Yesterday, I watched a video of a neuroscientist who became the subject of her own experiment, after she had suffered a massive stroke in the left lobe of her brain. It took many years for her right lobe to repair her left lobe. The source of her oneness with the universe restored the source of her structure and identity, that’s how she put it. She used her connection to the present moment, because she had no other choice.
We can all choose to live in the moment, right over left. I can choose to live in the moment. I can choose to write in the moment, even as I construct each moment on the page. Only, I’m stuck on the left. I can’t let go of me. I hold on to the story, I hold on to my story, I grasp at my ego. I smell the fear.
I’ve been working on a short story for a year. It’s a whale, it’s huge — it’s the story of my first full-on love with a man, back in in my early twenties, back in my political days. It wasn’t much of an affair, really. I can’t even recall his name. But the images are so vivid, so iconic. The moments are so powerful. I’ve written down all the scenes, each in sequence, a pile of pages, you’ve heard me read some of it. But still, I can’t end it after all this time. I’m not happy with it, there’s something wrong, something missing. I’m tormented by the mysterious hardwiring of my own love and desire. I’m trapped by a quest for meaning. I’m at sea and I’ve lost my compass. Just me and the whale and the vast, vast sea.
“You are driving me crazy,” I say out loud. “I can’t even remember your name, and still, you are driving me crazy.”
I look up from the computer monitor. His his face is right there, still young and pink and fuzzy, hasn’t aged a day. His blue eyes shine like I remember them the first time, his golden curls tumbling over the denim shirt I remember from that night at the anti-war meeting in the red brick church. My study feels strange, as if it weren’t the comfy room where I write every day. Surely it’s the light that’s tricking me, the pale rainy day that seeps in through the shutters. My fingers are pecking away at the black keys, typing is second nature to me. I never look at my fingers, only at the screen, at each letter, each word as it accumulates before me.
“You fell in love, that’s all.” I look up and see him smile. It’s a sweet smile, not lascivious, like I remember, like all the scenes I’ve written for him, a wise-beyond-its-years smile.
“People fall in love, that’s what trains our hearts,” he says.
“I know,” I say, “But, I’ll never feel like that again. It’s too late.”
“Perhaps. Only… you made me up. You know that, don’t you? You made it all up.”
“No, no, you were real, it really happened,” I say. I feel my throat tighten, but I go on. “Our amazing sex … all of the feelings … and, I left Patsy for you … only, you … you didn’t want me… And then, I’ll never forget how it all ended, you and me in that bar a year later.”
“I know the story, I know. But, what you call love — that’s what you made up.”
“No! Oh, no you don’t, you don’t get to do that to me! That love was real, it changed me, I know this, absolutely. It has to mean something.”
“Maybe,” he said, “Unless you choose to let go and see what happens.”
“I can’t do that. I don’t know why. Shit, I can’t figure this out.”
“You did it with your father, didn’t you?” he says, smiling again. The room is very hot, even without the sun. I can feel myself sweating.
“You’re not my father, don’t do that, don’t say that.”
“You made that up, too,” he said, touching my hand on the keyboard, gently swiveling my body towards him.
“Your brain has made up all these stories. The stories that surround the moments. Don’t you know, it’s the moment that’s important, not the stories. It’s the moment that’s important, not the meaning. The stories are holding you back.”
“No, that’s not true. The stories are me, my life, it’s all about stories. This is why I wanted to be a writer.”
“Is it? Then why did it take you so long, if it was so important?”
I sat in the chair holding his hand. I couldn’t say anything, gagged, bound, tied up, unable to move, unable to speak.
“Should I tell you? Or can you write it yourself?”
The texture of his hand is rough, like a construction worker’s. I hold onto it, I don’t know for how long, except that the light from the window seems to have brightened. Perhaps the sun is coming out after all. I pull away from him and return my fingers to the keys. I start to type:
Every love is a whale, it must be conquered, it must be killed, or it will kill you.
5/29/08
5/22/08
Best Ever Present
I am a massive memory ship violating icy waters
I am a closet of sacred treasures, juju talisman of the holy cigar box
I am an empire of joy, of sweet boy fears of never getting enough
I am a summer birthday with a zero at the end of it, twisted backwards
#6: Strangers serenade my melting candles on a big boat to Europe,
best ever present, thin-tired, hand-braked racer bike,
I fall from it, under the teacher’s first grade fur
I feel the maid’s wartime metal plate as I set her curlers
#9: A sweaty friendless June I’m smothered by love I barely notice,
Perry Mason mysteries & farm-stand beefsteaks, two for a quarter,
best ever present blares: transistor jesus dancing WHACK Connie Francis, WHACK Elvis croquets me upside the head on a trip to Sears
# 12: More half-eaten cake pushed aside, quivering fingertips
peel Scotch tape with care from clattering best ever present
Smith-Corona electric typing living writing from my
broken dead refugee cat heart left behind, annual family impersonation
Oh my holy blah blah blah,
Oh my graceless off-key chorus of numerical ingratitude
Oh my pathetic brain lobe battle
Oh my endless craving heartsick vomit
Oh my blessed gonads rising, what is happening?
Something here is very wrong, man.
Fuck this poem
Fuck this sentimental scrabble game
Fuck you for making me
Fuck me for writing it
Fuck this poem
Supposed to be an inventory of days, 59 of ‘em, marching with military precision across vistas of manhood and mountains of madness
Supposed to be a ditty of grimy triumphs and hospital nightmares and champagne toasts at the Russian Tea Room
Supposed to be an album of faded Kodaks, throwaway crescendos, deeply felt regrets, everyday epiphanies
Supposed to be a catalog of wounds and gifts to help you live each year knowing less at the end of it than you did when you started
Supposed to be wisdom
Supposed to be metaphor
But nobody dreams anymore in the lonely house with the atrophied amphibians that crawl the wallpaper to God,
where makeup artists are mortified that their very best gifts scare the horses
where amnesia seizes happiness and throws it out the window
where I forget that I still bite my nails
world without shame, world without end, world without me
Deserve more
Deserve the best ever present
Deserve to stop hoping
I am a closet of sacred treasures, juju talisman of the holy cigar box
I am an empire of joy, of sweet boy fears of never getting enough
I am a summer birthday with a zero at the end of it, twisted backwards
#6: Strangers serenade my melting candles on a big boat to Europe,
best ever present, thin-tired, hand-braked racer bike,
I fall from it, under the teacher’s first grade fur
I feel the maid’s wartime metal plate as I set her curlers
#9: A sweaty friendless June I’m smothered by love I barely notice,
Perry Mason mysteries & farm-stand beefsteaks, two for a quarter,
best ever present blares: transistor jesus dancing WHACK Connie Francis, WHACK Elvis croquets me upside the head on a trip to Sears
# 12: More half-eaten cake pushed aside, quivering fingertips
peel Scotch tape with care from clattering best ever present
Smith-Corona electric typing living writing from my
broken dead refugee cat heart left behind, annual family impersonation
Oh my holy blah blah blah,
Oh my graceless off-key chorus of numerical ingratitude
Oh my pathetic brain lobe battle
Oh my endless craving heartsick vomit
Oh my blessed gonads rising, what is happening?
Something here is very wrong, man.
Fuck this poem
Fuck this sentimental scrabble game
Fuck you for making me
Fuck me for writing it
Fuck this poem
Supposed to be an inventory of days, 59 of ‘em, marching with military precision across vistas of manhood and mountains of madness
Supposed to be a ditty of grimy triumphs and hospital nightmares and champagne toasts at the Russian Tea Room
Supposed to be an album of faded Kodaks, throwaway crescendos, deeply felt regrets, everyday epiphanies
Supposed to be a catalog of wounds and gifts to help you live each year knowing less at the end of it than you did when you started
Supposed to be wisdom
Supposed to be metaphor
But nobody dreams anymore in the lonely house with the atrophied amphibians that crawl the wallpaper to God,
where makeup artists are mortified that their very best gifts scare the horses
where amnesia seizes happiness and throws it out the window
where I forget that I still bite my nails
world without shame, world without end, world without me
Deserve more
Deserve the best ever present
Deserve to stop hoping
MOTHERS' DAY
A mother bird flies to the nest she built in a Boston fern outside my kitchen window. I noticed her the week my dog died, as if nature was reminding me that Life Goes On. The violins should swell now, I think. Doggie dies, bird arrives, wheel of life, god is good — cue the violins. Life has no soundtrack, life is not a movie, where the auteur commands, and we feel. Life has no such easy meanings. The bird doesn’t feel my pain.
I pick up the phone to play an unretrieved voicemail message. My friend Joan. Her words are slow, carefully formed. “I’m back home now, I needed to come home,” I hear her say.
“I’m not sure who I told what to, but… anyway, I wanted you to know, my mother died last Friday.”
I stare out the window. Should I give that bird a name? Mabel, maybe? Thelma? Libby? Oh man, Libby. Mama Libby. Libby Mama. Mama gone too, my mama gone. Mama long gone, almost 13 years ago to the day, this very day, could it be? Dead at 81. How could I not think of her, my mama, too?
Joan’s mother had apparently died the day they finally brought her home from the hospital. The nurse barely had time to get things set up in the hospice.
“It was so quick,” Joan says, when I call her back.
“She was ready,” I reply, trying for a tone of calm compassion. Out the window a breeze sways the basket with the fern and the mama bird tucked inside.
“She was ready,” Joan repeats. I hear the collapse in her voice, the struggle not to. I fiddle with some mail using my free hand.
“I’ll tell you more when…when we’re not on the phone,” she says. Words are the key. They unlock whatever holds it all in. I ask if I can help — dinner, a walk on the beach?
“I love you,” I say. “I love you, too,” she says and I feel the flood coming, even as the click cut us off.
The metal doggie flap clanks loudly as I swing open the kitchen door, causing the bird to fly away with a startling flutter. Jesus, you’ve made her abandon her eggs, you heartless foe of nature! Now what? What kind of bird is she, anyway -- a wren, a sparrow, a starling? — my friend Ed thinks she’s a finch. How long will this egg drama go on? I walk across the porch to the fern. When I first peered inside, I was so amazed to find a perfect straw nest cradling three bluish eggs, mottled and smaller than my pinkie tip. Now, as I peek in, I see, not eggs, but a fluffy mess of feathers, and a fleshy bit sort squirming in slow motion. This is new birth! She’s hatched one!
Oh shit! Hide me so that mama can return, so the little runt won’t die! I retreat to the kitchen to watch through the window. I stand frozen, like a predator. Maybe I’ll buy Joan flowers. Or a book? What did I want when my mother went? In a minute, the bird reappears, landing on a cross beam. She flicks her head about before darting onto the fern and her chick, too new even to chirp.
Mother love, mother gone, mother death. Only one, only one to love, only one to hate, only she can make you right, only she can set me straight, only she can make me gay, only she could make me an orphan, a widow, black widow, spider woman. I see another mother roaming lonely, kohl-eyed in the dusky half-light, musty, trusting nothing, waiting for an uninvented psyche drug that will put her on the front page: CRAZY MAMA REUNITES WITH LONG LOST SPUD, one in a gaggle of orphan spuds cast in an opera of lost mamas, all given up on, giving up their baby’s blood to the ones with the happy-birthday-Jesus cakes on Christmas Day. Hard-luck mamas lose their babies to the ones with the tarnished Walmart crucifixes over each major appliance, the ones who step up, step in, step over the bodies, like they did with my very own dear mama.
My very own flesh-and-blood-brother & his smirking fury wife found her on a Friday, yes a Friday, found in her bed, my big brother said, found dead from dreadful waiting, endless waiting for the end, she’s in a better place he said, he said it on that voicemail from hell, 13 years gone by, gone to a better place, he said, gone away and dragged my heart along, I said, crying and keening and pounding, sleep-walks and hot-baths, reading and re-reading Rilke, tear-ing up all over the translation. Damn God.
God damn. Listen to this, only a week before, just that very fucking Sunday before, my turn, first time sober, it was my turn to have the whole damn lot of ‘em over, three damn birthdays on a barbeque spit – and, to top it all off: Mother’s Day, it was Mother’s Day, then, and now, it’s going to be Mother’s Day all over again, they have one every year, I have read the decree by King Hallmark, one for every mama, one for Joan’s dead mama, one for your mama too, their own damn day to step over King Baby, bawling baby like I was, like the chick of the unknown genus, the mysterious species in the back yard of my own mortal ecosystem, mouth wide open, waiting for mama to bring more life, waiting for mama to come back to the nest, waiting for mama to regurgitate like she always did, waiting for mama to make the hurt go away, forever and always waiting for my mama, but it’s too late, too late, too late. Cue the violins now, goddammit!
Mother’s on her father’s throne, mother-lovers hover in the clapboard church where I stand without regret before the altar of God, ahead of the legions of professional finger-waggers with my puny entourage of fags and fag-hags and rag-tags, scorched by the lapping fire, the sizzling brimstone, melting into fear and nausea — I couldn’t help but get poetical.
faith shaped mama / living proof / giving proof to / unconditional / noncommissioned / mama type love / for us / for strangers / for Him / greater light in which she walked / humility / a dream / a nest / of love on earth / not just possible / necessary
I pick up the phone to play an unretrieved voicemail message. My friend Joan. Her words are slow, carefully formed. “I’m back home now, I needed to come home,” I hear her say.
“I’m not sure who I told what to, but… anyway, I wanted you to know, my mother died last Friday.”
I stare out the window. Should I give that bird a name? Mabel, maybe? Thelma? Libby? Oh man, Libby. Mama Libby. Libby Mama. Mama gone too, my mama gone. Mama long gone, almost 13 years ago to the day, this very day, could it be? Dead at 81. How could I not think of her, my mama, too?
Joan’s mother had apparently died the day they finally brought her home from the hospital. The nurse barely had time to get things set up in the hospice.
“It was so quick,” Joan says, when I call her back.
“She was ready,” I reply, trying for a tone of calm compassion. Out the window a breeze sways the basket with the fern and the mama bird tucked inside.
“She was ready,” Joan repeats. I hear the collapse in her voice, the struggle not to. I fiddle with some mail using my free hand.
“I’ll tell you more when…when we’re not on the phone,” she says. Words are the key. They unlock whatever holds it all in. I ask if I can help — dinner, a walk on the beach?
“I love you,” I say. “I love you, too,” she says and I feel the flood coming, even as the click cut us off.
The metal doggie flap clanks loudly as I swing open the kitchen door, causing the bird to fly away with a startling flutter. Jesus, you’ve made her abandon her eggs, you heartless foe of nature! Now what? What kind of bird is she, anyway -- a wren, a sparrow, a starling? — my friend Ed thinks she’s a finch. How long will this egg drama go on? I walk across the porch to the fern. When I first peered inside, I was so amazed to find a perfect straw nest cradling three bluish eggs, mottled and smaller than my pinkie tip. Now, as I peek in, I see, not eggs, but a fluffy mess of feathers, and a fleshy bit sort squirming in slow motion. This is new birth! She’s hatched one!
Oh shit! Hide me so that mama can return, so the little runt won’t die! I retreat to the kitchen to watch through the window. I stand frozen, like a predator. Maybe I’ll buy Joan flowers. Or a book? What did I want when my mother went? In a minute, the bird reappears, landing on a cross beam. She flicks her head about before darting onto the fern and her chick, too new even to chirp.
Mother love, mother gone, mother death. Only one, only one to love, only one to hate, only she can make you right, only she can set me straight, only she can make me gay, only she could make me an orphan, a widow, black widow, spider woman. I see another mother roaming lonely, kohl-eyed in the dusky half-light, musty, trusting nothing, waiting for an uninvented psyche drug that will put her on the front page: CRAZY MAMA REUNITES WITH LONG LOST SPUD, one in a gaggle of orphan spuds cast in an opera of lost mamas, all given up on, giving up their baby’s blood to the ones with the happy-birthday-Jesus cakes on Christmas Day. Hard-luck mamas lose their babies to the ones with the tarnished Walmart crucifixes over each major appliance, the ones who step up, step in, step over the bodies, like they did with my very own dear mama.
My very own flesh-and-blood-brother & his smirking fury wife found her on a Friday, yes a Friday, found in her bed, my big brother said, found dead from dreadful waiting, endless waiting for the end, she’s in a better place he said, he said it on that voicemail from hell, 13 years gone by, gone to a better place, he said, gone away and dragged my heart along, I said, crying and keening and pounding, sleep-walks and hot-baths, reading and re-reading Rilke, tear-ing up all over the translation. Damn God.
God damn. Listen to this, only a week before, just that very fucking Sunday before, my turn, first time sober, it was my turn to have the whole damn lot of ‘em over, three damn birthdays on a barbeque spit – and, to top it all off: Mother’s Day, it was Mother’s Day, then, and now, it’s going to be Mother’s Day all over again, they have one every year, I have read the decree by King Hallmark, one for every mama, one for Joan’s dead mama, one for your mama too, their own damn day to step over King Baby, bawling baby like I was, like the chick of the unknown genus, the mysterious species in the back yard of my own mortal ecosystem, mouth wide open, waiting for mama to bring more life, waiting for mama to come back to the nest, waiting for mama to regurgitate like she always did, waiting for mama to make the hurt go away, forever and always waiting for my mama, but it’s too late, too late, too late. Cue the violins now, goddammit!
Mother’s on her father’s throne, mother-lovers hover in the clapboard church where I stand without regret before the altar of God, ahead of the legions of professional finger-waggers with my puny entourage of fags and fag-hags and rag-tags, scorched by the lapping fire, the sizzling brimstone, melting into fear and nausea — I couldn’t help but get poetical.
faith shaped mama / living proof / giving proof to / unconditional / noncommissioned / mama type love / for us / for strangers / for Him / greater light in which she walked / humility / a dream / a nest / of love on earth / not just possible / necessary
ANHEDONIA
The parched tinder brush of my life ignites into a blaze of sadness, and once sparked, devours even the lush bits seen by all the world in a single moment, suspended in time. Who knows why, who the fuck knows why, now, why, me?
Man, I wake up one day, drowsy. It comes to me — I dunno, I’m all closed up, I’m curled like a grub, I’m balled up in defense of something out there, you know what I mean, nameless-like. Then, in an instant, I just get it, I just don’t feel that jolt anymore. I’m numb, I’m dying, I’m a dead man in a death walk, dragging a carcass through a perfectly fine life. I only just noticed, since, it’s true, the dead have trouble feeling. Everything to live for, everything to love for, everything before me in a life that oh so many others would die for…Yes, everything, and still I’m torched, burned right down to the ground. Nothing remaining but a word that floats through the air between us, 15 minutes into the session, like ash in a fire zone.
“It’s called anhedonia,” Garry says. Compassion bathes his handsome face, painted with the gold of a morning sun that splashes through the window behind him. I recoil from the word, I must avoid its hot truth, its Latinate accusation a poker searing my gut. Need darkness now, need nothingness, need out now, need death.
“Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure, “ he continues. “We see this as a red flag…a kind of warning. If it persists, we would call it depression.. low-grade, but still, a depression.”
It’s as if I have been waiting for this word for a long, long time, suspending life in lieu of an explanation of my emptiness, knowing the moment would come, bating my breath, so I could feel my furious blood spurt through the corrugations of my brain, delivering its heart-shriveling, mind-polluting, soul-scorching poisons with a hateful private vengeance. Here it is: Depression.
Freud started it, the power of the sound of words, the balm of the talk, the trust, like what I have with Garry — the love that lets me show him the wounds. Over and over, I do it, I show him. I reveal, I strip, I rip all the flesh from my chest and show a still-beating heart. We peer inside, into the ugliest parts. I bring a witness, I live to tell about it, I live.
“The cause?” he continues. “Typically a cataclysm—a death, a breakup, a disease. For you? An accumulation, I would say…there have been losses this winter. And there’s your weight problem. And the loneliness, and... and…and?….”
I feel a magazine coming on so I grab a warehouse. Its sound echoes in my airshaft, which feels pink and round. I scoop up the rowboat and take a long bovine. With a second one, I electrify my waterfall. Love and death, our theme this day, love and death, the spectre of the living, love and death, a contradiction denied by the need to survive, love and death, here they come now.
I think to myself: I’ll beat you to the punch, my dearest Garry, I’m gonna say these words, you know I can do it. It’ll be better, don’t you think? just to blurt it? to let myself say it: to tell you?
“It’s a monster,” Garry says. “It’s a bitch. It’s huge for us, turning 60,” he says. He says it. “It’s a horrible truth, that life ends, that we are mortal. How do we go on, knowing that life ends?”
A dead dog, a lost love, a loveless bed in a silent house, creaking bones, numbing jobs, bloated pride, endless tropes — looming, yawning, wretched!— One pin of my life after another, can you see them? a triangle waiting to be struck, fuck me, strewn akimbo, oh daddy, don’t dare drop the ball.
Is that a tear on Garry’s cheek, or just the angle of the light? Do I get a drop of liquid pain squeezed from his duct, a gem, a glimmer of light, permission? Our eyes meet. I turn away. I glance down and see the watch hand jump into place. Garry wipes his eye with his hand and looks at his watch too. He rearranges the papers in my file. He looks up and smiles.
My time is up.
Man, I wake up one day, drowsy. It comes to me — I dunno, I’m all closed up, I’m curled like a grub, I’m balled up in defense of something out there, you know what I mean, nameless-like. Then, in an instant, I just get it, I just don’t feel that jolt anymore. I’m numb, I’m dying, I’m a dead man in a death walk, dragging a carcass through a perfectly fine life. I only just noticed, since, it’s true, the dead have trouble feeling. Everything to live for, everything to love for, everything before me in a life that oh so many others would die for…Yes, everything, and still I’m torched, burned right down to the ground. Nothing remaining but a word that floats through the air between us, 15 minutes into the session, like ash in a fire zone.
“It’s called anhedonia,” Garry says. Compassion bathes his handsome face, painted with the gold of a morning sun that splashes through the window behind him. I recoil from the word, I must avoid its hot truth, its Latinate accusation a poker searing my gut. Need darkness now, need nothingness, need out now, need death.
“Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure, “ he continues. “We see this as a red flag…a kind of warning. If it persists, we would call it depression.. low-grade, but still, a depression.”
It’s as if I have been waiting for this word for a long, long time, suspending life in lieu of an explanation of my emptiness, knowing the moment would come, bating my breath, so I could feel my furious blood spurt through the corrugations of my brain, delivering its heart-shriveling, mind-polluting, soul-scorching poisons with a hateful private vengeance. Here it is: Depression.
Freud started it, the power of the sound of words, the balm of the talk, the trust, like what I have with Garry — the love that lets me show him the wounds. Over and over, I do it, I show him. I reveal, I strip, I rip all the flesh from my chest and show a still-beating heart. We peer inside, into the ugliest parts. I bring a witness, I live to tell about it, I live.
“The cause?” he continues. “Typically a cataclysm—a death, a breakup, a disease. For you? An accumulation, I would say…there have been losses this winter. And there’s your weight problem. And the loneliness, and... and…and?….”
I feel a magazine coming on so I grab a warehouse. Its sound echoes in my airshaft, which feels pink and round. I scoop up the rowboat and take a long bovine. With a second one, I electrify my waterfall. Love and death, our theme this day, love and death, the spectre of the living, love and death, a contradiction denied by the need to survive, love and death, here they come now.
I think to myself: I’ll beat you to the punch, my dearest Garry, I’m gonna say these words, you know I can do it. It’ll be better, don’t you think? just to blurt it? to let myself say it: to tell you?
“It’s a monster,” Garry says. “It’s a bitch. It’s huge for us, turning 60,” he says. He says it. “It’s a horrible truth, that life ends, that we are mortal. How do we go on, knowing that life ends?”
A dead dog, a lost love, a loveless bed in a silent house, creaking bones, numbing jobs, bloated pride, endless tropes — looming, yawning, wretched!— One pin of my life after another, can you see them? a triangle waiting to be struck, fuck me, strewn akimbo, oh daddy, don’t dare drop the ball.
Is that a tear on Garry’s cheek, or just the angle of the light? Do I get a drop of liquid pain squeezed from his duct, a gem, a glimmer of light, permission? Our eyes meet. I turn away. I glance down and see the watch hand jump into place. Garry wipes his eye with his hand and looks at his watch too. He rearranges the papers in my file. He looks up and smiles.
My time is up.
5/21/08
DONNIE
If I stop to think about it, Donnie’s face was very much like a ferret’s: a tiny mouth, a prominent and sloping nose, close-set eyes under a single bushy brow, hardly any chin at all. You could see his Adam’s apple bobbing when he started to lie, which he did a lot. He had to...he was a speed freak.
Saturday afternoon, I'm still waiting for him to show. Typical, nothing new. He's in town on a layover, that’s what he calls it, but he's up in Harlem to get shot up, bam, instant oblivion, totally insatiable, which, of course, is the problem, you can imagine, right, some big black buck ties him off, has his way with him, get the picture?... long before he manages to find his way to me, ya know, all the way down here in Chelsea. I put up with it, mother fucker, I put up with it because, well, you guessed it, he’s such a great lay.
The first half hour, I pace — then, I give in and curl up with a book, that's why the long, shrill sound of the door bell startles me. I walk across the room to buzz him in. Sharp light filters through the blinds across the front of the tiny bedroom, striping everything except the double bed which is crammed into a dark alcove next to an air shaft. A makeshift set of stairs, more like a ladder, leads upwards to my stylish living room, a barely converted tenement. The clomp of Donnie's boots precedes his knock.
I fling the door open. “Fuck me,” he screams, grinning maniacly, and jumps into my arms.
And fuck him I did, with gusto known only to a man in his 20s. Against the rough-hewn lumber of the stairs, I fucked him. Bending over the ancient chipped porcelein sink in the middle of the room, I fucked him. Even on the scratchy polyester sheets, a Canal Street bargain now covered with greasy handprints, I fucked him. Over and again, which is why I was willing to pace and wait, and eat my pride, every time.
Flashing turquoise spurts/ Mast of a tottering catamaran/ bondage blue cheese Sound around cheap rope, potato chipping/ sun bursting/ face-slapping/ sand in my butt crack ing/ moving now/ drying tomato/pure eh?
On the surface, Donnie lived an iconic American story, a shadow left from centuries past, don’t you see? an orphan who becomes a railway signalman, out of Baltimore, Charm City, stepping off the train with a guitar and a grin, singing unto the skies of a multitude of lives that pass him by on the rails, singing of the lives of other people, not his own.
It's only on the surface, though, this gypsy whimsy, not way down deep where the moral rot is found, where the degradation and the filth, the darkness and the death, the ever-present death reside, wages of hate of a self-directed kind -- not so much sin, just hate.
Hurt me, he would say it right out, and I would.
Hurt me, he would yell, up on stage, a second-rate punk in a third-rate band.
Hurt me, he would taunt, and even his sweat would smell like hate when he walked into a room.
It was never love on my part, though repeated applications of repetitous lust may sow confusion -- energy passes from loins to heart and back again, enough said. I was young and hungry, and just as self-obsessed then as I would later become, when I was a speed freak myself, it's how I knew the signs of the walking death, don't you see?
We came to our final sorry ending, Donnie and I, on a beach, out near the tip, tip tippy end of the south fork of the blessed Longest Island, a date when he was late by more than just a little, a day he finally came with one too many lame excuses and his eager puppy smile was not enough. I let it wash into the sea, I kicked the surf, I walked away, I let it all go that day, into the sea.
Saturday afternoon, I'm still waiting for him to show. Typical, nothing new. He's in town on a layover, that’s what he calls it, but he's up in Harlem to get shot up, bam, instant oblivion, totally insatiable, which, of course, is the problem, you can imagine, right, some big black buck ties him off, has his way with him, get the picture?... long before he manages to find his way to me, ya know, all the way down here in Chelsea. I put up with it, mother fucker, I put up with it because, well, you guessed it, he’s such a great lay.
The first half hour, I pace — then, I give in and curl up with a book, that's why the long, shrill sound of the door bell startles me. I walk across the room to buzz him in. Sharp light filters through the blinds across the front of the tiny bedroom, striping everything except the double bed which is crammed into a dark alcove next to an air shaft. A makeshift set of stairs, more like a ladder, leads upwards to my stylish living room, a barely converted tenement. The clomp of Donnie's boots precedes his knock.
I fling the door open. “Fuck me,” he screams, grinning maniacly, and jumps into my arms.
And fuck him I did, with gusto known only to a man in his 20s. Against the rough-hewn lumber of the stairs, I fucked him. Bending over the ancient chipped porcelein sink in the middle of the room, I fucked him. Even on the scratchy polyester sheets, a Canal Street bargain now covered with greasy handprints, I fucked him. Over and again, which is why I was willing to pace and wait, and eat my pride, every time.
Flashing turquoise spurts/ Mast of a tottering catamaran/ bondage blue cheese Sound around cheap rope, potato chipping/ sun bursting/ face-slapping/ sand in my butt crack ing/ moving now/ drying tomato/pure eh?
On the surface, Donnie lived an iconic American story, a shadow left from centuries past, don’t you see? an orphan who becomes a railway signalman, out of Baltimore, Charm City, stepping off the train with a guitar and a grin, singing unto the skies of a multitude of lives that pass him by on the rails, singing of the lives of other people, not his own.
It's only on the surface, though, this gypsy whimsy, not way down deep where the moral rot is found, where the degradation and the filth, the darkness and the death, the ever-present death reside, wages of hate of a self-directed kind -- not so much sin, just hate.
Hurt me, he would say it right out, and I would.
Hurt me, he would yell, up on stage, a second-rate punk in a third-rate band.
Hurt me, he would taunt, and even his sweat would smell like hate when he walked into a room.
It was never love on my part, though repeated applications of repetitous lust may sow confusion -- energy passes from loins to heart and back again, enough said. I was young and hungry, and just as self-obsessed then as I would later become, when I was a speed freak myself, it's how I knew the signs of the walking death, don't you see?
We came to our final sorry ending, Donnie and I, on a beach, out near the tip, tip tippy end of the south fork of the blessed Longest Island, a date when he was late by more than just a little, a day he finally came with one too many lame excuses and his eager puppy smile was not enough. I let it wash into the sea, I kicked the surf, I walked away, I let it all go that day, into the sea.
YES WE CAN!
This is just like that other time, Martin thinks, as he scans the big room. He’s at a meeting like any other, in a little town like any other, on a day like any day on the endless campaign trail. His gaze has fallen upon an old-fashioned radiator at his left near the window. Now he remembers — yes, that radiator — it’s just like that other time, in the basement room of the old Studebaker dealer. It was after all the votes were cast and counted. We won that one.
Martin Stollard is a professional operative, arriving at birth with politics in his blood, passed down from three generations of all-American do-gooders and glad-handers. It is said that amateur is Latin for one who loves. Does that mean professional is one who doesn’t, who won’t, who can’t? Someone like Martin? The professional without much of a life outside the game. He likes trying to elect somebody else.
Jesus, that’s no cause for shame, Martin thinks. Certainly no cause for what happened to me, you know that’s true. There were plenty of other people he could have picked on, Mother of God, why me? Why was I so special? This is what he thought, if he thought about his life. Why target a single, pathetic, depressed campaign drone, a rootless, soulless, cipher bouncing from precinct to precinct in search of enough hope or adrenalin to make it through just one more day? This is what he really thought, if he thought about his life at all.
Martin looks at the eager volunteers, mostly young, mostly white. There are no cynics in this crowd, the faces before him so eager, so trusting; no haters in this crowd, these faces regard him as the man with the plan; no killers in this crowd, the faces before him so different this time, he tells himself that, no killers this time. Have courage before you speak, he thinks, the killers are all gone. He wants to believe it, one more time.
He stepped into the center of the room, looking up at the faces. He was the only staffer running orientation tonight, and he liked it that way. “What would you think if I told you that you can change the world in a week?” he said to them, pacing across the worn planks at the front of the cavernous room.
Florescent illumination gave his bland features a greenish cast, or maybe it was his shirt, green, with blue stripes. His face was smooth, the day’s stubble barely visible. His thin blond hair was inching back wards, away from his eyes, even though he was only 32. His waistline sagged, melting into rounded, almost feminine hips beneath the khaki.
“Yes, we can!” the room erupted, the kids screaming it out, like they were at one of the big rallies. They cheered and laughed and giggled at themselves, with the pleasure of being part of a club that was so potent in the world, repeating the chant over and over. Yes, we can.
Their greenish faces shimmered like a desert mirage through Foster Grants, off in the distance, coming closer, closer, detail sharpening. Martin felt a familiar quiver in his gut. He’s here, he thought. Sure enough, at the the back of the room, one pair of eyes, hazel eyes grew larger, telescoping themselves into the space directly in front of Martin, completely filling his field of vision with the luminous helix of a single hazel iris floating in a sea of very, very white, a wall of white, in fact, closing in around him .
The public version of Martin’s captivity was prosaic. But for him, privately, secretly, it was a golden time. He had been bound, and deprived of his senses by means of a soft acrylic ski mask that his adversary had pulled down over his head backwards, so tufts of blond poked out of the eyes and mouth on the back of his head. It made Martin feel contained, tidy. It was comforting. In place of his sight, he had a circle of clear, unsullied crystal blue light over which the man beyond hovered, like a stranded saint, crossing into the glow in a series of tiny moments of startling beauty and bliss. His captor was a god.
“People, people,” Martin yelled over the crowd, which had now become completely unruly from the chanting. More than anything he feared losing control. He clapped his hands, and quiet descended upon them again.
“Let’s get down to it,” he said, placing two heavy boxes filled with 9x12 manila envelopes onto the table. He began handing stacks of them to the volunteers at each end of the front row, and watched until every kid had an envelope.
/instruction/ Green face/regulation/nice, crisp spank to the flank/mommy/daddy / no-daddy/no-daddy/Plymouth in garage/ darkness in my closet/invading ice cream trucks/biggest possible banana.
“So people, you came here to work, yes? To win this thing big…please, nod your heads yes. OK, so get out there with passion and commitment, you know what I mean, right? Make your enthusiasm contagious. Our time is now, let’s get out there, big time, and win!”
New life beyond/ passing clouds in gear/notice every crevice/crawling/strangle / monkey/don’t touch it/ fascinating rhythm /king of the small domain / beyond /take me please.
You there, you know who you are, back of the room, that’s right motherfucker, hazel eyes, you mother fucker, following me around again, jesus H., the son of God, I can tell you this, you won’t get away with it this time, this time I’ll struggle, this time they won’t find me, this time….
Martin stepped behind the desk to hide the wetness he felt on the leg of his khaki pants. He hoped nobody would notice. He sat down, staring at the manila envelope. Maybe it would dry before the kids left the room to man their stations. He noticed an imperfection in the surface of the manila paper. He wanted to look up and find the one with the hazel eyes, but he was afraid.
This was like the other time, no matter what anyone else said. It was. If he kept his secret, maybe they wouldn’t find out, maybe he could go back to the golden time again.
Martin Stollard is a professional operative, arriving at birth with politics in his blood, passed down from three generations of all-American do-gooders and glad-handers. It is said that amateur is Latin for one who loves. Does that mean professional is one who doesn’t, who won’t, who can’t? Someone like Martin? The professional without much of a life outside the game. He likes trying to elect somebody else.
Jesus, that’s no cause for shame, Martin thinks. Certainly no cause for what happened to me, you know that’s true. There were plenty of other people he could have picked on, Mother of God, why me? Why was I so special? This is what he thought, if he thought about his life. Why target a single, pathetic, depressed campaign drone, a rootless, soulless, cipher bouncing from precinct to precinct in search of enough hope or adrenalin to make it through just one more day? This is what he really thought, if he thought about his life at all.
Martin looks at the eager volunteers, mostly young, mostly white. There are no cynics in this crowd, the faces before him so eager, so trusting; no haters in this crowd, these faces regard him as the man with the plan; no killers in this crowd, the faces before him so different this time, he tells himself that, no killers this time. Have courage before you speak, he thinks, the killers are all gone. He wants to believe it, one more time.
He stepped into the center of the room, looking up at the faces. He was the only staffer running orientation tonight, and he liked it that way. “What would you think if I told you that you can change the world in a week?” he said to them, pacing across the worn planks at the front of the cavernous room.
Florescent illumination gave his bland features a greenish cast, or maybe it was his shirt, green, with blue stripes. His face was smooth, the day’s stubble barely visible. His thin blond hair was inching back wards, away from his eyes, even though he was only 32. His waistline sagged, melting into rounded, almost feminine hips beneath the khaki.
“Yes, we can!” the room erupted, the kids screaming it out, like they were at one of the big rallies. They cheered and laughed and giggled at themselves, with the pleasure of being part of a club that was so potent in the world, repeating the chant over and over. Yes, we can.
Their greenish faces shimmered like a desert mirage through Foster Grants, off in the distance, coming closer, closer, detail sharpening. Martin felt a familiar quiver in his gut. He’s here, he thought. Sure enough, at the the back of the room, one pair of eyes, hazel eyes grew larger, telescoping themselves into the space directly in front of Martin, completely filling his field of vision with the luminous helix of a single hazel iris floating in a sea of very, very white, a wall of white, in fact, closing in around him .
The public version of Martin’s captivity was prosaic. But for him, privately, secretly, it was a golden time. He had been bound, and deprived of his senses by means of a soft acrylic ski mask that his adversary had pulled down over his head backwards, so tufts of blond poked out of the eyes and mouth on the back of his head. It made Martin feel contained, tidy. It was comforting. In place of his sight, he had a circle of clear, unsullied crystal blue light over which the man beyond hovered, like a stranded saint, crossing into the glow in a series of tiny moments of startling beauty and bliss. His captor was a god.
“People, people,” Martin yelled over the crowd, which had now become completely unruly from the chanting. More than anything he feared losing control. He clapped his hands, and quiet descended upon them again.
“Let’s get down to it,” he said, placing two heavy boxes filled with 9x12 manila envelopes onto the table. He began handing stacks of them to the volunteers at each end of the front row, and watched until every kid had an envelope.
/instruction/ Green face/regulation/nice, crisp spank to the flank/mommy/daddy / no-daddy/no-daddy/Plymouth in garage/ darkness in my closet/invading ice cream trucks/biggest possible banana.
“So people, you came here to work, yes? To win this thing big…please, nod your heads yes. OK, so get out there with passion and commitment, you know what I mean, right? Make your enthusiasm contagious. Our time is now, let’s get out there, big time, and win!”
New life beyond/ passing clouds in gear/notice every crevice/crawling/strangle / monkey/don’t touch it/ fascinating rhythm /king of the small domain / beyond /take me please.
You there, you know who you are, back of the room, that’s right motherfucker, hazel eyes, you mother fucker, following me around again, jesus H., the son of God, I can tell you this, you won’t get away with it this time, this time I’ll struggle, this time they won’t find me, this time….
Martin stepped behind the desk to hide the wetness he felt on the leg of his khaki pants. He hoped nobody would notice. He sat down, staring at the manila envelope. Maybe it would dry before the kids left the room to man their stations. He noticed an imperfection in the surface of the manila paper. He wanted to look up and find the one with the hazel eyes, but he was afraid.
This was like the other time, no matter what anyone else said. It was. If he kept his secret, maybe they wouldn’t find out, maybe he could go back to the golden time again.
5/20/08
Charlie, the Grateful Alcoholic
“Don’t be afraid of the Steps,” he would say, a ready smile lighting up his blue eyes, an improbably boyish thatch of silver hair falling onto his 70-year-old forehead. He was Charlie, “the grateful alcoholic,” and he was what my rehab counselor called “an interim sponsor.”
My time was almost up, the fabled 28 days in a residential rehab, and I was due to return to the outside world without the intense daily therapy, the constant group reinforcement, the constant AA meetings both on and off the hospital grounds where I had been since I finally, 28 days before, had cried out in my bathtub, drunken and drugged out, “God, please help me, I can’t do this any more.” 28 days before I called up my best friend who held my hand as I called a list of rehabs to see which one could take me on a Friday of the July 4th weekend, nearly 14 years ago. 28 days of rigorous honesty and a lifetime of confusion and shame served up daily with too much food and too many cigarettes.
I was scared. After all, I had heard at every meeting that it was common for newcomers to relapse. I had heard that the key was to go to 90 meetings in 90 days, and to get a sponsor so that I could enter into the mysterious brotherhood that involved something called “working the steps.” I had heard that most people wouldn’t make it. I was determined, now that I almost had 30 days, that I would make it, so of course I needed a sponsor…only I didn’t have one, and I was scared.
Scared of going back to the craziness of drinking, and especially in recent years, almost daily use of various other drugs that had reduced me to a scrawny, hollow-eyed zombie with audio hallucinations and advanced paranoid delusions. The kind of insanity that is referenced in Step 2.
That I was in this sponsor-less state wasn’t for a lack of trying : For weeks at every meeting I listened to each share, thinking, how about him, maybe him? This was especially true at the few meetings for gay and lesbian members of AA, which I attended at the encouragement of my counselor.
I thought that if I didn’t have a gay sponsor, I would be lost. How could I ever share my deepest darkest secrets like people said you had to to anyone but another gay man? How could I stop feeling ashamed and judged if I didn’t have somebody whose story was the same as mine? Wouldn’t these people be like Jerry Falwell and the other fundamentalists, some of whom were in my own family? Weren’t they out to “get” me? So I needed a gay sponsor, that was all there was to it.
Indeed, the counselor had suggested it: “Go to gay meetings,” he said, “and pick somebody whose story is easy for you to identify with. Look for similarities.” So each week a friendly AA member would pick me up and drive me into the city, where I would attend a meeting populated mostly by gay men, with a scattering of women. But somehow, I never managed to find the “right” sponsor, or to have the nerve to ask anyone.
“What am I going to do?” I whined to the counselor on that last day.
“Do you really want a sponsor?” he asked me.
“Absolutely,” I replied, looking down at the floor. “I’m really afraid of relapsing. I don’t think I can make it.”
“Great!” he said, beaming. I couldn’t figure out why my terror gave his such delight, but he went on. “We’ll get you a sponsor.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as he went on. “Start by forgetting everything you’ve been thinking about: age, sex, sexual orientation, race, drug of choice, location…can you do that?”
I said I would try, and he continued: “Think of the one person you have met in a meeting or who spoke at a meeting who seems to be the happiest.”
I concentrated, running dozens of faces through my mind. All of a sudden, the shuffle of faces stopped, and there was one left, the face of Charlie, an older guy who attended almost every meeting in the area. He was always driving newcomers around. He seemed kind and encouraging. He always had a big smile on his face when he identified at meetings by saying, “Hi, I’m Charlie, the Grateful Alcoholic.” He was seventy to my forty-five, he was married with grown kids, a straight-out drunk with no history of any of the drugs that I had used. Not gay…definitely not gay.
“Are you thinking of somebody?” the counselor asked.
“Yes, I think so,” and I told him about Charlie, whom he of course knew. He wrote down a number. “Go to the pay phone now and call his number and ask for Charlie to help you.”
And so I did, right then and there.
Charlie agreed immediately, and suggested that if I wanted to spend time with him, the best way to do so was to attend some of the same meetings. As it happened, Charlie attended a 6:30 am morning meeting in an office building in downtown Pasadena, which was a short drive from the sober living house I was at. Plus, I would hook up with him at a couple of the evening meetings I attended as part of my rehab’s “after-care” program.
Sometimes, Charlie and I would go to breakfast after the early morning meeting, or meet for coffee, but most weeks, our interaction was through phone calls and for a few minutes after these various meetings.
I stayed sober during those early months, and began to look at some of the problems I was having in my life. Charlie would always say, “one day at a time, one step at a time —- it took you all these years to get sick, you will have plenty of time to get better.” And so it was, one by one, I picked up my life. My employers were supportive and I didn’t lose my job. I found a roommate to help me with my rent, and I began to tackle my screwed up finances, neglected for so long.
Charlie had suggested that maybe what I needed to do was to consult a professional, and he asked around until he found a credit counsellor. But first, I had to tackle the four boxes of unopened bills in my closet — during my drinking and drugging, I would collect the bills, and then, instead of paying them, put them into the box, out of sight out of mind, that was my motto.
So Charlie came over to my apartment one Sunday afternoon to help me work up the courage to tackle this seemingly insurmountable challenge. He sat across from me at the kitchen table encouraging me to open and sort every bill. Every so often I would come across a photo I had tossed in, including pictures of a past partner who had died of AIDS. I was so guilty, and so lonely, and in such pain. I looked up with tears about to burst.
Charlie turned to me and said, simply and straight from the heart, “Well, I don’t know too much about these issues, but I know it must hurt, so why don’t you just have a good cry.” And that’s what I did, held in the arms of this gentle older straight guy, who perhaps had no idea how much healing he dispensed that afternoon. Or perhaps he did, he had a lot of wisdom.
Over the next months, I would hear Charlie share at meetings, “Don’t be afraid of the steps. The steps will set you free.” Somehow I had come to understand that these Steps were the portal of the AA sobriety program, and that I hadn’t passed through it, yet.
But every time I started to write down my lists of resentments and issues, I would get hung up on some shameful episode that I felt was completely private and special, and which was unique only to gay people. I had begun sharing some of those feelings at meetings, especially those frequented by gay and lesbian members of AA. Even at Charlie’s morning meeting I found AA members who didn’t reject me because I was different from them. In fact, some of them attended other meetings with me, or invited me out to breakfast to support me when I seemed to need it. I was beginning to understand why they called it a Fellowship.
One morning I was at a gay meeting and I heard the share of a guy who seemed to be reading my mind. He had issues that were similar, or so it seemed. I thought I had heard the voice of a sponsor who could really help me work the steps. I stopped him after the meeting and asked him if he might be willing to help me with the steps. He was willing, but suggested that I needed to have a conversation with Charlie.
I was really afraid of telling Charlie that I wanted to work the steps with somebody else. After all, I was not only special, but a real prize of a sponsee, everyone could see that. I had stayed sober all of 5 or 6 months, surely that was special! One morning after our early meeting I worked up the nerve to raise the issue.
“That’s great!” boomed Charlie, when he heard my faltering explanation of this new idea: to work the steps with another sponsor. “When I was new, I had four or five sponsors. I guess I was sicker than most. Get all the help you can, son. I’ll still be here.”
And he was, even as I drifted more and more to other meetings, the special meetings that made me feel more comfortable. Over time, I took on meeting commitments closer to home, got involved with service work at our gay and lesbian meeting center, continued working the steps during that first year, and even began helping sponsees of my own (imagine that!)
As it happened, the AA International Convention was in nearby San Diego, and my gay sponsor Rob A. and a pack of our friends attended the opening meeting in the giant Stadium, which happened to coincide with my first AA anniversary. I was overwhelmed in the moment when 100,000 alcoholics recited the Serenity Prayer together in that stadium. My face was covered with tears as I sat and listened to one speaker after another and witnessed the flag ceremony and this remarkable coming together of all of us whose lives had been saved by the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I walked back into my hotel lobby alone, filled with spirit, love and gratitude. I pushed the elevator button, lost in my own thoughts. The doors opened, and there before me was that shining, improbably cheerful and loving face of Charlie the Grateful Alcoholic, who I had not seen for months. He gave me a hug and wished me a happy anniversary. Amazingly, five years later I had another, similar experience at the Minneapolis AA International Convention, this time at the closing Big Meeting. Charlie and his friends were right in front of the group I was with. God has quite a sense of humor, doesn’t he?
I have told my story and the influence of Charlie’s unconditional love and support from many AA podiums, and the story has great power, especially for young gay alcoholic newcomers to our fellowship. I believe that the psychology of growing up gay does create separateness and a kind of shame that is challenging to overcome. Most gay people in recovery need help from their gay and lesbian peers to do so. Perhaps this is true for every other “special category” of human being, I’m not sure.
At the same time, I know that coming to honest terms with my own identity and my own unique issues as part of the larger AA Fellowship has been invaluable. The symbol of that process for me was this very average and very special member, my very first sponsor, Charlie, the Grateful Alcoholic.
We all need help overcoming our “terminal uniqueness,” if we hope to cultivate humility and humanity. We all need a Charlie in our recovery. I am so grateful that Charlie happened for me. He taught me to make no assumptions about where to look for love.
My time was almost up, the fabled 28 days in a residential rehab, and I was due to return to the outside world without the intense daily therapy, the constant group reinforcement, the constant AA meetings both on and off the hospital grounds where I had been since I finally, 28 days before, had cried out in my bathtub, drunken and drugged out, “God, please help me, I can’t do this any more.” 28 days before I called up my best friend who held my hand as I called a list of rehabs to see which one could take me on a Friday of the July 4th weekend, nearly 14 years ago. 28 days of rigorous honesty and a lifetime of confusion and shame served up daily with too much food and too many cigarettes.
I was scared. After all, I had heard at every meeting that it was common for newcomers to relapse. I had heard that the key was to go to 90 meetings in 90 days, and to get a sponsor so that I could enter into the mysterious brotherhood that involved something called “working the steps.” I had heard that most people wouldn’t make it. I was determined, now that I almost had 30 days, that I would make it, so of course I needed a sponsor…only I didn’t have one, and I was scared.
Scared of going back to the craziness of drinking, and especially in recent years, almost daily use of various other drugs that had reduced me to a scrawny, hollow-eyed zombie with audio hallucinations and advanced paranoid delusions. The kind of insanity that is referenced in Step 2.
That I was in this sponsor-less state wasn’t for a lack of trying : For weeks at every meeting I listened to each share, thinking, how about him, maybe him? This was especially true at the few meetings for gay and lesbian members of AA, which I attended at the encouragement of my counselor.
I thought that if I didn’t have a gay sponsor, I would be lost. How could I ever share my deepest darkest secrets like people said you had to to anyone but another gay man? How could I stop feeling ashamed and judged if I didn’t have somebody whose story was the same as mine? Wouldn’t these people be like Jerry Falwell and the other fundamentalists, some of whom were in my own family? Weren’t they out to “get” me? So I needed a gay sponsor, that was all there was to it.
Indeed, the counselor had suggested it: “Go to gay meetings,” he said, “and pick somebody whose story is easy for you to identify with. Look for similarities.” So each week a friendly AA member would pick me up and drive me into the city, where I would attend a meeting populated mostly by gay men, with a scattering of women. But somehow, I never managed to find the “right” sponsor, or to have the nerve to ask anyone.
“What am I going to do?” I whined to the counselor on that last day.
“Do you really want a sponsor?” he asked me.
“Absolutely,” I replied, looking down at the floor. “I’m really afraid of relapsing. I don’t think I can make it.”
“Great!” he said, beaming. I couldn’t figure out why my terror gave his such delight, but he went on. “We’ll get you a sponsor.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as he went on. “Start by forgetting everything you’ve been thinking about: age, sex, sexual orientation, race, drug of choice, location…can you do that?”
I said I would try, and he continued: “Think of the one person you have met in a meeting or who spoke at a meeting who seems to be the happiest.”
I concentrated, running dozens of faces through my mind. All of a sudden, the shuffle of faces stopped, and there was one left, the face of Charlie, an older guy who attended almost every meeting in the area. He was always driving newcomers around. He seemed kind and encouraging. He always had a big smile on his face when he identified at meetings by saying, “Hi, I’m Charlie, the Grateful Alcoholic.” He was seventy to my forty-five, he was married with grown kids, a straight-out drunk with no history of any of the drugs that I had used. Not gay…definitely not gay.
“Are you thinking of somebody?” the counselor asked.
“Yes, I think so,” and I told him about Charlie, whom he of course knew. He wrote down a number. “Go to the pay phone now and call his number and ask for Charlie to help you.”
And so I did, right then and there.
Charlie agreed immediately, and suggested that if I wanted to spend time with him, the best way to do so was to attend some of the same meetings. As it happened, Charlie attended a 6:30 am morning meeting in an office building in downtown Pasadena, which was a short drive from the sober living house I was at. Plus, I would hook up with him at a couple of the evening meetings I attended as part of my rehab’s “after-care” program.
Sometimes, Charlie and I would go to breakfast after the early morning meeting, or meet for coffee, but most weeks, our interaction was through phone calls and for a few minutes after these various meetings.
I stayed sober during those early months, and began to look at some of the problems I was having in my life. Charlie would always say, “one day at a time, one step at a time —- it took you all these years to get sick, you will have plenty of time to get better.” And so it was, one by one, I picked up my life. My employers were supportive and I didn’t lose my job. I found a roommate to help me with my rent, and I began to tackle my screwed up finances, neglected for so long.
Charlie had suggested that maybe what I needed to do was to consult a professional, and he asked around until he found a credit counsellor. But first, I had to tackle the four boxes of unopened bills in my closet — during my drinking and drugging, I would collect the bills, and then, instead of paying them, put them into the box, out of sight out of mind, that was my motto.
So Charlie came over to my apartment one Sunday afternoon to help me work up the courage to tackle this seemingly insurmountable challenge. He sat across from me at the kitchen table encouraging me to open and sort every bill. Every so often I would come across a photo I had tossed in, including pictures of a past partner who had died of AIDS. I was so guilty, and so lonely, and in such pain. I looked up with tears about to burst.
Charlie turned to me and said, simply and straight from the heart, “Well, I don’t know too much about these issues, but I know it must hurt, so why don’t you just have a good cry.” And that’s what I did, held in the arms of this gentle older straight guy, who perhaps had no idea how much healing he dispensed that afternoon. Or perhaps he did, he had a lot of wisdom.
Over the next months, I would hear Charlie share at meetings, “Don’t be afraid of the steps. The steps will set you free.” Somehow I had come to understand that these Steps were the portal of the AA sobriety program, and that I hadn’t passed through it, yet.
But every time I started to write down my lists of resentments and issues, I would get hung up on some shameful episode that I felt was completely private and special, and which was unique only to gay people. I had begun sharing some of those feelings at meetings, especially those frequented by gay and lesbian members of AA. Even at Charlie’s morning meeting I found AA members who didn’t reject me because I was different from them. In fact, some of them attended other meetings with me, or invited me out to breakfast to support me when I seemed to need it. I was beginning to understand why they called it a Fellowship.
One morning I was at a gay meeting and I heard the share of a guy who seemed to be reading my mind. He had issues that were similar, or so it seemed. I thought I had heard the voice of a sponsor who could really help me work the steps. I stopped him after the meeting and asked him if he might be willing to help me with the steps. He was willing, but suggested that I needed to have a conversation with Charlie.
I was really afraid of telling Charlie that I wanted to work the steps with somebody else. After all, I was not only special, but a real prize of a sponsee, everyone could see that. I had stayed sober all of 5 or 6 months, surely that was special! One morning after our early meeting I worked up the nerve to raise the issue.
“That’s great!” boomed Charlie, when he heard my faltering explanation of this new idea: to work the steps with another sponsor. “When I was new, I had four or five sponsors. I guess I was sicker than most. Get all the help you can, son. I’ll still be here.”
And he was, even as I drifted more and more to other meetings, the special meetings that made me feel more comfortable. Over time, I took on meeting commitments closer to home, got involved with service work at our gay and lesbian meeting center, continued working the steps during that first year, and even began helping sponsees of my own (imagine that!)
As it happened, the AA International Convention was in nearby San Diego, and my gay sponsor Rob A. and a pack of our friends attended the opening meeting in the giant Stadium, which happened to coincide with my first AA anniversary. I was overwhelmed in the moment when 100,000 alcoholics recited the Serenity Prayer together in that stadium. My face was covered with tears as I sat and listened to one speaker after another and witnessed the flag ceremony and this remarkable coming together of all of us whose lives had been saved by the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I walked back into my hotel lobby alone, filled with spirit, love and gratitude. I pushed the elevator button, lost in my own thoughts. The doors opened, and there before me was that shining, improbably cheerful and loving face of Charlie the Grateful Alcoholic, who I had not seen for months. He gave me a hug and wished me a happy anniversary. Amazingly, five years later I had another, similar experience at the Minneapolis AA International Convention, this time at the closing Big Meeting. Charlie and his friends were right in front of the group I was with. God has quite a sense of humor, doesn’t he?
I have told my story and the influence of Charlie’s unconditional love and support from many AA podiums, and the story has great power, especially for young gay alcoholic newcomers to our fellowship. I believe that the psychology of growing up gay does create separateness and a kind of shame that is challenging to overcome. Most gay people in recovery need help from their gay and lesbian peers to do so. Perhaps this is true for every other “special category” of human being, I’m not sure.
At the same time, I know that coming to honest terms with my own identity and my own unique issues as part of the larger AA Fellowship has been invaluable. The symbol of that process for me was this very average and very special member, my very first sponsor, Charlie, the Grateful Alcoholic.
We all need help overcoming our “terminal uniqueness,” if we hope to cultivate humility and humanity. We all need a Charlie in our recovery. I am so grateful that Charlie happened for me. He taught me to make no assumptions about where to look for love.
5/19/08
New York Rant
I didn’t think about it much at all, a short call from a headhunter, a friend of so-and-so who had done me a kindness. Why not, I could find some time, always interesting to know about the job market, why not? As it happened, it turned out to be me she was after, serious as a heart attack, a big job in New York, right there in Greenwich Village.
“Can I buy you lunch this week and we can talk about it some more?” she asked.
I put down the phone and stared through the dirty window at the trees that surround my office. The rain had stopped, but the leaves were heavy and drooping.
New York City. Oh I know, it’s just a call, nothing real. But still, it’s impossible to contain the sense of the miraculous. It makes me drool over my future, this sudden turn, this arrival from the heavens. Oh the possibilities, the opening up of the humdrum, some music playing now, a symphony, a backdrop, a subtext, a final chance.
It’s the young man I see, manufactured from the memories that linger, like wisps of hair that need smoothing down, a wild energy of lust and hunger, fueled by ambition, by naked yearning. It makes my joints ache now and my teeth grate. And my heart, the crustiest of the organs, if it would beat a bit more fiercely, maybe the shell would burst, maybe the feelings would return for a redemptive encore.
It’s as if the memories could be predictive, when this feeling came over me. A needle drops into a groove cut so long ago, and it plays over and over until the whole thing cracks, broken. Let me put the pieces back together as I think of New York, the character of the concrete sidewalks, the sculptures of garbage at the curb, the shadow dances of sunlight as the heavens meet the steel arms reaching upwards, always upwards, on the ground and flying at the same time.
I have to think of New York after such a phone call, the astonishing freedom, the inventing of a life so long ago, my debauchery at night and my daytime impersonation, as if I were a person who belonged.
I was Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin and Louis Auchincloss on the upper east side, J.D. Salinger and David Ogilvy and Andy Warhol and Holly Golightly, every character in every New York novel and film, and every person who invented them — though no creations of my own remain to justify these inhabitations. A few drunken diary entries that nest on a shelf, great whines and whelps to the universe. Resentments over some missing angel visitation I had somehow expected, but which had never arrived to rescue me from the well of loneliness filled the hours that were left when my frantic rushing about slowed to a momentary repose.
Nevertheless, there I am, sitting on the stage at MoMA, delivering to the world some bloviation that I had in fact written, a pushy kid in his 20’s edging into a spotlight. Today at that age, I’d have a blog and sell a screenplay off the blog and have my own line of swag for hipsters in snowboard outfits with too much bling. But back then I wore a tie, and my drunken friend Tom with all the money in the world took me out to the Russian Tea Room to celebrate and we stumbled back downtown with daytime vodka hangovers to buy cocaine in a penthouse suite at the Chelsea Hotel.
And I’m with Robbie, ten years my junior, squiring me out on my thirtieth birthday to the Tavern on the Green. He was from Jersey and wanted to become a chef — he would after a couple of years at a hotshit culinary school. He was drawn to the festive pretention of the Tavern, the twinkly lights and the overpriced plates. Because it made him happy, so was I. High on life and a joint in the cab on the way over, I played dress-up with a kid who had never worn a suit, surrounded by expense accounts and blue hair and diamonds, and a waiter who winked at me, a wordless tribute to this successful hunter in the jungle filled with predators. I cannot remember the meal, but I do remember the glitter in Robbie’s eyes upon me. I cannot remember the fullness of my belly, only my heart. Were we in love? Is that what love was? Or was it simply his willingness to perform such a ritual just to please me?
Ah, the weekends and the summers at Sag Harbor with Linda, my ferocious beloved befuddled Linda — a compulsive star fucker with varicose veins, more often than not she had to be told who the celebrity was. “Oh look, it’s Jerry Cooney,” I said one afternoon after the beach, as we tapped cataloupes at Doug the Albino’s vegetable stand in Bridgehampton.
“Wow,” she’d say… and after the inevitable beat, “So, who’s Jerry Cooney,” and I’d tease her ignorance until she almost threw a melon at me. She went up to the boxer, of course, just like she had to speak one Saturday with Diana Vreeland at the bar in the Carlyle, where we were drinking martinis after a trip to the Whitney, and another time when I spied James Mason at a reception at Lincoln Center, and countless others. My favorite was her approach to Peter Pears in the Ginger Man where we had gone for a post opera snack, Pears had played Captain Vere in Billy Budd at the Met. She put a towel on her arm, grabbed the water pitcher and made her way around the table to Peter, who was 68 years old and either confused or charmed, I never knew, but Linda sat with him for 20 minutes.
I’m lined up along 17th Street early with the other queens on the very first morning of Barney’s annual sale, finding a divine couture Armani tux that lost me my American Express Card, that and the out-of-control trip to Italy, the house in Sag Harbor, and the new boyfriend Paul, he had such a great laugh, there is so much to remember. And so much to forget.
Do not regret the past, nor close the door to it —- this is a central wisdom for me now. All the glamour of my self destruction has been tidied up and I’m left with the half-true conviction that I’m all better now, that one more spin at the center of the universe will redeem me.
I turn away from the window and the trees and grab my coffee cub. There’s a meeting coming up and I must prepare.
“Can I buy you lunch this week and we can talk about it some more?” she asked.
I put down the phone and stared through the dirty window at the trees that surround my office. The rain had stopped, but the leaves were heavy and drooping.
New York City. Oh I know, it’s just a call, nothing real. But still, it’s impossible to contain the sense of the miraculous. It makes me drool over my future, this sudden turn, this arrival from the heavens. Oh the possibilities, the opening up of the humdrum, some music playing now, a symphony, a backdrop, a subtext, a final chance.
It’s the young man I see, manufactured from the memories that linger, like wisps of hair that need smoothing down, a wild energy of lust and hunger, fueled by ambition, by naked yearning. It makes my joints ache now and my teeth grate. And my heart, the crustiest of the organs, if it would beat a bit more fiercely, maybe the shell would burst, maybe the feelings would return for a redemptive encore.
It’s as if the memories could be predictive, when this feeling came over me. A needle drops into a groove cut so long ago, and it plays over and over until the whole thing cracks, broken. Let me put the pieces back together as I think of New York, the character of the concrete sidewalks, the sculptures of garbage at the curb, the shadow dances of sunlight as the heavens meet the steel arms reaching upwards, always upwards, on the ground and flying at the same time.
I have to think of New York after such a phone call, the astonishing freedom, the inventing of a life so long ago, my debauchery at night and my daytime impersonation, as if I were a person who belonged.
I was Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin and Louis Auchincloss on the upper east side, J.D. Salinger and David Ogilvy and Andy Warhol and Holly Golightly, every character in every New York novel and film, and every person who invented them — though no creations of my own remain to justify these inhabitations. A few drunken diary entries that nest on a shelf, great whines and whelps to the universe. Resentments over some missing angel visitation I had somehow expected, but which had never arrived to rescue me from the well of loneliness filled the hours that were left when my frantic rushing about slowed to a momentary repose.
Nevertheless, there I am, sitting on the stage at MoMA, delivering to the world some bloviation that I had in fact written, a pushy kid in his 20’s edging into a spotlight. Today at that age, I’d have a blog and sell a screenplay off the blog and have my own line of swag for hipsters in snowboard outfits with too much bling. But back then I wore a tie, and my drunken friend Tom with all the money in the world took me out to the Russian Tea Room to celebrate and we stumbled back downtown with daytime vodka hangovers to buy cocaine in a penthouse suite at the Chelsea Hotel.
And I’m with Robbie, ten years my junior, squiring me out on my thirtieth birthday to the Tavern on the Green. He was from Jersey and wanted to become a chef — he would after a couple of years at a hotshit culinary school. He was drawn to the festive pretention of the Tavern, the twinkly lights and the overpriced plates. Because it made him happy, so was I. High on life and a joint in the cab on the way over, I played dress-up with a kid who had never worn a suit, surrounded by expense accounts and blue hair and diamonds, and a waiter who winked at me, a wordless tribute to this successful hunter in the jungle filled with predators. I cannot remember the meal, but I do remember the glitter in Robbie’s eyes upon me. I cannot remember the fullness of my belly, only my heart. Were we in love? Is that what love was? Or was it simply his willingness to perform such a ritual just to please me?
Ah, the weekends and the summers at Sag Harbor with Linda, my ferocious beloved befuddled Linda — a compulsive star fucker with varicose veins, more often than not she had to be told who the celebrity was. “Oh look, it’s Jerry Cooney,” I said one afternoon after the beach, as we tapped cataloupes at Doug the Albino’s vegetable stand in Bridgehampton.
“Wow,” she’d say… and after the inevitable beat, “So, who’s Jerry Cooney,” and I’d tease her ignorance until she almost threw a melon at me. She went up to the boxer, of course, just like she had to speak one Saturday with Diana Vreeland at the bar in the Carlyle, where we were drinking martinis after a trip to the Whitney, and another time when I spied James Mason at a reception at Lincoln Center, and countless others. My favorite was her approach to Peter Pears in the Ginger Man where we had gone for a post opera snack, Pears had played Captain Vere in Billy Budd at the Met. She put a towel on her arm, grabbed the water pitcher and made her way around the table to Peter, who was 68 years old and either confused or charmed, I never knew, but Linda sat with him for 20 minutes.
I’m lined up along 17th Street early with the other queens on the very first morning of Barney’s annual sale, finding a divine couture Armani tux that lost me my American Express Card, that and the out-of-control trip to Italy, the house in Sag Harbor, and the new boyfriend Paul, he had such a great laugh, there is so much to remember. And so much to forget.
Do not regret the past, nor close the door to it —- this is a central wisdom for me now. All the glamour of my self destruction has been tidied up and I’m left with the half-true conviction that I’m all better now, that one more spin at the center of the universe will redeem me.
I turn away from the window and the trees and grab my coffee cub. There’s a meeting coming up and I must prepare.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
