Eric Shaw Quinn

No independence is won without a struggle.

The signing of the Declaration on the 4th was only the beginning of what it would take to bring those ideals to bear.  So, July 5th was really day one of this on-going struggle we’ve been in to make our dream of “freedom for all” a reality.

July 5th has always had an odd significance in my life.  After college I moved to New York, because I had no idea what else to do.  I loved New York.  Still do.  It was not as crazy about me.  July 5th was the day I moved home to my mom’s to regroup.  I’ll live in New York again when I’m rich.  I’m just too big a princess to do day to day in Manhattan otherwise.

The 5th has continued throughout my life to be a day of beginnings for me.  Today, I observe the 16th anniversary of the single most noteworthy beginning for me so far.

April that year, I had met someone when I was in Austin for a friend’s wedding.  It was something special.  It was love.  I said good-bye at the airport but I could not live with that for long.  We talked constantly on the phone.  His life in Austin was at loose ends and I could not wait.   Soon, he was in Los Angeles and I was, for the first and only time in my life, actually living with someone who was there, just because he wanted to be with me.

My first book was due out that summer.  I was writing the screenplay for the movie deal that I’d already made for the book.  And I was in love and living with someone who said he loved me.

It was at last, I thought, the moment when my life would finally begin.

It was everything I had worked for.  It was everything I had dreamed of all my life, and a little bit more.  It was my break.  It was the beginning.

I was asleep on the sofa when he woke me, late on the night of July 4th.  I’d had a barbecue with the neighbors.  He’d been out with friends, a choice he was making more and more frequently.  We both knew it was over.  He had been sleeping on the foldout.  “We” had lasted less than a month.  He came home hungry that night, his paycheck oddly spent again.  The grocery crop that grew magically in the refrigerator had not yet sprouted.  He blamed me.  That was happening a lot more frequently, too.

Words were exchanged.  I located his suitcase.  I was flying through the air.  The phone was yanked out of the wall.  I was trying to get out of the apartment.  He was chasing me across the courtyard.  The neighbors were silhouetted in their windows, watching.  I was on the ground.  The iron chair was in his hands, above his head.

“You can put the chair down and sit in it while you wait for the police to get here, and yes, I’ve already called them,” the building manager said.  “Or they can look for the pieces of you in the bushes.  Your choice.”

The Sheriffs looked at the marks on my body with their flashlights.  They wouldn’t let me smoke.  I was impressed that they did not seem to judge me or care that we were two men.  They took him with them.  It was the early hours of July 5th.  It was sixteen years ago.  It began.

The book tour crashed and burned when the publisher forgot to do anything they’d promised to do.  The movie studio was sold and the movie is yet to be made.  And I have been single since.

Independence.  It’s a mixed blessing.  I don’t answer to anyone at home or at work.  But that moment when my life begins, still eludes me.  I hunger for it.  It inspires me in all that I do.  Every word I write.  Every trip to the gym.  Every day I decide to get out of bed.  Every invitation I accept or decline is weighed on those scales.  Will this be the day my life begins?

Sixteen years is a long time to be single.  It is harder to remember that the last person who said he loved me — not in a friend or family kind of way – tried to kill me.  But the 5th of July doesn’t mark the end of something.  It’s the beginning of everything else.  The year that followed was a year of having my heart broken to pieces.  Picking up those pieces also brought me to some major course corrections.  I found a new true north.

I saw him a time or two after.  By arrangement with the Sheriff, he came by to get his things at an appointed time.  My neighbors and friends all just happened to drop by right around that time.  They sat, like Oprah’s sisters in The Color Purple on the front porch.  Their arms folded they glared at him like those women eyed Harpo when he came home, hat in hand, after beating Oprah.  I may be alone, but I’m not unloved.

We met once when he invited me for coffee.  He complained to me that the man he’d been living with had not bothered to tell him he was HIV positive.  There was a Band-Aid in the crook of his arm from the blood test.  I don’t know the result.  We had one last, eye-opening visit.  He was in the hospital.  He’d been taken there following a long “party” he’d attended in the hills.  He expressed concern to me about what he suspected they were putting in the crystal meth.  Oh.

I hope he is well and I hope that July 5th, sixteen years ago, has been as positive a change in his life as it has been in mine.

And me? Another year begins today and anything is possible.  Maybe today .  .  .