ROGER:    You know what I would like to tell you? I would like to tell you 'why', because it has taken me years to figure out that one and I have never told a soul. I used to lie awake at nights wondering, 'what kind of man ... man ... was I that I could...? ' Everytime I asked myself that question, lying there, I'd see one thing. I'd close my eyes and I'd see my father's eyes.

Everyone else, see, who looked into my dad's eyes, saw kindness and warmth.  The disappointment he saved for me and me alone. Nothing I ever did was good enough.   Everything that seemed like a victory to me was nothing to him. Worse than nothing. I couldn't get it right.

So I grew up knowing that I couldn't trust myself. You don't know what that's like.   I never knew what to do. Only that whatever I did would be wrong.  Felt like I was falling into a bottomless pit and there was nothing there to stop me.  There was no anchor. There was nobody to care. Nobody to even notice. Nobody to throw me a rope.

Then I met Holly. And I thought, 'Omigod, this girl...my salvation'. And we fell in love. We got married. She was so damn committed to me. She doesn't remember that now. She wants real bad to forget it. But she hung in there. She didn't give a damn what anybody else thought about me. I was good enough. Finally.

I was everything to her ... for awhile. Until I realized that she really loved another man, and then the disapproval was back and all that continual scorn that I'd seen in my father's eyes. That was the way Holly began to look at me, and I started to fall again. I was falling and falling and falling and falling and finally ... I started just , you know, praying that I could just ... hit the bottom and get it over with . But the funny thing is, see, that you just never hit the bottom, you just ... it's long, and it's sickening and it never ends, and uh, ....and I grew more and more terrified , I guess, and angry, and, uh ... mean. And I finally got to the point where I just said,
'Well, mmm ... man, I'm not gonna go down alone' .... so I took her with me.

ALEXANDRA:   You raped her. 

ROGER:  Yes. I beat her and I raped her. Yeah.

NEXT SCENE

ROGER:   There just isn't any bottom to that pit, so you just keep falling and falling ... through it all there was only one light that I saw, one last chance, one shining innocent little girl ...

ALEXANDRA:  Christina.

ROGER:  Christina ... the one fine thing I'd ever done, the one pure love I'd ever known,  and Holly took it from me. And even Ed knew the truth, but they kept it from Chrissy.  And I watched my own daughter growing up calling another man 'Daddy'. And he was everything to her.  He was the biggest, best, brightest person in her little world. And I was a stranger.

But finally ... I thought, finally ... this is a fight nobody can judge. This is a fight ... this is right. You know, this is right, and this is something I'm gonna win, and I'm gonna be with my little girl.

But once you start freefalling in that pit, boy... you just, there's no one and nothing to stop you. Nothing to stop the fall. Except a real one. And when I hit the bottom of those cliffs in Santo Domingo, it was finally over. And they left me for dead, and I was relieved. But I didn't get off that easy. I wasn't allowed to take my comfortable failures to the grave.  Vaughn found me and put me back together. And I came back stronger. This time I was going to get it right.

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ThorpeRenaldi@michaelzaslow.com  

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02/16/06 12:55:02 AM