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).
9/2/07
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.
OUIJA
Man, I don’t know if the Ouija board thing was Patsy’s or Amanda’s idea —- hell, I can’t even remember which stupid Astrology sign is which, know what I mean? You come up to me and ask me my sign, I’ll despise you right off, that’ll do it —- that shit makes me crazy. Likely as not I’ll answer: yep, born on the cusp of the hammer and sickle. I love it when the wacko’s stare at me with that blank look, like, man, what the fuck sign is he?
Same with this Ouija business, I mean, here we were, revolutionaries by day, doing our little part to bring down the imperialist system and shit, and then, what do we do? Sit around at night trying to hook up with dead people? No no no, mama, not this baby boy. My only excuse was the weed, you know, I mean, I don’t wanna sound like a pussy, but if you get me high, I will follow you anywhere.
Anyway, this one night, something happened. It was just the five of us, as usual, nobody else really knew, so you fucking better not tell. Dinner was over and we’d toked up and opened another bottle of red. One of the chicks, oops, hey, I mean women, don’t start with me, ok? They pulled out the Ouija and I started in with the jeers and the wisecracks like I always did: gimme a break, here we go again, hey, did your aunt Mabel get laid last night on the other side, you know, and they’d sneer and make fun of me, Look who’s talking Mr. Big-Time Revolutionary from Big-time Louisville Kentucky, so I let it drop.
Linda set up the board and Amanda would drone out this incantation that she always used: “Oh, world of spirit, a world beyond us, tell us your secrets and tell us no lies.” Oh, my God. The first time I heard that, I nearly gagged. “Oh Christ-on-a-crutch, this is rich,” you know, I just couldn’t contain myself.
Anyway, I had only been the driver on this Ouija thing twice, both busts you know, I guess those spirits just don’t like cynical bastards like me. But this one night in question, Amanda kept bullying me into doing it again, bullshit like the ying-yang energy and she could tell they wanted a man, really, you’re making me vomit, Amanda, cut this shit out. I swear I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for the superior bong hits with some kind of hash Bruce had found the day before, so there I was: fingers lightly touching the little hockey puck in the middle of the board with the stupid swamy pictures and the numbers and alphabet, you’ve seen it, I know you have.
Let me cut to the chase here, I mean, I do not, repeat NOT want to convey the idea that I put any stock whatsoever in what happened, no matter what you may think, OK? Anyway, Amanda is like coaching me, and telling me to breathe and to close my eyes, and I kinda do, and I’m grooving along with the hash buzz, and then, well I dunno, really I guess you’d call it a trance. OK…watch it, baby, I’m just here to tell you, I like went someplace, and everybody in the room kind of went there with me. All I know is that when I snapped out of it I was covered in sweat and I was as cold all over as I had ever been, which was really not that easy —- it was summer in Washington DC, you know, you just don’t get that cold, right?
I looked around at skinny Patsy and fat Amanda, and beautiful Linda and scraggly Bruce, anyway, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz — you were there, and you and you and you. Linda had like a pad of graph paper, and she’d put little letters into the little boxes. She was grinning at me and waving the pad of graph paper. What the fuck happened, I asked. I want to tell you, I was more than a little freaked. Did somebody lace that hash? They were all kind of laughing, and patting me, and Patsy handed me some wine.
And then Linda asked, was I ready? And then she read the little words off the graph paper:
WILD ELK BALTIMORE CHARLES BETTY ASK FOR BETTY THE BOOK THE BOOK
OK so here’s the wierd part. The next day at work Patsy comes to me, this was before we started sleeping together, but we were already warming up to the idea, and she like knew how prickly I was about this Ouija stuff, and she said, hey Nick, are you ready for this? Ready for what? I sez. Well, sez Patsy, We looked up Wild Elk in the Baltimore phone book, and then she shoves the yellow pages in front of me.
Wild Elk Occult and Spiritual Books, it says, right there in print, with an address on Charles Street. So…I’ll spare you the detail, OK? Yes, we went up to Baltimore that Saturday, and we found the fucking bookstore, and this wierd guy behind the counter sold us this book, it was indeed, called The Betty Book, you can check me on this. It was a whole thing about seances, some guy and his wife from the other side back in the 30's. Not exactly Das Kapital, OK, and all summer the girls read from this book, and there’s more, but I’m not going into it. I swear, I’ve tried all these years to forget this shit, and you’d better do the same.
It is really not relevant, that’s what I think.
Same with this Ouija business, I mean, here we were, revolutionaries by day, doing our little part to bring down the imperialist system and shit, and then, what do we do? Sit around at night trying to hook up with dead people? No no no, mama, not this baby boy. My only excuse was the weed, you know, I mean, I don’t wanna sound like a pussy, but if you get me high, I will follow you anywhere.
Anyway, this one night, something happened. It was just the five of us, as usual, nobody else really knew, so you fucking better not tell. Dinner was over and we’d toked up and opened another bottle of red. One of the chicks, oops, hey, I mean women, don’t start with me, ok? They pulled out the Ouija and I started in with the jeers and the wisecracks like I always did: gimme a break, here we go again, hey, did your aunt Mabel get laid last night on the other side, you know, and they’d sneer and make fun of me, Look who’s talking Mr. Big-Time Revolutionary from Big-time Louisville Kentucky, so I let it drop.
Linda set up the board and Amanda would drone out this incantation that she always used: “Oh, world of spirit, a world beyond us, tell us your secrets and tell us no lies.” Oh, my God. The first time I heard that, I nearly gagged. “Oh Christ-on-a-crutch, this is rich,” you know, I just couldn’t contain myself.
Anyway, I had only been the driver on this Ouija thing twice, both busts you know, I guess those spirits just don’t like cynical bastards like me. But this one night in question, Amanda kept bullying me into doing it again, bullshit like the ying-yang energy and she could tell they wanted a man, really, you’re making me vomit, Amanda, cut this shit out. I swear I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for the superior bong hits with some kind of hash Bruce had found the day before, so there I was: fingers lightly touching the little hockey puck in the middle of the board with the stupid swamy pictures and the numbers and alphabet, you’ve seen it, I know you have.
Let me cut to the chase here, I mean, I do not, repeat NOT want to convey the idea that I put any stock whatsoever in what happened, no matter what you may think, OK? Anyway, Amanda is like coaching me, and telling me to breathe and to close my eyes, and I kinda do, and I’m grooving along with the hash buzz, and then, well I dunno, really I guess you’d call it a trance. OK…watch it, baby, I’m just here to tell you, I like went someplace, and everybody in the room kind of went there with me. All I know is that when I snapped out of it I was covered in sweat and I was as cold all over as I had ever been, which was really not that easy —- it was summer in Washington DC, you know, you just don’t get that cold, right?
I looked around at skinny Patsy and fat Amanda, and beautiful Linda and scraggly Bruce, anyway, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz — you were there, and you and you and you. Linda had like a pad of graph paper, and she’d put little letters into the little boxes. She was grinning at me and waving the pad of graph paper. What the fuck happened, I asked. I want to tell you, I was more than a little freaked. Did somebody lace that hash? They were all kind of laughing, and patting me, and Patsy handed me some wine.
And then Linda asked, was I ready? And then she read the little words off the graph paper:
WILD ELK BALTIMORE CHARLES BETTY ASK FOR BETTY THE BOOK THE BOOK
OK so here’s the wierd part. The next day at work Patsy comes to me, this was before we started sleeping together, but we were already warming up to the idea, and she like knew how prickly I was about this Ouija stuff, and she said, hey Nick, are you ready for this? Ready for what? I sez. Well, sez Patsy, We looked up Wild Elk in the Baltimore phone book, and then she shoves the yellow pages in front of me.
Wild Elk Occult and Spiritual Books, it says, right there in print, with an address on Charles Street. So…I’ll spare you the detail, OK? Yes, we went up to Baltimore that Saturday, and we found the fucking bookstore, and this wierd guy behind the counter sold us this book, it was indeed, called The Betty Book, you can check me on this. It was a whole thing about seances, some guy and his wife from the other side back in the 30's. Not exactly Das Kapital, OK, and all summer the girls read from this book, and there’s more, but I’m not going into it. I swear, I’ve tried all these years to forget this shit, and you’d better do the same.
It is really not relevant, that’s what I think.
KEY WEST
I should warn you right now, this is a sort of corny story. It’s about my first visit to Key West, and there’s sex and drugs and stuff, so if you’re offended, take a hike. So we drove all day, Walt and I, in my 1972 Super Beatle. Straight down that sticky black road, two lanes for hundreds of miles, surrounded by nothing but water. It could make you a little sick if you didn’t watch yourself.
It was all just so damned beautiful, you know? We’d make it a ways, and then Walt would want to stop to look at some flock of birds, or a picturesque swamp or something. He would read little entries from the tourist guidebook each time we went a few more miles, strangely eager for information about paradise. He also got pretty chatty after a joint or two, you know what I mean, and we had some great weed in those days, Florida was flooded with the shit.
Then I’d need to pee, and hell, who cared if the other mad tourists in their Lincolns and Caddies saw us wangling our weenies without the cover of trees. Hell, I thought, maybe a cute one would stop. When the sun was overhead the heat in the VW was impossible, so we hit a greasy spoon in a wide place called a key and ate a fried seafood pattie on a bun and thought it was all so romantic because a pelican flew by the window before we could pay our check. Ah, youth!
By late afternoon, with the hazy hot December sun racing us to the horizon, I put my foot down, literally and figuratively, and the little car puttered to a grand finale with gas to spare. We pulled to the side with a dozen other tourist cars and had a fat fellow with a gaudy shirt take a picture of the two of us under the big sign that spanned the road, “Welcome to Key West.” The sun was definitely in the West, about to be swallowed somewhere behind the low buildings and the ratty palm trees.
“Which way to the pier?” I asked the guy with the gaudy shirt, and he told me, all very polite, don’t you know. He didn’t seem to mind that my hair hung down to the middle of my back and I wore only cutoffs and a puka necklace. I flashed him the peace sign and we got back in the little Beetle.
Thanks to Walt’s exhaustive reading of the guidebook entries, we had already filled our heads with every fact and myth about Key West, the land at the end of the road where misfits flourished and Hemingway wrote in between drinks. Ninety miles from Cuba, home to a naval base, quaint little shops, and at this moment, stay with me, the legendary stroll down the little town’s pier at sundown.
Soon, were surrounded by something other than water for the first time in hours. The island was bigger than it had a right to be, and depressingly middle class, at least at first. Jesus, between the naval base and the Sears store, the subdivisions and the mall, we could have been anywhere in Florida. For this I’m on vacation? Puleeze, I thought. Plus, it wasn’t even beautiful anymore. The edge of the road was scrubby, with white dirt that looked like somebody had crumbled pie dough and laid it along our path. The palms were stuck in the sand like parsley garnish on a plate of chopped liver, right? And the houses had those hideous white rock yards that sparkled, like the ceiling of all those tract homes.
Then, almost suddenly, the road narrowed and we entered a canopy of dense green. There were little houses, shockingly white in the deepening shadows, each sporting more outrageous curliques of fancy, wild Victorian frou-frou, hung improbably along the rooflines and entryways. Of course, our guidebook had told us that Key West was built by New England sailors in the 19th century, but still, wouldn’t you be a little knocked out to see a Massachusetts town being strangled by a rainforest? Especially if you were as stoned as we were.
The traffic began to clog, making it pretty damn hard to make any time. We only had a few more blocks to go, so we found a place to dump the car in front of a little store selling Po-Boys and Cuban beans at one counter and half-pints of booze at another. We bought two cokes and a bottle of Jack Daniels and the old lady behind the counter gave us some cups filled with ice.
We walked hand in hand towards the sun, swigging and laughing, filled with the tingle of who knows what’s coming, fully out of the day-to-day, even other people’s day-to-day like our parents. Both Walt and I had parents with houses in different ugly Florida subdivisions. This is where old Jews and Wops come to die, evidently, only his daddy was a Baptist preacher, which is maybe why he liked me to spank him.
He let go of my hand and ran, splashing a little of the drink along the way. The dense green had given way to a parking lot and that kind of nautical industrial stuff that has to go along with places where boats are tied up, know what I mean? Off to the right was a long two-story motel that made an L in order to contain the little harbor. And off to the left, almost suddenly leaping into our glowing faces, was a long, very long pier that stretched out into the water, hundreds, no thousands of worn planks holding up almost that many people.
Swarms of people, strollers being pushed by Norman Rockwell couples, multigenerational families of unknown ethnic origins rattling wildly to each other as if nobody else were there. Couples of all ages, mostly half-naked, just in from the beach, hanging on each other in poses that would put museums to shame, get my drift? But mostly it was a crowd of freaks. Long haired, body-painted, tie-dyed stoned-out polymorphously perverse over the top, fucking hippie kind of freaks. I mean, it was like every Be-in since the summer of love had sent a delegation.
Half of them were performing. Guitarists strumming vigorously to the sky, eyes closed in a private trance, peaking from time to time to see if some fool had tossed a quarter into the open guitar case. Jugglers and unicyclists and those irritating mime people, wacko’s dressed up in Renaissance costumes despite the fucking heat. I mean it, is this an acid trip or what?
And then, there were the queers… pairs of hippie boys like us, some just starting their beards with goofy haircuts abandoned in eager anticipation of long hair to come. Bell bottoms and uniforms, elaborate drag queens and greased up muscle boys. Tough looking girls escorting their girlfriends, all pretty with pony tails and pastel capri pants. A hot little hippie boy whose eyes never left the sweat-beaded chest of a shirtless sailor in tight bell bottoms, strolling arm in arm without a care in the world. Every combination and variation, which you must know in 1973 was really something to see.
The smell of good weed was everywhere, and we lit a joint too, as we made our way as close to the end of the pier as we could. A lovely tan boy in a Blue Speedo and flip flops stood next to me, golden curls cascading onto his shoulders. Paging Michelangelo, you know what I mean? I offered him the joint and he took it between his teeth backwards like —- a shotgun —- and I put my lips onto the end of the joint as be blew, and he blew my mind, and I looked into his eyes as the general cacophony, the cloud of noise and snatches of music congealed into a giant roar.
I smiled at the boy and turned to my left, just in time to see the gleaming Gulf of Mexico swallow the last little taste of the big orange sun. I pulled Walt into my arms and together we kissed the golden haired boy, surrounded by noise and the possibilities of paradise.
How’s that for a corny ending, I warned you.
It was all just so damned beautiful, you know? We’d make it a ways, and then Walt would want to stop to look at some flock of birds, or a picturesque swamp or something. He would read little entries from the tourist guidebook each time we went a few more miles, strangely eager for information about paradise. He also got pretty chatty after a joint or two, you know what I mean, and we had some great weed in those days, Florida was flooded with the shit.
Then I’d need to pee, and hell, who cared if the other mad tourists in their Lincolns and Caddies saw us wangling our weenies without the cover of trees. Hell, I thought, maybe a cute one would stop. When the sun was overhead the heat in the VW was impossible, so we hit a greasy spoon in a wide place called a key and ate a fried seafood pattie on a bun and thought it was all so romantic because a pelican flew by the window before we could pay our check. Ah, youth!
By late afternoon, with the hazy hot December sun racing us to the horizon, I put my foot down, literally and figuratively, and the little car puttered to a grand finale with gas to spare. We pulled to the side with a dozen other tourist cars and had a fat fellow with a gaudy shirt take a picture of the two of us under the big sign that spanned the road, “Welcome to Key West.” The sun was definitely in the West, about to be swallowed somewhere behind the low buildings and the ratty palm trees.
“Which way to the pier?” I asked the guy with the gaudy shirt, and he told me, all very polite, don’t you know. He didn’t seem to mind that my hair hung down to the middle of my back and I wore only cutoffs and a puka necklace. I flashed him the peace sign and we got back in the little Beetle.
Thanks to Walt’s exhaustive reading of the guidebook entries, we had already filled our heads with every fact and myth about Key West, the land at the end of the road where misfits flourished and Hemingway wrote in between drinks. Ninety miles from Cuba, home to a naval base, quaint little shops, and at this moment, stay with me, the legendary stroll down the little town’s pier at sundown.
Soon, were surrounded by something other than water for the first time in hours. The island was bigger than it had a right to be, and depressingly middle class, at least at first. Jesus, between the naval base and the Sears store, the subdivisions and the mall, we could have been anywhere in Florida. For this I’m on vacation? Puleeze, I thought. Plus, it wasn’t even beautiful anymore. The edge of the road was scrubby, with white dirt that looked like somebody had crumbled pie dough and laid it along our path. The palms were stuck in the sand like parsley garnish on a plate of chopped liver, right? And the houses had those hideous white rock yards that sparkled, like the ceiling of all those tract homes.
Then, almost suddenly, the road narrowed and we entered a canopy of dense green. There were little houses, shockingly white in the deepening shadows, each sporting more outrageous curliques of fancy, wild Victorian frou-frou, hung improbably along the rooflines and entryways. Of course, our guidebook had told us that Key West was built by New England sailors in the 19th century, but still, wouldn’t you be a little knocked out to see a Massachusetts town being strangled by a rainforest? Especially if you were as stoned as we were.
The traffic began to clog, making it pretty damn hard to make any time. We only had a few more blocks to go, so we found a place to dump the car in front of a little store selling Po-Boys and Cuban beans at one counter and half-pints of booze at another. We bought two cokes and a bottle of Jack Daniels and the old lady behind the counter gave us some cups filled with ice.
We walked hand in hand towards the sun, swigging and laughing, filled with the tingle of who knows what’s coming, fully out of the day-to-day, even other people’s day-to-day like our parents. Both Walt and I had parents with houses in different ugly Florida subdivisions. This is where old Jews and Wops come to die, evidently, only his daddy was a Baptist preacher, which is maybe why he liked me to spank him.
He let go of my hand and ran, splashing a little of the drink along the way. The dense green had given way to a parking lot and that kind of nautical industrial stuff that has to go along with places where boats are tied up, know what I mean? Off to the right was a long two-story motel that made an L in order to contain the little harbor. And off to the left, almost suddenly leaping into our glowing faces, was a long, very long pier that stretched out into the water, hundreds, no thousands of worn planks holding up almost that many people.
Swarms of people, strollers being pushed by Norman Rockwell couples, multigenerational families of unknown ethnic origins rattling wildly to each other as if nobody else were there. Couples of all ages, mostly half-naked, just in from the beach, hanging on each other in poses that would put museums to shame, get my drift? But mostly it was a crowd of freaks. Long haired, body-painted, tie-dyed stoned-out polymorphously perverse over the top, fucking hippie kind of freaks. I mean, it was like every Be-in since the summer of love had sent a delegation.
Half of them were performing. Guitarists strumming vigorously to the sky, eyes closed in a private trance, peaking from time to time to see if some fool had tossed a quarter into the open guitar case. Jugglers and unicyclists and those irritating mime people, wacko’s dressed up in Renaissance costumes despite the fucking heat. I mean it, is this an acid trip or what?
And then, there were the queers… pairs of hippie boys like us, some just starting their beards with goofy haircuts abandoned in eager anticipation of long hair to come. Bell bottoms and uniforms, elaborate drag queens and greased up muscle boys. Tough looking girls escorting their girlfriends, all pretty with pony tails and pastel capri pants. A hot little hippie boy whose eyes never left the sweat-beaded chest of a shirtless sailor in tight bell bottoms, strolling arm in arm without a care in the world. Every combination and variation, which you must know in 1973 was really something to see.
The smell of good weed was everywhere, and we lit a joint too, as we made our way as close to the end of the pier as we could. A lovely tan boy in a Blue Speedo and flip flops stood next to me, golden curls cascading onto his shoulders. Paging Michelangelo, you know what I mean? I offered him the joint and he took it between his teeth backwards like —- a shotgun —- and I put my lips onto the end of the joint as be blew, and he blew my mind, and I looked into his eyes as the general cacophony, the cloud of noise and snatches of music congealed into a giant roar.
I smiled at the boy and turned to my left, just in time to see the gleaming Gulf of Mexico swallow the last little taste of the big orange sun. I pulled Walt into my arms and together we kissed the golden haired boy, surrounded by noise and the possibilities of paradise.
How’s that for a corny ending, I warned you.
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