They tell me I am loved.
They tell me that all meaning is assigned, that I create reality, my own decoder ring in a universe unfolding, so that I can be more of who I already am. They tell me I am loved.
They tell me to spot the signposts, the tap on the shoulder, the yearnings and dreams, the synchronicities that make me say, Oh, my!
They tell me I am loved.
And what if they are right, the oracles of this not-so New Age, what if they are right? What if all the love I need is wrapped around me like a blanket, the cold I feel comes only when it slips onto the ground?
What if they are right about the love, waiting like a spring deep in the ground, a well without a bottom, a coldness from the depth that chills me right before the flow begins?
What if they have always been right, the Spirit Ones, the ones I sneer at?
Oh, no, not the heartless conditional love machines of the mega church and the homegrown jihads, not the silly robots of marching magazine subscribers, not the ridiculous finger waggers with too many pets to clean up after and children that hate them.
No, I mean the real Spirit Ones, the real woo-woo’s, the Ones who shut up and listen, the Ones who know peace. The Ones who chant in the storefronts and the hilltop meditation dojos, the Ones who speak in the tongues of their enemies, and stab their parents in the heart, the Ones whose filthy and despised secrets flutter into nothingness, who trade their ties in for tie-dies and die tied to shapes other than the cross.
What if they are right when the tell me that I’m perfect, always was?
What if they are right when they whisper like a lover on my pillow and they melt me with their tears?
What if they are right to strip their clothes off in the street and run towards the sunset with a flock of doves in the open blue sky when the end of the world draws near, and all we can do is laugh at the ridiculous joke we just got, a joke that took forever to understand, a joke we cannot tell, because there is no punchline, there is no line that I can use to pull myself in, reeling from the feeling that there is no hope left in this nation of the hopeless.
Get hope. Get hopped up on hope, hoping that someday, I’ll know what they are talking about, and know -- not think, not hope, but really know -- that they are right when they tell I am are loved.
12/4/07
BRIGHT AND SHINY OBJECTS
I click the seat belt and ignite the engine of my SUV, filled to the limit with loneliness and gasoline. I’ve prepared for my solo commute back to L.A.: water bottle, cell phone, jumbo Starbucks, an eat-in-the car protein-bar breakfast. It was a five pound weekend, I think. I’m dressed in business casual, and the clothes are too tight. My puffed up flesh pulls at the seams of the slacks, the starched shirt, the gray cashmere sweater that zips up the front. I’m at the beached whale stage of my weight cycle.
The car windows are filthy and the dashboard is layered with weeks of dust. Outside, ugly tract houses alternate with scrubby desert lots, oddly vacant, untouched by the appetites of the subdividers. Sandy says it’s the Indian land, that Palm Springs is a checkerboard because developers don’t want to build where the Indians won’t sell.
Thank God for Sandy, he’s rescued me. Come spend Thanksgiving, there’s room in my little casita, he said. We’ll hang out and do Turkey Day, then drive up the mountain to the men’s retreat on Friday.
I see immense mountains on my left as I merge onto the freeway ramp. It’s too early in the day for the deep purple shadows they cast across the valley floor. The low morning sun glints off the hood of the car in front of me. I catch one hazel eye in the rear-view mirror, and I wink at myself. My eye smiles. I am smiling at the part of me that loves the open road, the freedom and the freshness. The other part of me, a deeper part, dreads these roads. Growing up, they signified yet another move, another social dismemberment disguised as adventure.
This is, I think, the central metaphor of my life, an Army brat’s uprootedness, the pathos of never fitting in, the lurching back and forth between desperately wanting to know you and not even wanting to try. It is my story and it bores me. I want exciting stories, I want to tell them, I want to write them down, I want to be known as someone who does. Saturday night I stood on stage at the talent show and read a piece about Internet dating. It was funny, they laughed. It was funny.
The NPR theme music pulls me out of my reverie, and I hear the announcer delivering one of those heart-warming little yarns they have, right before getting into the news of war and death and money. This one is about a woman who decides to Google her husband’s name, only to discover that he’d won the lottery years before. Surprise, surprise, he’d forgotten to mention it. Maybe I’ll work with this story, maybe there’s something here for me, I think, and suddenly, with the wide expanse of striped concrete ahead, the terrifying choreography of hurling cars and lumbering semi’s around me, I remember my writing. I am a writer. I tell people that I’m a writer. I attend a writing class. This week, however, I’m a writer who didn’t write.
I can’t decide if I care about the anonymous radio couple, the lying husband, the bamboozled wife. Perhaps she was cheating on him, stealing his money. Maybe they shared a secret from the past that justified this sort of retribution. I like to adopt characters and the shards of stories that I can work with, I have a list. Should I add them to my to my collection of real-life stories, my hoard? They move me, these stories. Maybe they’ll move my readers someday, whoever they turn out to be. Maybe.
The pleasure comes in taking out a gem from the trove, cutting it, polishing it. Nature provides to the diamond cutter whose eye and skills create the value. An average person would not recognize anything precious in the raw and forlorn lumps over which so many lives have been lost, so many made.
At a party, my host Daniel and I chat with Rob.
“Surely you remember her,” Rob says to Daniel, “she was my next door neighbor until she married that rich guy.”
“Oh, is she the one whose husband ran her down with the jet ski?” asks Daniel.
“He tried to murder her?” I say.
“Well,” says Rob, sipping his wine. “She decided to believe him when he told that her he had frozen up, that he had panicked, and simply frozen up. She said she believed him, only now, he’s in a coma. She’ll be very rich when he dies.”
I think of Hitchcock and revenge as I drive. I take a sip of coffee. I notice a kid in the back of a station wagon on my right, a red ball cap on his head. As I pull even with the driver I glance over. A woman with streaked hair is applying eyeliner, the rear-view mirror angled so that she can see her face. I see a red ball cap on the pavement.
Then there’s the one about the woman who faked being a 9-11 survivor. Evidently, she so believable that the other survivors elected her to chair their committee. She testified before Congress. Even after being unmasked as a fraud, she stuck to her original story. There was no evidence that she was even in New York when the planes hit the towers. She was from Belgium, actually.
I met this guy on Saturday at the retreat, married for 25 years. He’s a massage therapist, and a sexologist — his actual word — a sexologist. He provides therapeutic erotic encounters, mostly for clients who are also married men. They’ve never been touched like I touch them, he tells me. Women can’t do that, you know. I wonder about the wives.
Sandy and I are gossiping about the weekend on Sunday night, curled up on his bed after we drove back down the mountain. He lobs me one, wham! — about a guy he had sex with called Sammy, athletic and good looking, forty-something. I smirk, Sandy goes on. Most of the details follow the normal script, seduction, acceleration, release.
Then he says, “It’s the weirdest thing, he brought his son to the retreat, you know, that cute blond lad.”
I’d met the kid, went by the name of Hank, eighteen and gay, definitely chicken in a group where 35 was considered young. I had wondered how he found us.
“When did he come out to his kid, anyway?” I ask.
“He said he came out to Hank when he was five years old, and that Hank replied, ‘Oh dad, of course I knew that.’” Same words my mother used when I came out to her.
My driving is on autopilot, the characters and stories pulling me through my theta-waving mind. Then, boom, back in the real world, a cop car whooshes past me, zig-zagging the traffic to a dead stop. Up ahead there are four or five more black-and-whites. San Bernardino Police, it says on the door of the one closest to me. More cop cars pull in and block all the lanes.
My cell phone rings and I click the bluetooth button on my steering wheel. “Hi Nick, it’s Ron.” It’s my AA sponsee, calling in with the download from his Thanksgiving. I listen, another real-life story. He’s asking his mother what he was like as a child, and he hates the answer. He’s biting his tongue when his Republican brother praises Bush, and he wonders why everyone in his family seems so angry. The holiday season is upon us, I offer: it’s our national pageant of pain.
In front of me, I see a clutch of uniformed police officers cuffing two black kids with baggy jeans and white T-shirts draping down to the middle of their thighs. One cop has his gun out. They drag the kids into the back seat of the police cruiser.
Real life is seductive. Other peoples’ stories pull me in with their authenticity, their potential to go deep into the human heart. People caught at a crossroads. When they make the turn, they will never be the same again.
Bright shiny objects. Shiny and distracting. They distract me, they make me look away, they help me look away from my own pain, run away from my own story.
Aging gay man, fat, alone and depressed about his aloneness—-no, not the third person, have some balls, use the first.
I’m binge eating again and I can’t stop. I can’t bring myself to exercise. I’m willful and angry and ashamed. Still, I pretend I’m OK. I pretend this is not depression, I pretend that I am not depressed because I turn sixty in June and I’m still alone. I pretend I don’t mind being alone. I take refuge under the covers, where my dreams lie. Stay away from me. I don’t need you, I’ll be OK. Just get away and let me write.
The police blockade unravels as the car with the perps in the back seat speeds towards the exit, and the other black-and-whites follow. A cop drives a PT Cruiser, the perps’ car, I suppose. The red Chevy Malibu in front of me pulls away. I hit the gas and fiddle with the radio dial, trying to get a clearer signal.
The car windows are filthy and the dashboard is layered with weeks of dust. Outside, ugly tract houses alternate with scrubby desert lots, oddly vacant, untouched by the appetites of the subdividers. Sandy says it’s the Indian land, that Palm Springs is a checkerboard because developers don’t want to build where the Indians won’t sell.
Thank God for Sandy, he’s rescued me. Come spend Thanksgiving, there’s room in my little casita, he said. We’ll hang out and do Turkey Day, then drive up the mountain to the men’s retreat on Friday.
I see immense mountains on my left as I merge onto the freeway ramp. It’s too early in the day for the deep purple shadows they cast across the valley floor. The low morning sun glints off the hood of the car in front of me. I catch one hazel eye in the rear-view mirror, and I wink at myself. My eye smiles. I am smiling at the part of me that loves the open road, the freedom and the freshness. The other part of me, a deeper part, dreads these roads. Growing up, they signified yet another move, another social dismemberment disguised as adventure.
This is, I think, the central metaphor of my life, an Army brat’s uprootedness, the pathos of never fitting in, the lurching back and forth between desperately wanting to know you and not even wanting to try. It is my story and it bores me. I want exciting stories, I want to tell them, I want to write them down, I want to be known as someone who does. Saturday night I stood on stage at the talent show and read a piece about Internet dating. It was funny, they laughed. It was funny.
The NPR theme music pulls me out of my reverie, and I hear the announcer delivering one of those heart-warming little yarns they have, right before getting into the news of war and death and money. This one is about a woman who decides to Google her husband’s name, only to discover that he’d won the lottery years before. Surprise, surprise, he’d forgotten to mention it. Maybe I’ll work with this story, maybe there’s something here for me, I think, and suddenly, with the wide expanse of striped concrete ahead, the terrifying choreography of hurling cars and lumbering semi’s around me, I remember my writing. I am a writer. I tell people that I’m a writer. I attend a writing class. This week, however, I’m a writer who didn’t write.
I can’t decide if I care about the anonymous radio couple, the lying husband, the bamboozled wife. Perhaps she was cheating on him, stealing his money. Maybe they shared a secret from the past that justified this sort of retribution. I like to adopt characters and the shards of stories that I can work with, I have a list. Should I add them to my to my collection of real-life stories, my hoard? They move me, these stories. Maybe they’ll move my readers someday, whoever they turn out to be. Maybe.
The pleasure comes in taking out a gem from the trove, cutting it, polishing it. Nature provides to the diamond cutter whose eye and skills create the value. An average person would not recognize anything precious in the raw and forlorn lumps over which so many lives have been lost, so many made.
At a party, my host Daniel and I chat with Rob.
“Surely you remember her,” Rob says to Daniel, “she was my next door neighbor until she married that rich guy.”
“Oh, is she the one whose husband ran her down with the jet ski?” asks Daniel.
“He tried to murder her?” I say.
“Well,” says Rob, sipping his wine. “She decided to believe him when he told that her he had frozen up, that he had panicked, and simply frozen up. She said she believed him, only now, he’s in a coma. She’ll be very rich when he dies.”
I think of Hitchcock and revenge as I drive. I take a sip of coffee. I notice a kid in the back of a station wagon on my right, a red ball cap on his head. As I pull even with the driver I glance over. A woman with streaked hair is applying eyeliner, the rear-view mirror angled so that she can see her face. I see a red ball cap on the pavement.
Then there’s the one about the woman who faked being a 9-11 survivor. Evidently, she so believable that the other survivors elected her to chair their committee. She testified before Congress. Even after being unmasked as a fraud, she stuck to her original story. There was no evidence that she was even in New York when the planes hit the towers. She was from Belgium, actually.
I met this guy on Saturday at the retreat, married for 25 years. He’s a massage therapist, and a sexologist — his actual word — a sexologist. He provides therapeutic erotic encounters, mostly for clients who are also married men. They’ve never been touched like I touch them, he tells me. Women can’t do that, you know. I wonder about the wives.
Sandy and I are gossiping about the weekend on Sunday night, curled up on his bed after we drove back down the mountain. He lobs me one, wham! — about a guy he had sex with called Sammy, athletic and good looking, forty-something. I smirk, Sandy goes on. Most of the details follow the normal script, seduction, acceleration, release.
Then he says, “It’s the weirdest thing, he brought his son to the retreat, you know, that cute blond lad.”
I’d met the kid, went by the name of Hank, eighteen and gay, definitely chicken in a group where 35 was considered young. I had wondered how he found us.
“When did he come out to his kid, anyway?” I ask.
“He said he came out to Hank when he was five years old, and that Hank replied, ‘Oh dad, of course I knew that.’” Same words my mother used when I came out to her.
My driving is on autopilot, the characters and stories pulling me through my theta-waving mind. Then, boom, back in the real world, a cop car whooshes past me, zig-zagging the traffic to a dead stop. Up ahead there are four or five more black-and-whites. San Bernardino Police, it says on the door of the one closest to me. More cop cars pull in and block all the lanes.
My cell phone rings and I click the bluetooth button on my steering wheel. “Hi Nick, it’s Ron.” It’s my AA sponsee, calling in with the download from his Thanksgiving. I listen, another real-life story. He’s asking his mother what he was like as a child, and he hates the answer. He’s biting his tongue when his Republican brother praises Bush, and he wonders why everyone in his family seems so angry. The holiday season is upon us, I offer: it’s our national pageant of pain.
In front of me, I see a clutch of uniformed police officers cuffing two black kids with baggy jeans and white T-shirts draping down to the middle of their thighs. One cop has his gun out. They drag the kids into the back seat of the police cruiser.
Real life is seductive. Other peoples’ stories pull me in with their authenticity, their potential to go deep into the human heart. People caught at a crossroads. When they make the turn, they will never be the same again.
Bright shiny objects. Shiny and distracting. They distract me, they make me look away, they help me look away from my own pain, run away from my own story.
Aging gay man, fat, alone and depressed about his aloneness—-no, not the third person, have some balls, use the first.
I’m binge eating again and I can’t stop. I can’t bring myself to exercise. I’m willful and angry and ashamed. Still, I pretend I’m OK. I pretend this is not depression, I pretend that I am not depressed because I turn sixty in June and I’m still alone. I pretend I don’t mind being alone. I take refuge under the covers, where my dreams lie. Stay away from me. I don’t need you, I’ll be OK. Just get away and let me write.
The police blockade unravels as the car with the perps in the back seat speeds towards the exit, and the other black-and-whites follow. A cop drives a PT Cruiser, the perps’ car, I suppose. The red Chevy Malibu in front of me pulls away. I hit the gas and fiddle with the radio dial, trying to get a clearer signal.
TEETH & MOUTH
Off to the dentist today, a cleaning: the bitch, the gal who cleans my teeth and gums, her own biting mouth covered by a corrugated paper napkin, and this see-through plastic helmet that descends over the top of her face, a low-budget Darth Vadar with blond hair pulled back tightly.
“Very nice,” she says, stabbing and prodding my gums, her inquisitorial spotlight aimed right at the damn teeth like they were Judy Garland in one final curtain call, and I moan, out loud, I mean, it’s not easy to converse with the mirror and the water jet torture machine jammed in there, along with the gizmo that sucks out the water and the blood. Thank god for that, it keeps me from a tragic drowning incident, right there in Westwood.
Very nice? I mull that over, heat crawling around my neck. A matching pair of jolts, little current zaps, stun the gaps where my two molars used to be, now occupied by metal screws. Zap, zap. The molars were ripped from their places of honor by a different sadist, the endodontist, at least he had good drugs, they called it ‘twilight’ anaesthesia —that’s when you’re nearly catatonic, but awake enough so you don’t retch all over the bastard as whacks the side of your tooth with a mallet to rip and shred the roots away from your jaw.
Oh yes, “very nice” indeed, toothless in Westwood and she thinks it’s nice.
It’s true enough, the damn missing teeth are in the back of my mouth, one on each side, so that, under daily conditions, I don’t look like some kind of Appalachian refugee, unable to express myself because of the gale force of whistling that comes from such gaps. Except when I laugh, I mean when I cut loose with a true guffaw, when the lips pull back, and point towards my ears as they reveal the pathetic missing teeth. Then they show, and I don’t even know it until it’s too late.
I think of Betty Ann Babbage from high school, the one with the page boy, the industrial metal mouth and the irrepressible giggle. Her arm was like Dr. Strangelove’s the minute the giggle erupted, boom, the palm of her hand would cup over her mouth, over the armament in there, and you’d hear her aunt Mabel say, “Oh honey, don’t cover your face with your hand like that, you have such a pretty smile.”
“Very nice, indeed,” I think, “thanks a fucking bunch,” as Marilyn, the hygienist retracts her hands and the instruments of torture they clutch. I pull out the suction thinggie, and I look right up at her.
Lies, all lies, I confess to myself, there you go again. She’s not a bitch, this Marilyn, constantly pleasant, unflinchingly professional, concerned, competent. Well, except that one time, when her X-ray failed to detect the absess at the root of my M-2, that gigantic upper molar. Hence, the endodontist. And the howling gap, soon to be filled with fake new teeth, if the rest don’t fall out before February.
“Home care, that’s the secret,” she croons. “Home care.”
“That and six grand for the fucking titanium posts and another couple for the fucking crowns,” I think, as I shut my eyes and visualize Betty Ann’s right paw, covering her mouth, while the other one claws the TV screen, trying to grab the Beetles on Ed Sullivan, to find a way to transcend the torture of orthodontia.
Some might say my feelings about Marilyn were spiteful, even resentful: hell hath no fury like a tooth extraction patient. Especially when-- maybe, just fucking maybe -- the tooth didn’t need to go. This woman should buy me a car. Is she covered by insurance? I discussed this entire matter with my therapist, and he encouraged me to discharge the anger with constructive, bark-like sounds, so I crawled on the floor of his tasteful Santa Monica condo, barking and wanting to pee on some priceless antique he acquired with my money. Complaining about overcharging to a therapist, well, this is carrying coals to the Westside equivalent of Newcastle -- Torrance maybe.
You demand the truth, is that what I’m hearing? Truth, you say, dental truth, Shakespearean dental truth? Well, it’s most likely my DNA, mother had soft teeth, bridges over her troubled bicuspids, top and bottom, and a bad bite, charming as a beauty queen, that fetching overbite, but hell in the later years. Genetic hardship nothwithstanding, it could have been the drugs, prodigious quantities of speed, dissolved in a wash of Jack Daniels, coating my naked mouth area for days at a time, hell, weeks at a time.
Could have been that. Or my periodontal predelictions.
Dentistry, like sobriety and monogamy, cannot easily be boxed in by simple moral concepts like truth. Lost teeth, like lost love and the occasional binge, most often fall into the domain of wisdom, not truth.
“Very nice,” she says, stabbing and prodding my gums, her inquisitorial spotlight aimed right at the damn teeth like they were Judy Garland in one final curtain call, and I moan, out loud, I mean, it’s not easy to converse with the mirror and the water jet torture machine jammed in there, along with the gizmo that sucks out the water and the blood. Thank god for that, it keeps me from a tragic drowning incident, right there in Westwood.
Very nice? I mull that over, heat crawling around my neck. A matching pair of jolts, little current zaps, stun the gaps where my two molars used to be, now occupied by metal screws. Zap, zap. The molars were ripped from their places of honor by a different sadist, the endodontist, at least he had good drugs, they called it ‘twilight’ anaesthesia —that’s when you’re nearly catatonic, but awake enough so you don’t retch all over the bastard as whacks the side of your tooth with a mallet to rip and shred the roots away from your jaw.
Oh yes, “very nice” indeed, toothless in Westwood and she thinks it’s nice.
It’s true enough, the damn missing teeth are in the back of my mouth, one on each side, so that, under daily conditions, I don’t look like some kind of Appalachian refugee, unable to express myself because of the gale force of whistling that comes from such gaps. Except when I laugh, I mean when I cut loose with a true guffaw, when the lips pull back, and point towards my ears as they reveal the pathetic missing teeth. Then they show, and I don’t even know it until it’s too late.
I think of Betty Ann Babbage from high school, the one with the page boy, the industrial metal mouth and the irrepressible giggle. Her arm was like Dr. Strangelove’s the minute the giggle erupted, boom, the palm of her hand would cup over her mouth, over the armament in there, and you’d hear her aunt Mabel say, “Oh honey, don’t cover your face with your hand like that, you have such a pretty smile.”
“Very nice, indeed,” I think, “thanks a fucking bunch,” as Marilyn, the hygienist retracts her hands and the instruments of torture they clutch. I pull out the suction thinggie, and I look right up at her.
Lies, all lies, I confess to myself, there you go again. She’s not a bitch, this Marilyn, constantly pleasant, unflinchingly professional, concerned, competent. Well, except that one time, when her X-ray failed to detect the absess at the root of my M-2, that gigantic upper molar. Hence, the endodontist. And the howling gap, soon to be filled with fake new teeth, if the rest don’t fall out before February.
“Home care, that’s the secret,” she croons. “Home care.”
“That and six grand for the fucking titanium posts and another couple for the fucking crowns,” I think, as I shut my eyes and visualize Betty Ann’s right paw, covering her mouth, while the other one claws the TV screen, trying to grab the Beetles on Ed Sullivan, to find a way to transcend the torture of orthodontia.
Some might say my feelings about Marilyn were spiteful, even resentful: hell hath no fury like a tooth extraction patient. Especially when-- maybe, just fucking maybe -- the tooth didn’t need to go. This woman should buy me a car. Is she covered by insurance? I discussed this entire matter with my therapist, and he encouraged me to discharge the anger with constructive, bark-like sounds, so I crawled on the floor of his tasteful Santa Monica condo, barking and wanting to pee on some priceless antique he acquired with my money. Complaining about overcharging to a therapist, well, this is carrying coals to the Westside equivalent of Newcastle -- Torrance maybe.
You demand the truth, is that what I’m hearing? Truth, you say, dental truth, Shakespearean dental truth? Well, it’s most likely my DNA, mother had soft teeth, bridges over her troubled bicuspids, top and bottom, and a bad bite, charming as a beauty queen, that fetching overbite, but hell in the later years. Genetic hardship nothwithstanding, it could have been the drugs, prodigious quantities of speed, dissolved in a wash of Jack Daniels, coating my naked mouth area for days at a time, hell, weeks at a time.
Could have been that. Or my periodontal predelictions.
Dentistry, like sobriety and monogamy, cannot easily be boxed in by simple moral concepts like truth. Lost teeth, like lost love and the occasional binge, most often fall into the domain of wisdom, not truth.
FLAME OUT
God knows, I’d been patient, standing in my socks behind him in the security line. He wasn’t bad looking, tall and firm, dressed entirely in denim. At first I smiled to myself as he fumbled around in his duffel, arranging and fussing. Perhaps he was flying for the first time since the TSA took over. He pulled out a copy of Muscle and Fitness magazine and stuck it in his pocket. The TSA goons were waving at him, people were shifting and grumbling… Get your stuff into the plastic bins, for Chrissake! Heat is crawling up my shoulders to my neck. My brain begins to simmer, it’s burning in the skillet. It smells like danger and fury. I surrender to it, I grab his arms, I yank the heavy rope from my laptop bag to tie his wrists up quickly.
“Hey, what the fuck!” he yells, just before I shove my handkerchief into his mouth and knock his feet out from under him. I seal his lips with a strip of gray gaffer’s tape and pull the rope between his arms and ankles. Gagged and hog-tied, he writhes on the ground at my feet.
A few people cheer, I hear their words above my heartbeat: “Atta boy!” and “Serves him right!”…. I squirt him with lighter fluid, soaking the denim, splashing his hair and face, and a woman hands me one of those long-necked BBQ lighters. I aim it at Mr. Denim. Whoosh. Bluish fire bursts from its barrel, it catches hold of his blue jeans. Flames race up his squirming body, the denim like underbrush on a parched hillside. He struggles, but it’s too late. Cracking and popping are the only sounds, as flames shoot 20 feet into the air. Only the man seems to burn. Iit smells like a church picnic. I notice the burnt edge of the Muscle and Fitness magazine peeking out of the charred mess on the floor in front of the security machine. I step over and go through.
I feel clean and unburdened. I search for someplace to sit; my eyes are drawn to a flat-screen provided by Channel Seven, showing live pictures of flaming residential horror: Halloween colors. The TV’s audio is on ‘mute’, so I squint to see the white words cutting across the terrified pantomime of a woman, her contorted face bobbing in and out of the frame. The woman is not fat, but there is a fullness to her, in her thirties maybe. The jittery camera tilts down to show her cherubic little girl and a tan cocker spaniel pulling on a leash. The camera zooms into a snapshot of the two of them in front of a teepee, the little girl wearing a tiny Indian headdress and a crooked smile. The shot tilts up to a sky choked in smoke, the fire’s redness smudged with black and billows of charcoal gray. Zoom out, a two-shot, the woman, now crying, and a blond anchorwoman wearing a crisp safari jacket, her perfect teeth moving purposefully … AND ALL THEY COULD SAVE WAS THE FAMILY DOG AND A SCRAPBOOK…
I turn away to find a seat. My wireless screen flashes some email. A deal on a car rental, boring items from work, two messages from back East: ‘Are U OK?’ ‘Is the house in danger?’ California is burning to the sea, Day of the Locusts on CNN. The truth is, if it weren’t for the news, this round of fires would have escaped my notice. Not like last time, when I was surrounded.
I rise to the loudspeaker squawks that announce my flight and climb the wobbly metal stairs to find a window seat. I sink into the lull of the familiar mindless flight ritual… muffled engine rumble, dimming cabin lights, the triumphant lift. Outside, off to the West, I see isolated flashes of tangerine flame and wisps of smoke in the canyons and hills. The plane pierces through the soup that blankets the city after two days of fires. My cheek and eye are warmed by a plastic sun. Aerial vibrations make my cradle rock; my bassinet sways high above cotton clouds.
I’m startled when a steward comes running down the aisle with his hair on fire. He leans over me, but I bash him in the head with a book of poems, which in turn catches fire. It’s OK, because I have a key to my porthole window. I unlock it and hurl the flaming book into the void, watching the fiery thing twirl and smoke as it melts into a panoramic view of the full expanse of Los Angeles — red, flaming, ablaze from the mountains to the ocean. I gasp, my God, I had no idea the fires were so widespread. I could have sworn they said the burning was only in Malibu, maybe Arrowhead, not this hell.
Suddenly I feel the plane losing altitude. We are heading back down, down into the fire zone. I try to make out the geography, but I’m disoriented. I get my bearings when I make out the towers at Universal City, and realize we are headed back to Burbank. I feel a tapping on my shoulder, it’s the steward again, his head covered with scabs and burn marks. He wears only his underwear. It is a true white, a shocking white, a strange comfort.
“What happened to your uniform?” I ask, averting my eyes.
“I lost it in the fires,” he says. “All I got away with was this,” and he holds up a photo album. I am suddenly so grateful that I managed to scan my photos onto the computer last summer. The steward pokes at me again.
“What is it?” I shout, peaking at his underwear.
“We are going to have to ask you to leave, now.”
“Why? What have I done?”
“Your house is on fire, you must evacuate,” and he grabs me, shoving me through the tiny porthole window. I grab hold of the edge of the plane, and yell, “But my laptop, my memories.”
He tosses the case to me and it inflates like a parachute. I glide gently toward burning Burbank. To my right, I see NBC in flames, helicopters spewing water onto the immense buildings. To my left, a brilliant wall of fire on the mountains above town, the mini mansions popping into flame — like when you were a kid, the rolls of caps you spread on the sidewalk, seeing who could pop pop pop the most in a row.
As I near the ground the unbearable heat rises up to me, flames licking my ass. I maneuver myself through a downdraft and onto Alameda Avenue. It is empty, except for the white ash drifting festively. No cars, no people -- where are they? I hear no screams, I smell no burning flesh. I remove my shirt and pants and wrap my sock feet with them to protect against the scorching sidewalk. From the west a flock of gulls, maybe 50 of them, fly into the hot wind in a V-shaped formation creating a perfect moving shadow, like an arrow. I take it as a sign that I must follow.
When I turn the corner, every house on the block has burned down to its nubs. I realize that I am on my street, the street where I live, standing in my underwear with my feet wrapped in rags. This gives me a sense of inner peace and I realize that I am definitely not miserable, I am ready to go on TV.
A group of dogs trots down the center of the street towards me. One of them stops and stands up on his hind quarters. I recognize the dog, it’s Karen’s dog from across the street. I feel awkward because I’ve forgotten his name. Fortunately, he has the social graces to offer a paw and say, “It’s Rocket,” and then I remember, of course, Karen’s dog Rocket. I notice that Rocket has a rosary in his paw. I didn’t realize that Rocket was a Catholic dog.
“They are after all of us,” says Rocket, fingering the rosary. “They are rounding up all the dogs, they believe we have started these fires.”
“No that’s impossible,” I say, “You couldn’t do that,” but Rocket looks down at the ground with a kind of doggy sheepishness that leaves me feeling uneasy and suspicious.
“Where’s Basil?” I ask Rocket, but he runs away. I turn towards my house, or what’s left of it. The doorbell lays on the driveway. I ring it because my keys are still in the plane. I hear Basil barking wildly, like he used to do before he became so deaf. My heart leaps with joy and I step into the building, my laptop case banging against my BVDs at each stride.
“Basil, Basil Rathbone!!” I shout, frantic to find my devoted pet. The smell of burning books hits me like a hammer, and I see my entire library in a charred pile. I lean over and pick up a smoldering copy of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A strain of electronic wah-wah music produces a rhythmic glide. I grab hold with both hands until it drops me right into the closet, right into the smoky shambles of my wardrobe. I am overcome with grief, all these clothes that I love, especially those which are now too small for me to wear. I start to cry, and then I think, This is ridiculous. I’m in my burning house and I cannot get out of the closet. I wipe away a tear from my blackened cheek, and see Basil sitting in the bubbling hot tub smoking a cigarette.
“You never told me you smoked,” I say to him, getting all huffy.
“Why would I, you would just make my life more miserable,” says the Springer Spaniel.
“You’re all I have left, you and my laptop,” I shout, making sure that he can hear me. He puffs on his filtered cigarette and stares into the middle distance with uncharacteristic chilliness.
“You didn’t start these fires, did you?” Basil looks towards me, grinning in his sly way.
“It was time for you to start fresh, anyway. Your life is such a joke,” Basil says. “You’ve got your laptop, you’ve got me. What else do you need?”
“You call that unconditional love?…Dammit, you set this fire, didn’t you?” I shout. “I can’t believe it, after all I’ve done for you,”
“Oh please,” Basil says, tossing the lit cigarette towards the fern garden, which was still unburnt. “You sanctimonious bastard, you pathetic fool, you self-centered idiot.”
The dog’s words echoed in my heart for a long time. Maybe he is right, I think, maybe I’m confusing anger and love. The flames flare up from the garden behind me. I climb into the hot tub to escape them, and stare into the purple sky.
FURNITURE
The anticipation of delivery is impossible. Anxiety and caffeination knot the crevices of my gut. It is too late to reclaim the tiny fortune I have blown. Dust-bunnies skitter and I tumble into reverie. The four ultra seating modules materialize, knife-sharp edges sheathed in velvety grey-green fabric — the color-Nazi’s dub it “Overcast”.
My dream for months, a fevered hovering in the air, pale like a salmon’s belly, polished chrome legs a counterpoint to my carpet’s frenzied Persian geometry. I’m aroused by the pristine coolness, this lust delivering the entitled belonging of mid-century modernity.
Furniture can do that, can make you horny for living, jonesing for an experience that it can both contain and embody. It took me forever to commit: multiple visits to the intimidating showroom — like dates. I even took out a section of the sectional at Easter, a dalliance that brought me ever so close. Eventually, with finality, I called the clerk, fabric swatch clutched in my non-phone hand. I made it official, I proposed with a plastic card and a lump in my throat. And then, the wait: a torturous term of gestation, as each piece got built from scratch in a factory in Gardena, a short drive down the very same Five Freeway that gets me to the job that enables such an extravagant affair of the heart.
It is time for this new love — my passion is palpable. And yet, I cannot seem to let go of my heart’s discards, so wrong-sized for this house, for this life. One by one, the old pieces populate what had once been a garage, filthy and unused except as a place to cram the detritus of this old gypsy’s ridiculous follies. Post-renovation, it’s now “My Little Casita”— my aerie, bright and mirrored, floored with dappled linoleum cushioning the treadmill and barbells, massage table and altar, fantasies spiritual and carnal, made sacred in the fragrant breeze that flutters through the garden just outside.
This is the California I traveled so far to grab, oh, so fucking long ago. And what of those remnant days long past?…mere decorations for the hours of my youth? Like favorite songs, witnesses to a life — whether worth living, only time, more time will tell.
Against one wall, the authentic Hoosier cabinet I found on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn one golden February Saturday, its oak so dark and luminous, capped by a tapped-lead countertop that crowns a base: doored shelves, drawers and a pull-out bin, said to be for potatoes. A narrower piece perches, not affixed, atop the base to boast a pair of opposing leaded-glass doors. Smack-dab in the middle, another bin, smaller, no doubt for flour, so said the salesman, a curly-eared Hasid who had never been anywhere near Indiana. He claimed my Hoosier dated back to the 1890’s; of course, without provenance, but for 130 bucks, who cared? I needed the storage.
The Hoosier sits adjacent to an Empire-style bureau, faux of course, but noble and solid despite the peeling veneer. Carved curlicues on the massive front legs show visible grooves from the gnawing, back when my Springer Spaniel, Basil Rathbone, was an irrepressible puppy with a teething problem. How could I dispose of it, so emblematic of the wild oats of my youth, sown with coincidence and abandon on the fabled, cobbled trails of Greenwich Village in the hoary days of 1978? It fairly jumped out and grabbed me right there on Christopher Street, it bumped me as I stumbled drunk out of some gutterhole of a bar, beers and shots too countless to recall.
But remember I do, proof positive of the preposterous price of this piece: 75 dollars to a greasy-haired Hippie who hawked it: was it even his? Or was he just scamming this wasted fag? I hailed a cab, and stowed the drawers in the big back seat, tied its body to the roof, the hippie and the cabbie screaming furiously: Tie the godamned thing right, why doncha? I rode shotgun clutching the bureau out the window, all the way home to Chelsea — 20 bucks the price to the Puerto Rican who ran the Botanica on the ground floor to help me lug it up four flights, liked to kill us both. I wanted that very night to fold my socks and jeans and skivvies into that chest of drawers. Instead, I passed out.
My gaze finds the curves and edges of a harvest table, carved long and narrow decades ago: gargoyles and castles, vines and fruits twining upward toward the sun-pitted tabletop — memories oozing right out of the wood grain. Just there: it sits amidst rented luxury, that penthouse in DC, scored with Paul our very first morning from the want ads, the day we fled Manhattan — before our love expired. We laid out on this very table glorious spreads of exotic foodstuffs, love-drenched banquets that mimicked our respective Mediterranean bloodlines, his from Lebanon, mine from Italy.
We didn’t know how sour celebration would become. Don’t blame the table, which so beautifully held our culinary dance, his lamb kibbee, my Florentine tartar larded with anchovies; tabboule and orzo, grape leaves and veal bundles, and so it went, a culinary pas-de-deux, dueling desserts the feast’s careening culmination, so fat and sticky. Just like me, only I was sugared well before the guests arrived. As for the table, it longed to return to Pittsburgh, to my rich friend Tom’s ancestral homestead. First a loaner, then a keeper — and why not? Tom had too much as it was, and kept no replicas; the rich want only the real.
I want it too, I wanted it then, I wanted it all, beloved chattel with vivid living stored inside each drawer, each door impossible to shut, each scratch across the surface a wound, not festering, but not quite healed. I don’t imagine I’ll ever sell them, yank their precious bodies from here, this well-earned final resting place — mine perhaps, as well. Could I ever get enough?
The doorbell startles: delivery men await. I wipe my eyes and greet them, my breath constricted as they work. I slip a twenty to the lead man on his exit, then touch my finger to the box’s edge. They crave my blade inside their seams; they ache to open up, to reveal their unfurled narrative, the urgent dreams before us.
Suddenly, I am alone. No, not alone. There is furniture.
My dream for months, a fevered hovering in the air, pale like a salmon’s belly, polished chrome legs a counterpoint to my carpet’s frenzied Persian geometry. I’m aroused by the pristine coolness, this lust delivering the entitled belonging of mid-century modernity.
Furniture can do that, can make you horny for living, jonesing for an experience that it can both contain and embody. It took me forever to commit: multiple visits to the intimidating showroom — like dates. I even took out a section of the sectional at Easter, a dalliance that brought me ever so close. Eventually, with finality, I called the clerk, fabric swatch clutched in my non-phone hand. I made it official, I proposed with a plastic card and a lump in my throat. And then, the wait: a torturous term of gestation, as each piece got built from scratch in a factory in Gardena, a short drive down the very same Five Freeway that gets me to the job that enables such an extravagant affair of the heart.
It is time for this new love — my passion is palpable. And yet, I cannot seem to let go of my heart’s discards, so wrong-sized for this house, for this life. One by one, the old pieces populate what had once been a garage, filthy and unused except as a place to cram the detritus of this old gypsy’s ridiculous follies. Post-renovation, it’s now “My Little Casita”— my aerie, bright and mirrored, floored with dappled linoleum cushioning the treadmill and barbells, massage table and altar, fantasies spiritual and carnal, made sacred in the fragrant breeze that flutters through the garden just outside.
This is the California I traveled so far to grab, oh, so fucking long ago. And what of those remnant days long past?…mere decorations for the hours of my youth? Like favorite songs, witnesses to a life — whether worth living, only time, more time will tell.
Against one wall, the authentic Hoosier cabinet I found on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn one golden February Saturday, its oak so dark and luminous, capped by a tapped-lead countertop that crowns a base: doored shelves, drawers and a pull-out bin, said to be for potatoes. A narrower piece perches, not affixed, atop the base to boast a pair of opposing leaded-glass doors. Smack-dab in the middle, another bin, smaller, no doubt for flour, so said the salesman, a curly-eared Hasid who had never been anywhere near Indiana. He claimed my Hoosier dated back to the 1890’s; of course, without provenance, but for 130 bucks, who cared? I needed the storage.
The Hoosier sits adjacent to an Empire-style bureau, faux of course, but noble and solid despite the peeling veneer. Carved curlicues on the massive front legs show visible grooves from the gnawing, back when my Springer Spaniel, Basil Rathbone, was an irrepressible puppy with a teething problem. How could I dispose of it, so emblematic of the wild oats of my youth, sown with coincidence and abandon on the fabled, cobbled trails of Greenwich Village in the hoary days of 1978? It fairly jumped out and grabbed me right there on Christopher Street, it bumped me as I stumbled drunk out of some gutterhole of a bar, beers and shots too countless to recall.
But remember I do, proof positive of the preposterous price of this piece: 75 dollars to a greasy-haired Hippie who hawked it: was it even his? Or was he just scamming this wasted fag? I hailed a cab, and stowed the drawers in the big back seat, tied its body to the roof, the hippie and the cabbie screaming furiously: Tie the godamned thing right, why doncha? I rode shotgun clutching the bureau out the window, all the way home to Chelsea — 20 bucks the price to the Puerto Rican who ran the Botanica on the ground floor to help me lug it up four flights, liked to kill us both. I wanted that very night to fold my socks and jeans and skivvies into that chest of drawers. Instead, I passed out.
My gaze finds the curves and edges of a harvest table, carved long and narrow decades ago: gargoyles and castles, vines and fruits twining upward toward the sun-pitted tabletop — memories oozing right out of the wood grain. Just there: it sits amidst rented luxury, that penthouse in DC, scored with Paul our very first morning from the want ads, the day we fled Manhattan — before our love expired. We laid out on this very table glorious spreads of exotic foodstuffs, love-drenched banquets that mimicked our respective Mediterranean bloodlines, his from Lebanon, mine from Italy.
We didn’t know how sour celebration would become. Don’t blame the table, which so beautifully held our culinary dance, his lamb kibbee, my Florentine tartar larded with anchovies; tabboule and orzo, grape leaves and veal bundles, and so it went, a culinary pas-de-deux, dueling desserts the feast’s careening culmination, so fat and sticky. Just like me, only I was sugared well before the guests arrived. As for the table, it longed to return to Pittsburgh, to my rich friend Tom’s ancestral homestead. First a loaner, then a keeper — and why not? Tom had too much as it was, and kept no replicas; the rich want only the real.
I want it too, I wanted it then, I wanted it all, beloved chattel with vivid living stored inside each drawer, each door impossible to shut, each scratch across the surface a wound, not festering, but not quite healed. I don’t imagine I’ll ever sell them, yank their precious bodies from here, this well-earned final resting place — mine perhaps, as well. Could I ever get enough?
The doorbell startles: delivery men await. I wipe my eyes and greet them, my breath constricted as they work. I slip a twenty to the lead man on his exit, then touch my finger to the box’s edge. They crave my blade inside their seams; they ache to open up, to reveal their unfurled narrative, the urgent dreams before us.
Suddenly, I am alone. No, not alone. There is furniture.
12/3/07
CANCER BLOGGER
Quite the arrival, snazzier, hipper than her regular office wear, recently shorn,
a pixie coif, like Hepburn, Audrey, with the same eyes too:
wide, as the awkward silence that constricts us.
It shocks -- a headstart on the chemo? everyone’s thinking.
“Nice do” won’t do. What will, when surgery awaits?
Precious few slippings now of her heroic inspirational. I saw one, terrible:
The reaper’s shadow blackness knits her brow, rings her eyes.
Fatigue masks terror, disguises relief, the final stinking foxhole is abandoned.
She brings her own photographer, Felliniesque, the Senora Paparazza stalks us,
Stealing all the hug-snapping, smile-swapping, brain-slapping,
Our home-girl cancer victim celeb. I blanche, thinking, is this farewell?
Banish that! Delirium pirouettes in survival celebration, after all.
Engineered parsed dubious medical evasion lawsuits.
Courage extraction advocate demanding dueling diagnoses ultrasound,
PET scan, radiate giant magnets tracking down crafty fucker cells
In my bestest post-modern former-art-school-student friend.
Too late to ladle tasty casserole resentment nourishing stupefaction.
Inveigh in scarlet logistical maneuvering,
bean-counter assassins, paperwork terrorists.
Suddenly bereft, I gnaw arthritic gnarls.
My impotent pawing faces transcendent explanations.
The factory are parts broken, the warranty expired.
Her proclamation: globular-tubular, fabulation, magnification.
Procrastination impossible: no longer the promised lightning strike at the lump.
They’re gonna cut ‘em both off.
Touching militant defiance swallows shame.
Cancer shame-blame. Battery on the poisoned plain, denial’s first cousin.
Not for her: posting blow-by-blow, blog blogged blogging.
Gallant gallows optimism family encryption devotion:
Swarming pixel love currency international exchange rate.
Pay attention.
Wi-Fi hospital post-op blogger drifted fevered morphing morphine dream (predictive):
merge
breasts
third eye
eyelash
vestige
scar
mastectomy
a pixie coif, like Hepburn, Audrey, with the same eyes too:
wide, as the awkward silence that constricts us.
It shocks -- a headstart on the chemo? everyone’s thinking.
“Nice do” won’t do. What will, when surgery awaits?
Precious few slippings now of her heroic inspirational. I saw one, terrible:
The reaper’s shadow blackness knits her brow, rings her eyes.
Fatigue masks terror, disguises relief, the final stinking foxhole is abandoned.
She brings her own photographer, Felliniesque, the Senora Paparazza stalks us,
Stealing all the hug-snapping, smile-swapping, brain-slapping,
Our home-girl cancer victim celeb. I blanche, thinking, is this farewell?
Banish that! Delirium pirouettes in survival celebration, after all.
Engineered parsed dubious medical evasion lawsuits.
Courage extraction advocate demanding dueling diagnoses ultrasound,
PET scan, radiate giant magnets tracking down crafty fucker cells
In my bestest post-modern former-art-school-student friend.
Too late to ladle tasty casserole resentment nourishing stupefaction.
Inveigh in scarlet logistical maneuvering,
bean-counter assassins, paperwork terrorists.
Suddenly bereft, I gnaw arthritic gnarls.
My impotent pawing faces transcendent explanations.
The factory are parts broken, the warranty expired.
Her proclamation: globular-tubular, fabulation, magnification.
Procrastination impossible: no longer the promised lightning strike at the lump.
They’re gonna cut ‘em both off.
Touching militant defiance swallows shame.
Cancer shame-blame. Battery on the poisoned plain, denial’s first cousin.
Not for her: posting blow-by-blow, blog blogged blogging.
Gallant gallows optimism family encryption devotion:
Swarming pixel love currency international exchange rate.
Pay attention.
Wi-Fi hospital post-op blogger drifted fevered morphing morphine dream (predictive):
merge
breasts
third eye
eyelash
vestige
scar
mastectomy
BEFORE THE DOORBELL
He is the creator and destroyer, and the source of all energy and love — a warrior. His profile says so, they think so, the ones who come here. The Man marvels that another one will arrive soon, ring his doorbell — all from a few hundred words and some dirty pictures. It’s been arranged, The Scene. It’s only sex, the Man thinks…twitch twitch…It’s only sex, he thinks, as he checks the list in his head.
Mirrors everywhere. Sexy, gotta get sexy here, sexy. That pudgy person there, you think he’s sexy? Just look at him! Flash flash … So much to do, check the list? Back there — over by the cerebral cortex, it’s sitting on the bloody corrugated furrows of your life ... The Man peels the clingy shirt from his middle — once a lithe and nimble runner flying above the sidewalks and the grasslands to the admiration of bystanders… pound pound pound … that’s the password to a fucked-up knee.
Post-op was going so well, doing just great until that last time, that last scene, that full-Monty scene, that full sex scene, that scene, as in, what scene are you into? And he sings out, It’s not for me to say, and he takes over and he throws his knee out. Must stretch, stretch the fricassee of tendons and fascia. A sound in his leg, Pop pop pop…There is a curse is upon him. He’s a goner, another scene, he is crazy, obsessed, just like the old addict days. Addicted…Addicted to sensation…Sensation, that’s the thing. You’re such a sensation: he says it to the man in the mirror. You’re such a sensation!
He stares into the mirror. He becomes the mirror. He becomes his genitalia, two-toned, like 40’s dance shoes — spotted like something amphibian, primal, hanging off the front of his body. Tan and white, well pink, but white by comparison to the rich brownness of the rest of him, white from the rubbing and the rings, pulling at him in his drugged-up madness so long ago. Make it bigger, must be bigger, must be as big as the biggest one they’ve ever seen. Gigantic, a steak at the corner butcher’s…Slice slice slice. Childhood operation, only 1.5 testicles. Sheathe your sword, and get on with it.
The Man shuffles across the Denny’s behind his walker, eager for the early bird special. Maybe they have the roasted turkey tonight, he thinks. His companion is ancient, a wizard, wielding drumsticks as crutches. Both are dressed in warrior gear, but they refuse the discount, because in Palm Springs you’re still young, forever young, young is how he feels.
He craves to exceed the physical boundaries provided by God, to fill up every cell, each molecule, all the atoms. He is God, one more time, he is Shiva and he feels high. Where is that fucking thing? Not the list, the white plastic thing, not the dildo, like the late night cable shows. No, the small, pure white plastic rocket ship melting against his healthy prostate, which he wears like a fashion accessory.
— My, that’s a lovely brooch … real diamonds or cubic zirconium?
— Fuck you, I deserve it, I deserve a good prostate rub, even if I am on a walker.
The Man takes the diamond blue tablet out of the squat plastic bottle with the teeth — it almost bites him, makes his teeth clatter, teeth chatter…chat chat chat, fuck fuck fuck — So he places the blue pill onto the countertop, next to the espresso machine. He’s a-brewing, needs a jolt before the scene.
Did you know there are vigilantes at the Starbucks? The old Chinese woman, she signals Charlie Chan who cha-cha’s in. The jig is up. They know he’s ordered an extra shot! It’s OK, Mr. Chan, they told me it was OK. It’s all I have left… don’t take away my macchiato!
He slips his chaps on quickly to cover the cellulite, and kneels before the altar in the corner — Pan, Ganeesha and a horizontal Buddha, even Jesus lounging serenely, stare up at the wall, a framed oil painting of the Man’s dead father, a handsome soldier in an Eisenhower jacket and a pencil thin mustache. He whispers.
— Did you know that I was captured by an itinerant artist in the rubble of France right after V-E Day? … just a Joe with some cognac, a few sou’s, and a scar on my ass-cheek.
The Man picks up a tri-colored rose and pricks his finger on a thorn. Pricks grow from the Cocteau walls, cocks fall out of the windows; the swollen ones join in a chorus of shame and old show tunes. He ignites some incense from the world’s highest mountain. Tibetan essence curls around the Man’s palms as he releases a prayer:
I want to destroy whatever it is, the waxy yellow buildup that haunts this room…Give me strength, if not love….Oh, Daddy!!
His favorite leather vest no longer covers his belly, no matter how much he smoothes it out. The geometry of the mirrors and the sling, it’s too much for him, it makes him sweat.
I smell like a man, not an animal, he shouts, and suddenly his dog pees on the edge of his boot. The dog coughs and pants. The Man stops to calculate the dog’s life, 13 times 7, somewhere near 90. Who will die first? the Man wonders, although he himself refuses to pant and cough.
— This doesn’t fit, I can’t do it, I can’t stuff the cannoli.
— Don’t expect cannoli unless you’re in the hospital and I stop on the way.
— Who will bring me cannoli or hold my hand in the overpowering evening sweetness of the Angel’s trumpets?
— Maudlin is NOT attractive, sir. Bitter, party of one, this way please.
— Don’t hook that walker on my pants cuff. Don’t force me to cuff you, to make you watch the endless wrestling by the prisoners of Williams Burroughs and Abu Ghraib. Don’t make me love you.
He hears the doorbell above the sound of his heart, and he runs for it.
Mirrors everywhere. Sexy, gotta get sexy here, sexy. That pudgy person there, you think he’s sexy? Just look at him! Flash flash … So much to do, check the list? Back there — over by the cerebral cortex, it’s sitting on the bloody corrugated furrows of your life ... The Man peels the clingy shirt from his middle — once a lithe and nimble runner flying above the sidewalks and the grasslands to the admiration of bystanders… pound pound pound … that’s the password to a fucked-up knee.
Post-op was going so well, doing just great until that last time, that last scene, that full-Monty scene, that full sex scene, that scene, as in, what scene are you into? And he sings out, It’s not for me to say, and he takes over and he throws his knee out. Must stretch, stretch the fricassee of tendons and fascia. A sound in his leg, Pop pop pop…There is a curse is upon him. He’s a goner, another scene, he is crazy, obsessed, just like the old addict days. Addicted…Addicted to sensation…Sensation, that’s the thing. You’re such a sensation: he says it to the man in the mirror. You’re such a sensation!
He stares into the mirror. He becomes the mirror. He becomes his genitalia, two-toned, like 40’s dance shoes — spotted like something amphibian, primal, hanging off the front of his body. Tan and white, well pink, but white by comparison to the rich brownness of the rest of him, white from the rubbing and the rings, pulling at him in his drugged-up madness so long ago. Make it bigger, must be bigger, must be as big as the biggest one they’ve ever seen. Gigantic, a steak at the corner butcher’s…Slice slice slice. Childhood operation, only 1.5 testicles. Sheathe your sword, and get on with it.
The Man shuffles across the Denny’s behind his walker, eager for the early bird special. Maybe they have the roasted turkey tonight, he thinks. His companion is ancient, a wizard, wielding drumsticks as crutches. Both are dressed in warrior gear, but they refuse the discount, because in Palm Springs you’re still young, forever young, young is how he feels.
He craves to exceed the physical boundaries provided by God, to fill up every cell, each molecule, all the atoms. He is God, one more time, he is Shiva and he feels high. Where is that fucking thing? Not the list, the white plastic thing, not the dildo, like the late night cable shows. No, the small, pure white plastic rocket ship melting against his healthy prostate, which he wears like a fashion accessory.
— My, that’s a lovely brooch … real diamonds or cubic zirconium?
— Fuck you, I deserve it, I deserve a good prostate rub, even if I am on a walker.
The Man takes the diamond blue tablet out of the squat plastic bottle with the teeth — it almost bites him, makes his teeth clatter, teeth chatter…chat chat chat, fuck fuck fuck — So he places the blue pill onto the countertop, next to the espresso machine. He’s a-brewing, needs a jolt before the scene.
Did you know there are vigilantes at the Starbucks? The old Chinese woman, she signals Charlie Chan who cha-cha’s in. The jig is up. They know he’s ordered an extra shot! It’s OK, Mr. Chan, they told me it was OK. It’s all I have left… don’t take away my macchiato!
He slips his chaps on quickly to cover the cellulite, and kneels before the altar in the corner — Pan, Ganeesha and a horizontal Buddha, even Jesus lounging serenely, stare up at the wall, a framed oil painting of the Man’s dead father, a handsome soldier in an Eisenhower jacket and a pencil thin mustache. He whispers.
— Did you know that I was captured by an itinerant artist in the rubble of France right after V-E Day? … just a Joe with some cognac, a few sou’s, and a scar on my ass-cheek.
The Man picks up a tri-colored rose and pricks his finger on a thorn. Pricks grow from the Cocteau walls, cocks fall out of the windows; the swollen ones join in a chorus of shame and old show tunes. He ignites some incense from the world’s highest mountain. Tibetan essence curls around the Man’s palms as he releases a prayer:
I want to destroy whatever it is, the waxy yellow buildup that haunts this room…Give me strength, if not love….Oh, Daddy!!
His favorite leather vest no longer covers his belly, no matter how much he smoothes it out. The geometry of the mirrors and the sling, it’s too much for him, it makes him sweat.
I smell like a man, not an animal, he shouts, and suddenly his dog pees on the edge of his boot. The dog coughs and pants. The Man stops to calculate the dog’s life, 13 times 7, somewhere near 90. Who will die first? the Man wonders, although he himself refuses to pant and cough.
— This doesn’t fit, I can’t do it, I can’t stuff the cannoli.
— Don’t expect cannoli unless you’re in the hospital and I stop on the way.
— Who will bring me cannoli or hold my hand in the overpowering evening sweetness of the Angel’s trumpets?
— Maudlin is NOT attractive, sir. Bitter, party of one, this way please.
— Don’t hook that walker on my pants cuff. Don’t force me to cuff you, to make you watch the endless wrestling by the prisoners of Williams Burroughs and Abu Ghraib. Don’t make me love you.
He hears the doorbell above the sound of his heart, and he runs for it.
12/2/07
DREAM FRAGMENTS
The cheap all-in-one printer spits out a final page with a whir, a chug, a beep. A fainter bleep from the back of the house informs me that a load of wash is ready. The house is a soft machine that contains my life, emitting signals. I know the code, so any unfamiliar audio intrusion can be upsetting. This vigilance is now entirely up to me, since my Springer Basil seems to be deaf. He too is getting old.
After a year in the house, I began to hear random chirps. For weeks I searched, looking for crickets, for something, anything to get rid of the increasingly annoying soundscape. I told the cleaning lady, and in a frenzy of frustration, we emptied every drawer and closet in the place. We found the culprit: a bag of smoke detectors, left in the back of the linen closet by the seller, maybe the last thing he did before signing the escrow papers. They chirped laconically as each battery expired.
The pages hold my dreams, literally. Two months of dream fragments, transcriptions from scribblings in the dark, contorted words in a notebook I now keep on the nightstand. It’s gotten easier, the fragments more complete, more cinematic.
This morning I came to suddenly, the dog was making a kind of whimpering noise. This is new, eyes still closed, and I’m back into the dream. There was a couple: she was explaining how much of a gentleman I was, that I stayed focused on our work, when all she wanted to do was to have sex. I’d like to see him (that’s me) fuck my husband; it’s covered by insurance.
I drifted back into the porno dream state, a porno dream state. The yelping continued and I opened my eyes. I reached for the notebook, it’s become automatic. I switched on the halogen lamp and started to write. Isn’t it odd, I wrote. Dreaming of sex and I’m not hard?
The dream capture regimen was the result of a workshop. I take a lot of them, this one led by a feeble and chubby Jungian with rebellion in his soul; it’s what drew him to me, his social and political fervor, not this dream ideology. When I was 35, I had a dream that changed the course of my life, he had said. It was precognitive—a predictive dream, a story from deep within the universe.
I poured over the pages of dream fragments for a prediction, double-strong French roast blur-buzzing the top of my head, right above my sinuses, my drippy morning snotty head. I never used to have allergies, did I? Is this part of getting old?
Talk about your dreams, the workshop leader had suggested. So, I sent the dream fragments as an email attachment to my therapist. I loved his response, a New Yorker cartoon caption: I think it will be more relevant to our discussion for you to tell me what they mean to you. It’s our therapy dance: Ve-r-r-r-y interesting, how does it make you feel?
I focus; I grab words with a yellow highlighter pen: tribal superhero special effects strategy discussions frenzied dark blond Warren Beatty fanatical gunshot SMS competition actors big party complicated survivors’ guilt prosthetic cock and balls devices numbers paternity S&M fishermen circus Pope Pius audition Julia Child coffee protein seriously handsome.
I want to turn the pattern into a shower curtain. I want to wear the yellow words, patches all over my body, tattoos of my underworld life, a dreamscape of needles and ink.
I sneeze, suddenly, loudly. My eyes water and I grab the six sheets of paper, suddenly furious, tossing the pages onto the desk, next to a large 9 x 12 envelope. Names march above the return address. I read my own name and address, and then pull out the papers inside.
There are no dreams here; these are daylight documents, five different items. I must sign them today at my lawyer’s office -- a durable power of attorney, a advance health care directive, a authorization for use and disclosure of protected health information, a declaration of trust, and my last will and testament.
Pending death made real in an envelope. Death always pending, my eventual death, my imminent death, my death in any case. A spade becomes a spade with the end of denial, the fatuous dream of immortality, a flight from madness and terror, a from of darkness to blot out a simple fact, made so tidy and legal in the envelope in my hands.
There is no time to dream when you must plan for death.
After a year in the house, I began to hear random chirps. For weeks I searched, looking for crickets, for something, anything to get rid of the increasingly annoying soundscape. I told the cleaning lady, and in a frenzy of frustration, we emptied every drawer and closet in the place. We found the culprit: a bag of smoke detectors, left in the back of the linen closet by the seller, maybe the last thing he did before signing the escrow papers. They chirped laconically as each battery expired.
The pages hold my dreams, literally. Two months of dream fragments, transcriptions from scribblings in the dark, contorted words in a notebook I now keep on the nightstand. It’s gotten easier, the fragments more complete, more cinematic.
This morning I came to suddenly, the dog was making a kind of whimpering noise. This is new, eyes still closed, and I’m back into the dream. There was a couple: she was explaining how much of a gentleman I was, that I stayed focused on our work, when all she wanted to do was to have sex. I’d like to see him (that’s me) fuck my husband; it’s covered by insurance.
I drifted back into the porno dream state, a porno dream state. The yelping continued and I opened my eyes. I reached for the notebook, it’s become automatic. I switched on the halogen lamp and started to write. Isn’t it odd, I wrote. Dreaming of sex and I’m not hard?
The dream capture regimen was the result of a workshop. I take a lot of them, this one led by a feeble and chubby Jungian with rebellion in his soul; it’s what drew him to me, his social and political fervor, not this dream ideology. When I was 35, I had a dream that changed the course of my life, he had said. It was precognitive—a predictive dream, a story from deep within the universe.
I poured over the pages of dream fragments for a prediction, double-strong French roast blur-buzzing the top of my head, right above my sinuses, my drippy morning snotty head. I never used to have allergies, did I? Is this part of getting old?
Talk about your dreams, the workshop leader had suggested. So, I sent the dream fragments as an email attachment to my therapist. I loved his response, a New Yorker cartoon caption: I think it will be more relevant to our discussion for you to tell me what they mean to you. It’s our therapy dance: Ve-r-r-r-y interesting, how does it make you feel?
I focus; I grab words with a yellow highlighter pen: tribal superhero special effects strategy discussions frenzied dark blond Warren Beatty fanatical gunshot SMS competition actors big party complicated survivors’ guilt prosthetic cock and balls devices numbers paternity S&M fishermen circus Pope Pius audition Julia Child coffee protein seriously handsome.
I want to turn the pattern into a shower curtain. I want to wear the yellow words, patches all over my body, tattoos of my underworld life, a dreamscape of needles and ink.
I sneeze, suddenly, loudly. My eyes water and I grab the six sheets of paper, suddenly furious, tossing the pages onto the desk, next to a large 9 x 12 envelope. Names march above the return address. I read my own name and address, and then pull out the papers inside.
There are no dreams here; these are daylight documents, five different items. I must sign them today at my lawyer’s office -- a durable power of attorney, a advance health care directive, a authorization for use and disclosure of protected health information, a declaration of trust, and my last will and testament.
Pending death made real in an envelope. Death always pending, my eventual death, my imminent death, my death in any case. A spade becomes a spade with the end of denial, the fatuous dream of immortality, a flight from madness and terror, a from of darkness to blot out a simple fact, made so tidy and legal in the envelope in my hands.
There is no time to dream when you must plan for death.
9/2/07
9/12
I can’t bring myself to talk about it, not even to Norman, especially not to Norman. I want to talk about it, I really do. I know I need to talk about it. It may just be too much. Especially today. I had forgotten, it’s the anniversary. When they showed pictures of the planes and the towers all over again, I just had to shut the TV off. The worst part isn’t about the planes. The worst part is about Dylan. The worst part is about my son. It was the day after the planes and the towers. That was when it happened.
I had been in love with the idea of love, just like I had been in love with the idea of Jesus as a dewy youth, searching for a way to belong and somebody to belong to. Love was abstract, a salve, a balm to heal the wounds, the rewounding, the self-wounding. It was an illusion, my idea of love, blurred by the sex. In the old days, back before both Dylans, even way before that, sex was my magic potion, sex kept me alive, sex created the illusion of love. I got laid all the time, festivals and fireworks, sex galore. I would walk into a room, I had the superman thing going on. Drugs and alcohol and money and sex, that’s where I thought I would find love.
The years brought me to my senses, brought sobriety. They also brought erotic famine: my heroic charm and flirtatious gearbox simply didn’t work anymore. I was alone and lonely, an older gay man, fattening, unmedicated, bolted invisibly to the wall.
One morning after, in a moment of descent, I sat with my coffee and woke up. What if the balm were divorced from the romance of it all? What if I found it from a different kind of love, an unconditional love, love without sex, love based on need, love like a dog’s, love that wouldn’t go away, reliable, tender, perfect, immutable?
Baby love?
What if I gave my love to a child? What if I found a child, got a child, had a child? Loved it? What if I gave up on the bullshit, the shame, the games, the failed romances, the cycle of breaking up? It was a blinding flash, like a mudslide hitting me, that idea. I Googled my way through the what-if’s. There is adoption, the gingham induction of the forlorn, suspiciously angry at foster annihilation and disgrace. There is fake insemination, finding the appropriate pillow to accept my sperm, and the right Salvadoran midwife to cash my numerology. But, no, the universe was telling me something else. I didn’t know what it was, but I tried to listen. Calling out my intention to the winds, I found her; calling out my desire and need, she came; calling out, shouting out, crying out was how it happened.
I found Dylan in my own kitchen, drinking a coke. Here’s the deal, let’s get to the point, he was a she, on the way to he-dom: transgender, transitional gender, gender reassigned, you get my drift? His life began as a gal, ended as a pal, but he still had the right plumbing for my request.
Dylan and I met at an AA meeting. We had become close, real close, her as a guy. I really dug him, so what if he didn’t have a dick? And so, one night, I put it to him. How about it buddy? Would you let me fuck you so I could get a kid?
I guess I was surprised at myself for asking. I know I was surprised at him for saying yes. I don’t know if it was pity or charity or exactly what, since he’d have to stop taking the testosterone and the steroids and the other drugs that buffed him up and made his mustache grow. But he agreed. “It’s like a little break,” he said. “You deserve a break. I’ll give you a break.”
Why was I nervous when that night finally came? All the sex I’d had —- men, women, high, sober, vanilla, kinky. You’d think it would be no big deal. But it was, some kind of sacred show, some kind of test, some kind of serious. He walked in as butch as I’ve ever seen him, a guinea-T pulled across his pecs, or rather his breasts that were flattened and shaped by the tape he wrapped each day. His biceps bulged, and I could see the tightness in his jaw. He was a little freaked too. I let him be the top, it turned him on. He was hot.
And so that’s how it happened, that’s how I became a Dad, how I became a man. That one single night, that one coupling with two deposits, many returns. Dylan missed his period, called me up when he was sure.
“Hello, Daddy” is what he said, and I didn’t know who he was at first.
“No, I mean it, I mean it, you’re gonna be a daddy.”
We spent that nine months watching his stomach and his breasts grow and his mustache wither up. Even without the drugs, though, he never let go of the butch thing. He certainly never went to the maternity store. Instead of mumu’s and oversized blouses, I would buy him larger jeans and men’s dress shirts every couple of weeks. He was a hip hopper, all baggie and streetwise, our story hidden under waves of fabric.
He moved in with me after he started to show, and I stayed close. I stayed in every night and stayed away from the Internet. I stayed close, I moved into the orbit of the growing stomach, I touched it as often as I could, I kissed it. Some evenings all we did was lay still on the bed and listen for the little heartbeat under the intake and out flow of our synchronized breaths.
I took a leave of absence in the seventh month. I was deathly afraid of complications. This was no ordinary birth, no ordinary woman, no ordinary child. I was there for the vomit and the swelling and the anger. I stayed in and cooked and cleaned and tried to show my gratitude for the gift that Dylan was about to give to me. I worked hard to change my personality, zipping my lip, trying to say “yes,” avoiding at all costs any disturbance in our temporary domestic situation that could impact the little boy growing in Dylan’s stomach.
Oh yes, it was a boy, we found out one day at the doctor’s, a babbling brook up there on the computer monitor, the black and white and gray movement throbbing with a heartbeat, and a little tiny blob that the doctor assured us was a penis. Imagine that spurting and thrusting and maybe making babies of his own some day, maybe not, who knows what the box of the future might contain?
By this time I was praying, formally, on my knees, praying to the God of my fathers for this little boy to come out OK; praying to an atheists’ god, the god of doubt; praying to the God of the Baptists and the Catholics; praying to the Jesus in the picture under glass, Jesus with his hand on the shoulder of a soldier in an Eisenhower jacket, the glass I used to put out lines of cocaine; praying to the God of the Buddhists, which is no God at all, no Buddha God except the god that is everywhere and nowhere, the god of the particle and the molecule and the speck of dust; praying to all the gods on my altar, the dancing Shiva and the Ganesh I picked up at a Hindu shrine near Kuala Lumpur.
We must have had the magic touch — that, or maybe there is a God, can you believe I just said that? That there was a God that day in the hospital, a God just for us, two men having a baby, one with breasts and a giant stomach, huge, like he swallowed an overripe watermelon: Did you hear the one about the two men in the maternity ward? Yes, everyone stared, we were used to it by now. Fuck, I would have stared!
It was, as these things go, an easy birth, only a couple of hours of his pain, my pacing.
“Are you the new father?”
“Yes, I am, thank you very much. One of them.”
“Well you can see your baby now.”
I can see my baby now, I can see my baby now, I cry to the ceiling, to the heavens, I can see my baby now, the love vessel has arrived, and I can see my baby now, the hope of the future is alive, I can see my baby now, the blood wet mess of a child is held to the sky and he cries out, I can see my baby now, the mother, yes the mother with a mustache sleeps, I can see my baby now, the bleeps and whistles of the hospital machines no longer needed, I can see my baby now, the blank eyes stare at the middle distance, I can see my baby now, the nurse pries my fingers loose & I stare through the daddy room glass, I can see my baby now, I can see my future now, I can see.
The baby, sweet pink little thing, became little Dylan, an honor certainly earned by the man-child who sacrificed everything for my love — not to receive my love; no, to help me find a way to give it. Big Dylan moved to San Francisco the month after little Dylan was born, after a month of recuperation. That was our deal. He would get on with his life; he would not be part of the baby’s life. I would be a single momdadparent, all alone raising the little baby. Big Dylan slept all the time that first month, and exercised when he wasn’t sleeping. He refused to tend to little Dylan. I understood. Of course there was no nursing: little Dylan went on the bottle straight away.
I didn’t care, I didn’t care about anything really, my world focused right down to that little mouth and that little nose, and hell, that little butt that spurted and seeped the stinky monkey shit, right on schedule, all day, all night. I didn’t care that I was a sleepless zombie, up at all hours, grabbing a nap when I could, washing and cooking with little Dylan strapped to my chest, a papoose of love, a little bundle of everything I wanted. The doctor told big Dylan that he could start the testosterone after the month of resting. Since the steroids were illegal, he didn’t ask the doc about those, but it didn’t matter, he would find a source up in the Bay Area and get back on track. He hadn’t decided about the surgery yet anyway. He needed to do the drugs first for a while.
I tried not to cry. I really tried; I held back my tears the day Dylan left us. I tried for as long as I could, right up until the point when he turned to me, his funny manly upper register voice forming the sentence that got me, you know, really got me: “You’re gonna be such a great dad.” I caught the sob in my throat, suspended it for a minute, then it burst, I burst inside. I wanted to give him my thanks, but he knew everything already. I wanted it all to come out in words. It came out in sobs as he closed the door behind him.
Love is what came to me in a 7.6 pound bundle, love disguised as little eyes, little toes and fingers, a little pee-pee, little everything getting bigger so much faster than I wanted it to. Every moment offered love, every sense delivered it, love conducted an experiment on my neural pathways, soldering connections here to there and back around, new strolls into the regions of the heart that had become so overgrown in the years of love drought.
I could give you the blow-by-blow of this little bundle’s growing up. I would, but besides taking way too long, it’s really only of interest to me, nothing special, nothing new. Happens to everyone, doesn’t it, every new parent? You’d boo me off the stage in a minute if I started up with Baby’s first sort-of word (da-da), Baby’s first real word (doggie — similar to da-da); his first crawl, first walk, first bike, first song, first toilet-trained shit. Jesus, this is what our species does, you’re saying this right about now, or something like it, I know you are.
Dylan was a shy child with large brown eyes, curious, even thoughtful. He considered his answers carefully when I asked him a question, even before he had the words. He was neat, but not fastidious, active with his body. He seemed to be able to find joy and fun with all the other boys, and even the girls, largely through some kind of physical grace that had been gifted to him as a natural right.
Birthdays came each September, tumbling over time and marking a moment when I, along with every adult I knew, would exclaim, just look at how big Dylan has grown. My, what a big boy! His fourth birthday blew in with the Santa Ana winds that parched the air and burned the scrub that covered the hills surrounding Los Angeles. The smell hung over our back yard in the flats of Silver Lake as the kids gathered for his party. They didn’t notice —- the cake and the juice and the baseball mitt I gave Dylan distracted them.
The foul air made my eyes water, I thought it was the air. Maybe I was crying, my eyes reflecting my heart. My heart was crying from joy, my soul was breathing and I was telling the god that brought me Dylan that I was finally all right. I was crying not for him, but for the little four-year-old me, whose Daddy was away in the wars, and he was left all alone. I was crying for my own lonely self and was grateful that I would never be alone again, and would never have to fear that somebody would find me and would, sooner or later, leave me.
I wanted to cry out to the legions of the lonely and the alone: take heart, you don’t have to be this way anymore, you can be loved. Find a sapling to nurture and watch it grow, help it grow, let it flourish. Find this forest of endless joy to shade you from the harshness of the arid sun, or the frozen blizzard of the shutdown soul. Take heart, there is an answer, and I have found it. Take heart, you know you have one. Take heart, stop trying to run from the love that will not pause. Turn around and run towards the light.
That fall I quit my regular job and went freelance, so I could work at home. It was technical writing, sitting for hours on the computer constructing simple sentences in simple English so that translators in two dozen countries could provide a manual in their native tongue, a manual that could be tossed in the trash with an expletive expelled in two dozen languages. My Dylan came into the room one day. He was about three feet tall, his brown wavy hair covered by a little San Francisco Giants baseball cap, a gift from his other dad, the original Dylan, sent anonymously. He wore a plain green T-shirt and denim shorts.
“You look sad, Daddy,” he said, pulling at my arm. I turned towards him. I moved into him and I felt him so intensely there was color. Pale blue. I let go of it all and moved down to pick him up. He started to cry.
“What’s with the tears, Big Boy?” I asked, waving my willow in the wind.
“When you’re frosted, I’m frosted,” Dylan said. “You’re everything to me, Daddy.”
The year went by in a blink, a stack of outgrown clothes carried to Goodwill every few months: He was getting so big. The summer before his fifth birthday, when I would lose him to the kindergarten, to the institutions, to the ones who make little boys into dead citizens, that summer we took a long road trip. We got into the big station wagon and drove.
I had a vague idea for the trip, but I let that go too. Each morning at breakfast Dylan and I would pull out the oversized Rand-McNally Road Atlas and put it on the table between us, no matter what table we were eating from. He would squeeze up his eyes as tight as he could —- no peeking —- and we would recite our special incantation: On the road again, tell us where to go. On the road again, tell us how to live. On the road again, show us the way, show us the day.
From within his momentary blindness, Dylan would drop a finger somewhere on the map, spread open to the page displaying our current location. I would yell Hoo-ray, we have a winner! And Dylan would squeal. We would load up the back of the wagon and point the car to the spot where the Rand-McNally map met Dylan’s little finger, and head out for another day.
I was the winner, of course, no matter what. I was the winner each day and the winner inside. I won the prize, the holy prize, the grail, the love prize that I had never hoped to win. I was never going to find love again, but I did. I was in the winner’s circle for the first time in my life. I was a winner that whole trip, and, I thought, for the rest of my life, my life as a Dad, my life with Dylan.
That’s how I came to appreciate the cliché about living in the moment. Not the shopworn wisdom shoveled to the forlorn during their trials and daily setbacks — just wait a day, your luck will change, it always does —- not the 12-step advice of ‘one day at a time’ that is hauled out on bad days, white knuckle days, not-drinking days when you want to. No this is the appreciation of the good moment, the moments on the trip, the ordinary joyous fantastical never-to-happen-again moments. These moments too will die, just like the bad ones. The point is the same: this too shall pass.
It was the morning before his fifth birthday, that day in September, the year: 2001. Everyone in the world, certainly everyone alive in America remembers where they were when they found out. I heard it on the radio. I was in my studio, typing away at some especially nettlesome technical solution, trying to allow people without engineering degrees to understand why an obscure piece of software required so many clicks. It was early, but it was one of those Southern California days without a marine layer to burn off. The Santa Ana’s would be coming soon, the hot desert breath would come upon us and deliver hellfire to stupid homeowners in the brush and badlands. The light was so bright already I had flipped down the wooden shutters all around the room. The monitor was glowing in the gloom, and I remember cursing the bad software design. Thank God technical writers get no bylines, I thought, or I would be given all the blame for these stupid engineers.
I heard a smooth voice come out of the radio, but it didn’t register: a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. It was the first plane, and nobody really knew yet what was to come, what the day would bring, how the weight of history would reassert itself, would smother us all with every emotion we had within us, well, at least every bad one.
I ran to the den and found the remote. Right away the TV went on, like millions of others, tuned to CNN as the horror and the madness and the unknown future unfolded before our eyes. My eyes filled with tears, open wide for hours, blinking, staring at and through little Dylan, who hovered near my leg like a hummingbird. Of course, after the second plane and the continuing madness on the screen, I had to turn the TV off. I couldn’t have those images rearranging his neurons, not the day before his fifth birthday, not at age five, not ever. I would hold back the future, I would block what he knew, what he would ever know. I would keep him safe in my arms.
There was no party to cancel, thank God, nothing planned on his actual birthday to cancel. I had intended to buy a little birthday cake and light five candles for just him and me in the middle of the day, as the finale to a nice little lunch, right before naptime. But there were no stores open that morning, at least not in my area. Nobody wanted to leave their house. So I rifled around in the pantry, keeping the radio low in the background, and found the fixings for a cake. We spent the morning making it, just Dylan and I. He sifted the flour beautifully for a five-year-old, and he picked out the right measuring spoon for the other dry ingredients, once I lined them up in size order. We made a huge mess with the electric mixer, but that was OK. I was grateful for the mess, for the cleanup, for the sponge, for Dylan. The three layers looked lovely in their round pans, popped sharply on the counter to lure the air bubbles onto the surface.
They only needed 30 minutes in the oven, so I let Dylan play outside in the front yard, just for 30 minutes. Then we could ice it together. My favorite, and now his: yellow cake with creamy milk chocolate icing. All from scratch. Like mama used to make. Now like Daddy used to make.
Truth be told, I wanted him to go outside so I could watch CNN. I had seen only a half hour that morning, snatched in the time before he crawled out of bed and sleep-walked to find me. It was on the little set in the kitchen, with the sound low. It was at eye level for me, I reasoned, so even if he burst in on me, I could cut it off before too much damage was done. Before too much damage was possible. Before.
So I stood in the kitchen, staring at the little 9” screen, so bright and sharp it hurt. There were no more clips of the planes and the towers by then. There was so much to tell, the story was still to be told, big stories and the small, an orgy of detail, numbing. I switched around. All of the networks ran nothing but the horror, nothing but the news. They had all had already somehow managed to compose anthems worthy of Sousa and animations rivaling Spielberg, drumbeats and rhythms that quickened the pulse right before the tasteful commercials. I stared at a shot of the beautiful California coast, a car gliding on a ribbon of road, water so blue on the little screen, the silvery finish of the car glinting like a sword.
I think it must have happened when the CNN theme music came back on, so loud, so martial. I didn’t hear anything from the front yard; I didn’t hear anything for ten minutes. I know because I was checking on the yellow cake in the oven. The three pans were turning a nice golden brown, like the tan I used to get on long vacations in Florida. I could see them through the safety glass when I turned on the oven light. I was ready with a toothpick in my hand, ready to open the oven door and stick in the toothpick, when the knock and the doorbell came. Turning, I heard the siren.
I ran to the door, and it was Debbie from the next house. Debbie had thinning hair from chemo, so she wore a brick-red turban. Her face was in shock, which made sense. I had seen her in the yard earlier, she had that wide-eyed, slack-jawed look of disbelief. All of us did.
“You have to come, it’s Dylan,” she said, her mouth still open after the words came out, after the sound hit my ears, after I understood the words, after I pushed the screen door open and ran onto the driveway leading to the street, the dead-end cul-du-sac where there was never any traffic, the reason I bought the house the year Dylan turned two.
The ambulance arrived just as I did. There were neighbors standing in the middle of the road, blocking the way, my way and the way of the man who burst out of the cab of the vehicle and yelled something, making the people step aside, showing me what they were staring down at.
His little Giants cap was right-side-up on the cement. He was face down, his arms reaching towards the curb. He’s sleeping in the road, I thought, That’s funny. It’s not even nap time.
Every face turned up to look at me. Their horror was like the people’s on the TV set, the people walking away from the towers. Only there was no dust or debris in the air, only horror.
“Dylan, big boy,” I yelled, as I ran over to his little body. I kneeled and reached out, shaking his little arm. Nothing happened as I shook harder and yelled out his name again, louder this time.
The ambulance technician pulled at me as he said, “This is an emergency, sir, please, stay back while we do our job.”
I fell backwards as he pulled on my arm, and that’s when I saw the back end of the car on the other side of the street. It was an old Mazda, not gleaming silver, but a kind of nondescript color. It was angled funny, half in the driveway, half in the street, the engine still running. I could see the exhaust from the crummy old engine, puffing out of the tailpipe.
Gloria Chung was in her husband Daryl’s arms. Her shoulders were heaving, and Daryl was looking down the street at something, I don’t know what he was looking at.
The medical guy was saying something, he was saying something to me. He was shaking me, and saying something. I couldn’t hear him. I turned to Dylan, and I heard my voice. Dylan, honey, the cake is going to burn. Let’s go in now. Let’s stop playing. The medical guy was putting a sheet over his head, and trying to lift me up. I was not able to stand. I was not able. I was not able to hold it any longer, I could smell the shit in my pants, I could feel the shit as it took over my body, I was a runny pile, impossible to lift up and take away, to get out of the street. I was not there anymore.
I was covered with blood. My hands had scooped up only a little of it, the rest pooling on the black uneven surface of the street dividing my house and Daryl and Gloria’s house. The first injection was administered in the ambulance. We drove away and they shot me up.
How long I was under sedation? What were the various gradations of drugging involved in the care of the instantly insane, which is certainly what I was. I came to in a nondescript room. A nurse with a stiff uniform was patting down my forehead with a cool wet towel, but I was too groggy to talk. I fell backwards into the pillow, deep into my real life, the dreams that saved me. Most of my dreams involved large groups of people, furiously rushing back and forth to get something done. There was always such urgency to these dreams. Sometimes we were in a big church. Sometimes we were in a stadium. Public type places, not my house. People I knew kept rushing in and out of doors and appearing out of nowhere with questions. I was in charge, and I had answers to give to the people who were asking me questions. Dylan was not in these dreams. Sometimes I thought he was there, I felt his presence. I even smelled him once. But there was never any dream that I remembered, anyway, where Dylan was visible. Looking back, I think this is weird.
They transferred me from the hospital lock-down to a long-term care facility, that’s what they called it. I must say, most of the people I met seemed perfectly normal to me, even those people there who had not been on the other side for years. This was their home, and they liked it. There was a door, it was painted dark gray. On the other side were the problem residents. At night if you got close to that door you could hear them. They were the ones that shouted and hurt themselves. They were the ones that got special attention.
All I ever got was drugs and bad meals. And therapy sessions. I don’t know if it was the drugs or if it was me, but I really had no energy whatsoever for a long time. They would bring me into the office of the therapist, Dr. Liebman, and I would just sit. There was no couch, that’s another cliché. There was a nice chair, though, upholstered with a flowery print on a very nice glossy cotton fabric. I would finger the surface of the fabric on the arms of the chair and just sit. I wasn’t unhappy to be there, it was a nice room. Dr. Liebman was OK, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer his questions for a long, long time. I don’t know how long it was, how long it took me to respond.
I kept my questions to myself. I tried not to talk. I had spent my life as a talker. Talk talk talk, all the time. I always needed to fill the empty air with words. No longer. That was somebody else’s job. My job was to stay quiet and still. I hated moving the air around me, and so I didn’t even want to eat. I began losing weight. I had no muscle tone.
One day Norman came into my room. I noticed his name when he leaned over the bed to move me so he could change the sheets. Norman was an orderly, an attendant, a medical assistant. He had the whole wing to tend to, so I didn’t see him that much at first, but I noticed when he came into my room. He wore scrubs. They fit nicely. He was probably in his forties, he had some gray hair, which flipped up in the front. His teeth were uneven on the bottom.
The thing about Norman was that he didn’t act like I was crazy. He talked. He did the talking. He filled in the spaces. Boy he could really talk. All that talking was good. He talked about the TV shows that he liked. He really liked science fiction, and he talked about the science fiction, the books and the movies. He really loved the classics. Wells, Asimov, Heinlein.
One day Norman walked into the room, but before starting to work on me, he said, “I have something for you,” and he smiled. I did not move. I wasn’t moving then. He held up a three-by-five-inch index card with something written on it. The card was pale blue. “I’ll just put it here for you,” and he carefully placed the card at the edge of the nightstand.
The next day he brought another card in; this time it was pastel yellow. “Here’s your gift,” he said, smiling. And he placed it right on top of the blue card. Norman brought in a card every day after that. The ritual was always the same. I wouldn’t acknowledge his gift, or move in any way. But after the first week, when he had run out of new colors and the card on top was blue again, I started to read the cards. Late at night when nobody, not the staff, not the other patients, when nobody could see me move, that’s when I read the cards. The words on the cards were quotes from his favorite writers, mostly science fiction writers, mostly Heinlein. They were little moral lessons, I think, things Norman must have believed, or thought I should believe. I began to want to ask Norman about the cards, but I didn’t, I continued to lay still.
“Why don’t you try smiling?” Norman said to me one morning, as he rolled me over and pulled at the bottom sheet, still wet with my sweat. “Or better yet, how about getting out of bed so I don’t have to roll you around like a catatonic. You don’t want to be catatonic, do you?”
I felt his hands on my side as he shoved me over. I liked the way it felt. I liked the words that he spoke.
“I know you’re not catatonic, because I know you pick up the cards that I leave. Don’t you?”
There were hundreds of cards by the time they let me out of the hospital, so many that I put them into a large box, after I started moving around again. My time in the hospital erased my life. I had no friends any more. My brother was my only visitor, an infrequent presence. He was the one who sold my house at the height of the market, sold my car and my things, and banked the money. I guess he wasn’t so bad.
When it came time to leave the hospital, when they said I was better, he wanted me to move in with him and his wife. We’re empty nesters, we have that huge house, you know? I wasn’t that crazy. I wound up in a small apartment in Santa Monica, which I thought I could afford with all the money in the bank. In Santa Monica I could walk on the beach, stare at the tourists, go to a coffee shop. I wouldn’t need a car. And it was far away from Silver Lake, and the streets that Dylan and I had traveled every one of his 1,825 days.
I opened the door that first time, and Norman stood there in blue jeans and a light tan jacket. I wasn’t really surprised. Naturally, he had access to my records. He held a bunch of roses and a green three-by-five card. On the card was another Heinlein quote:
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily.
All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
(Hurting yourself is not sinful - just stupid).
I had been in love with the idea of love, just like I had been in love with the idea of Jesus as a dewy youth, searching for a way to belong and somebody to belong to. Love was abstract, a salve, a balm to heal the wounds, the rewounding, the self-wounding. It was an illusion, my idea of love, blurred by the sex. In the old days, back before both Dylans, even way before that, sex was my magic potion, sex kept me alive, sex created the illusion of love. I got laid all the time, festivals and fireworks, sex galore. I would walk into a room, I had the superman thing going on. Drugs and alcohol and money and sex, that’s where I thought I would find love.
The years brought me to my senses, brought sobriety. They also brought erotic famine: my heroic charm and flirtatious gearbox simply didn’t work anymore. I was alone and lonely, an older gay man, fattening, unmedicated, bolted invisibly to the wall.
One morning after, in a moment of descent, I sat with my coffee and woke up. What if the balm were divorced from the romance of it all? What if I found it from a different kind of love, an unconditional love, love without sex, love based on need, love like a dog’s, love that wouldn’t go away, reliable, tender, perfect, immutable?
Baby love?
What if I gave my love to a child? What if I found a child, got a child, had a child? Loved it? What if I gave up on the bullshit, the shame, the games, the failed romances, the cycle of breaking up? It was a blinding flash, like a mudslide hitting me, that idea. I Googled my way through the what-if’s. There is adoption, the gingham induction of the forlorn, suspiciously angry at foster annihilation and disgrace. There is fake insemination, finding the appropriate pillow to accept my sperm, and the right Salvadoran midwife to cash my numerology. But, no, the universe was telling me something else. I didn’t know what it was, but I tried to listen. Calling out my intention to the winds, I found her; calling out my desire and need, she came; calling out, shouting out, crying out was how it happened.
I found Dylan in my own kitchen, drinking a coke. Here’s the deal, let’s get to the point, he was a she, on the way to he-dom: transgender, transitional gender, gender reassigned, you get my drift? His life began as a gal, ended as a pal, but he still had the right plumbing for my request.
Dylan and I met at an AA meeting. We had become close, real close, her as a guy. I really dug him, so what if he didn’t have a dick? And so, one night, I put it to him. How about it buddy? Would you let me fuck you so I could get a kid?
I guess I was surprised at myself for asking. I know I was surprised at him for saying yes. I don’t know if it was pity or charity or exactly what, since he’d have to stop taking the testosterone and the steroids and the other drugs that buffed him up and made his mustache grow. But he agreed. “It’s like a little break,” he said. “You deserve a break. I’ll give you a break.”
Why was I nervous when that night finally came? All the sex I’d had —- men, women, high, sober, vanilla, kinky. You’d think it would be no big deal. But it was, some kind of sacred show, some kind of test, some kind of serious. He walked in as butch as I’ve ever seen him, a guinea-T pulled across his pecs, or rather his breasts that were flattened and shaped by the tape he wrapped each day. His biceps bulged, and I could see the tightness in his jaw. He was a little freaked too. I let him be the top, it turned him on. He was hot.
And so that’s how it happened, that’s how I became a Dad, how I became a man. That one single night, that one coupling with two deposits, many returns. Dylan missed his period, called me up when he was sure.
“Hello, Daddy” is what he said, and I didn’t know who he was at first.
“No, I mean it, I mean it, you’re gonna be a daddy.”
We spent that nine months watching his stomach and his breasts grow and his mustache wither up. Even without the drugs, though, he never let go of the butch thing. He certainly never went to the maternity store. Instead of mumu’s and oversized blouses, I would buy him larger jeans and men’s dress shirts every couple of weeks. He was a hip hopper, all baggie and streetwise, our story hidden under waves of fabric.
He moved in with me after he started to show, and I stayed close. I stayed in every night and stayed away from the Internet. I stayed close, I moved into the orbit of the growing stomach, I touched it as often as I could, I kissed it. Some evenings all we did was lay still on the bed and listen for the little heartbeat under the intake and out flow of our synchronized breaths.
I took a leave of absence in the seventh month. I was deathly afraid of complications. This was no ordinary birth, no ordinary woman, no ordinary child. I was there for the vomit and the swelling and the anger. I stayed in and cooked and cleaned and tried to show my gratitude for the gift that Dylan was about to give to me. I worked hard to change my personality, zipping my lip, trying to say “yes,” avoiding at all costs any disturbance in our temporary domestic situation that could impact the little boy growing in Dylan’s stomach.
Oh yes, it was a boy, we found out one day at the doctor’s, a babbling brook up there on the computer monitor, the black and white and gray movement throbbing with a heartbeat, and a little tiny blob that the doctor assured us was a penis. Imagine that spurting and thrusting and maybe making babies of his own some day, maybe not, who knows what the box of the future might contain?
By this time I was praying, formally, on my knees, praying to the God of my fathers for this little boy to come out OK; praying to an atheists’ god, the god of doubt; praying to the God of the Baptists and the Catholics; praying to the Jesus in the picture under glass, Jesus with his hand on the shoulder of a soldier in an Eisenhower jacket, the glass I used to put out lines of cocaine; praying to the God of the Buddhists, which is no God at all, no Buddha God except the god that is everywhere and nowhere, the god of the particle and the molecule and the speck of dust; praying to all the gods on my altar, the dancing Shiva and the Ganesh I picked up at a Hindu shrine near Kuala Lumpur.
We must have had the magic touch — that, or maybe there is a God, can you believe I just said that? That there was a God that day in the hospital, a God just for us, two men having a baby, one with breasts and a giant stomach, huge, like he swallowed an overripe watermelon: Did you hear the one about the two men in the maternity ward? Yes, everyone stared, we were used to it by now. Fuck, I would have stared!
It was, as these things go, an easy birth, only a couple of hours of his pain, my pacing.
“Are you the new father?”
“Yes, I am, thank you very much. One of them.”
“Well you can see your baby now.”
I can see my baby now, I can see my baby now, I cry to the ceiling, to the heavens, I can see my baby now, the love vessel has arrived, and I can see my baby now, the hope of the future is alive, I can see my baby now, the blood wet mess of a child is held to the sky and he cries out, I can see my baby now, the mother, yes the mother with a mustache sleeps, I can see my baby now, the bleeps and whistles of the hospital machines no longer needed, I can see my baby now, the blank eyes stare at the middle distance, I can see my baby now, the nurse pries my fingers loose & I stare through the daddy room glass, I can see my baby now, I can see my future now, I can see.
The baby, sweet pink little thing, became little Dylan, an honor certainly earned by the man-child who sacrificed everything for my love — not to receive my love; no, to help me find a way to give it. Big Dylan moved to San Francisco the month after little Dylan was born, after a month of recuperation. That was our deal. He would get on with his life; he would not be part of the baby’s life. I would be a single momdadparent, all alone raising the little baby. Big Dylan slept all the time that first month, and exercised when he wasn’t sleeping. He refused to tend to little Dylan. I understood. Of course there was no nursing: little Dylan went on the bottle straight away.
I didn’t care, I didn’t care about anything really, my world focused right down to that little mouth and that little nose, and hell, that little butt that spurted and seeped the stinky monkey shit, right on schedule, all day, all night. I didn’t care that I was a sleepless zombie, up at all hours, grabbing a nap when I could, washing and cooking with little Dylan strapped to my chest, a papoose of love, a little bundle of everything I wanted. The doctor told big Dylan that he could start the testosterone after the month of resting. Since the steroids were illegal, he didn’t ask the doc about those, but it didn’t matter, he would find a source up in the Bay Area and get back on track. He hadn’t decided about the surgery yet anyway. He needed to do the drugs first for a while.
I tried not to cry. I really tried; I held back my tears the day Dylan left us. I tried for as long as I could, right up until the point when he turned to me, his funny manly upper register voice forming the sentence that got me, you know, really got me: “You’re gonna be such a great dad.” I caught the sob in my throat, suspended it for a minute, then it burst, I burst inside. I wanted to give him my thanks, but he knew everything already. I wanted it all to come out in words. It came out in sobs as he closed the door behind him.
Love is what came to me in a 7.6 pound bundle, love disguised as little eyes, little toes and fingers, a little pee-pee, little everything getting bigger so much faster than I wanted it to. Every moment offered love, every sense delivered it, love conducted an experiment on my neural pathways, soldering connections here to there and back around, new strolls into the regions of the heart that had become so overgrown in the years of love drought.
I could give you the blow-by-blow of this little bundle’s growing up. I would, but besides taking way too long, it’s really only of interest to me, nothing special, nothing new. Happens to everyone, doesn’t it, every new parent? You’d boo me off the stage in a minute if I started up with Baby’s first sort-of word (da-da), Baby’s first real word (doggie — similar to da-da); his first crawl, first walk, first bike, first song, first toilet-trained shit. Jesus, this is what our species does, you’re saying this right about now, or something like it, I know you are.
Dylan was a shy child with large brown eyes, curious, even thoughtful. He considered his answers carefully when I asked him a question, even before he had the words. He was neat, but not fastidious, active with his body. He seemed to be able to find joy and fun with all the other boys, and even the girls, largely through some kind of physical grace that had been gifted to him as a natural right.
Birthdays came each September, tumbling over time and marking a moment when I, along with every adult I knew, would exclaim, just look at how big Dylan has grown. My, what a big boy! His fourth birthday blew in with the Santa Ana winds that parched the air and burned the scrub that covered the hills surrounding Los Angeles. The smell hung over our back yard in the flats of Silver Lake as the kids gathered for his party. They didn’t notice —- the cake and the juice and the baseball mitt I gave Dylan distracted them.
The foul air made my eyes water, I thought it was the air. Maybe I was crying, my eyes reflecting my heart. My heart was crying from joy, my soul was breathing and I was telling the god that brought me Dylan that I was finally all right. I was crying not for him, but for the little four-year-old me, whose Daddy was away in the wars, and he was left all alone. I was crying for my own lonely self and was grateful that I would never be alone again, and would never have to fear that somebody would find me and would, sooner or later, leave me.
I wanted to cry out to the legions of the lonely and the alone: take heart, you don’t have to be this way anymore, you can be loved. Find a sapling to nurture and watch it grow, help it grow, let it flourish. Find this forest of endless joy to shade you from the harshness of the arid sun, or the frozen blizzard of the shutdown soul. Take heart, there is an answer, and I have found it. Take heart, you know you have one. Take heart, stop trying to run from the love that will not pause. Turn around and run towards the light.
That fall I quit my regular job and went freelance, so I could work at home. It was technical writing, sitting for hours on the computer constructing simple sentences in simple English so that translators in two dozen countries could provide a manual in their native tongue, a manual that could be tossed in the trash with an expletive expelled in two dozen languages. My Dylan came into the room one day. He was about three feet tall, his brown wavy hair covered by a little San Francisco Giants baseball cap, a gift from his other dad, the original Dylan, sent anonymously. He wore a plain green T-shirt and denim shorts.
“You look sad, Daddy,” he said, pulling at my arm. I turned towards him. I moved into him and I felt him so intensely there was color. Pale blue. I let go of it all and moved down to pick him up. He started to cry.
“What’s with the tears, Big Boy?” I asked, waving my willow in the wind.
“When you’re frosted, I’m frosted,” Dylan said. “You’re everything to me, Daddy.”
The year went by in a blink, a stack of outgrown clothes carried to Goodwill every few months: He was getting so big. The summer before his fifth birthday, when I would lose him to the kindergarten, to the institutions, to the ones who make little boys into dead citizens, that summer we took a long road trip. We got into the big station wagon and drove.
I had a vague idea for the trip, but I let that go too. Each morning at breakfast Dylan and I would pull out the oversized Rand-McNally Road Atlas and put it on the table between us, no matter what table we were eating from. He would squeeze up his eyes as tight as he could —- no peeking —- and we would recite our special incantation: On the road again, tell us where to go. On the road again, tell us how to live. On the road again, show us the way, show us the day.
From within his momentary blindness, Dylan would drop a finger somewhere on the map, spread open to the page displaying our current location. I would yell Hoo-ray, we have a winner! And Dylan would squeal. We would load up the back of the wagon and point the car to the spot where the Rand-McNally map met Dylan’s little finger, and head out for another day.
I was the winner, of course, no matter what. I was the winner each day and the winner inside. I won the prize, the holy prize, the grail, the love prize that I had never hoped to win. I was never going to find love again, but I did. I was in the winner’s circle for the first time in my life. I was a winner that whole trip, and, I thought, for the rest of my life, my life as a Dad, my life with Dylan.
That’s how I came to appreciate the cliché about living in the moment. Not the shopworn wisdom shoveled to the forlorn during their trials and daily setbacks — just wait a day, your luck will change, it always does —- not the 12-step advice of ‘one day at a time’ that is hauled out on bad days, white knuckle days, not-drinking days when you want to. No this is the appreciation of the good moment, the moments on the trip, the ordinary joyous fantastical never-to-happen-again moments. These moments too will die, just like the bad ones. The point is the same: this too shall pass.
It was the morning before his fifth birthday, that day in September, the year: 2001. Everyone in the world, certainly everyone alive in America remembers where they were when they found out. I heard it on the radio. I was in my studio, typing away at some especially nettlesome technical solution, trying to allow people without engineering degrees to understand why an obscure piece of software required so many clicks. It was early, but it was one of those Southern California days without a marine layer to burn off. The Santa Ana’s would be coming soon, the hot desert breath would come upon us and deliver hellfire to stupid homeowners in the brush and badlands. The light was so bright already I had flipped down the wooden shutters all around the room. The monitor was glowing in the gloom, and I remember cursing the bad software design. Thank God technical writers get no bylines, I thought, or I would be given all the blame for these stupid engineers.
I heard a smooth voice come out of the radio, but it didn’t register: a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. It was the first plane, and nobody really knew yet what was to come, what the day would bring, how the weight of history would reassert itself, would smother us all with every emotion we had within us, well, at least every bad one.
I ran to the den and found the remote. Right away the TV went on, like millions of others, tuned to CNN as the horror and the madness and the unknown future unfolded before our eyes. My eyes filled with tears, open wide for hours, blinking, staring at and through little Dylan, who hovered near my leg like a hummingbird. Of course, after the second plane and the continuing madness on the screen, I had to turn the TV off. I couldn’t have those images rearranging his neurons, not the day before his fifth birthday, not at age five, not ever. I would hold back the future, I would block what he knew, what he would ever know. I would keep him safe in my arms.
There was no party to cancel, thank God, nothing planned on his actual birthday to cancel. I had intended to buy a little birthday cake and light five candles for just him and me in the middle of the day, as the finale to a nice little lunch, right before naptime. But there were no stores open that morning, at least not in my area. Nobody wanted to leave their house. So I rifled around in the pantry, keeping the radio low in the background, and found the fixings for a cake. We spent the morning making it, just Dylan and I. He sifted the flour beautifully for a five-year-old, and he picked out the right measuring spoon for the other dry ingredients, once I lined them up in size order. We made a huge mess with the electric mixer, but that was OK. I was grateful for the mess, for the cleanup, for the sponge, for Dylan. The three layers looked lovely in their round pans, popped sharply on the counter to lure the air bubbles onto the surface.
They only needed 30 minutes in the oven, so I let Dylan play outside in the front yard, just for 30 minutes. Then we could ice it together. My favorite, and now his: yellow cake with creamy milk chocolate icing. All from scratch. Like mama used to make. Now like Daddy used to make.
Truth be told, I wanted him to go outside so I could watch CNN. I had seen only a half hour that morning, snatched in the time before he crawled out of bed and sleep-walked to find me. It was on the little set in the kitchen, with the sound low. It was at eye level for me, I reasoned, so even if he burst in on me, I could cut it off before too much damage was done. Before too much damage was possible. Before.
So I stood in the kitchen, staring at the little 9” screen, so bright and sharp it hurt. There were no more clips of the planes and the towers by then. There was so much to tell, the story was still to be told, big stories and the small, an orgy of detail, numbing. I switched around. All of the networks ran nothing but the horror, nothing but the news. They had all had already somehow managed to compose anthems worthy of Sousa and animations rivaling Spielberg, drumbeats and rhythms that quickened the pulse right before the tasteful commercials. I stared at a shot of the beautiful California coast, a car gliding on a ribbon of road, water so blue on the little screen, the silvery finish of the car glinting like a sword.
I think it must have happened when the CNN theme music came back on, so loud, so martial. I didn’t hear anything from the front yard; I didn’t hear anything for ten minutes. I know because I was checking on the yellow cake in the oven. The three pans were turning a nice golden brown, like the tan I used to get on long vacations in Florida. I could see them through the safety glass when I turned on the oven light. I was ready with a toothpick in my hand, ready to open the oven door and stick in the toothpick, when the knock and the doorbell came. Turning, I heard the siren.
I ran to the door, and it was Debbie from the next house. Debbie had thinning hair from chemo, so she wore a brick-red turban. Her face was in shock, which made sense. I had seen her in the yard earlier, she had that wide-eyed, slack-jawed look of disbelief. All of us did.
“You have to come, it’s Dylan,” she said, her mouth still open after the words came out, after the sound hit my ears, after I understood the words, after I pushed the screen door open and ran onto the driveway leading to the street, the dead-end cul-du-sac where there was never any traffic, the reason I bought the house the year Dylan turned two.
The ambulance arrived just as I did. There were neighbors standing in the middle of the road, blocking the way, my way and the way of the man who burst out of the cab of the vehicle and yelled something, making the people step aside, showing me what they were staring down at.
His little Giants cap was right-side-up on the cement. He was face down, his arms reaching towards the curb. He’s sleeping in the road, I thought, That’s funny. It’s not even nap time.
Every face turned up to look at me. Their horror was like the people’s on the TV set, the people walking away from the towers. Only there was no dust or debris in the air, only horror.
“Dylan, big boy,” I yelled, as I ran over to his little body. I kneeled and reached out, shaking his little arm. Nothing happened as I shook harder and yelled out his name again, louder this time.
The ambulance technician pulled at me as he said, “This is an emergency, sir, please, stay back while we do our job.”
I fell backwards as he pulled on my arm, and that’s when I saw the back end of the car on the other side of the street. It was an old Mazda, not gleaming silver, but a kind of nondescript color. It was angled funny, half in the driveway, half in the street, the engine still running. I could see the exhaust from the crummy old engine, puffing out of the tailpipe.
Gloria Chung was in her husband Daryl’s arms. Her shoulders were heaving, and Daryl was looking down the street at something, I don’t know what he was looking at.
The medical guy was saying something, he was saying something to me. He was shaking me, and saying something. I couldn’t hear him. I turned to Dylan, and I heard my voice. Dylan, honey, the cake is going to burn. Let’s go in now. Let’s stop playing. The medical guy was putting a sheet over his head, and trying to lift me up. I was not able to stand. I was not able. I was not able to hold it any longer, I could smell the shit in my pants, I could feel the shit as it took over my body, I was a runny pile, impossible to lift up and take away, to get out of the street. I was not there anymore.
I was covered with blood. My hands had scooped up only a little of it, the rest pooling on the black uneven surface of the street dividing my house and Daryl and Gloria’s house. The first injection was administered in the ambulance. We drove away and they shot me up.
How long I was under sedation? What were the various gradations of drugging involved in the care of the instantly insane, which is certainly what I was. I came to in a nondescript room. A nurse with a stiff uniform was patting down my forehead with a cool wet towel, but I was too groggy to talk. I fell backwards into the pillow, deep into my real life, the dreams that saved me. Most of my dreams involved large groups of people, furiously rushing back and forth to get something done. There was always such urgency to these dreams. Sometimes we were in a big church. Sometimes we were in a stadium. Public type places, not my house. People I knew kept rushing in and out of doors and appearing out of nowhere with questions. I was in charge, and I had answers to give to the people who were asking me questions. Dylan was not in these dreams. Sometimes I thought he was there, I felt his presence. I even smelled him once. But there was never any dream that I remembered, anyway, where Dylan was visible. Looking back, I think this is weird.
They transferred me from the hospital lock-down to a long-term care facility, that’s what they called it. I must say, most of the people I met seemed perfectly normal to me, even those people there who had not been on the other side for years. This was their home, and they liked it. There was a door, it was painted dark gray. On the other side were the problem residents. At night if you got close to that door you could hear them. They were the ones that shouted and hurt themselves. They were the ones that got special attention.
All I ever got was drugs and bad meals. And therapy sessions. I don’t know if it was the drugs or if it was me, but I really had no energy whatsoever for a long time. They would bring me into the office of the therapist, Dr. Liebman, and I would just sit. There was no couch, that’s another cliché. There was a nice chair, though, upholstered with a flowery print on a very nice glossy cotton fabric. I would finger the surface of the fabric on the arms of the chair and just sit. I wasn’t unhappy to be there, it was a nice room. Dr. Liebman was OK, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer his questions for a long, long time. I don’t know how long it was, how long it took me to respond.
I kept my questions to myself. I tried not to talk. I had spent my life as a talker. Talk talk talk, all the time. I always needed to fill the empty air with words. No longer. That was somebody else’s job. My job was to stay quiet and still. I hated moving the air around me, and so I didn’t even want to eat. I began losing weight. I had no muscle tone.
One day Norman came into my room. I noticed his name when he leaned over the bed to move me so he could change the sheets. Norman was an orderly, an attendant, a medical assistant. He had the whole wing to tend to, so I didn’t see him that much at first, but I noticed when he came into my room. He wore scrubs. They fit nicely. He was probably in his forties, he had some gray hair, which flipped up in the front. His teeth were uneven on the bottom.
The thing about Norman was that he didn’t act like I was crazy. He talked. He did the talking. He filled in the spaces. Boy he could really talk. All that talking was good. He talked about the TV shows that he liked. He really liked science fiction, and he talked about the science fiction, the books and the movies. He really loved the classics. Wells, Asimov, Heinlein.
One day Norman walked into the room, but before starting to work on me, he said, “I have something for you,” and he smiled. I did not move. I wasn’t moving then. He held up a three-by-five-inch index card with something written on it. The card was pale blue. “I’ll just put it here for you,” and he carefully placed the card at the edge of the nightstand.
The next day he brought another card in; this time it was pastel yellow. “Here’s your gift,” he said, smiling. And he placed it right on top of the blue card. Norman brought in a card every day after that. The ritual was always the same. I wouldn’t acknowledge his gift, or move in any way. But after the first week, when he had run out of new colors and the card on top was blue again, I started to read the cards. Late at night when nobody, not the staff, not the other patients, when nobody could see me move, that’s when I read the cards. The words on the cards were quotes from his favorite writers, mostly science fiction writers, mostly Heinlein. They were little moral lessons, I think, things Norman must have believed, or thought I should believe. I began to want to ask Norman about the cards, but I didn’t, I continued to lay still.
“Why don’t you try smiling?” Norman said to me one morning, as he rolled me over and pulled at the bottom sheet, still wet with my sweat. “Or better yet, how about getting out of bed so I don’t have to roll you around like a catatonic. You don’t want to be catatonic, do you?”
I felt his hands on my side as he shoved me over. I liked the way it felt. I liked the words that he spoke.
“I know you’re not catatonic, because I know you pick up the cards that I leave. Don’t you?”
There were hundreds of cards by the time they let me out of the hospital, so many that I put them into a large box, after I started moving around again. My time in the hospital erased my life. I had no friends any more. My brother was my only visitor, an infrequent presence. He was the one who sold my house at the height of the market, sold my car and my things, and banked the money. I guess he wasn’t so bad.
When it came time to leave the hospital, when they said I was better, he wanted me to move in with him and his wife. We’re empty nesters, we have that huge house, you know? I wasn’t that crazy. I wound up in a small apartment in Santa Monica, which I thought I could afford with all the money in the bank. In Santa Monica I could walk on the beach, stare at the tourists, go to a coffee shop. I wouldn’t need a car. And it was far away from Silver Lake, and the streets that Dylan and I had traveled every one of his 1,825 days.
I opened the door that first time, and Norman stood there in blue jeans and a light tan jacket. I wasn’t really surprised. Naturally, he had access to my records. He held a bunch of roses and a green three-by-five card. On the card was another Heinlein quote:
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily.
All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
(Hurting yourself is not sinful - just stupid).
NEW WAY OF SEEING IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET
I have finally come into a state of grace, having made the pixel my own personal savior. Those millions of tiny squares of luminescence, streaming onto my computer screen, assembled in a kaleidescope of meaning, patterns that help me see, help me live, allow me finally to connect to all the other men out there, those who seek salvation, hope, healing, sex.
Of course I had heard for years the anguished confessions, the endless testimonials of torment and delight, the dirty little references to online porn and Internet dating, the endless cruising of the digital photos and encapsulated autobiographies of desire and intention. I heard, but kept my distance.
Oh, it was not for a lack of understanding —- my work has become defined by the digital and I share the world’s boundless obsession for gadgets and trends and coolness, so much so that I am embarrassed to admit it. Like the admission that I have no lover. Perhaps I am not loved, some days, even, am unloveable. I get only what I want. Or deserve. Had I wanted to meet people thru the Internet, I would have. And so it was that I crossed over the line, in my own way, in my own time. I bought the new computer, I boosted my broadband account, I mastered the digital camera. Fingers poised on the keyboard, heart at the portal of a new house, beating, throbbing, yearning, I was free to be whatever I wanted, to enter this new world. Frozen, those fingers, unable to find the words, unable to find the heart. Who am I, actually? Who am I to the world? Who do I want you to see? Whom do I want to want me?
The answers would come from my faith in the pixel, the pixels, the pixellated vision of reality I found already assembled on the websites of desire and lust. For weeks I lurked. Each night I would dive, clicking my way through the photos, men in every conceivable contortion and state of desire. Hot men, fat men, old men, boys; hairy men, leather men, people with every imaginable fetish, a yen for every body part, every single form of beseechment.
Self-chosen names signal the deepest yearnings for dominance or humiliation, friendship, love, adventure, entertainment. And, the little profiles and messages, littered with typos and inadvertent, class-based codes and cult messages --- one after another, the glowing communiqués from the LED temple of the pixel life, a new way to worship.
Then, a guy sent me a message asking for more photos of me, and another asking for stats… what are my stats? And so, I began my quest for connection. More and more men emerged from the vast ether before me, materializing as responses, woofing their way into securing a response in turn from me. Willing supplicants from Bratslava; eager twosomes from Kuala Lumpur…and, eventually, terrifyingly, a guy from across town, somebody whom I could actually meet, somebody who might administer my redemption, who might end my endless isolation. As a consequence of this conflation of electricity and desire, hope and courage, yearning and duplicity, a succession of three-dimensional human carbon-based life forms materialized before me. A new world of my own making, a gift of grace.
By now the novelty and addiction have worn off, the experience has become mine, it is not a new way of seeing. I still look at the pixels, I still read the words, on the surface and between the lines. And I offer, across the miles, a piece of my soul, on its own terms, a gift I may receive in return. The pixels have helped me see. Perhaps you become the dream I yearn for. Perhaps a disappointment. But manifest between us is the power of healing and connection made real by a transubstantiation of pixels into flesh. The consequence may be eternal love, or not, but in the moment of deciding, I know that I am real, I am alive, I am awake, I am sane, I am yours, for eternity.
Of course I had heard for years the anguished confessions, the endless testimonials of torment and delight, the dirty little references to online porn and Internet dating, the endless cruising of the digital photos and encapsulated autobiographies of desire and intention. I heard, but kept my distance.
Oh, it was not for a lack of understanding —- my work has become defined by the digital and I share the world’s boundless obsession for gadgets and trends and coolness, so much so that I am embarrassed to admit it. Like the admission that I have no lover. Perhaps I am not loved, some days, even, am unloveable. I get only what I want. Or deserve. Had I wanted to meet people thru the Internet, I would have. And so it was that I crossed over the line, in my own way, in my own time. I bought the new computer, I boosted my broadband account, I mastered the digital camera. Fingers poised on the keyboard, heart at the portal of a new house, beating, throbbing, yearning, I was free to be whatever I wanted, to enter this new world. Frozen, those fingers, unable to find the words, unable to find the heart. Who am I, actually? Who am I to the world? Who do I want you to see? Whom do I want to want me?
The answers would come from my faith in the pixel, the pixels, the pixellated vision of reality I found already assembled on the websites of desire and lust. For weeks I lurked. Each night I would dive, clicking my way through the photos, men in every conceivable contortion and state of desire. Hot men, fat men, old men, boys; hairy men, leather men, people with every imaginable fetish, a yen for every body part, every single form of beseechment.
Self-chosen names signal the deepest yearnings for dominance or humiliation, friendship, love, adventure, entertainment. And, the little profiles and messages, littered with typos and inadvertent, class-based codes and cult messages --- one after another, the glowing communiqués from the LED temple of the pixel life, a new way to worship.
Then, a guy sent me a message asking for more photos of me, and another asking for stats… what are my stats? And so, I began my quest for connection. More and more men emerged from the vast ether before me, materializing as responses, woofing their way into securing a response in turn from me. Willing supplicants from Bratslava; eager twosomes from Kuala Lumpur…and, eventually, terrifyingly, a guy from across town, somebody whom I could actually meet, somebody who might administer my redemption, who might end my endless isolation. As a consequence of this conflation of electricity and desire, hope and courage, yearning and duplicity, a succession of three-dimensional human carbon-based life forms materialized before me. A new world of my own making, a gift of grace.
By now the novelty and addiction have worn off, the experience has become mine, it is not a new way of seeing. I still look at the pixels, I still read the words, on the surface and between the lines. And I offer, across the miles, a piece of my soul, on its own terms, a gift I may receive in return. The pixels have helped me see. Perhaps you become the dream I yearn for. Perhaps a disappointment. But manifest between us is the power of healing and connection made real by a transubstantiation of pixels into flesh. The consequence may be eternal love, or not, but in the moment of deciding, I know that I am real, I am alive, I am awake, I am sane, I am yours, for eternity.
DINNER DURING THE PLAGUE
A Biblical plague came upon us that purgatorial summer week I was alone with Dad in the wonderful brick house in Austin, Texas, the house that contained my loneliness.
Another move, another school, another chance to make the best of it. I would race home from the school of strangers to sit in that house, alone reading book after book. When I read Dostoyevsky I would drink cups of tea, pretending that I was there in Russia too, anyplace but in my own skin. Thank God for the books. And for that house. When we moved in, I loved that house so much that I spent a month making elaborate architectural drawings, alone on the front porch under a canopy of oaks and maples and the flowery explosion of fruit trees.
Now, I cursed those trees which had suddenly brought with the change of season a civilization of tent caterpillars all around us, everywhere in Austin that summer, a nightmare all day long, even worse during the dark of night, nighttime, nightmares of being covered and eaten alive by creatures sent as retribution by a stern and unforgiving God. I could hear the echoes of the cursing of this plague, and yes, the cursing of the God who sent it, coming from inside the brick fortress, where we manned our stations to hold the invasion at bay, one caterpillar at a time.
They started dropping the morning we took mom to the airport, dad and I, kissing her before she walked across the tarmac towards the metal stairs. She turned and waved and entered the plane that would take her home to Louisville, to the funeral of a brother I had only met once.
Now, three days later, the furry inches of individual insects had become a carpet, spreading out in all directions, everywhere you went in town. An undulating invasion of terrifying primordial creatures, devouring whatever lived in their path. It was impossible to avoid them as you walked. You made a sickening crunchy squishing noise, you had a universal reaction of nausea, not so much because it felt like murder, although it was, but because of that sound, drawing your attention down to a footprint of caterpillar pus, half dead creatures wiggling and oozing in your wake. I quickly learned not to linger. The caterpillar legs on their undersides would take hold anywhere as they squirmed towards their unknown instinctual destinies, and they wouldn’t let go, even when you tried to shake them off. All of Austin’s citizenry could be seen enacting antic pantomimes of leg-shaking and finger-flicking, punctuated by sudden spasms of horror as a falling caterpillar landed someplace on the body, just another part of the world that would be coated by the communal fur commanded by these creatures’ life cycle.
We had stuffed the edges of the ancient window air conditioners with old rags and crumpled-up copies of the Austin American-Statesman in a vain attempt to keep them out. Still, some pioneer, driven by God only knows what logic and desire, would find its way through the convolutions of the stuffing, emerging onto an black-and-white shard of the newspaper, and then down the wall towards the seat of our real nightmares, the bed. Dad had bought me an extra vacuum cleaner of my own, its red plastic housing now a permanent fixture in the middle of the floor in my bedroom, suction at the ready to deliver any errant larvae to a final resting place inside the sealed bag.
“Good luck, buddy,” Dad said as he left for work. It was Saturday and I was cooking dinner for Dad, just the two of us. My menu was purloined from Mama: fried chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, white gravy and chocolate cream pie. Pulling down the Fannie Farmer cookbook I sat at the metal kitchen table, doing my homework, preparing for the exam that my Dad would be forced to administer without his consent later that evening. I had an image of our sitting together, happy and together, the world shut out, his eyes beaming proudly upon me as we ate the food that I had prepared just for him, a vision that drove me even as I began to trot the three blocks to the market for provisions.
It was early in the day and not yet scorching and humid, so I encased myself in long pants, a turtleneck shirt with sleeves that drooped over my wrists. Just to make sure, I used rubber bands at the terminus of each fabric opening, stretched them tight enough to block even a recent larvae baby from gaining purchase on my flesh. I wore a straw hat with a big wide brim, and I carried a bandana for flicking. It was hard to run in boots, but they had no openings for the pests to enter, so I clomped along, swishing and praying towards the store, my list in my pocket, my heart in my throat, the madness of daddy love wrapped around me.
My precautions were successful. Only a dozen caterpillars crawled on the surface of my sweaty garments, easy to knock off with a well-aimed forefinger or the pop of the bandana. None breeched the barriers onto my flesh. Even more important, I escaped ridicule, a darker fear. My costume did not seem unusual in Austin during the infestation. You would see the young and the poor, those without cars, wrapped in gauze or festive fabrics, all manner of homemade shields. The horror showed in their eyes, gripped in the exercise of some ancient ritual, squishing along and wincing and cursing at an uncaring universe.
By noon the ingredients laid like loot on the Formica counter, the humming of the old Kenmore fridge and the muffled clicking of the kitchen clock my only companions. I was lost in the zone of individual tasks, a labyrinth of chopping and heating and measuring and stirring, covered with a thin sweat coating of terror that somehow I would fail and lose the love, the special kind of love that mama got when she cooked these very items for him. Time yawned and napped, and poked at me to hurry up.
Somehow the individual dishes managed to get finished, and they all looked roughly like the color pictures, grouped together in the center of Fannie’s cookbook, bright green beans, golden crispy chicken, tan peaks of meringue, and the pale comfort of the potatoes and beige gravy.
Right on time, his face in an involuntary mask of caterpillar terror, Dad burst into the back door. “Just look at what you’ve done,” and I beamed. We sat down, and because Mama was not there, we did not say grace.
Shame and gratitude cannot be stirred together, cannot be blended. Like oil and water, they repel, they separate, they make a mess. I was that mess that evening, staring at the floor where a brown furry caterpillar inched along his trail from the door. The chicken was fried on the outside, raw on the inside. The beans were vivid green, but impossible to chew. The potatoes turned out fine, but the glutinous mass of lumpy beigeness in the gravy boat induced a gagging that even my father’s pity could not stifle.
We made it through, picking and trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, but the pie pushed into the territory of emotional destiny. My knife sliced cleanly through the meringue, the first cut was fine. The second cut was fine. The wedge tool scooted under the graham cracker crust, I lifted, and the whole chocolaty mass flopped, the filling not a fluffy solid pudding, but instead like a milkshake.
I started to tear up, staring back at the floor and a second caterpillar.
“What happened, son?”
“I don’t know, I followed the recipe,” and the weeping became orchestral, a symphony of sobs.
He got up to investigate the remains of the ingredients, still arrayed on the Formica.
“Here’s the culprit,” he said, holding up the flat rectangular box of Baker’s chocolate — semi-sweet chocolate. “Did you add too much sugar?”
“Sure, I added sugar, just the amount in the recipe.”
“No,” Dad said, now holding the dark blue Fannie Farmer in his big hands. “It calls for unsweetened chocolate….”
I sniffled, looking up from the floor to my Dad.
“Hey, anybody could make the same mistake. Hell, I do it all the time. You did good, thanks for a beautiful meal.”
The gratitude was a rush, flowing over my body like honey, a balm, a sweet coolness that calmed my palpitations, my aching heart, most of my shame.
“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, as he scooped up the big pie mess into bowls, and opened the freezer in search of some ice cream.
Another move, another school, another chance to make the best of it. I would race home from the school of strangers to sit in that house, alone reading book after book. When I read Dostoyevsky I would drink cups of tea, pretending that I was there in Russia too, anyplace but in my own skin. Thank God for the books. And for that house. When we moved in, I loved that house so much that I spent a month making elaborate architectural drawings, alone on the front porch under a canopy of oaks and maples and the flowery explosion of fruit trees.
Now, I cursed those trees which had suddenly brought with the change of season a civilization of tent caterpillars all around us, everywhere in Austin that summer, a nightmare all day long, even worse during the dark of night, nighttime, nightmares of being covered and eaten alive by creatures sent as retribution by a stern and unforgiving God. I could hear the echoes of the cursing of this plague, and yes, the cursing of the God who sent it, coming from inside the brick fortress, where we manned our stations to hold the invasion at bay, one caterpillar at a time.
They started dropping the morning we took mom to the airport, dad and I, kissing her before she walked across the tarmac towards the metal stairs. She turned and waved and entered the plane that would take her home to Louisville, to the funeral of a brother I had only met once.
Now, three days later, the furry inches of individual insects had become a carpet, spreading out in all directions, everywhere you went in town. An undulating invasion of terrifying primordial creatures, devouring whatever lived in their path. It was impossible to avoid them as you walked. You made a sickening crunchy squishing noise, you had a universal reaction of nausea, not so much because it felt like murder, although it was, but because of that sound, drawing your attention down to a footprint of caterpillar pus, half dead creatures wiggling and oozing in your wake. I quickly learned not to linger. The caterpillar legs on their undersides would take hold anywhere as they squirmed towards their unknown instinctual destinies, and they wouldn’t let go, even when you tried to shake them off. All of Austin’s citizenry could be seen enacting antic pantomimes of leg-shaking and finger-flicking, punctuated by sudden spasms of horror as a falling caterpillar landed someplace on the body, just another part of the world that would be coated by the communal fur commanded by these creatures’ life cycle.
We had stuffed the edges of the ancient window air conditioners with old rags and crumpled-up copies of the Austin American-Statesman in a vain attempt to keep them out. Still, some pioneer, driven by God only knows what logic and desire, would find its way through the convolutions of the stuffing, emerging onto an black-and-white shard of the newspaper, and then down the wall towards the seat of our real nightmares, the bed. Dad had bought me an extra vacuum cleaner of my own, its red plastic housing now a permanent fixture in the middle of the floor in my bedroom, suction at the ready to deliver any errant larvae to a final resting place inside the sealed bag.
“Good luck, buddy,” Dad said as he left for work. It was Saturday and I was cooking dinner for Dad, just the two of us. My menu was purloined from Mama: fried chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, white gravy and chocolate cream pie. Pulling down the Fannie Farmer cookbook I sat at the metal kitchen table, doing my homework, preparing for the exam that my Dad would be forced to administer without his consent later that evening. I had an image of our sitting together, happy and together, the world shut out, his eyes beaming proudly upon me as we ate the food that I had prepared just for him, a vision that drove me even as I began to trot the three blocks to the market for provisions.
It was early in the day and not yet scorching and humid, so I encased myself in long pants, a turtleneck shirt with sleeves that drooped over my wrists. Just to make sure, I used rubber bands at the terminus of each fabric opening, stretched them tight enough to block even a recent larvae baby from gaining purchase on my flesh. I wore a straw hat with a big wide brim, and I carried a bandana for flicking. It was hard to run in boots, but they had no openings for the pests to enter, so I clomped along, swishing and praying towards the store, my list in my pocket, my heart in my throat, the madness of daddy love wrapped around me.
My precautions were successful. Only a dozen caterpillars crawled on the surface of my sweaty garments, easy to knock off with a well-aimed forefinger or the pop of the bandana. None breeched the barriers onto my flesh. Even more important, I escaped ridicule, a darker fear. My costume did not seem unusual in Austin during the infestation. You would see the young and the poor, those without cars, wrapped in gauze or festive fabrics, all manner of homemade shields. The horror showed in their eyes, gripped in the exercise of some ancient ritual, squishing along and wincing and cursing at an uncaring universe.
By noon the ingredients laid like loot on the Formica counter, the humming of the old Kenmore fridge and the muffled clicking of the kitchen clock my only companions. I was lost in the zone of individual tasks, a labyrinth of chopping and heating and measuring and stirring, covered with a thin sweat coating of terror that somehow I would fail and lose the love, the special kind of love that mama got when she cooked these very items for him. Time yawned and napped, and poked at me to hurry up.
Somehow the individual dishes managed to get finished, and they all looked roughly like the color pictures, grouped together in the center of Fannie’s cookbook, bright green beans, golden crispy chicken, tan peaks of meringue, and the pale comfort of the potatoes and beige gravy.
Right on time, his face in an involuntary mask of caterpillar terror, Dad burst into the back door. “Just look at what you’ve done,” and I beamed. We sat down, and because Mama was not there, we did not say grace.
Shame and gratitude cannot be stirred together, cannot be blended. Like oil and water, they repel, they separate, they make a mess. I was that mess that evening, staring at the floor where a brown furry caterpillar inched along his trail from the door. The chicken was fried on the outside, raw on the inside. The beans were vivid green, but impossible to chew. The potatoes turned out fine, but the glutinous mass of lumpy beigeness in the gravy boat induced a gagging that even my father’s pity could not stifle.
We made it through, picking and trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, but the pie pushed into the territory of emotional destiny. My knife sliced cleanly through the meringue, the first cut was fine. The second cut was fine. The wedge tool scooted under the graham cracker crust, I lifted, and the whole chocolaty mass flopped, the filling not a fluffy solid pudding, but instead like a milkshake.
I started to tear up, staring back at the floor and a second caterpillar.
“What happened, son?”
“I don’t know, I followed the recipe,” and the weeping became orchestral, a symphony of sobs.
He got up to investigate the remains of the ingredients, still arrayed on the Formica.
“Here’s the culprit,” he said, holding up the flat rectangular box of Baker’s chocolate — semi-sweet chocolate. “Did you add too much sugar?”
“Sure, I added sugar, just the amount in the recipe.”
“No,” Dad said, now holding the dark blue Fannie Farmer in his big hands. “It calls for unsweetened chocolate….”
I sniffled, looking up from the floor to my Dad.
“Hey, anybody could make the same mistake. Hell, I do it all the time. You did good, thanks for a beautiful meal.”
The gratitude was a rush, flowing over my body like honey, a balm, a sweet coolness that calmed my palpitations, my aching heart, most of my shame.
“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, as he scooped up the big pie mess into bowls, and opened the freezer in search of some ice cream.
ITALIAN PRIDE
I feel the illusive ancestral stirrings of my Italian grandparents, progenitors of a commonplace dynasty of American nobodies, presented to the world as we were because Vincent and especially Marie DeMartino were ashamed to be Italian outside of the confines of their secret hearth. Vincent was disgorged onto the shores of Ellis Island as a young man, in the time when whole towns fled there with their tattered hopes. He was a tailor, as proud of avoiding taxes as he was of his exquisite hand on the needle. Vincent’s life became arranged by the marriage to Marie, whose family had settled in Little Italy when she was only five. She had no accent and she liked it that way.
When Vincent came to her, Marie grabbed the wedding ring, a talisman that empowered the hopeless mission that would become her life’s work: to scrub the foreignness from the fabric of their lives as soon and as thoroughly as she could. Their three sons and a daughter would speak ONLY English, even in the home. She would sharply carve another sliver of flesh from the lips of her husband whenever his anger and resentment drew him back to the comfort of his mother tongue. From Little Italy to an apartment in Queens, she moved them soon with the pennies she hoarded in the kitchen, and then to a duplex. Finally, she claimed the ultimate embodiment of her American dream: a house in the leafy suburbs.
Even as a boy, somehow I knew I was “Italian,” but had no way yet of filling that empty vessel with the fluid of meaning, the identity I so desperately needed as a rootless Army gypsy child. We had been stationed in Germany by the time I started first grade. Maybe there is a misty, vague memory of longing and disappointment stirring that our one vacation to the south of France didn’t include a side trip into Italy. So I must have known, how could I not with a last name like DeMartino? “Three pages of DeMartino’s in the Manhattan phone book—-it’s like Smith in Italy!” I would later proclaim to the Wasps and the rubes, a made-up fact that credentialized and defended me, as if they cared.
But I was a half- breed, the non-Italian stock from my mother’s folk who left the shores of Ireland, the valleys of Alsace, the highlands of Scotland, surrendering their chastity in adequate Protestant couplings that populated the impoverished European-American farmlands of Kentucky back when they were young.
I am a mongrel of Europe, deceiving the world with my last name which summons a glorious civilization that once ruled everything. The name was a badge for that young man who, like generations before, sweetly wandered the streets of Florence in search of its boundless gifts of beauty. Sitting in the coach class train to Rome, surrounded by frenzied sweaty young soccer fans, like animations of the David statue I had devoured in the Palazzo della Signoria just the day before. I imagined what life would have been like had Vincenzo’s seed not travelled on that heartless boat to New York in 1907, but instead had made me one of them. Mounting the crest of the cliffs above Monterossa al Mare, breathing the perfumed air that comforted Richard the Lionhearted as he journeyed off to slay the dragons of Islam, I placed myself in the long line of fishermen, mending their nets and waiting for the world to arrive and to conquer Italia once again. Arm in arm I stroll with a handsome architect along the Venician Fondamento dreaming of the riches of the doges, imagining that my simple last name would somehow have opened the treasure houses of history. The flood of cheap tourist memories is upon me, antidote to the peculiar self-hate of my grandmother, knowing all the while that my Italy would have undoubtedly provided for me only a squalid hovel and the starchy subsistence of the South. It was starvation that had driven them all to abandon the hateful boot for the unknown.
Shimmering is the image of my little 8-year-old self, sitting anxiously in shorts on the bench of the baby grand piano that grandma had wedged into the tract home’s parlor, a mural of tranquil Lake Como on the wall behind. It was the only place in the room that he could sit because the Italian provincial furniture was encased in clear embossed plastic that stuck to his legs, and made his unbreathing Dupont miracle fabric shirt stick to his skinny young flesh back there in the 50’s.
Marie performed for me that day, for all of us. There were the plates of mysterious Italian delicacies brought out, along with stern tributes to my neatness…. Served up with invective to the hapless tailor she had married, a man who, I would later learn, kept a mistress in the next town. He would take his lover for trysts in the cabin of his boat, docked somewhere on the Long Island Sound. Tipped off, Marie evidently burst upon them in the throes of whatever passion was being spooned out, and this is how she got her mink coat, the very one she could not resist bringing out to show us on that first summer visit to the tiny Lindenhurst house. She put the thing on and sashayed back and forth in the space between the piano and the couch. I sneezed as the moth ball chemicals filled the still and humid air, and I had to go outside.
My identity is cheap and pinned on, like an oversized tin button, striped with the green, red, and white of the Fatherland: ITALIAN PRIDE. I bought one in my 20’s at a stall in South Philly from a fat lady serving sausages and onions when I was visiting Kitty Capparella. Tattered pictures of the Pope and JFK were taped to the cart where she cooked the sausages. She resembled my grandmother, right down to the visible dark hairs on her upper lip, plucked painfully every week in a vain attempt to escape being a cliche like the shrouded women in the black-and-white movies that I love too much for words.
When Vincent came to her, Marie grabbed the wedding ring, a talisman that empowered the hopeless mission that would become her life’s work: to scrub the foreignness from the fabric of their lives as soon and as thoroughly as she could. Their three sons and a daughter would speak ONLY English, even in the home. She would sharply carve another sliver of flesh from the lips of her husband whenever his anger and resentment drew him back to the comfort of his mother tongue. From Little Italy to an apartment in Queens, she moved them soon with the pennies she hoarded in the kitchen, and then to a duplex. Finally, she claimed the ultimate embodiment of her American dream: a house in the leafy suburbs.
Even as a boy, somehow I knew I was “Italian,” but had no way yet of filling that empty vessel with the fluid of meaning, the identity I so desperately needed as a rootless Army gypsy child. We had been stationed in Germany by the time I started first grade. Maybe there is a misty, vague memory of longing and disappointment stirring that our one vacation to the south of France didn’t include a side trip into Italy. So I must have known, how could I not with a last name like DeMartino? “Three pages of DeMartino’s in the Manhattan phone book—-it’s like Smith in Italy!” I would later proclaim to the Wasps and the rubes, a made-up fact that credentialized and defended me, as if they cared.
But I was a half- breed, the non-Italian stock from my mother’s folk who left the shores of Ireland, the valleys of Alsace, the highlands of Scotland, surrendering their chastity in adequate Protestant couplings that populated the impoverished European-American farmlands of Kentucky back when they were young.
I am a mongrel of Europe, deceiving the world with my last name which summons a glorious civilization that once ruled everything. The name was a badge for that young man who, like generations before, sweetly wandered the streets of Florence in search of its boundless gifts of beauty. Sitting in the coach class train to Rome, surrounded by frenzied sweaty young soccer fans, like animations of the David statue I had devoured in the Palazzo della Signoria just the day before. I imagined what life would have been like had Vincenzo’s seed not travelled on that heartless boat to New York in 1907, but instead had made me one of them. Mounting the crest of the cliffs above Monterossa al Mare, breathing the perfumed air that comforted Richard the Lionhearted as he journeyed off to slay the dragons of Islam, I placed myself in the long line of fishermen, mending their nets and waiting for the world to arrive and to conquer Italia once again. Arm in arm I stroll with a handsome architect along the Venician Fondamento dreaming of the riches of the doges, imagining that my simple last name would somehow have opened the treasure houses of history. The flood of cheap tourist memories is upon me, antidote to the peculiar self-hate of my grandmother, knowing all the while that my Italy would have undoubtedly provided for me only a squalid hovel and the starchy subsistence of the South. It was starvation that had driven them all to abandon the hateful boot for the unknown.
Shimmering is the image of my little 8-year-old self, sitting anxiously in shorts on the bench of the baby grand piano that grandma had wedged into the tract home’s parlor, a mural of tranquil Lake Como on the wall behind. It was the only place in the room that he could sit because the Italian provincial furniture was encased in clear embossed plastic that stuck to his legs, and made his unbreathing Dupont miracle fabric shirt stick to his skinny young flesh back there in the 50’s.
Marie performed for me that day, for all of us. There were the plates of mysterious Italian delicacies brought out, along with stern tributes to my neatness…. Served up with invective to the hapless tailor she had married, a man who, I would later learn, kept a mistress in the next town. He would take his lover for trysts in the cabin of his boat, docked somewhere on the Long Island Sound. Tipped off, Marie evidently burst upon them in the throes of whatever passion was being spooned out, and this is how she got her mink coat, the very one she could not resist bringing out to show us on that first summer visit to the tiny Lindenhurst house. She put the thing on and sashayed back and forth in the space between the piano and the couch. I sneezed as the moth ball chemicals filled the still and humid air, and I had to go outside.
My identity is cheap and pinned on, like an oversized tin button, striped with the green, red, and white of the Fatherland: ITALIAN PRIDE. I bought one in my 20’s at a stall in South Philly from a fat lady serving sausages and onions when I was visiting Kitty Capparella. Tattered pictures of the Pope and JFK were taped to the cart where she cooked the sausages. She resembled my grandmother, right down to the visible dark hairs on her upper lip, plucked painfully every week in a vain attempt to escape being a cliche like the shrouded women in the black-and-white movies that I love too much for words.
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