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.
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