew he had made a grave mistake, and then his problem became how to cut her loose without sending her over the edge. She was his “beautiful psycho” and the “barnacle on my back.” Unhinged, unpredictable, and possessive to the extreme, Patricia rarely let Chuck out of her sight and stuck by his side like a seeing-eye dog, going so far as to follow him into the Men’s room of the McDonald’s down the street from the funeral home. She talked about them being one spirit and destined to be inseparable forever. She showered with Chuck and insisted that they hold hands during meals. One day Chuck was fixing a busted lawn mower in the maintenance shed and accidentally sliced his finger open. There was Patricia, not with hydrogen peroxide and band aids, but with her tongue, lapping up his blood, ecstasy on her face and a drop of blood on her lovely chin.

Over the years Chuck has had more than his share of violent episodes with women. They’ve thrown plates and butter knives and bottles, stabbed him with keys, forks and safety pins; they’ve threatened him with Mace and pepper spray, burned his clothes, slashed his tires. Patricia added her own chapter in Chuck’s tortured relationship history. When Chuck insisted that Patricia give him some breathing room and privacy, allow him to pee and poop in peace, take a few links out of his chain, she wigged out, took it to mean that he no longer loved her. Then, to prove how much she loved him, she tried to run him down with a golf cart.

Chuck never loved Patricia, but he was fond of her and cared for her and worried about her. The more he struggled to get away, the tighter Patricia clung to him. Chuck became a prisoner in his own life. Whatever he did, wherever he went, Patricia was right there. She was a preternaturally light sleeper who woke at the slightest sound. Chuck said Patricia slept with her eyes open. They fought constantly and even got themselves banned from McDonald’s.

In the end, Chuck did what Patricia’s father had done, picked a spot and made a break for it. He slipped away from Gypsy Rose’s in the owner’s decrepit Datsun pick-up, with $50 to his name, a change of clothes, a harmonica and a Bible, and a pint bottle of whisky. The Datsun died in South Carolina. Chuck stuck out his thumb, headed nowhere in particular as long as it was away from Patricia. He wasn’t on the highway ten minutes before a woman in a red Corvette slowed down to give him a look. Her name was Alice DuPont and she was traveling to New York City.