Breakup Machine

[First broadcast April 14, 2014. I was 52 at the time, and finally agreed to do one of these shows as a favor to a friend, whose daughter was a production intern on the show...]

Buckley: When did you write 'Breakup Machine' ? That was one of your earlier, I suppose that is to say, a bit more.. uh, 'emotional' pieces.

Me (laughing): You could say I enjoyed my own drama back then, whether that was good or bad, it helped me become a more, uh, balanced person, I guess. And up until that time, I had been an, uh, unwitting proponent of that whole Dionysian ethic, where you could really only create unless you were in pain, and the best way to do that was to, uh, conduct your life like.. uh, conduct your life in such a way that you fell rapidly in and out of love, which connotes a certain machine-like precision that you have to conduct relationships under.

Buckley: So what does that entail?

Me: Turns out it's a wee bit self-destructive, Bill. (chuckles) So by the time I'd written, well, when I wrote 'There She Was Next To Me,' for example, just two years later, I had come to a point where that sort of, uh, entropy if you will, breaks your body down. So thank God I was forced to take a look at that from a physical standpoint. I don't know if it's karma or luck, I don't really care.

Buckley: I've read 'Breakup Machine' many times over the years, and it always strikes me as dark, then more dark, then intensely dark, hopelessly darker still, then ends with such a... oh, a concession to..... to what, exactly?

Me: I didn't figure that out myself until years later, but it's truly a love song, all the way. This person I was back then, trying to convince myself that love didn't exist, or at least the kind I had just lost, because it was the only way to survive the pain I had chosen to have in my life at that point. But this... machine/man spends his entire life convincing himself that there is no higher purpose than teaching someone to live with pain, and then finally realizing in the end what's he lost himself. And luckily, the real me--- and many other people from the mail I still get on this piece--- many other people woke up before it was.. well, at least before it was too late.

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[Here is the original piece, 'The Breakup Machine,' in its original form. It differs a bit in length from the version that appeared in 'Nomad Hotel,' the 2010 compilation from Random House, but preserves my original intent as well as can be expected given that editors care more about money than words.]

I am the Breakup Machine.

I was not conceived, fresh from the womb, as the Breakup Machine.

I spent 10 years on the Golden Path of mediocrity with a woman who I knew, deeply in my sinews and circuits, was not right for me. We scraped like sandpaper and all the time I hit those spiky barriers that pop your tires.

The time spent began to teach me the price of not being my self, the Breakup Machine.

I spent another 10 years in relative happiness, bliss even. We sprang from the ruins of each other, re-programmed ourselves to feel, to bleed, to take sledgehammers to our concrete, to grow flowers and food and watch it blossom in spring.

Then in the End, there was still the End, all the more wrenching for lack of a scapegoat. Simply a summer that faded to the beautiful death-red of autumn, then its inevitable successor, a winter that tasted like gunmetal, convulsed me like dry heaves and tore my tears from me in cataclysmic waves triggered by the landmines of remembered bliss. Oh how we romanticize the past.

By way of explanation, I have played plenty of poker and found it to be true that if you’re in a game for 10 minutes and cannot find the sucker, he is you. Therefore, if there are two people in a relationship and you’re not the one breaking up, well………

So I became me. Perhaps more accurately, I discovered me, inside all along.

I developed the ability to break up with anyone, at any time.

I slept with people while knowing nothing more than their name and the fact that most times one of us had a cock and one a pussy.

I made hundreds of breakfasts of eggs, bacon and no doggie bag and no you cannot have my e-mail address. I walked out hundreds of mornings after hundreds of coffees and hundreds of times yelling back over my shoulder that I would not be back, ever, and relished the burn of the mark each one of them tried to leave on me, as if their confused stare or their squinting enmity would linger somehow.

Once just to see how it felt I left in the middle of a fuck, wet and hard, down the middle of the street, dark naked with my clothes balled up in hand, dancing in the halogen moonlight;

I looked deeply into hundreds of pairs of azure eyes, hazel, green and black eyes. Impassive and resolute, I mouthed the words that made the brains behind the eyes fire the pattern of neural synapse jumps that embedded the message into the cerebral cortices of their owners that left no doubt that I would not be back and the decision was final. Time is the fire in which we burn. I did not blink. I did not cry.

I still do not cry. Ever. Because I am the Breakup Machine.

Then I began to understand that I was teaching them, too. About impermanence, the illusion of security, the nature of self-reliance. All truths, all learned harshly or not at all.

So the Breakup Machine found a 5th gear.

I started cultivating longer relationships as long as I could think of how I would break up by the first time I’d looked into their eyes or smelled their perfume or touched their blouse. I began scanning them for insecurities, mining their family histories freely shared, listening rapt to their relationship stories and weaving intricately beautiful tapestries of Breakup. I took my job quite seriously…. An offhand endearment on a third date, a seemingly out-of-character blowup at a restaurant six weeks in, an engagement ring hinted at but never produced, a confession to a sexual deviance whose image could never be erased, a deal-breaking character flaw created in myself and hidden, then outspokenly vocally revealed at a gathering of her family, these were the raw materials from which I hammered out the Breakup---

Such stories I had, such artistry created, all these women my unwitting canvases, so many pages in so many journals about so many me’s, running from one to the other with my magic wand, all of them innocent as babes being kissed ‘pon their dewy heads, until they shook the fairy dust off years later, coming to the inevitable conclusion that what does not kill us only makes us dangerous and unbalanced, and in so becoming, stronger.

I am a teacher. I am the Breakup Machine.

But then something happened. The Breakup Machine met a woman with whom he could not break up and she dismantled the machine, carefully setting each of its parts aside until she found the warm beating heart inside and touched it with her magic and they lived together in the new-found bliss of….

Sorry. Nice try. This isn’t that story.

The first part of that actually happened, though. The Machine did meet The Woman, she did dismantle the parts, she did find the warm beating heart. But by that time, I am the Machine and the Machine am me. I believed my own stories, told for so long and with such satisfaction that what had begun as an exercise in the painful need to evolve the species, had become me. Tendrils of copper wire, fiber optic, network cable, neural relays, indistinguishable from cartilage, sinew, bone, brains, muscle. It became a literal truth:

We are the Breakup Machine. The two of me, the one of me.

Reaching my perfection. All the parts and pieces set carefully aside by the Beautiful Woman, coalescing on their own back into one unit, segments of a symbiote seeking each other with the inexorability of gravity and death, until, shaking off the after-effects of the reintegration, we stood up, took the woman tenderly in our arms, and with blank black eyes and a mouth which spoke programs of electric binary, asked the woman

“Do I know you?”

We both learned some very painful lessons that day. She never thanked me. None of them have ever thanked me.

Yet I have given so much. Given up so very much.