Original Salon Article: How (and a bit of why) I Stuck So Many Women With The Check

She's deleting it from Salon, but several people took screen captures.

Here's a pdf: http://www.box.net/shared/lqgq5vysks47im895u6e

And here's the original article:

How (and a bit of why) I Stuck So Many Women With The Check

DECEMBER 5, 2010 3:23PM

by Susan Crain Bakos

The aging lesbian artist sat across the restaurant table from me, her eyes aglow as she praised me. Her sexual pass was feeble, easily put off with an “I don’t know what you mean” shrug. She said she was preparing to fight her landlord’s eviction (though he was right, she was behind in the rent) and trying to get a show and worrying about finding replacement income now that she couldn’t sell Obama condoms on the street. An old Leftie in the East Village mode, she was, had been and always would be poor, proud, ineffective and angry. She will take aim at someone with the dying push of her fingertips on the keyboard. What did she want from me, except perhaps the chance to score a heterosexual sexpert? Buy her paintings. Write about her. Help her get a book deal. Introduce my banker friend to her friend who needed investment. I stuck her with the check—and cab money.

Let me be clear. That was mean. Every time I’ve done it, I’ve known just how mean it was—and not justified by my contempt of the “mark.” Rather, even more my bad for having lunch with them.

Sometimes I’ve walked the check when cash-flow constricted and more often with more than enough money in my handbag to pick up that check. I say I didn’t bring my wallet and hand it over—usually to the woman who wants to “network” with me, i.e., she’s younger, full of herself, very ambitious in the sense of wanting to get somewhere fast and be somebody NOW but not in the old-fashioned sense of: Willing to work hard to get there. So many girls identify themselves as sex coaches or educators, going by the name of Luscious Lola or Divine Deenie or Sumptuous Sade, posing, for example, with nearly bare—and why oiled?—ass thrust toward camera, glancing cheekily over their shoulders— like the girls of the 80s, 90s, 00s, but a bit more dummied down in each re-incarnation, especially this one The Cupcake Re-Generation. Most men don’t network like this and women don’t either, but “girls” of any age do. They gush over me, “love” me, “love” my work, call me an “icon” or something similar meaning “old achiever on way out.” They ask me to read their work, help them write a book proposal for free, send my contact list. Yet they come expecting me to buy lunch too. I claim missing wallet, hand over check and tell her I will need cab fare.

Within hours, she is blogging nasty comments about me (in a blog read by tens of people). Suddenly I am old” and not as talented as they are. They will sell more books than I do, they say—they “hate” me now they say—or so I’ve been told they say because I don’t read any of it. (The lesbian artist wrote her intentions of collaborating on an “anonymous” Hate Susan website with another woman in an email that a third party forwarded to me. Smart girls, huh? I won’t mention their names because I don’t want to drive traffic to their sites, selling their products. Let my lawyer/lover/cousin go after them if either ever makes a profit.)If I don’t care about people, I don’t care about what they think or write or say—even if I am the subject. Anonymous internet trolls and mean girls, snarky jealous people and the poor little marks who didn’t get all that free help they wanted? Time-wasters. Watching a syndicated episode of “Friends” is a better use of time than reading them.This check-dodging is relatively new behavior for me, a new category in a series of bad behaviors that is—at least I can say this much—declining in severity and intensity to the point where it is an errant stream, not a river sometimes overflowing its banks.

For much of my life I have been struggling with psychological issues. Following a suicide attempt seven years ago that was very nearly successful, I began hearing a new diagnosis from a succession of therapists. Programs run out; new ones open up; everybody has their own diagnosis and treatment concept; nobody ever put me on drugs which should have been a clue to Borderline. When I was out of those options, I saw a semi-retired therapist who had a sliding fee scale fee. I paid her in lump sums when writing checks came in. Some therapists said Borderline Personality Disorder; others did not. My first therapist following the attempt labeled it “reactionary depression to a series of life setbacks.” My current therapist, an expert in the field of personality disorders, describes me as “on the borderline of Borderline,” not quite putting me in, not quite taking me out. (“BPD is an umbrella term, covering a range of symptoms and behaviors, manifested differently in each sufferer; and in the majority, the symptoms are treatable, the behaviors can be changed but it takes time which is why insurers go for the ‘untreatable’ label.”) Her treatment plan includes dialectical talk therapy and Buddhist meditation. (Google the research, people. It works for many of us.) Brain scans prove that Buddhist monks have been able to change their brain patterns through meditation. And brain scans of Borderlines also show abnormalities in certain regions of the brain.

If I fell to my knees, wept, tore my hair and told you I’d found Jesus and will devote the rest of my life to spreading His word, some of you would likely forgive me anything except maybe cruelty to animals. But as I confess my crimes, I am also trying to understand them, an intellectual exercise that will offend the judges among you. Like the first confessor in this series, I expect to be pilloried by the outraged. It won’t be the first time. Six years ago I wrote about liking black men in bed and I still get death threats from angry, ignorant racist black women and their counterpart white men. (Idea for a dating service?) I read far enough in to pick up the scent of the tar pits from which they spring—and delete or forward to a cop when threats are involved.

Understand. Explain. Not Excuse. Or even Defend.

The emotional conundrum is that I feel some emotions with inappropriate and painful intensity—which is why BPD sufferers have been compared to burn victims—yet also suppress and distort emotion, channeling it into actions that have nothing to do with the feeling. I’ve not exhibited the big bad behaviors of poor Lindsey Lohan, but I have left when I should have stayed, played havoc with schedules, mine and other people’s, lied, cheated, managed money badly, including my phase of picking up too many checks and attempting to buy love, veered from thinking I am worthless to exhibiting a sense of entitlement (like “entitled” to getting my checks picked up)—and now in a sense, I have stolen. The latest—and truly, I hope the last—bad behavior is a con, you’re thinking, aren’t you?

What is a con?

Bigger than the small stuff we sinners are confessing to in this section on Salon. Really. We are street hustlers, small players for petty cash or the equivalent. A hustler or a con artist works on the same basic knowledge of human nature: The greedy, the self-involved, the dreamer with a romantic vision of her future success that doesn’t include a trail of blood, sweat and tears—he and she can be conned and hustled. It takes but a tiny amount of leverage to use that greed or lust for fame against her.Applying the leverage, pulling the hustle, feels good at the time—really a high—but awful afterward. I imagine binging/purging must feel like this in the mind and soul. Or shoplifting. I am trying to understand and explain the behavior—and recognize the trigger points, usually major life events out of my control—to stop it because Jesus is not there for me (but Buddha is.) Looking back, I see that I risked months, years of stability and happiness on a big gamble (or, in this case, in little crimes)that let out some of the emotion, like blood-letting. The street hustle as pressure valve.

My former friend Alex Zola based his blog The Zola System on his father’s life philosophy. His late father, a Holocaust survivor, once hustled the streets as a survival tactic while Alex has done it for the same reasons I did: for the high and out of contempt for the mark. There’s a lesson here for you too: If you go out looking for a free lunch, you will probably get a check, payable now in your case, or later with interest in mine.