Sins of the Eldest Daughter

Dissolve /TheRapture, ch.6

2011-10-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

Still falling
Breathless and on
again...
Till my hand shook with the weight of fear
I could possibly be fading
Or have something more
to gain

Mazzy Star
Dissolve (Bill Voila, art)

When pain is what you’re accustomed to, the touch of true tenderness is terrifying. And so for my sins, that’s what God gave me.

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Hell Above the Water /The Rapture, ch. 5

2011-09-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

I am never relaxed
Even when I say I am
I’m always on the alert
Looking for the problem...
I flirt with guys
But they don’t get me
I think I’m ready to kill
The next person
That doesn’t fit [me]

Curve
Hell Above the Water

I

Swinger, addict, married man, monk
Smoker, toker, stand up guy, drunk
Twelve stepper, white knuckler, government grunt
Past child molester
Present memory forgetter
Bringers of promises, trophies, sorrow, laughter
And carriers:
chlamydia, scabies, herpes, and venereal warts - oh my!
These are the men, the men who have moved through my life.
For them I am friend, lover, mother, sex slave, wife.

Age mates from school, a father figure or two, cougar cubs - oooh!
These are the men who have loved me, the men who have
believed in, beguiled, belittled, and sometimes beat me. One cheated
for and another on me. One till-death-do-part’d me. One
plucked me up off the street for a Wham, bam, thank you ma’am
and a wink. One marched off into battle, another ran
to sit chanting at the feet of masters. These are the men,
the men who have bedded me, sexed me, caressed me with
hands schooled in childhood hurts and worse. For them I am
sometimes savior, sometimes bitch. I am stand up, bend over,
film noir, doggie style, climax screamer, pillow
crier, and witch.

I am all of these things
I am this and more
It’s hell above the water
Hell above the water...

I I

I was so very young when I learned to submerge. I’m good at it. And when I say I’m good at it, I don’t mean I’m good at holding my breath. I mean I can breathe water. It’s survival, baby, learned behavior. It’s evolution.

Actually, it’s disassociation - that’s what the psychologists call it - which is a twenty-dollar word for Elvis leaving the building while he’s still in it. Denial, disassociation, doing the over-controlling bitch dance, these are all defense mechanisms designed by the body/mind to circumvent the mushroom cloud response to what shrinks call “overwhelming emotional distress”. That’s another coupla twenty-dollar words for things that are so disturbing to consider and so very fucked up to experience that we disappear them. Or ourselves.

Poof!

Denial and disassociation, these are the magic wands of life; the magic that lets the show march on like Innocent Erendira, her sleeping body walking with eyes open, talking with mind shut, bending over lying down standing up; sex. Erendira’s sexual servitude began at the hands of her grandmother. She was fourteen. Mine began at the hands of a grandfather. I was four. And although I made the memory vanish, I was never able to deny the claim that pleasure has on my body. Or pain.

I I I

The body fucking in spite
of pain, fucking around
the pain, through the pain, in-
to the pain; harder, faster, wilder, riding the pony pain;
breaking it
in the pleasure of climaxing in pain. I never wept
but spent a decade drinking
cheap wine and peeing blood. In the emergency room
I sat shivered in splinters awaiting the benediction
of one pill, two pill
red pill, blue pill.

Good sex, bad
sex, sex with the slippery nail jack-
hammering; coercion, perversion, passionate embrace, fucking
in haste; fumbling, fondling, force. Lifelong
sex has bound me: hunter hunted hostage.
This sing song, song
singing a pornographic Dr. Seuss rhyme; this
magic in my head, this playful, painful, angry, stoic
lullaby; this poetry for liars, lovers, the men
whose secrets I keep; this song of pleasure
and pain, I can’t deny. It’s me.
Raised by a drunk and a slut, I learned early  
to keep my clever mouth shut

And the chorus sings:

I got no reason to say a thing
got no reason to say a thing
‘cause you don’t scare me at all
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no

I V

What I know is pain. What I can withstand is pain. What I can count on is that each road to pleasure will, ultimately, wind me sweetly back to the unbearable brightness of pain.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from its creator.
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And There It Was /The Rapture, ch. 4

2011-07-17T20:19:00.000-07:00

I looked at the psychologist and said, “He kept saying, 'But what if. What if the 17-year-old you did go?' He kept trying to make it into a different ending.”

It had happened in a nice restaurant where I was wearing beautiful dress sitting next to a handsome man - my lover - and I was angry but didn’t realize it.

“He said my life was tragic.”

The psychologist said, “Your life has been tragic.”

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission.
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Wild Horses /The Rapture, ch. 3

2011-05-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

Childhood living
is easy to do.
The things you wanted
I bought them for you...
You know I can't let you
slide through my hands ...
I watched you suffer
a dull aching pain ...
I know I’ve dreamed you
a sin and a lie... 
Faith has been broken,
tears must be cried  

Wild horses couldn't drag me away
Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them some day

I

The worst part about the worst thing, is that there are ALWAYS things that can be worse. Are worse. And there are always worse versions of your personal worst. My personal worst. There is an unending supply of things that are worse than the worst thing any of us have experienced. So, to my way of thinking, the challenge is to nod in acknowledgement, like strangers passing on a night street. The nod that says, I see you. The nod that says, Your face is imprinted upon my mind like the redness of the naked sun upon my eyes. The nod that says, So don’t even fucking imagine you can hurt me.

That’s how I handle my memories of my worst days. I don’t compare. Comparison just suggests that I have not suffered enough. Suggests that before I can call out my demons and name them aloud, I must prove I have gone through the worst of the worst. As a society we tend to honor only the worst of the worst. We tend to label. We tend say, to so many we say, Stop complaining. It could be worse.

What is, exactly, the difference between complaining and naming? What is the difference between naming and blaming? What is the difference between blaming and simply calling out?

I was just out of graduate school and working for a jury consulting firm when one of the very first sexual abuse suits was brought against the Catholic Church. How many years of abuse had occurred before the day of that trial? How many children? How much of their experience was labeled as complaining? How many adults violated as children were labeled as sinners blaming the Church?

Things have changed since that ground-breaking trial, a trial I was lucky to be a small part of; the consulting firm I worked for told the plaintiffs to go full steam ahead, the Church be damned. By the end of the mid 1990s, not long after that lawsuit, more than half a billion dollars had been paid out by the Church in jury awards, settlements, and legal fees. That was in the United States alone. That was a decade and a half ago. And the lawsuits just keep coming. So, has the worst that could happen to the Catholic Church happened? Did things change?

I have a friend who spoke with certainty in her voice when she said to me, “It’s different now. No one believes sexual abuse is okay.” But I disagree.

If we thought sexual abuse was wrong, we wouldn’t be blaming the Catholic Church. And the Boy Scouts of America. And that creepy man down the street whose wife runs a daycare. If we thought sexual abuse was wrong, we’d be willing to talk about this one little fact: incest comprises the bulk of sexual abuse that is committed. Notice I said committed, not reported. Here’s what I told my friend: If we thought it was wrong, there would be no sexual abuse.

But here’s the rub. Wikipedia tells me that incest is sexual intercourse. You know intercourse, right? Most of us call it fucking. My American Heritage Dictionary tells me that incest is a “statutory crime” of “sexual relations” with a “near relative.” It also tells me that sexual relations means intercourse.

So, it’s not incest if he uses his mouth? his hand? mine?

So, it’s not incest if it’s a cousin I’ve never seen before? How about a cousin I know but who is once removed? twice removed?

While we’re doing definitions, how about this one. Statutory crimes are not taboos so much as laws against things we say are taboo. Like that 18-year-old punk down the street who’s fucking your 16-year-old, fully-consenting daughter. That’s statutory rape. Which we enforce at will.

Like I told my girlfriend, if we truly believed sexual abuse was wrong, we’d be looking for abusers where they hide in plain sight. Families. My family. Maybe yours.

II

When you are sexualized young, there is no innocence, there is no childhood. When you are sexualized young, what remains of innocence is only the ritual, much like wine is the ritual replacement for the blood of Christ; a prayer and a priest saying it’s holy doesn’t necessarily make it so. Even God knows this. God especially knows this.

I’ve thought a lot about innocence. Sexual innocence. I remember being a child, and later a teenager, and knowing when what I witnessed was innocence. The eleven-year-old girl on the playground hanging from the bars and twisting her legs, saying “This feels good.” I watched with the other girls who pretended not to notice - I mean you may KNOW it feels good, but for God’s sake you do not SAY it feels good - and I knew. This girl was innocent. I could feel it. I wanted it.

In junior high, my best friend told me about her and her boyfriend as they explored their sexuality. Not too much. Not the body grinding details. But she told me enough for me to see two things. Her innocence. And his thoughtful response to her innocence. I wanted to be able to be her in the worst way. On my very worst days, I would say to myself what if. What if I were that kind of girl? But I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. I couldn’t even imagine being. For a girl sexualized before she could even read, achieving innocence would be akin to unbreaking the spirit of a wild horse. What’s done is done.

When you come early to things stuffed into the crevices of your small body; hard things; soft things; when you still feel those things in your mouth, though you can’t say why because your mind doesn’t remember even though your body stubbornly does; you train yourself to feel around them, like horses trained to race around barrels. You learn to move as if they aren’t there, flowing at high speeds with agility and grace, slowing down only long enough to miss what blocks your path to the goal. You perform.

I spent my childhood performing innocence. And performing sex acts I couldn’t stop from happening. Thousands of Catholic boys and girls have spent thousands of years performing innocence. Or worse. Moving on to perform the same ritual of abuse performed upon them.

See? There are worse things. Always.

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from its creator.
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Amazing: He Called Me Baby // The Rapture, ch. 2

2011-05-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Now there is no sin, in anything. It’s amazing.

Dear Sweet Readers,

It’s time for the next big adventure in the saga of my sins. Before we commence, however, one note. The zero birthday that was impetus for this blog has come and gone. I survived it. Thrived even. I’ve embarked upon a brand new decade, and so I’ve changed the subtitle of this blog from My Zero BDay Blog to YEAR ONE. Seems appropriate, don’t you think?

And now, on with the sin!

In my last post, I told you that I’ve begun my next book. I’m calling it The Rapture, after the blog post that started it all. The official first chapter is Amazing: Spring Tease ^_~. And, yes, I’m totally excited. I’m more than a little frightened as well, because I’ve decided to write The Rapture here on Sins of the Eldest Daughter, post by post, which feels a lot like performing without a net. Scratch that. IS performing without a net. Just my bare ass hanging in the wind. ~ahem~ No photos, please.

Because you are reading as I write, literally; you, my dearest and sweetest of readers, get to be a part of the book. Just give me a shout out any old time. Tell me what you like. Tell me what you don’t like. Tell me what leaves you dizzy in the dust, which for the record, I consider a good thing. You know, like the bio says, I drive real fuckin’ fast. Try to keep up. ^_~

HERE’S WHERE WE LEFT OFF:

It’s here. It’s happening. This transformation. It’s amazing.

This feeling...
It’s in the stars, in the sun.
It’s everywhere in everyone and it will be
Everyday
From now on...
It’s amazing.

When I say transformation, I’m not talking about a religious conversion. I have not been born again in Christ. Or Buddha. Or Mohammed. I have been born again in sin.

You heard me.

Born again.

In sin.

Sin is the most amazing and transformative thing I know. Where the hell would we be without it? Sin is the ultimate catalyst. From the idea of original sin, to the commission of so-called sins, and best of all, the way that forgiveness is sometimes treated as a holier-than-thou, get-out-of-sin-free card; everything to do with sin is an amazement to me.

We all sin. Every single one of us. It’s what binds us together in this amazing technicolor dream world we call life, and I am certain a case could be made for the idea that a human being without sin is no longer truly human. This is, in part, why I named this blog Sins of the Eldest Daughter. Fact is, all my online avatars carry sin in their names. When listeners ask about my DJ name on Blip.fm, which is 4sins, I tell them that sin is my first, my last, and my middle name.

And my nickname. ^_~

Actually, the meaning of my name is relevant to this story, although it’ll be awhile before you see how. Indulge me. I was born Dina Renée, Dina being the Italian form of Dinah, which is the Hebrew word for judged. Wait, it gets better. Dina, daughter of Leah and Jacob, followed her own star and judged by her own heart, and for this she was either
a) raped and thereby disgraced or
b) found lying with her man before holy wedlock and thereby disgraced and called harlot (see The Red Tent).
Regardless of which story you subscribe to - and three guesses as to which I prefer - Dina was doomed. My given name is four little letters that together spell out: she who is judged, vindicated, and avenged. And reborn. Renée, remember?

Okay, time for a little background.

First there was the Garden. You remember the Garden. Lush. Verdant. Abundant in everything but the rain that made it so. It’s amazing, that trick, God-like. And here in rain sodden western Oregon we would dearly love to learn the secret to that trick.

First there was the Garden. Then there was the Fall, otherwise known as the Original Fuck Up. At least that’s God’s side of the story. CliffsNotes version: The Fall is when human beings took the long walk off a short plank and found themselves “transitioning” from a perfect state of innocence - innocent obedience to be exact - to an underwater-and-in-danger-of-drowning state of guilty disobedience.

Okay, right there I got a problem. Who the hell says obedience makes us innocent and disobedience makes us guilty? God. I know. But isn’t that just a little short sighted? In case you haven’t noticed, humans suck at guilt. Oh, we feel it often enough, but it doesn’t actually change the way we act.

The way I see it, Adam and Eve fell from grace because they wanted to learn the truth, in this case, the truth about good and evil. They desired to know the whole world, not just their little slice of it. Being children - mere babes in the garden - they didn’t figure on the down side, which is that once you know good and evil, you can’t be innocent. Not anymore. That is the human condition.

In Bali, newborns are considered to be gods sent straight from heaven, and so for the first six months of life, all children are revered as minor deities, but afterward they become mere mortals, capable of falling from grace like the rest of us. Because the loss of innocence is the essential human condition, a human being without sin is not human.

Oh for God’s sake! I don’t mean that we’re all born sinners who must be redeemed in Christ, yadda yadda yadda. If that’s your schtick, cool. God bless. After all, Jesus was a radical dude. But I’m talking about a whole new paradigm here.

Are you ready?

On the one hand, we have parents, human parents, and any parent (any half-assedly decent parent) knows that children do not get it right the first time. Big surprise, I know. Good parents know that just because the kids have gotten into the forbidden cookie jar doesn’t mean they have sinned. It means they’re curious-as-shit, teeny tiny humans. On the other hand, we have God. One little nibble of a mistake and it’s Get the hell outta my garden! WTF?! This says more about his (excuse me, His) parenting than it does about sin. Or us, for that matter.

Wikipedia (yes Wikipedia, not the Bible, is my go to book) tells us that “sinfulness... consists in the guilt of Adam and Eve’s first sin: the want of original righteousness... [which is] commonly called original sin.”

Translating loosely - by which I mean translating the Dina way - this means that truth (aka, righteousness), not sex, is the original sin. God knows, truth was the first casualty. Always is.

Truth; the whole, unadulterated, complicated, covered up, dug up, ugly-and-divine-at-the-same-time truth; this is what lies at the center of God and Man. Truth and Sin.

Those of you who are regular readers of Sins of the Eldest Daughter know that I’ve had a life of challenges. And if you’ve been paying close attention then you also know that I hold the radical belief that sin - every sin and every sinner, no matter how great the magnitude or how ugly the act - is ultimately forgivable.

This is not a religious stance for me.

This is not a philosophical or political belief. Nor is it faith.

This is the triumphant total of what life has thrown at me.

From sexual abuse and a locked-down childhood in which I was permitted to show up only as a pretty doll speaking lines that came when you pulled my string, to a decade-long illness and a bipolar brain that demands constant balancing, I have drawn not only great strength from my challenges but also the courage to face any and all foes. This includes the shadow side of myself and my choices. I don’t flinch at ugly.

It is these challenges - and more importantly, the knowledge that what I struggle with is what every human being on the planet struggles with, namely the will to face the ugly truths and make something worthwhile out of them - it is this that spurs me to write and share my journey with you.

This year my journey brought me something wonderful. Something so amazing that it leaves me as speechless as my friendship with Jose once did. As luck would have it, this amazing thing, this thing I would say yes to under any conditions, is a sin. Oh yeah, baby. It’s a sin that everyone fears deeply. A sin that everyone hates self-righteously. And a sin that pretty much everyone has indulged in at one time or another. Or wants to. The best sins always are.

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from its creator.
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Amazing: Spring Tease ^_~ // The Rapture, ch. 1

2011-04-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

I feel sweet
Do you feel sweet? It’s amazing
I have no skin - and I feel everything
It’s amazing.
...
Now there is no sin, in anything. It’s amazing
I love life. I hope you do, too. Cuz I love everything
It’s all amazing.

Dear Sweet Readers,

If you’ve read The Rapture, then you know something has been shifting for me this year. Something impossible. Something amazing. And all I want to do is tell the story of this unexpected spring, this blessing. For months now, the story has been a Siren song of promise and temptation. It sings out at the top of its lungs as I speed along the highway to the cash job that keeps me both from bankruptcy - again - and from writing. All the way to work and all the way home, I hear my story telling itself. But when the car stops, the voice stops. Crap.

I began steering with one hand and taking notes with the other. I’ve gotten good at it, too. Steer, drink coffee, eat breakfast, change lanes, work the volume on the stereo; one hand is all you ever need. And who needs more than one eye to watch the road and the speed traps, right? Well, no matter, because even when I have faithfully typed every amazing word, every flash of inspiration caught on the fly, this story continues to wink in and out of existence. Kinda like the Oregon sun; I know it exists, but I can’t prove it.

So until the story has more form and substance to it, I offer you my

SPRING TEASE...

Imagine yourself here in Oregon. In the wet Willamette Valley. Here where we’ve just spent six or seven months in the coma of our damp, dark northern latitude. Something the rest of the world calls winter; hah! Right now we crave the sun like a lover. We crave the whisper, the promise, the tingle on the skin. The blessing. And the sin.

What we get is a strip tease on PMS.

The first physical rush of sunshine on our skin - like the teasing dip of panties, skimming but not showing - comes for an afternoon in February. Maybe two. When our collective sigh rises like a businessman’s lunch time trousers, prissy Miss Spring slaps on a Mackintosh. And it’s rain in the morning, rain in the afternoon, and rain on the telephone at night. Rain swearing like a jealous boyfriend. Rain ranting like a possessive wife.

Come March, Spring slips and slinks.. a peek, a cheek.. the heat of cherry pink lips; we can almost taste her. For a day. Maybe two and a half. Her bosom blooming like a flowering plum - titty flash! Oh the tassels and fringe fly like, you got it, rain. More rain. And the chorus sings ♫ rain, rain go away ♫ - and don’t fucking ever come back if you want another dollar in that thong. Spring? She turns on her pretty kitten heel and tosses her flowered bra over her shoulder in a final flourish of fuck you as she leaves the stage without showing a thing.

Intermission. The Ark does a half time dance with some plastic animals from a Farrell’s Zoo Sundae during which we Oregonians slump over our Starbucks cups and dream of blizzards, tornadoes, and other sexy winter storms. Anything but rain. (Oh don’t flame me. It’s comedic hyperbole. Jeez.)

In Portland, where I live, we love our coffee, our books, and our wine and beer - some of the best made anywhere. Why? Because in the winter here, it’s dark. It’s dark when we drive home from work and it hasn’t quit being dark by the time we turn around and drive back. Dark and wet. During the day, all eight hours of it, it’s gray and wet. Add titty bars and you’ve pretty much summed us up. And churches. For some goddamned reason, we have just as many churches per capita as strip joints. At least that's the rumor: more strip clubs and churches (and breweries), per capita, than anywhere else in U.S. Go figure.

The tease of flowered panties flying one day and the cold shoulder of hail - or hell fire and damnation - the next, oh, the humanity of it! And, oh, the promise it holds, our almost-there time of year, the temptation...

It’s glorious. It’s life changing.
This feeling...
It’s amazing.

Our almost-there time of year holds all the coiled yearning, all the panting breathlessness of...almost...oh yeah...Oh YEAH! Who’s your daddy?!?

Fornication. It’s a sin. Look it up.

Hey, over here. Focus. We’re talking about me, remember? And that certain something that’s been shifting.

It’s here. It’s happening. It’s life changing.

This feeling...
It’s in the stars, in the sun.
It’s everywhere in everyone and it will be
Everyday
From now on...
It’s amazing.

But the writing of it? Just shoot me now!

I’ve been writing for months about this experience, this blessing of an unexpected spring and for weeks and weeks and WEEKS the writing has kicked my ass. I mean up one side of the freeway and down the other. Seriously, Jacob was able to wrestle the angel, an actual angel, to the ground and demand a blessing and yet here I am with the blessing already in hand and, for the fucking life of me, I have not been able to pin it down. Not in words anyway.

My only solace at such times as these: music. If it weren’t for music, there are some things that I’d just never figure out. Music speaks when I have no words, which is essential, for without words my life is a tangle and my thoughts literally knot up around my throat like a noose. It’s music that loosens the ropes. Music that supplies the sound track to the torrent of thoughts. Music that grants a clarity I would otherwise have no access to. In fact, what is to follow, all the many posts after this one, might be considered the sound track to my life. For that’s how the telling of this story has unfolded.

Music is my shelter, my Siren, my Sin; my God and my Demon lover; the hymn of my transformation.

It’s here. It’s happening. This transformation. It’s amazing.

Oh, don’t worry! When I say transformation I’m not talking about a religious conversion. I have not been born again in Christ. Or Buddha. Or Mohammed. I have been born again in sin.

You heard me.

Born again.

In sin.

Sin is one of the most amazing, transformative things I know. And sin is what’s coming up next, just as soon as I get this blog post - and the writer’s block it represents - out of the way. So you’re going to have to come back if you want to know what sin I’m committing. But this much I can tell you now. Over the past weeks I have realized that the story I struggle to write is unwieldy because it is, most likely, the next book.

I know! I’m pinching myself. I haven’t even finished posting the first book. Regardless, starting with this post, you’ll be finding yourself in The Rapture. It’s gonna be amazing.

And, by the way, if you listen to this One Eskimo song on a loop, as I have while writing this, that word AMAZING doesn’t get old. It grows sweeter and truer and more beautiful with each repetition.

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from its creator.
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PS...
If you love Amazing, by One Eskimo, then you must listen to this amazing DJ on Blip: @ladypn. She has sent me some of the most beautiful songs on the airwaves. I know you’ll love her, too.

Three gorgeous celestial bodies, Venus, Chiron, and Ceres, are converging in Pisces. Vibrations of love and healing.

2011-03-29T01:39:00.000-07:00

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Tuesday, 29 March 2011 - TIME TO REREAD *THE RAPTURE*.

My birthday has come and gone
The stars have aligned
The Year One blog is about to take off
You don't want to miss the launch
It's going to be so amazing

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It's My Birthday!

2011-03-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

Dear Sweet Readers,

It's my birthday today. I love my birthday!! Wanna help me celebrate? Here's where you can find me.

On FaceBook
On Twitter
On YouTube

Or come on over to Oregon and join me for dinner. Oops, that's a date. Two's company. Three hundred's a crowd. ^_~

See ya!
xoxo ~ Dina

PS - Don't even think you missed my birthday, peeps, cuz I celebrate all month! =)

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29 MARCH 2011 - TIME TO REREAD THE RAPTURE (below).

This Year One blog is about to take off. And you don't want to miss the launch. It's all going to be amazing.

The Rapture // Prologue

2011-02-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Coleridge
Kubla Khan

Dear Sweet Readers,

The words in my head have no order. No matter how I arrange them, they remain a pile of shards. The odd thing is that when the music plays and someone else’s voice is crying out the lyrics, the same thoughts compose themselves in a dance and my life slides into shape: a kaleidoscope of meanings contained within a whole that glitters with clarity. It is a beauty to behold. But time and time again I have raced to my keyboard only to find that there is no capturing this Kubla Khan I live in. The simple truth is that all thoughts now reside in my body - a place with dance but no speech - where they live as impulse and direction, and both say one thing.

Run!

Ultimately, I’ll have something to say about that body, my body, and the impulse to run from what it feels, but now... just now ...

For now, all you need to know is that no matter how I toss a lasso, my thoughts rush wild and headstrong. There’s no way to round ‘em up without also spooking them; they’d rather die than be corralled. I’ve been trying for a week now, a month, a hundred unbroken years, and as I write today I am drinking bourbon and eating salami and grapes. The salami is for protein, for the fact that I’ve hardly eaten since the writing began to flow, the grapes are because fresh food is good for a body under stress, and the bourbon, well the bourbon should be self-explanatory. I’m fresh out of opium.

This is February, the month before my birthday, the month in which I began My Zero BDay Blog, and as I said in that first post a year ago, this birthday has me by the balls. Had me. That zero birthday is done now and the birthday to come is just days away. Time to look back. What I found was that I started this blog grieving the loss of the familiar. Of course.

It’s five minutes of midnight. The Eels are singing “End Times” in the minor key of missing someone; a quiet guitar, a lulling rolling repetition of five notes.... I stand under the stars, bright and crisp in a rare cloudless sky, as the minor key and the rolling guitar sound the same notes in my heart that a favorite Chris Isaak song once did, one of so many songs I once narrated my life by. Now as I look at the stars, I wonder if these songs will ever speak to me the same way. “She’s gone now, and nowhere near,” they sing. “Seems like end times are here.”

I was melancholy when I wrote that, clearly, but I found that I wasn’t missing the woman I had been so much as the comforts of the familiar. That melancholy allowed me to start waving goodbye to the old life and to kiss the cheek of the woman I thought I deserved to be. See, I started the blog with the intent of bringing myself into alignment with time and space, for I am a woman whose decade long illness has her aging all out of sequence, a woman for whom time has meant only the long farewell to a season of life she didn’t get to experience. I didn’t get to experience. My hope was that blogging might provide some space for me to become comfortable in my now middle-aged skin. Believe it, people. By all units of measurement, I am just about halfway through my life and this year, as my father likes to point out, is the start of the next great adventure. The second half of life, Year One.

In all honesty, the Year One thing has me a bit freaked, but only because moving forward in my life requires admitting that I once spent a good chunk of it in a virtual coma. No, not a plugged-into-beeping-machines kind of coma, but the image is apt. The paralysis of bipolar depression in combination with thought-canceling chronic pain and a bunch of other stuff... well if you’re lucky, and I was, one day you wake up, look in the mirror, and say Holy Fucking Crap! Why the hell do I look so old?!

If you’re me, you start clicking those ruby heels together and then... you stop cold. There truly is no place like home, not for me. Home is somewhere I have no desire to return to. Ever. Home was a terror. Which leaves me in a very strange place. No way to go forward. No desire to go back. Looks like end times are here, you know? It really makes a person wish she believed in the Rapture. Makes me wish I believed in the Rapture. It would take care of a lot. Plus I could be holier than thou and certain I knew the One Truth that trumps all. But I could no longer be an opinionated bitch and that’s a deal breaker; I’ve got too much to say to go silent now.

This year, Year One, I plan to uncork things and shift it into high gear. I know! Those of you who are regular readers are thinking There’s a higher gear for this girl? When the cork blows, I’d better duck. Maybe. And maybe you can help me celebrate. See, this year’s February brought me something unexpected. Something in me broke - I couldn’t help but feel it - and I could have imagined the worst; God knows it’s been a hard year, one fucker of a year, for sure, but it seemed to me that this thing inside me didn’t break apart. It broke open, like a bud. The whole month of February has been spent writing - or trying to write - about the bodies I’ve carried, about the unseen wounds of wars fought internally and externally, and most of all, about the opening bud inside me that heralds a spring I could never have imagined would be mine.

Something is shifting. Something impossible to describe.
Something is unfurling. Something miraculous.

Maybe it is the Rapture. Of course my idea of rapture is distinctly different from my Christian brethren. My book of prayer was written by a Tibetan Buddhist master who, if I recall correctly, I met when I was twenty. Chogyam Trungpa was the Rinpoche from whom I received my Tibetan name. Orgyan Chodron. It means dharma lamp; light of truth.

Here is today’s meditation:

We need not change ourselves, need not negate what we are. We can use what we are as inspiration. So [work, which is the fourth stage for the seeker], is taking delight in and working hard with whatever working base we have - our neuroses, our sanity, our culture, our society. We do not make sectarian distinctions or assert our superiority, but we take delight in what is and then work with it.
The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation,* Chogyam Trungpa

Welcome to the Rapture.

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* p 149, emphasis added
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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Best Friends, Wet Dogs, Birthdays and Jose

2011-02-13T23:36:00.000-08:00

Tonight I'm going to let the words fall out in a heap. Someone will surely have a rake or a shovel and can move them if they block the door.

Starting with the post of a friend and fellow blogger whose work you totally owe it to yourself to read. No, really, Reading Oh Shit... She's Awake will change your life. It'll make you laugh till you snort. Yeah, you'll cry some, but whatever. That's life. As I was saying, starting from Lori's blog and moving forward to Jose's birthday, this is where my heart's been these past two weeks.

February 5, 2011 at 12:08 pm

Lori,

I was moved by The Moon and St. Christopher, a little more than seemed usual for me (it IS a beautiful piece), but then I remembered that I’ve been in hiding. Again. It’s what I do. This morning I crawled out of my ground hog’s hole squinting and tucking my head, bracing for the more-brightness-than-I-really-want, but it was cloudy. No need to cringe against the light; the sky has me covered. Guess that means spring will be coming soon to my life, but not right now. And that suits me just fine.

I read on to Serendipity and Sadhappy Endings. That’s when it hit me:

the date of The Moon and St. Christopher 
the fact that I’m still running from the hands of kindness
the date of your mother’s death and the note from your mother/yourself
today’s date
why I have tears in my eyes.

Today is the 5th. Jose’s birthday is the 8th. Was the 8th. It’s been so long since he died that I no longer register that day in advance. Now it just hits me out of the blue, like sudden sun.

I haven’t been writing, not on paper, but in my head the words are a jumble of desire piled up against a locked door. They’re all about love and why I love men that others deem unsuitable; I don’t feel the need to do what’s expected, only what’s expected of me by my heart. So, once again, I love a man who lights me up in every way but whose life choices bring silent disapproval from friends and family. Once again I’m bracing. And now it’s Jose’s birthday, too.

Ah… so that’s why I’m in hiding.

Thanks for opening the damn door, hon. I’ve landed in a whining, wet dog of a heap on the other side, but whatever. I’m here.

Sending you inarticulated thank yous, plus lots of wet dog hugs...

2.8.11 .. THIS IS PROBABLY THE PART YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR .. 2.8.94

This poignant picture is a small part of a mural* in the Castro district, which, as unlikely fate would have it this year, is where I was on Jose's birthday. For the very first time ever. Jose loved Castro Street. For those who don't know, The Castro is the gayest part of the gayest city on the planet, San Francisco. And for those of you who haven't already read his name a thousand times on this blog, Jose Sequiera is the friend who holds the best-friend-key to my heart. He died at thirty. Had he gotten the HIV cocktail in time, this year would have found him firmly in middle age. Amazing. The mural - which runs maybe a quarter of a block and catalogs life before, during, and after AIDS became a death sentence - is something I knew nothing about until I found myself standing in front of it. In The Castro. On Jose's Birthday. It made me think of Jose not just because the man is on his death bed, and not because it was Jose's birthday, but because the man in the mural looks just like Jose. Imagine my reaction.

That's all I have to say. If you want to know more about Jose and me, head on over to The Movie Lovers. Or you could just read this. It's what Jose wrote to me the year he died on the occasion of my own birthday, which is just a couple of weeks away.

Dina,

May the birds sing your name
May the rivers roar for you
May the stars twinkle like your eyes
May the trees sway in your presence
May the earth and the havens rejoice because you were born on this day.

Happy Birthday

Love,
Jose

Happy birthday, baby. Happy birthday.

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*You’ll find the mural at the juncture of Market, 16th, and Castro Street.

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War. What Is it good For?

2011-02-05T21:37:00.000-08:00

What follows is a reprise of a post I wrote nine months ago when I was serializing my book, The Movie Lovers, here on Sins of the Eldest Daughter. I am moved to repeat it because I recently posted the very same chapter, in full, on the new Movie Lovers blogsite, and when I did, something in me broke. I imagine it broke open, like a bud. At least I like to think that’s what happened.

I took a week to pause and consider why it was that posting Longtime Survivor hit me harder than I expected. First there’s the fact that I recently got to see a friend who has served three tours in Afghanistan. He is stateside now, but I can see he will never be home from war. Not long after, I saw The Wounded Platoon, a Frontline report on soldiers who served in Iraq, soldiers who found that they did not return alone; the invisible wounds of war came home with them. And last but certainly not least, Jose’s birthday... it comes next week.

When I began serializing The Movie Lovers on Sins of the Eldest Daughter, I remember thinking that AIDS would be the the current generation’s Viet Nam; AIDS being the much ignored and reviled undeclared war that played in the background of their childhood, a war that only they would be able to put into context and finally understand the days, the decades of days, when AIDS was a death sentence born in silence by an entire generation.

I have carried these bodies so far. I did not anticipate ever setting them down. And, so, without further ado, yadda yadda, the reprise:

LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR

Yesterday I looked up and realized that 1994 was gone, that it is, quite literally, history. That was a realization I thought I might never have. I have carried the bodies so far. I did not anticipate ever setting them down. Today I sat in the living room of a new friend and heard him say, “When our class, 1994, when our class left...” and I did the math. He was speaking of his high school class. I finished grad school in 1990. I knew, even before I answered his questions about The Movie Lovers and this blog, that I was speaking to the generation I’ve been waiting for. It is so fitting that this should be the class of ’94, and I know Jose would appreciate that as much as I do, being a writer of fiction and a man of consummate timing.

I used to do so much counting. Days since Jose died. Years. 1994 became my Year Zero. Everything from that moment separated into two categories. Before Jose’s death. After Jose’s death. People began to ask “Isn’t she done yet?” They didn’t mean the book. “It’s been a year. Isn’t she done yet?” Grief doesn’t have a time line, but today when I heard that year and I did the math, today I realized that I no longer needed to say “It’s been a decade and a half since Jose died.” I no longer wanted to measure my life from that fateful point; I no longer had to.

Tonight I let the bodies hit the floor.

LONGTIME SURVIVOR (HIV University), part 3/end

It was May of ‘94, early in the month I think, and it was hot, too hot: too hot to stand in the sun, too hot to move without sweating, and too hot for an already nauseated Jose to ride comfortably in the back seat of an old car without air-conditioning. Somehow I feel I should have known that last one, but we can only see as far as our experience allows.

Jose’s parents and I had brought him home from the hospital in the heat of the afternoon, and I parked my Rambler next to the back stoop because it was the quickest way into the apartment. But Jose was disoriented that day and uncharacteristically stubborn and he simply, for no reason we could discern, refused to go. A debate broke out in Spanish. Standing in the heat of the sun, what I noticed was the side of the building. Its gray paint had begun to blister but not yet to peel. A moment’s observation. In the time between that day and Jose’s death I would have many hours to study this tabula rasa, hours spent in five and ten minute increments sitting on these steps or atop the retaining wall, Frank chain smoking to the filter, me picking at the brown grass and dirt, both of us breathing the overheated smell of garbage as we worked to save the man we loved, something which we both knew couldn’t be done. I ended the debate between Jose and his parents by taking Jose firmly by the arm, walking him around to the front of the building, up the front steps, over to his front stoop, up those steps, and into his stuffy south-facing apartment. A distance of maybe forty or fifty feet, the trip took ten minutes and left us bathed in sweat. At each set of stairs, each step, I instructed Jose how to walk. Which foot to lift. When.

I got him inside. I got him comfortable. Then he began to vomit. And vomit and vomit and vomit. The jarring ride in my old car, the unseasonable heat, the long walk to his apartment, the toxoplasmosis, the drugs for the toxo, all these had conspired against him. His mother grabbed a bucket. His father brought a cool cloth. I held Jose close to my body, held the bucket close to his face, stroked his hair, and told him, “It’s all right sweetie it’s all right sweetie it’s all right.”

When I got home that night my left eye burned with the splash of vomit that was no longer there and my head burned, as with a fever, with the words Jose had spoken so often: all body fluids are dangerous. Even urine might have blood invisible to the eye. Certainly bile could have blood from an inflamed esophagus or stomach. Later -- days? weeks? -- I called an ICU nurse who told me it’s standard procedure to wear goggles when intubating a patient; when a person coughs or chokes, internal fluids get sprayed out along with the exhaled air.

“How careful is too careful?”

“It only takes once,” she said. It’s what we once heard in sex education classes about the risk of getting pregnant.

That night I returned home to my husband after holding my best friend in my arms while he puked, holding him not because he was drunk or heartbroken but because he was too sick to know what was happening to him; home to my husband and the dark of our back deck, home to make small talk and then to quietly to say, I’ve been exposed; home to make love -- the first time in a long while -- with no questions and no protection.

Jose died a month later.

* * *

The year Jose died, Philadelphia made a star of Tom Hanks and the title song remains an anthem to the devastation of that opportunistic collection of diseases we call AIDS. Philadelphia, as I mentioned, also bears the dubious distinction of being the first feature-length film to deal explicitly with AIDS since Longtime Companion came out in 1990. But in the summer of ‘89, the year in which the story of Longtime Companion draws to a close, I didn’t know anyone who had died of AIDS. I hardly knew anyone who had died. I wasn’t yet thirty. Thirty was when AIDS was still considered news and Congress passed the Ryan White CARE Act and a small but certain segment of the nation was saying, It’s about time. Thirty was when Frank and Jose were becoming fast friends with Cliff and me, when the four of us saw Maya Angelou speak and heard the resonance of truth in her voice when she said, “Those who have gone before you have already paid your way.” Thirty was when Jose called weekly to announce which movie he and I just had to see. We were crazy about the movies and crazy about each other; seemed we were best friends in an instant, though that can’t be true, but it was. Thirty was the start of Jose’s tenure as my best friend, the very last best friend I’ll ever have, because to be best friends you have to be young in a way that I’ll never be again.

* * *

It took me a year after Jose’s death before I worked up the courage to have myself tested, a year of alarms sounding in nightmares, a year of immobilizing grief. At some point during that year I finally realized, for certain and forever, that the world isn’t safe. It never was, of course, and I can’t tell you if the moment at which that became clear to me was when the bile hit my eye, when the best friend I’ve ever had stopped breathing, or if I simply found myself having a lot of those moments and finally stopped counting them, stopped tracking, stopped backtracking, and began letting it all wash over me like waves on the beach. What I can tell you is this: what they say about ignorance is sometimes true.

Wondering whether I’d been infected was frightening, but I needn’t have worried. At the turn of this new century, the CDC Surveillance Report on HIV and AIDS cases in the US had three things to say about how a person is exposed: Sex, drugs, and blood. It’s a chant that plays like the B-side to the boomer generation’s mantra: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll! All the rest, all that we imagine about how we may become exposed to HIV, is simply variations on this theme, variations on a theme of fear. I’m okay. But I’ve been watching my little corner of the Postmortem Bar, and it’s filling up like a last minute barbecue on the first real day of summer, filling up with my close friends and family friends, casual friends, co-workers, acquaintances. The three people walking on the beach at the end of Longtime Companion are very much alive. How they get to be at that bar as their dead friends and lovers reappear, I don’t know, but miracles like that are just one of the things I love about the movies; Jose, too.

Here, then, is the miracle in my movie: at the Postmortem Bar I’ll get to see Carl, the English department secretary from the university where I was a graduate teaching assistant, and I’ll catch up with a beloved linguistics professor there, too; I’ll see Jim, the eldest son of my grandmother’s best friend, like an uncle to me, the man whose mother still believes, as the Seventh Day Adventist church wills it, that her son’s death was caused by the sin of his lifestyle; I’ll see Gryphon, the clothing designer with the sterling bone pierced through his nose, who hand-constructed one-of-a-kind, antique-fabric kimonos for my auntie’s boutique; I’ll meet the young men, fifteen or twenty of them, whose pictures were pasted in a handmade shadow box that sat atop a red silk-draped altar in Jose’s room and to which he had gestured and said simply, “My friends who have died”; I’ll see Randy, my younger sister’s best friend and roommate, so dear to the family that our aunt referred to him as “one of the kids,” the man who would later arrive at my doorstep with books and pamphlets, tissues and kind words, and answers to questions I didn’t even know I had; I’ll see Garrett, who was always “going to beat this thing” with yoga, special diets, positive thinking, and who looked so bad after Jose died that Frank locked eyes with me and said, “Garrett’ll be next”; I’ll see Aaron, who died a year after Jose, and he’ll hug me and tell me he was always one to feel that he had to take care of those he loved, that he was dying and didn’t have the energy to take care of one more person and that’s why he sent me away, tears, astonishment, and all; I’ll finally get to meet Michael, the partner of my closest friend, Jim, the love of his life; I’ll meet the brothers and partners dear to all the men and women I met in my AIDS grief group; I’ll most likely see the neighbor from across the street and he’ll see his live-in “nephew,” whose empty hospital bed was all I ever knew of him; I’ll see the acquaintances, co-workers, and neighbors who haven’t died yet but will; I’ll see Jose; and I’ll see all the friends I held in my mind’s eye when Jose entered the hospital for the last time and I called my father in tears to tell him something that, even then as a man of fifty-odd years, he could not imagine: “In ten years, half my friends will be dead.”

It’s been nine years so far, and that circle of friends is gone. All dead.
Or shell shocked.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Because Thank You Sounds So Much Better Then I Feel Like Crap

2011-01-05T08:31:00.000-08:00

17 January 2011
It's been two weeks since I semi-posted this blog. It was a place holder, actually, something I wanted to do but could not follow through on at the time. That description, right there, sums up my entire adult life, at least the last half, which was the half in which I fell ill and finally against all odds began getting well half a dozen years ago. By "getting well" I mean that I began my upward path from damn near catatonic to... better. Truth is, unless I entered a coma, I really had nowhere to go but up. The "something I wanted to do but could not follow through on at the time" that is what my life has been since recovering my health: a desire to move forward, a need to accomplish a few goals, a belief in the possibility that I could be a normal person if only I tried hard enough. By "normal" I mean something simple; like a career in which I am appreciated, maybe not monetarily as well as I deserve, but through the love and respect of my colleagues; a marriage that, while not perfect, includes passion and tenderness and the willingness to care about the effect we have on each other's lives; some fun and some friends, and in this last thing I have succeeded. In the arena of friends, I am truly blessed. When I began this post, two weeks ago, I was feeling my lacks and my losses more keenly than my blessings and so I began this post -- Because Thank You Sounds So Much Better Then I Feel Like Crap -- for much the same reason that I began the blog itself: as a response to my feeling that I was drowning in lack and loss, that I might never finish anything that truly mattered to me.

Tonight, this is all the further I get because the meds are starting to take effect, which means I'll be typing like a drunkard if I try to resist sleep, and sleep is, after all, half of what the meds are intended to give me. So goodnight, dear sweet readers. Sweet dreams.

5 January 2011
- under construction ...WATCH THIS SPACE...

Been looking back on where I started 11 months ago and those who encouraged and praised my early efforts. ....

These are the comments -- all the comments, -- from my first two blog posts. I had expected nothing but received blessings right out of the blue.

... on 17 February, 2010

Big said...
I can identify with this quite a bit (less than 2 years till the ultimate zero for me, 40, 2012, next best hope for the end of the world.)

... developing the discipline, becoming professional. A really good book to reado n this is Stephen Pressfields's the War of Art. He talks about becoming comfortable being uncomfortable. and becoming true profesional. and offers great quote:

Novelist William Faulkner once said, "I only write when I am inspired." But then he added, "Fortunately I am inspired at nine o'clock every morning."

Lori said... http://shesawake.blogspot.com

Routine? Routine? Isn't routine just a really nice way to say 'rut'? Seriously. Screw your horoscope. You may be having a zero birthday, but that doesn't mean that you need to play it safe, does it?

Go forth, be your glorious self.
You do that very, very well.

*luv*

Jeanne Veillette Bowerman said... http://scriptchat.blogspot.com/p/how-to-chat.html

Babe, CELEBRATE the zeroes! I'm a way better woman at 46 than I ever was at 26. I'm wiser, more confident, and have learned to love every, sick, twisted flaw I have. Own it. Own that ZERO ;)

As for your writing every day goal. Excellent! I applaud it. I also applaud lowering expectations. I read someplace people who live in Switzerland are happiest because they have no expectations. Let's live by that. Hell, maybe THAT is what I'll give up for Lent ;) Great post. Truly enjoyed it. Happy early birthday!

... on 18 February, 2010

Nita said...
I have found over the years that when I thought others had changed it was usually me. My goals, thoughts, what mattered to me changed. Life continues and I cannot change the things I have done in the past, so I choose to move on and hope the future is better.

windowtotheworld said...
speechless, once more.

Coffeenuts said... http://coffeenuts-iam.blogspot.com/

Last night we had my folks out for dinner and I showed mom your Blog to give her a feel for all the additional posts you have made since your 'My Zero Birthday' excerpt. Longer story short, she hopes to read more of your blog in the future via my fathers computer.

As I've told you not long ago Dina, I myself am not a prolific reader so to the extent my 2-cents worth of comments will be of any use to you will likely be slim to none. However that said, your Blog has sparked a new interest in me previously thought to be non-existent...I do enjoy reading your Blog.

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Stealing Tomorrow from Today

2010-12-24T01:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't crash landed yet. I haven't crash landed yet.

It's eleven on a Thursday night and it's the 23rd of December, which means that in an hour it's officially Christmas Eve Day. And tomorrow I will be fine with that. But tonight, well tonight I had to steel myself against that feeling. You know the one, everybody who's single does. I was married for, literally, half my life and so this experience of steeling myself against feeling the envy of coupledom during a holiday was new, but it passed quickly. A glass of wine. A phone call from a girlfriend. Poof. Turns out I’m cool with the single-at-Christmastime thing. Sweet. But that still blue quiet ghost of Christmas passing even as it squats as a fat tree in the living room window, *that* feeling I have known my life long. And it was that feeling which surprised me today.

This year I am giving myself the gift of a family-free Christmas. Point of fact, I have given myself a completely family-free holiday season altogether, Thanksgiving to New Years, and so far it has been the happiest, most relaxing, and socially satisfying of my life. Bar none. And that's saying something, because as a child, I had the brief and happy experience of a Norman Rockwell Christmas. Really. It wasn't a Norman Rockwell family I grew up in, but at Grandma and Grandpa's house on the holidays it was perfect. Everything from my velveteen dress, sewn by my grandmother, to the tiny tinkle of bells on the tree and the tray of dates, figs, and old world fruitcake, everything was perfect. Not picture book perfect. Happy. There was love in every detail. Every year. It is the only sweet thing from childhood that I miss. Every year.

But that feeling I mentioned? That still blue quiet ghost of Christmas passing even as it squats as a fat tree in the living room window feeling? Yeah, that feeling is the hollow Christmas cavern I have inhabited every holiday season since. It’s the feeling of living on the outside of one’s skin, floating just above a bloodless interior, a kind of anemia of the emotions; the perfect antidote for fear. Terror is an overused word, so is hell, and those Christmases with my perfection-driven bipolar mother and new dad are long past. As an adult, when I went to my father’s home that first Christmas, I was surprised to find the feeling waiting for me there, a tiny hitchhiker in my belly. And it was there, again, with my step dad and his new wife, with my in-laws, with my auntie-mom, and now, with my sisters and their families. The hollow travels with me like a rig with an empty vial; needle, no morphine. But this year, given the pleasure I have experienced in the holidays so far, well, I guess I imagined that I had escaped that feeling.

I tell myself I won’t mess up again. I try to fix it good. I try to patch it up. I’ve got a a manual that tells me how we have to look... Why don’t you let it go, let it go, let it go?

Tomorrow night I imagine I will be feeling the joy of sitting on my ass watching a marathon of Criminal Minds while I eat yummy high-fat and even-higher-sugar foods. But tonight I can hear the psychologist saying, when I tell him it is only television that can reliably calm me, television that helps me to close my eyes to sleep, “You like crime shows?” he says, “Why is that?” Because the television is a syringe and the crime show is morphine, a perfect high wherein the ugliness of non-Rockwellian reality is subdued by good guys with guns.

This year I’ve given myself the gift of a Christmas without baggage, but come the New Year my resolution is to slay the dragon. Not morphine, not heroin, pain; my body is addicted to pain. It comes of a life lived in the grip of a post-traumatic stress that just never took the hint. A permanent couch surfer. I’m thinking that when it hits the road I might be able to crawl back inside my own skin. I might even like it there.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Halley’s Comet: My Zero BDay Blog Resumes

2010-12-09T00:19:00.000-08:00

First of all, welcome back dear sweet readers. It’s been a long strange summer and fall for me. After being repeatedly slapped up side the head by devoted friends and readers, both online and off, I have elected to eject the shaman’s edict of Blog Thee No More and just write. Fuck him if he can’t see that everything begun to spin out the day I stopped being the chief writer and bitch on Sins of the Eldest Daughter.

But all that comes later. What comes first is the spin out. It got very ugly. Here’s where it all started.

Friday, 3 December 2010

My eyes are open wide
and by the way, I made it through the day.
I watched the world outside
by the way, I’m leavin’ out today.

Shinedown
“Second Chance”

The shaman said, he said, he... I can’t recall the words, I truly can’t, and my lack of short-term recall was a big part of what had him concerned; but I remember the feeling of being seen in a way that no one else had ever seen me, the crisp clarity of recognizing myself as surely as my lungs recognize a clear winter’s night. I wrote down the shaman’s instructions -- get neuropsychological testing for memory -- knowing that the words he spoke would evaporate even before I left the room. Then I drove to a friend’s house and cried in his arms for an hour. I told him I knew what it meant to Virginia Woolf when she heard the birds singing in Greek again, told him that I knew why she then filled her pockets with stones and walked into the river, told him that I might never, ever be well.

The clinical psychologist said, he said... that first appointment he said nothing. He asked the questions I have answered a thousand and three times, and I dutifully supplied the answers: chaotic childhood, terrors of an abusive parent, sexual abuse (of course, right?); PTSD, major depressive episode, suicide narrowly aborted; long-term therapy, forgiveness, the eventual bipolar diagnosis and finally - finally! - the proper medication, those brain-chemistry altering pills that make life manageable. Made. Made life manageable. That was the outline of my life and I delivered it with dispassion; it’s the past. But the present had begun to look a lot like the past, and at the end of the session the psychologist had three words for me: Major Depressive Episode. Again.

“But I don’t feel it,” I said. He said, “Why would you? You’ve been depressed your whole life.”

When it got very bad, the depression, words no longer made sense. Words written on the page stopped being symbols of something I comprehended and spoken words began to runtogether andIcouldnothearthesyllables. I knew it was English, but I couldn’t make out the words. It was all just sounds. Letters. Then the psychologist said, what you’re describing now is the same as before, isn’t it? And it was. I hadn’t noticed. I drove home to look my life full-on in the mirror. I cried for two days. Then I went back for testing.

I took the tests that measure short-term recall capacity, the tests that reveal the psycho-neurological structure of the brain, and the MMPI tests that identify personality structure and psychopathology.

The term psychopathology may be used to denote any behavior or experience which causes impairment, distress, or disability, particularly if it is thought to arise from a functional breakdown in either the cognitive and neurocognitive systems in the brain. (Wikipedia)

In short, tests for mental illness. Again.

Three hours of testing the first day. Words. Lists. Numbers. Pictures. Recall, recall, recall, recall.

One particularly triggering battery of words and numbers affected me so profoundly that two days later I found myself screaming at my father about the horrors he left me to endure. There are reasons loss eviscerates me. There are reasons I cannot reach through my shame to accept the love and help others extend to me. There are reasons I hide who and what and how I am. And there are reasons why I’m afraid to sleep. Still. My father is a three-tour VietNam vet who has struggled with PTSD his whole life. “You know,” I told him, “that no matter what you do afterward, no matter how you let the past go and smooth out the present, that experience marks you. It marks you for life.”

************* Tune in again. The story continues.*************

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

One Last Breath

2010-07-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

Please come now, I think I’m falling
I’m holding on to all I think is safe
It seems I found the road to nowhere
and I’m trying to escape.

Creed
One Last Breath

I just spent thirty hours with an addict, a man who’s demons make him one of the cruelest and most self-centered assholes I know; a man whose heart shines through him like the eyes of a boy who would spend his last dime to bring you happiness; a man of unyielding truthfulness who sees into me in ways no other human being ever has; but an addict all the same. I am not an addict, I haven’t been an addict, but I regularly do things others find wildly foolish. Things I brazenly embrace, though they have the power to harm me. Things that cause others to fear for me. It’s what I choose. I am a sojourner in the belly of the beast, here to learn the forbidden from the inside out. When the consequences arrive, and they do, I simply suffer through them. The thing is, between the moment in which I make my choice and the consequences that follow, I find pieces of myself I didn't even realize were missing. And I make myself more whole.

Z, which is short for *Ezekiel, arrived at my doorstep a dozen hours later than he said he would. 2 AM. After grabbing some lengua tacos from our favorite drive thru, a hole-in-the-wall with food and prices like you’d find on the streets of Mexico, we came back to my place, ate, and fell into bed. Our first twelve hours together we spent sleeping, a deep, sweet, restful sleep the likes of which I have known only in his arms. When we woke he took me out to eat a good meal and I took him on a walk through the neighborhood. Our walk took us past the oldest local watering hole and we stopped in to see the walnut bar, massive, imposing, a thing from times gone by. Z ordered some smokey scotch, enjoying the opportunity to treat me to something I’d never had, and I remembered the first time he told me alcohol was his gateway drug. “Alcohol and heroin work on the same receptors in the brain,” he said, and I thought no wonder my mother loves alcohol. Scotch, actually. That was when Z was first in recovery. That was when we were in love. That was awhile ago.

This is the place where most stories cue the violins as the sad saga of one man’s downward spiral unfolds, but this is not that story. I’m not here to feel sorry for my friend or to pity him or be angry about the effect his life has had on mine, nor am I here to wax righteous. Z’s life is what it is: a desperate struggle for normal. He fakes normal as best he can. On the outside he keeps up appearances, keeps up the pace at work, and on the inside he lives in a private hell. He’s not the only man to live such a life. He’s not even the only one I know.

During the eighteen hours Z and I were together, together and awake, I watched my friend go from having an enjoyable afternoon with me to needing a drink to feel normal to wanting coke for a bit of that better-than-normal feeling in order to take the edge off the crazy he feels in every situation involving people. Eventually he was driven to using a needle until he needed liquor to encourage sleep, a sleep that never came. Satisfaction never came either. It would touch down and then fly off again, like a plastic bag whipped about in the wind. During that last night together, sleepless in the dark, in a quiet voice that might have been choosing from a lunch menu, Z said, “I want to die.” The sentence was effortless, slightly emphasizing the verb, like a child making a choice he realizes he may not get. “It would be a relief to have the struggle be over,” he said.

My life has also been a struggle, as anyone who reads this blog knows. I have fought lifelong, over and over, to recover and maintain physical and mental health. If anyone could find a high horse to stand on and lecture about addiction, it would certainly be me. But we are the same, my friend and I, except that his drugs are illegal and mine are paid for by insurance. Moreover, his drugs offer a transitory satisfaction. Not only are the drugs I take not an experience of mind-expansion-while-the-universe-vibrates-in-the-key-of-G, in my dark days the side effects of the drugs I was given were positively Medieval. The very best that could be said of them: they offered a wardrobe of undesired options, like wearing wet cotton or wet wool, living with your mouth covered over in cellophane or rubber, choosing whether your mind is to be bound in rope or leg irons.

I know that from the outside it appears addicts are creating their own struggle; you get addicted to drugs, your life gets hard. Duh. Stop the drugs, idiot. And while it’s true that addiction is a black-hole system of existence, the ultimate state of being out of control, what’s more interesting is that addiction is the end result of desperate efforts to control a bad state of mind. Let me say this another way. I see this struggle from the inside. First of all, I have had a doctor say to me that I could a) take the drug that made me so anxious I wanted to tear my skin off, or b) be in constant, unyielding, thought-obliterating pain. Furthermore she was mightily annoyed that I thought this side effect worth reporting to her after hours. From my perspective, Z is addicted to drugs because drugs are addictive. His attraction to drugs? That’s a result of his desire to find normal, his struggle to learn how to approximate the very simple dance steps that comprise normal, a struggle he has been losing his entire life.

What is normal? Just a word, people say; a concept, an average of highs and lows, a social construct, and maybe it is. But I can also tell you that normal is a shiny desired thing -- just out of reach -- a kind of forbidden fruit for those of us who live our lives off balance. We don’t simply idealize this thing called “normal” and wish we had it. We know we don’t have it. How do we know this? How do you know when you have a broken bone? You just know. Having broken my share of bones, two of which showed no outward signs, I can tell you that it is a pain distinguishable from all others. And so while it hurts to watch my friend, to watch this man I was once crazy in love with, spiral out of control as he swings high and low aiming for normal, I have no judgment about the fact that this is his life. Right now, it’s the best he can do.

* * * * *

I lay myself down, back to earth and the cool of the grass, eyes to heaven. Night is all in the trees, and coloring the sky; clear, dark, punctured by stars; vibrating so subtly. I take off my glasses and look deeply into the only jewels I will ever own; search for landmarks, a Dipper, the broad belt of Orion, the dance of the Pleiades; find only diamonds scattered across the night sky. Behind me, in a tiny stand-alone garage inhabited by college boys and dirty dishes, a sagging couch and a sink full of last night’s vomit, Z is slamming cocaine. The inside of his arm is still bloody and bruised from the afternoon he spent stabbing his way into himself.

A thin boy in black stumbles out, pukes into the bushes next to the house that belongs to the young couple who rent out the garage. “It’s a nice night,” I say, “if you’re not upchucking.” He turns as he wipes his sleeve across his mouth, sees me on the ground, walks over to reach out a hand. Any boy man enough to puke into the bushes and then have the presence of mind to introduce himself to a woman twice his age is okay by me. Later, when I say this to Z his only words will be, “He’s an addict.” And even later, when the birds are chirruping like the world is new and the sky has dropped its daily veil over the stars, I will watch as Z calls the boy in black and makes arrangements for them to go where I will not.

* * * * *

After eighteen wakeful hours of Z’s world, I found myself too tired to do anything but breathe. So I laid myself down on the floor cushions and watched Grey’s Anatomy reruns. I am not a doctor or paramedic, nor a nurse or self-appointed super hero. All the same, I resonate with stories where the main character stares down death as she tells the person in front of her that everything will be fine. It won’t, of course, but her job -- my job -- is to give that person courage, to walk them through the one thing they don’t want to do, whether that be living or dying. Year after year, life places me close to the ones I love when they gaze into the captivating eyes of death. Perhaps this is because I rest easy being in the same room, because I have danced the two-step that death and disease do. Some have judged that I foolishly run toward pain, but as I lay on my floor yesterday, sleep-deprived and sleepless, blinds drawn against the day and the shrill birds, I began to see that what I’ve run toward is intimacy. It just happens that the deepest intimacy in my life, thus far, has been with pain and the swan dive of death.

On the second night, after the stars and the college boys and the skinny kid puking, Z and I retired to his bed, a disheveled pad in a disheveled room where all things lay equal upon a carpeted floor, everything but sleep. So, after some hours of taking comfort in each other’s arms, I kissed him and rose to go. He begged me to drive with him to the other side of town, two maybe three hours away. When I said no it was a complete sentence, but since my apartment lay halfway between where we were and where Z planned to go, I drove him that far. On the freeway, I watched as he pulled out his used syringe and a small bottle of liquid morphine. My response was calm. Final. When his buddy reached for the needle, Z said simply, “She’s not down with it.”

At home on my own pillowed floor and still unable to court sleep, I sent a text to Z and asked how he was doing. His response: “A little tore up.” His remedy for the consequences: “Drink fiercely.” I found that a couple antihistamines and twelve hours of sleep was mine. It left me with bags under my eyes and a dream about maple bars. I love donuts, I really do, but I’m gluten intolerant. Celiac disease. Anything made with wheat is essentially poison for me. I know this. I knew it in the dream. But I went straight to that maple bar, picked it up, ate it, and went back for another without any regard for my condition. I woke in a state of wonder. As I recorded the dream, I found myself adding another sentence: I will always go back to what is forbidden if it makes itself available.

Forbidden fruit, the sins of the flesh, these fascinate me. I take sin very seriously, and by sin I mean the things we all do to cope with this amazing dream of reality. That’s what the Buddhists tell us: reality is just a dream we make up as we idly play in the sandbox of time, lost in our own heads. My sin, one of them, is that I prefer being a student of sin to being a judge. It can be dangerous, this point of view. And so illuminating.

Consider the Oracle at Delphi, which is inscribed with the one true goal, "Know thyself." Consider Eve, the so-called original sinner, who taught us that self-knowledge follows closely behind knowledge of God and, of course, that self-knowledge means knowledge of sin. Now imagine, just for a moment, that sin is not the source of our downfall but rather the source of all insight, a master teacher. Imagine that sin offers to show us the parts of ourselves that we fear, the parts that we hide or deny. In the I Ching the sixty-first hexagram is entitled Insight, and it declares that to gain insight we must yield to the object of our inquiry. Just think of it as giving into sin. Becoming “totally open and unprejudiced toward its true nature.”

Go beyond objectivity into pure observation and acceptance... fully influenced by what you’ve observed and experienced. Now stop. Pull back . . . taking with you [both] a penetrating understanding and INSIGHT based upon actual experience. . . . You will not lose your perspective or jeopardize your principles in this empathetic voyage. Instead you gain a valuable INSIGHT into something that may be, in fact, controlling a part of your life.

I know that to choose poison is self-destructive; I was raised by a drunk. And I know that choosing self-destructive behaviors is tantamount to sin. Just check the list of the Seven Deadlies: pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, sloth. Pride starts the whole thing off, and I confess that I know the sin of being certain of my capacity to do what I set out to do regardless of the consequences. For some, the consequences of desire are addiction, which brings us to greed (aka, avarice), lust, gluttony, and sloth, each one an element of addiction. Throw in a little obsession, which covers envy and anger, and you’ve got them all; seven deadly sins inside a sunny afternoon. All you need is the lying that tags along behind sin like a pestering little sister and you have the icing on the poisonous cake. I prefer chocolate, but my mother would have made apple or carrot cake. More nutritious.

My sometimes loving, sometimes raging, always self-medicated mother, who has since been reduced from scotch to boxed wine and cheap vodka, was the reason for my suicidal childhood. Another sin. Of course I didn’t let this defect show. It was my baby sister who ended up hospitalized with an overdose. My own nearly successful attempt wasn’t until long after I left home, after depression had invaded my body like an army of worms sliding through a barrel of abandoned fruit. That’s when it became impossible to disguise the fact that my mother’s voice was the trigger for my desire for death, for expulsion from the garden of hellish delights, and so I quit my mother with the same swift motion that friends might now advise me to quit Ezekiel. I held onto that “No” as tightly as I held onto the tincture of morphine I found in the medicine cabinet after a friend died of AIDS. It could have worked, too, the morphine. It was working; I could feel it. But then I realized what I wanted was not so much to die as to have the pain taken away. Dying was overkill. Go figure.

“No matter who she is,” my therapist said, “time with our mothers is essential.” And so when I was better, well, at least not as bad, I reestablished contact in small carefully measured doses. When my mother fell to the concrete floor of her garage, I didn’t ask my sisters what they wanted to do, I just drove. At our mother’s hospital bed on the other side of the state, I learned she fell because she was having a seizure and that she was having seizures because her liver was shot and her liver was shot because... well you know the rest. Maybe it was her kidneys, I don’t remember. What does it matter which organ is the rotten apple when all the rest follow suit? The doctors put my mother on detox. If her body was to heal, it had to be free of the poison in her veins. However, it wasn’t much more than a week between when I arrived to take charge of my mother’s care and when I made arrangements for her transfer to hospice. Somewhere in the middle was 27 consecutive hours.

Detoxed and fully lucid, my mother regarded me with eyes from which the veil had been lifted. For the first time in my life, I knew the caring person my aunt grew up with, the charming woman my father fell in love with, the woman who loved me, her first born. I can’t recall a word she said, not one, but I do remember when my mother surfaced; a sensation that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. I remember promising myself I would be present, expecting nothing, open to anything. And I remember the feeling, the summer-sun-on-my-skin feeling, of being loved by my mother. For 27 hours I knew exactly what is meant by that clinical phrase unconditional positive regard, and I imagine it is this feeling that Z is chasing when he sticks a needle in his arm. I know it.

I love that man and he is lost, and so for thirty hours I sojourned in the world in which he wanders alone stabbing at connection and comfort. The ties that bind us are sometimes impossible to explain, often connecting us long after it seems the tie should be broken. Some bonds defy time, distance, and all common sense, but then so does love. There is nothing scarier than real love, breath-taking as it is in its straightforward simplicity. Inexplicable in its beauty. As crystalline and clear as the insights Z has given me. Refracting. Fiery. Winking. Joyful. The closest thing to stars I will ever have.

As for my mother’s story, the rest is all but Biblical. With less than twenty-four hours before death was sure to claim her, family filing past her bedside, my mother did the miraculous. She lived. Despite the strokes, the seizures, the organ failure, she made a complete and speedy recovery. She went home. And, as her middle daughter said, you’d think she would have learned something from almost dying, but noooo. My assessment: my mother has cockroach DNA. It’s what all three of us girls say now. Then we laugh. We love our mother. We know longevity is a positive attribute. We also know that longevity is not so positive when the person living forever is as mean as a snake and twice as deadly. But one thing is for certain. Snakes make powerful medicine. It either kills you or cures you.
.
What is snake medicine? It’s the cure created from the poison, the original hair-of-the-dog remedy. After surviving many venomous attacks, not only do we conquer our fear, we are opened up to the world of the snake's medicine, which is alchemy. With snake medicine, that which holds us back or weights us down is transmuted into that which propels us forward, upward. Snake medicine demands that we let go of what we do not want in order to make space for what we truly desire, like letting go of wrath to make room for love. It takes courage to accept the lessons of the snake, the lessons of insight, and being a student of sin is part and parcel of that. At least it is for me.

Now comes the question and answer part, just like in Sunday school. You want to know if I really think sin is a good thing. You want to know if I understand that my apparent need to love an addict means I’m co-dependent -- I believe that’s still the current term -- and you want to know if I understand that co-dependency is, itself, a kind of addiction. Maybe you doubt my ability to see that by spending time with Ezekiel, I am potentially putting myself in harm’s way. Forget snake medicine, what you really want to know is whether I did any of those drugs I watched Z do to himself. Maybe you’re scared for me. Maybe you’re scared of me.

Here’s what I know about fear. It has everything to do with desiring the stasis of normal. When my friend who diffuses bombs in Afghanistan is walking the dark neighborhood streets stateside, he knows there is a one-hundred percent chance that no one will jump out and try to kill him, but still he finds himself wishing he carried a gun. “I never carry my gun,” he says. “If I carried it here, I’d kill someone.” The last time I saw him, he drew on a cigarette, considered his body’s permanent state of high alert, and said “I’m afraid I’ll be like this the rest of my life.” He said it like he was describing a favorite shirt that was now worn beyond repair. For some of us, normal can be lost forever. Back when I fell into a black-hole existence, one doctor paused to consider the cumulative effects of the chronic pain I carried. “I don’t know how you’ve managed to stay human,” she said. For the first time in my life, I felt seen. Normal can be as simple as having the obvious acknowledged. When my mother was still the most poisonous presence in my life, an addict who loved me, a man who grasps at normal like his last breath, observed the insidious roots of my mother’s madness in me. He held me fast in this reflection and would not release me but that I looked that fearsome blessing full in the face. Sometimes normal comes in ugly wrapping paper.

So you can keep your questions and your fears, all of them. I am immune.

Is that pride? Probably. Is it hubris? Maybe. But I know that self-knowledge doesn’t come without sin, mine or someone else’s.

In that last night together, me and my sweet, loving, hopeful, hateful, helpless, hollow of a man; a man in whom I still experience that longed for sensation I call home, if only for moments at a time; in that night, I scuttled suddenly across the floor, ragged, bare, and in drawing me back to him, Ezekiel clothed me in the gift of something once lost and now returned. For he is held fast in the grasp of fear and such beings know, without a word, when fear holds you, too.

-----------
*Ezekiel - You didn’t think I’d really use his name, did you?

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Carnival of Rust

2010-07-23T20:22:00.000-07:00

I’m on deadline. I have exactly 19 hours and 10 minutes, from this moment, to finish and post my last blog entry of the summer, One Last Breath. It’s nearly done. Or it was. Today, as I read the penultimate draft, it fell apart. Every writer knows what I’m talking about. And we all know that the work will be better -- much better -- in the long run for not having been rushed through a crucial transformation. But in this moment -- GodDamnItAll2Hell!! -- it has just fallen to pieces. This is the point at which spouses and children scatter. If they are wise. Pets, too.

In 19 hours and, now, 3 minutes I must get my ass dressed and out the door for my meeting with the shaman. Yes, I’m reentering the shaman’s version of My Personal Hell, also known here as boot camp for the woo-woo set. The shaman and I have agreed that I can post One Last Breath and then I will refrain from blogging for two solid months. So, as you can see, time is of the essence.

Off I go, then, scotch tape in hand, to finish the blog. I’ve got ~looks at watch~ 18 hours and 48 minutes. See you soon. ~Dina

Poets of the Fall – Carnival of Rust

Hello from Me and My Monkey

2010-07-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

The deeper you go, the higher you fly.
The higher you fly, the deeper you go.
So come on. Come on.
. . . .
Everybody’s got something to hide
‘cept for me and my monkey.

Your inside is out when your outside is in.
Your outside is in when your inside is out.
So come on. Come on.
. . . .
Everybody’s got something to hide
‘cept for me and my monkey. ^_~

Dear Sweet Readers. My song tonight is a little wink to you. Anyone who’s a regular reader here knows I don’t hide much. Alright, who am I kidding? I don’t hide anything! The funny thing is, if you knew me in my everyday life you’d also know that I’m rather a private person and that I don’t tell tales out of school. In other words, if you confide in me, your secret is safe. My own secrets are safe with me, too. While I would lay odds that most of you can’t imagine I have any secrets, given my writing style, the fact of the matter is that we all have things we keep to ourselves and we all need a hidey-hole from time to time, no one more so than those of us who are in the habit of laying our lives bare.

So tonight I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. It is all the truth, what I write; it happened. It’s also performance art.

Recently, I had a new Twitter friend express some worry that, and I’m interpreting here, I was too nice for her to be nice to. Which made me laugh. It’s true, I am genuine. And sincere. And happy. At least most of the time. I am also a bipolar being with big baggage carried by even bigger demons who shed heavily and shit everywhere. No joke. My house is a wreck because my demons live here. They’re worse than teenagers on drugs. I try not to let ‘em out in public if I can help it. It’s bad enough they have to live with me. The only thing they’re really good for is fodder for the stories I tell. But y’all knew that. Here’s my point, and also what I told the woman who’d witnessed only my helpful, sincere persona and thought me a little too sweet for her taste: I'm a happy person who writes like Marilyn Manson performs; a demon in lipstick. I mean, you don’t think Marilyn wears those costumes to the grocery store, do you? Neither do I. My life works best when I regularly take the monkey on my back out for a spin with the top down and the radio blaring. It’s what I do. But do my everyday peeps, my friends and family get to see this? Not on your life, not unless they read it here. Out in the everyday world, me and my monkey are chill.

It’s all performance art, people. Think about it. Isn’t all life that way?

Doesn’t circumstance lead us all? Forcing us to decide, daily, which parts of our personality to put forward and which to relegate to the background? Don’t all of us have parts of ourselves that only our lovers or partners see? And parts we save for church, for children, for chatting with the neighbors? Another part that comes out at parties and family gatherings? And then, yes, there are those few who make a living by saying and doing the outlandish things that we all think but dare not say or do ourselves. This would be where I sigh because I don’t make a living at this just yet.

That’s it. Nothing profound to say today. The real reason I’m here is to say hello. It’s been three weeks since the last post, way too long for my taste. I haven’t been lazy. Okay, I’ve been a little lazy. And exhausted. And sick. By turns. Yesterday I had just enough energy to lie in front of the television and watch three Harry Potter movies. On better days, I’ve also been happily slaving away on a blog that has gotten larger, longer, and more interesting than I had originally anticipated. So I’ve been giving it time to fully ripen and mature. In the mean time, I feel like I am ignoring you. I kinda am. So this blog is my check-in, my place to say WATCH THIS SPACE for “One Last Breath”, which is what I’m currently working on. Here's a taste:

Eventually he was driven to using a needle until he needed liquor to take the edge off and encourage sleep, a sleep that never came. Satisfaction never came either. It would touch down and then fly off again, like a plastic bag whipped about in the wind.

I’ll be posting “One Last Breath” just as soon as I can bring it to completion. Middle of next week is what I’m guessing.

One more thing. I’m starting work with the shaman again. We have struck a bargain: two months of intensive work and then I’m done. During that time I will not be posting a blog. So somewhere around the 21st, 22nd, 23rd of July you’ll see me post my last blog for the summer. Then it’s two months of putting my darling demons through their paces, separating the low-level energy suckers from the true blue freaks. Just think of me as being on a two month retreat into my hidey-hole. With hairy things that go bump in the night.

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Another Loose Cannon Gone Bipolar

2010-06-19T21:34:00.000-07:00

I created the sound of madness
wrote the book on pain
somehow I’m still here to explain

Shinedown
Sound of Madness

I’m starting in the middle of the story tonight. It’s not a literary device I’m choosing to employ, it’s just the easiest way for me to get started, and tonight getting started is what it’s all about because writing is often my salvation. Tonight I’m all about salvation.

When the shaman and I locked horns, to the point of my being put on leave, it was over my behavior, behavior I see as rooted in the fact of being bipolar. He argued choice. I argued chemistry. I've been under-medicated for several months due, he believes, to poor choices; I argue that the poor choices were due to my being unaware I was under medicated. Whatever. My brain chemistry is off kilter, has been off kilter. What this looks like to others is me overindulging in vices, withdrawing from family and friends, and struggling to cope in general. What this looks like to the shaman is me not following orders. In other words: I have a bad attitude and am unwilling to change, or even be motivated toward change.

A bad egg fated to rot rather than hatch. Willfully rot.

To be bipolar is tantamount to being a slacker on welfare, and by that I mean that those around us are driven to distraction with what looks like a willful refusal to straighten up and fly right. Again with the chicken/egg metaphor, I know, but the fact is that with bipolar disorders it’s never clear. Is the situation causing your mood or is it your mood that is causing you to reinterpret the situation? It can be nearly impossible to tell. So here I am, someone who matriculated magna cum laude from her graduate program, a scholar who walked away with the plum graduate prize, and for awhile, a successful editor and writing coach, but now I know exactly how the juvenile delinquent feels; there’s no winning for losing. Like I said, a bad egg.

In retrospect, which has the staggering clarity of the larger perspective, I believe I was misdiagnosed when a major depressive episode laid me out after grad school. Oh, I had a major clinical depression all right, that much is inarguable, but from today’s perspective I’d have to say that my all-consuming, at-one-with-the-wallpaper-and-the-furniture experience was the hallmark of a bipolar depression, a very ugly and until recently a very misunderstood state of mind and body.

My state of complete incapacity, accompanied with my fierce focus on making sure I got the right treatment if it killed me -- for surely not getting the proper treatment would kill me, and by my own hand at that -- this is what led to my being misdiagnosed as having Borderline Personality Disorder. I know that schizophrenia can easily be considered a much heavier cross to bear, but I must disagree. I have a cousin who carries that cross. We all know that meds are everything for him. And we all know that what he does when improperly medicated is about brain chemistry, not attitude. But forget all that because I didn’t grow up in that, the sane, part of the family. A person with a borderline personality is one considered, by diagnosis, to be a person with no regard for anyone’s welfare but her own. Worse. Traditionally it has been considered by the mental health community to be an untreatable condition.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a life sentence. And it is your fault, all of it, bad egg that you are.

At the time of my diagnosis, there was one treatment for BPD, experimental, and it was practiced in Portland, Oregon, my home town. My family and friends went to the clinic’s intro-to-your fucked-up-loved-one and came back saying, That’s you! They were genuinely relieved. I knew in the deepest part of myself that this was not, in fact, the name of my trouble, but I wanted to get well so I sucked it up and accepted the unacceptable.

Here’s the best part. The treatment for BPD is a behavioral program completely free of the coddling of emotions. It focuses on the patient learning to control her emotional state so that she might also control the actions that are the outgrowth of those emotions run amok. Conversely, the hallmark of a bipolar disorder is behavior that is not only uncontrolled but uncontrollable. Let me put it another way. Once I received the proper diagnosis and treatment, my new catch phrase became “Better living through chemistry.” It was that obvious.

Upon being properly medicated for cyclothymia, which I like to call Bipolar Lite, I saw behaviors that I had struggled with lifelong all but disappear overnight. Overnight. I took a pill and suddenly I could deal with the previously undealable. The mood swings slowed down to a little tick tock at the center and the chaos abated. I quit having what psychiatrists “suicidal ideation”; I knew the feelings weren’t real, but they felt real. Imagine that going away with a pill. Now imagine this: the actions of my harpy of a drunken mother suddenly made perfect sense to me. Now that is what I call clarity.

The worst part about being bipolar, in my experience, is BEING BIPOLAR. The life bipolar is a fucked up existence that requires constant re-evaluation and adjustments to maintain a delicate balance, and even then, balance is lost over and over and over. I’m all about meds. I take my meds like daily communion. But this year, just this month as a matter of fact, I learned that I can be properly medicated and still have an episode. How fucked up is that? Well, okay, I used to be on seizure meds and still got seizures, so... never mind. I get it. It’s just that clinical depression, even the black-hole-sun, death-star variety (with which I am intimately acquainted) is easier to medicate; when the meds work, they work. Bipolar Spectrum Disorder, which is the brand new shiny term for what used to be called manic depression, is a cycling disorder; just when you think you have a handle on your symptoms, the situation changes. And so do your symptoms. Without notice. Suddenly, what used to be fine is not fine. It’s a lot like being the crazy person you were before getting the proper treatment. I’m still getting the hang of it.

Enter the shaman.

You remember the shaman, right? That’s where this rant started. I came to the shaman by way of my osteopath. For over a decade, my osteopath and I have been working on undoing the tangle of a lifetime’s worth of chronic pain. From her perspective, I had finally come to a point of wellness, but something, “some energetic glitch” as she called it, was telling my body I was not well. She’s learning healing techniques from the shaman and so she asked if I would be willing to see him. Fast forward eight months. The shaman is angry with me because.... oh, let’s just skip the details. At this point it’s a he said, she said. So why do I care so much that the shaman is angry with me?

Before I answer that question, let me say this. Mistakes get made. Incorrect diagnoses will be given and incorrect treatments will be prescribed. It is inevitable. Neuroscience is still a young field, especially in the science of so-called mental illness. (I argue that “mental” illness is just as physical as diabetes or heart disease; it’s all chemistry. But that’s just me.) What is known about migraines, memory, and mental illness today is huge as compared to what was known ten or twenty years ago. I have spent my entire adult life gamely slogging through mistakes and missteps with my doctors, and I have respect for the fact that we are all learning our way through this brain chemistry stuff together, but... Forgive me. I’m unable to write this next part without rancor, so I’m going to let a couple of Ph.D.'s say it for me:

The most heartbreaking mistakes come when patients get blamed for failing to get better.*

I have been that patient. Only in my experience, the moment I start to be blamed for not getting better is actually directly after the moment our doctor/patient relationship has reached its zenith and it is time for me to find a doctor with greater skill. So far, my assessment of this shift has been accurate, and I have been well served following my judgment. My assessment: the shaman is angry because I am failing to get better on his terms. It’s the same brand of anger I heard from my first behavioral therapist, the one practicing the “cure” for my mistaken borderline personality diagnosis. Both of them have yelled at me these very words: “I’m not here to do it your way.”

I get it. I have not done everything the shaman told me to do. In addition, I have refused to let go of some of my less-than-stellar habits. But this, I argue, is not because I am willful. It is because I can take only so much stress and only so much change before I unravel. I know this; it did not require a diagnosis for me to know this about myself. I used to think this was a failure of character -- it certainly looks like it -- but what I’m coming to understand as I learn better living through chemistry is this: I am bipolar. Bipolar symptoms are stress-related. When my brain chemistry is balanced, I am balanced, but add stress and things shift. I have, just like my undiagnosed but undoubtedly bipolar mother, habits and coping mechanism that I developed long before my diagnosis. Bad habits. Bad coping mechanisms. However, unlike my mother, I did not settle into self-medicating with alcohol, sex, and pills. I began the search for wellness at sixteen. By virtue of a few key decisions, an education, and some decent breaks, I have avoided my mother’s hell, mostly -- a huge accomplishment -- and more importantly, I have avoided imposing my hell on children. Some days that is enough. Other days, that is everything.

So, do I want to live a life that’s better than that simple summation?
Is a pig’s ass pork?

You didn’t see that coming, did you? But here it is, the question that everything comes down to: chicken or pig? In a meal of ham and eggs the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. This is how committed I am to getting well. At ten I knew something was very wrong. At fourteen I knew I was in the kind of trouble I couldn’t get out of by myself. At sixteen I paid for a psychiatrist with my own money. I paid my way through college and grad school and when I was done, I got myself to the kind of doctors that could help me with my botched biology and neurology. I am nothing if not committed.

Here’s my problem. In his zeal to get me to snap out of my complacency, the shaman missed my bipolar spin out. He is also a master level therapist, so you’d think the shaman would have noticed, but my psychiatrist didn’t notice either. How could he? I didn’t know to report the symptoms I was having. Why? Well, the shaman assigned my experiences to “energetic shifts” -- as did I -- and I was experiencing a shit load of shifts. But there was more, and until now I didn’t know some of these things could be symptoms of my bipolar condition. I now have new list of additional signals that, like the idiot lights in my car, I ignore at my peril. I mean, Fuck me! I haven’t been this wrong on this many fronts since I was a teenager.

When I was a teenager I lived with my aunt, my mother’s sister. I knew that living with my parents would be the death of me (again, by my own hand) and so I moved to where someone would be watching, someone to reel me in when I got too far up a certain creek without a paddle. My aunt was a great disciplinarian. Firm. Fair. Fun. She was perfect for my much needed teenage rebellion; I could count on her the way a trapeze artist can count on the net. That is, until my uncle moved back in and took over the discipline. At a critical juncture in my young life, he missed the opportunity to see into my heart and instead focused on one night’s out of control behavior. His response was to give me what I call “the sweat off my balls” speech. I don’t remember a single word of it, just the start of that sentence: “And I wouldn’t give the sweat off my balls...” My uncle gave me much worse than the sweat off his balls. He gave me enough rope to hang myself when I didn’t need any more rope. What I needed was the net.

Like the shaman, my uncle was sending a message. I got the message, though it wasn’t the one he thought he was sending, and it scared me, which is what he wanted, but it didn’t scare me straight; it scared me deaf. And so did the shaman’s anger. Now the shaman will tell you that he is fighting for me and he’s waiting for me to fight for myself. He doesn’t know that I am already fighting for myself. This fight in me, this fight for the person I know I am and against the person I am (again!) being wrongly seen as being, this got me suspended, put on leave. It got me the shaman singing the lead in this damn song:

Yeah, I get it, you’re an outcast, always under attack, always coming in last, bringing up the past. No one owes you anything. I think you need a shotgun blast, a kick in the ass....

All my life, I have fought the effects of botched brain chemistry, the side-effects of medication, and the roadblocks of bad habits. And chronic pain, just for good measure. I object to brain chemistry being called mental illness, but there it is. And I sure as hell object to brain chemistry being called a bad habit. More than anything else, however, I object to the idea that when I argue for a clear vision of the human being that I am -- so that I might surrender to change -- I must be accused of arguing for my limitations.

************************

That line of stars? That’s a stand-in for the look on my face and sound of my voice, both wordless with frustration. I have come so far. I have unravelled and repaired so much. I want to tackle and take down this last “little glitch,” I do. I do not want to be bound by my limitations. They are there, yes, both my neurology and my biology are anything but standard, but it is workable. Here’s the thing. For the last several days, as I have returned to write and rewrite, think and rethink and rethink, whether I played Shinedown’s song or not, this is the only line I’ve heard:

When you gonna wake up and F I G H T ...
When you gonna wake up and F I G H T ...
When you gonna wake up and F I G H T ...
for yourself.

I’m just not sure which direction to throw the punch.

* Break the Bipolar Cycle: A Day-by-Day Guide to Living with Bipolar Disorder, by Elizabeth Brondolo, Ph.D., and Xavier Amador, Ph.D. (p 36)

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

White, straight, married. Educated.

2010-06-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

These are my credentials. And I use them.

Education allows me to speak with authority, and it’s not because of the letters after my name. I can think and speak with authority because that’s what an education teaches you to do. That I was married for longer than anyone I know who isn’t over 70 also gives me cred. Clearly I know how to make things work. It doesn’t hurt that I’m still young enough for my words to count with more than just the over-the-hill set. That I am straight is something beyond my control, but I know such things are the norm, the assumption, and I use that to my advantage. Why? Because I can. For the eight years before my husband and I married, while we cohabited, we used the gender neutral term partner, as in “my partner and I just picked out a kitten.” It was purposeful. I wanted to make people think. I wanted them to have to consider who I was, who I might be; to ask, rather than assume, if they wanted to know personal information. It should go without saying, then, that a good many of our friends are gay, lesbian, or transgender, but I would have done it regardless. I use my straight status as a personal protest against bigotry. Because I can. In the HIV-ravaged ‘80s and ‘90s, that was particularly important.

White. That is the best credential of them all. It is also the best weapon; nobody sees it coming. With the current unrest -- and outrageous rhetoric -- about immigrants, my white skin lets me say... damn near anything. In the ‘90s, when my friend Jose, a Nicaraguan immigrant with a strong accent, was treated poorly by clerks or wait staff, I had something to say about it. Subtle, but perfectly clear. If someone wanted to take me on, I had my Uncle Joe, born and raised in Puerto Rica. Two of my cousins have brown skin so dark they could pass for black. Of course all of my family members are citizens under the law, so such cred only goes so far. But now I get to pull out the big guns. Grace and William Bertocchini, my great grandparents, both Italian immigrants.

What no one but the family knows, and then probably only those of us who have seen the birth certificate, is that one of our forebearers is listed as “white” and the other is listed as “dark.” Which is code for "too brown to pass but not yet negro..."? Who knows. Clearly that’s a standard that was - and now is no longer. Except that it is. Just not on birth certificates. It is enough that my blond-haired, blue-eyed grandfather was considered white while his wife, with dark hair, eyes, and skin, was not; but there’s more. They came to the US without papers, at least Grandma did. Grandpa died before the opportunity to learn his citizen status ever came up. Grandma was brought here by two church ladies as an indentured servant. They paid her passage. Once in the New World, she owed them labor. Honestly, I am not making this up. That means she came here to do work that other Americans would not do or were unwilling to do for the pay offered. It also meant that Grandma earned her freedom the old fashioned way: by the sweat of her brow; purchasing it with years of her life in service. And now here am I, the first great grandchild and proud bearer of academic letters after my name. Imagine.

Those of you who are regular readers of My Zero BDay Blog know that I am all about full disclosure in the service of speaking what usually goes unspoken. Many cannot speak their truth - and the range of reasons is staggering - but I can speak, and so I do. Like I said, credentials will get you everywhere. I have spoken here about my days caring for my friend Jose as he died from complications due to AIDS and I have spoken here about the fact that I am bipolar. Today, I am here to speak about domestic violence.

That was kind of a long lead in, wasn’t it?

The fact is, I was preparing a very different blog for today, and yesterday, and over the weekend. And I will post it, just soon as it stops eating me alive. It’ll happen. In the mean time, I’m posting someone else’s blog. Sort of. You’ll have the link because her blog is beautiful and courageous. What I have for you here is...

My response to “Breaking the Silence” written by H.C. PALMQUIST

Dear H.C. PALMQUIST, I'm going to write my response before I scroll through your reader comments, because if I read that first, the images in my head will submerge and be lost to consciousness. I have no doubt you know what I mean.

Like you, I met my man at twenty and, like you, I was just grateful to have someone love me. David, I’m going to call him David, was a dozen years older and therefore, in my eyes, wiser. The subtle game of emotional push pull not only sucked me in, but so activated my childhood wounds that I quickly fell into the role of very unbalanced girl to his very patient man; he was my savior.

It was easy to isolate me. My family relationships weren’t healthy and I had no friends to speak of, except a best friend who was busy playing mother superior to my recalcitrant child. Moreover, I was so damaged that I could not honor my own response to feeling isolated and controlled, except to struggle with my partner, which was perfect because feeling crazy was my set point. My childhood, which included sexual abuse in conjunction with being raised by a Jekyll and Hyde drunk, had made me an expert at walking barefoot on broken glass and making it look like I was dancing Swan Lake. I was tailor made for an abusive man.

At the start, David’s abuse was so subtle that I didn’t see how I was being groomed to be the crazy (and battered) woman to his wise Zen master persona. Before I left, however, he had beaten and controlled me in all the obvious ways; I wasn’t clueless. Like you, I responded by taking us to counseling where I was told that flowers weren’t a real apology for a beating, but I wasn’t buying it. We got engaged. I was so invested in things being fine - being fixable - I didn’t see, until long after I left him, that David was both a drunk and a sexually violent man. For abused women the truth submerges, and all that remains is the glassy surface of a perfect lake. That’s all we want.

Here’s the lucky part, just before my 23rd birthday, I walked away from David and into the arms of the man who married me, a man whom my family adores to this day, even though we’ve been divorced for years. In retrospect, my husband was both very good to me and also a “healthier” more socially acceptable version of abuse, but that’s another story, and I’m not here to cast blame.

My wake up call with David, I kid you not, was a soap opera. In a single scene I saw that, no matter how angry they get, a man and a woman simply do not resort to the kind of behavior I was being subjected to. I still shake my head when I remember that.

Here’s the real corker. Upon meeting my fiance, my abusive alcoholic mother immediately saw through him. Of course she did; takes one to know one. But I could not hear her words. Her own behavior had so damaged me that I could not see the love she also had for me, nor believe her concerns for my welfare, which were genuine. Whatever doubts I was harboring at that early point in my relationship with David, I dismissed them in that moment. Like you said to Jason: The problem with a handbook [or a warning from family] is that every woman thinks it won’t happen to her.

Thank you for everything you have shared in this blog. I am SO proud of you. Not only did you pull yourself out of an insidious and lengthy cycle of abuse, but you took the risk of telling your story in a public forum. There is no greater courage.

I also have a special, personal, thank you to say. Reading this entry in your blog brought me the clarity I needed to finish my own. I’ve been struggling for far too long with the latest piece, and now I know why. Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.

Dina
aka Sins of the Eldest Daughter

PS - I have decided to post my response to your blog (with a link to you) as preamble to the post I am currently writing. I hope you don’t mind. Truly. Like you, I have taken my struggle to a public forum as a way of encouraging understanding for and conversation about difficult topics. Again, my thanks for your courage and your willingness to speak out. May your new life open to you with the sweet beauty of a budding flower.

Dear readers of My Zero BDay Blog. The next time I post, it will be the blog I just referred to - Another Loose Cannon Gone Bipolar - and I hope to have finished it before the end of the week. Until then, may all your hours bring you the surprise of possibility and all your days end with the satisfaction of having acted on those new possibilities. ~Dina

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

The Shape of My Heart

2010-06-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Sweet Readers,

You have no idea how happy I am to be saying those words again. Well, perhaps you do. I have received tweets and blips and emails saying that you love reading MyZeroBDayBlog, that you miss me, that you wonder what the shaman was thinking when he told me not to blog, that perhaps I’d feel better if I just wrote again. Indeed I will. And I’m pretty sure that the happy dance I did over blogging again could be seen from space. I am THAT happy to be here.

Having said that, I present to you the blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago, a blog I had wished to post for Memorial Day but couldn’t. How did this happen when I was officially not blogging? Well, the shaman decided that writing was good and so I was given the green light to blog, just as long as I emailed them to him instead of posting. As a compromise, it seemed good enough. Better than not writing at all, right?

The Shape of My Heart (lyrics)
Thursday 20 May 2010

Tonight I found myself thinking of #MilitaryMonday, the day when we post onto Twitter our support of those serving in the military. I always celebrate #MilitaryMonday by posting music on BLIP.fm. It goes to my Twitter page where I have many followers who serve or are in support of those who serve our country. Earlier on Blip, I was playing Sting’s “The Shape of My Heart,” sending it out to DJs in thanks for supporting me. My support of those in uniform and the support I have received as a writer not writing, those two conflated. Because the hour grows late, I will skip any attempt at explanation for that. Just let me say that the lyrics of “The Shape of My Heart” say much of what is in my heart tonight about the shape of why I write. I don’t write for money or respect or even readers, though I love knowing that you are out there. No, I write as a meditation. I write “to find the answer, the sacred geometry of chance, the hidden law of a probable outcome... [as] a dance.” That my words bring pleasure to you, that they may also bring you a measure of relief or recognition, this is a privilege I enjoy, but it’s not why I write.

If I said that I write because I love you, dear sweet readers, you might wonder at my sincerity and the shaman might think that something is wrong, imagining that I have lost myself in the need to be validated by others. But that’s not the shape of my heart.

Back to #MilitaryMonday. The reason I post music for our troops isn’t just that I married a Marine; in three tours, he saw no combat, though he had the once-in-lifetime experience of evacuating refuges from VietNam. It isn’t just that my father was in Special Forces for three grueling tours of duty; I didn’t grow up with him, though he later shared with me the details he could share with no one else. And it’s not because I have a friend serving in Afghanistan, though he defuses bombs for a living and has just been deployed to the China sea where North Korea is flexing its muscles. No, I post music for #MilitaryMonday because I know death. I have known, since the age of three, the gut-wrenching loss that comes with the death of a loved one and I know the loss of loved ones who die long before their time. I know the loss of someone who dies in your arms. I know the feeling of loss compounded by loss compounded by loss compounded by loss; AIDS brought that to me. But mostly I post music for our troops because I know the exhaustion of fighting what others consider to be a hopeless, perhaps even useless, cause.

Those of you who are regular readers know my memoir of love and death, The Movie Lovers, which describes my friendship with and eventual care-taking of Jose Sequeira as he died from complications of AIDS. But despite this experience, despite many losses in my life, I do not know the loss that the man I now call my best friend has known. Before the time of AIDS, he and a friend from his hey day in the gay bars started listing their tricks, a game of one-upmanship. For those not in the know, a gay man’s “tricks” aren’t johns but one-night stands, the mecca of gay sex before the blight of HIV. My friend and his friend stopped when they got to a hundred, no point in gilding the lily, right? After my friend lost his partner to AIDS -- which is how we met, in a grief group for survivors -- he and his friend did a reprise list, this time of the men they knew who had died. Again they chose to quit when the number reached one hundred. Through this friend, I now know the experience of death that is of so great a proportion that all sense of perspective is lost.

This is why I play music for our men and women in uniform. This is why I write. The shape of my heart demands it.

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

"Zero": My Zero BDay Blog Resumes

2010-06-06T22:36:00.000-07:00

Thursday, 3 June 2010

Tonight I’m courting the perfection of nihilism, which is just another way of saying that I’m playing Smashing Pumpkins as I write this, exercising the right of the artist to draw, paint, write, sing, or dance what it is we see in front of our eyes, what we see inside our own heads, in our dreams, in our nightmares, in yours. As artists we come here to engage with the fullness of life and the emptiness, the hope and the despair, the heaven on earth, the hell on earth, and the confusion in between. It’s what we do. Most of you know that I’m on a spiritual trajectory, working with a shaman. I have both spiritually focused friends and friends who are drug addicts. I have friends in the full range between. I have said it to each of them, I am saying it to you, and perhaps I should consider saying it to the shaman as well, my raison d’etre:

I came here for the full meal deal; nirvana or nihilism, it’s all a human state of mind. My job as an artist is to reflect that.

Last time I was here, dear sweet readers, I was taking my leave of you. I had been ordered by the shaman to cease and desist my blogging, and while it was painful choice, I did sign on with this man to create healing and change in my life, so cease I did. Those who have been reading this blog or my Twitter stream (@SinsoftheEldest) know that I have likened my work with the shaman to boot camp. Well, today I broke ranks.

Intoxicated with the madness
I’m in love with my sadness

I’m pretty sure that’s what the shaman believes of me, hence Smashing Pumpkins.

I don’t have permission to post this blog. What I do have is an understanding: if I choose to do those things I’ve been directed not to do, then I’m on my own. Now before y’all go and react to that (and first of all, thank you; I love that you are fierce about my well-being), let me tell you this. I am on leave. Normally one does not get leave from boot camp, military or shamanic, but my work with the shaman has been a struggle as of late, a tug of war. His solution: a month’s leave. And so, suddenly, here I am. On my own. Doing what has been forbidden.

Wanna go for a ride?

I know that readers come to Sins of the Eldest Daughter to taste of the forbidden fruit, whatever’s on the menu, and y’all have been steady in both your support of me and in your desire that I kick the shaman to the curb and write already. But I am committed to the work I began, the spiritual work, and I have no intention of quitting. I also know that in the shaman’s eyes, I am recalcitrant, a truant student who is absent even when I am present; a victim addicted to the drama of my own story. And maybe I am. My student/teacher agreement with this man is that I will submit to his will as a way of learning how I unwittingly submit to everyone’s will, whether I intend to or not. It is a tough lesson and one I very much need to learn.

The problem? I am also committed to my way of doing things, by which I mean I am committed to being the person I came into this world to be, something apparently only I can see for this attitude has been the bane of my life. I regularly find myself student to a master -- whether counselor, professor, or coach -- a role I sign on for in order to learn what I do not know, but while I desire the new skill I’m learning and need that skill to get to where I want to go, I also need to be who I am. Struggle ensues.

I did not win the struggle with my shaman today. Like any child, which is what I am in this situation, I do not in fact want to win. Winning out over a parent when one is still undeveloped is to find oneself without guidance or safety. There is no greater fear for a child. The struggle for control, self control, by which I mean control over one’s being and one’s choices, is too often a losing battle because it is waged upon the wrong field. This battle is not with others but with oneself, one’s habits, indulgences, vices, and it is a battle I have lost my whole life. I struggle with others; I lose myself.

This is what the shaman is trying to teach me, and he is teaching me as a drill sergeant teaches a Marine. This method has one rule. Do as you are told or be punished. As behavior modification goes, this is very effective. Just not with me. And I am not afraid to say so, punishment or no.

To the shaman, my arguments are those of one who is willful, one who cannot get where she wants to go, who is at loggerheads with life, and yet who continues to expect to do things as she has always done them. As he rightly points out, this is the definition of insanity. For my part, I know I am arguing for understanding. I also know it is not possible, this understanding, until I have proven that I can do both what is expected of me and what I wish to do. Scratch that. I do not wish to do anything. I am driven to do it, as a fish is driven upstream to the waters of its birth. There is no arguing with this instinct. And so I have argued with the shaman.

I never let on that I was on a sinking ship.
I never let on....

I grew up having to hide everything that was important to me. I grew up not being allowed to feel pain or fear or need. I survived by refusing to yield. On the outside, I submitted. The inside was another matter.

The problem, as the shaman sees it, is that I remain steadfast in my refusal to yield. I can submit, which is to say I bow to that which is unavoidable, giving in to the authority, power, or desires of another -- I have done this my whole life -- but I cannot yield. This behavior has its roots in an abusive childhood. I have overcome the childhood, the anger, the belief that I can be hurt but cannot cause hurt, and my need to regard my mother -- or anyone -- as toxic or bad or wrong. Such pejorative points of view do not serve me. But being stubborn has.

Today I told the shaman I knew the expected answers to his questions and that I would acquiesce because that is our agreement, but whenever he named the problem with my thinking, I had to disagree. Let me put this another way. Throughout childhood, I was told by my mother I had brown eyes. One day I looked into the mirror and discovered that my eyes are green. They are green like the forest: dark, with a smoldering brown at the center. Today, all I heard the shaman telling me was that my green eyes are brown. Struggle ensued. Then, mid argument, he let go.

There can be no tug of war if you are the only one holding the rope.

Immediately, I felt a rush of freedom. It wasn’t the I win! brand of freedom. It was just freedom.

Now some of you may be thinking that the shaman has given up, that he is deserting or punishing me. And some of you may be chuckling as you imagine him giving me just enough rope with which to hang myself (and undoubtedly, you are parents), but that’s not what I see. From my perspective, I have been given the gift of control. All of my relationships have been dominant/submissive relationships, with me in the submissive role (Jose being the exception, the only exception, so is it any wonder I wrote a book about our friendship?). I have struggled, I have cried, I have blamed and raged, and even attempted suicide, all in pursuit of having control over my life.

Let me say that again. All of my relationships have been dominant/submissive, with me in the submissive role. Today, when the shaman announced that for the period of a month I would be on my own recognizance, I received something I have never experienced. A person in a position of dominance over me chose not to dominate.

My experience of freedom today was not the freedom of the self-possessed -- I have a long way to go to be the sole person in charge of myself -- but it IS freedom. For the first time, my chosen jailer swung open the door. I did not have to charge the gate nor chew off my own leg to escape the trap. So, what do I do? I come here, the land of the forbidden. I pull up Smashing Pumpkins on YouTube and play “Zero.” Zero for MyZeroBDayBlog resumed. Zero for these lyrics:

My reflection, dirty mirror. There’s no connection to myself.

Those are the shaman’s worst expectations of how this could turn out for me, I know it. He undoubtedly has a set of best expectations as well, but those aren’t so clear. So I am playing Zero and writing my blog and singing, “Save your prayers for when we’re really gonna need ‘em.” I am not a saint. I am not a sinner. I’m someone who came here for the full meal deal. And I’m not settling for anything less.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Final Straw

2010-05-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

Every artist knows that a song isn’t a song until somebody sings it and a story isn’t a book until somebody reads it.

Dear sweet readers, by enjoying and responding to both my daily blogs and the first five chapters of The Movie Lovers, you have given me three and a half glorious months of heaven, a kind of virtual publication, which for me has been an experience not to be missed. Thank you, all, from the center of my writer’s heart.

I have pursued what I believed was the right path for me with purpose and ferocious desire and it led me here to you, but now it leads me away. I’ve reached a crossroads and find I must turn where I had planned to go straight. As for tonight’s blog title and song, both from Snow Patrol’s Final Straw album, that’s what I drew a week ago. I just didn’t know it. But the shaman did, and we all know what happens with the last straw.

I have reached a point where there aren’t enough indulgences or vices or fuck-ups; no matter what I do to endure or escape or decorate my life, I come back to the same unsatisfied place. When the Buddha met this realization, he renounced everything. I am no Buddha and I am not renouncing everything, just everything I have known and desired up to this point in my life. It is enough.

Here is the last of what I will be posting from The Movie Lovers, at least for the time being. It’s a paragraph from the middle of Chapter 6, One Easy Thing. I know some of you read it at my last posting, but I repeat it again with purpose.

In college I earned money as an art model, dropping my fuzzy yellow bathrobe (a favorite cast-off of my auntie’s) to pose on a dais. One artist, a quiet man in his forties who worked in pen and ink on toothy white paper, invited me to the opening of his show. “I drew you as Caesar,” he said. It wasn't the androgynous cast of my face that occasioned his portrait. It was what he saw behind my face, behind my every nude pose. “It's the purpose in your gaze,” he said, “your ferocious will.”

Being outwardly naked and inwardly ferocious is no longer sufficient for my life, not even metaphorically, not even if I wanted it to be. I signed on to learn from a shaman because I have things to do that, no matter how ferocious I am, I cannot accomplish with what I know now, with what I do now, with what I believe now. God knows if I could, I certainly would.

So I leave you with Smashing Pumpkins, because I know that everyone of you knows how this feels:

The world is a vampire, sent to drain.
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames.
And what do I get for my pain?
Betrayed desires, a piece of the game.
. . . .
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.
. . . .
Now I’m naked
nothing but an animal.
But can you fake it
for just one more show?
And what do you want?
I want change.
And what have you got
when you feel the same?

I came to the shaman for change, and then like all seekers, I told him I wanted to be able to act the same. I didn’t actually say this - I’m no idiot - but I might as well have; my actions said it.

Bottom line? I have been told to cease and desist my online nakedness. I will still be writing but I will not be posting, not for the foreseeable future. So this is goodbye.... I sincerely hope that you, my dear sweet readers, have experienced some sense of having been seen and known as you have read my story and Jose’s, for while the words may have been about me and my departed friend, they are intended to reach out to you, all of you, who may be feeling secretly exposed and yet unknown and wishing to be heard.

You can still find me on Twitter @SinsoftheEldest
and also on BLIP.fm @4Sins.
If I start up MyZeroBDayBlog again, y’all will be the first to know.

Peace out,
Dina

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

On the Borderline

2010-04-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

Remember when I said that I had entered the shamanic version of basic training? Boot camp for the woo-woo set, I called it. Well today I came close to losing everything I’ve worked for. Actually my fuck up was Tuesday, during the nighttime hours of the Scorpio full moon, and it was a doozy. Today I confessed my wrong doing to the shaman and took my punishment like a good soldier. It was painful but not permanent. Afterward, the shaman said that he had decided he wouldn’t drop me. I did not know I’d done something for which I could be dismissed.

The shock of the true nature of my offense was much worse than the pain of my punishment.

I am a natural iconoclast, it’s true. Daily you can find me kicking down barriers, dancing around the rules, and flirting with disaster, but I’m a good kid. I am. I’m the four-point honors student, not the fuck up. I have friends who are fuck-ups. I love them. But as for me? While I love a good mess and I love my messed up friends and I will make messes with them if they want me to, I have never had an intractable fuck-up on my record. Ever. It’s not my style. I was shocked when I heard the shaman’s words. I have never done anything that would cause me to get kicked out of a place where I wanted to stay. I have never made a wrong so intractable or inalterable that I could not backtrack, apologize, make amends.

Today I learned what my father meant when he said that kindness could often be the best punishment. My father didn’t raise me, but in addition to a second family, he did raise and care for many messed up foster kids. I’ll never forget when he told me that showing kindness when the swift kick of punishment was expected often brought contrite tears to an otherwise unreachable child. Today I was surprised to realize: I am that child.

There has been no writing nor any editing of The Movie Lovers this week. Shamanic work has been all. Plus many, many fuck-ups. . . . So, with apologies to my enthusiastic readers, here’s tonight’s teaser from Chapter 6.
One Easy Thing:

* * *

In college I earned money as an art model, dropping my fuzzy yellow bathrobe (a favorite cast-off of my auntie’s) to pose on a dais. One artist, a quiet man in his forties who worked in pen and ink on toothy white paper, invited me to the opening of his show. “I drew you as Caesar,” he said. It wasn't the androgynous cast of my face that occasioned his portrait. It was what he saw behind my face, behind my every nude pose. “It's the purpose in your gaze,” he said, “your ferocious will.”

* * *

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Turn Right Over to the TV Page

2010-04-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

The TV page is where you, my dear sweet readers, will be getting your entertainment tonight. Me? I am off to bed, and in the interest of sparing the social media world of just one little dose of TMI, I will skip the details.

Let’s just say that some of you can imagine I had way too much fun, which I did, at least in theory, and some of you can imagine that I am rather ill at the moment, which I most definitely am. And then there are those who know that I do Secret Santa Shaman Stuff. Give a kewpie doll to everyone in group three! Why? Well, I may or may not have done any and all of the detail-free things I mentioned, but the Secret Santa Shaman Stuff is what really has me wishing for a case of the flu. Yes, you heard me right, and no not the ACTUAL flu, just something like it. Something I can say I have and everyone will say, Oh... I’m sorry. That must be awful. I hope you’re feeling better soon.

See? Everyone feels for you when you have the flu.

That’s what I have, a thirty-six-hour Secret Shamanic Case of the Shits and no sleep and a need to be babied. Just a little bit.

Luckily for me the Universe has my back. My cat, Zoe, has put me on the well-kitten fitness program, which demands lots of cute kitten lounging, posing, and purring directly at the center of my lap so I must sit still, watch TV, and recuperate. Night all. Sweet dreams.

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Powerlines: The Transformation Landscape of Nowhere

2010-04-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

Dear sweet readers, I have just lived the week from hell. I know, I say that rather often lately, but this time even the Tarot agreed, tagging me with The Tower card. The Tower is one of the highest cards for healing and transformation. Awesome, right? Well maybe, sorta. As anyone who has been broken will tell you, the road to healing is one that leads straight through the landscape of nowhere. Luckily I find dust, scrub brush, and power lines oddly soothing, at least to look at anyhow. Good thing, because my journey though the energetic version of this landscape is akin to wandering in circles without food or water under the tutelage of the desert sun, buzzards optional. To everyone in the real world, of course, it just looks like I’m malingering. Some lessons come hard. But I am possessed of an iron will (thank you, Mother) and I cut my eye teeth on Marines, so it takes a hell of a lot to make me quit. Mostly what that means is that I learn things the hard way. Also, it means that the Universe is very happy to grind my nose into the dust until I cry uncle. But I digress.

Eight days ago, which is the last time I was here, I knew that everything I had to say was rooted in an old life, a life that had fallen away somewhere between an energetic shift at the hands of my shaman and the final posting of Chapter 5, Longtime Survivor. Well... I foolishly thought that a day or two of contemplation would be all I needed before continuing along my merry way.

The Universe said, Hah! It is to laugh!

This state of affairs, my pathetic state, has made my shaman very happy. He says I’m making good progress. He says don’t push, in fact, don’t do anything, which is funny because I couldn’t if I wanted to. It’s not that I couldn’t write this past week, not that I couldn’t edit, and not that I couldn’t talk, though I neither answered my phone nor posted much on social media; no, this past week I’ve been unable to do anything. Anything at all. Each morning I woke up in more pain than the day before. And before y’all begin wondering, let me tell you, physical pain, emotional pain, psychic pain, spiritual pain, at a certain level, they’re all the same damn pain. No matter, I tried to push my way through it, which only made the pain worse but I am nothing if not persistent. So four days ago the shaman grounded me. I am now playing a game of Shaman Says. If it’s not shaman sanctioned, I don’t get to do it. Think boot camp, only for the woo-woo set. And before y’all start assuming this is for pussies, let me say this. I will marry and financially support the first Marine to undertake and survive this kind of spiritual odyssey. I was married to a Marine, people, a three-tour Marine, and he made it his personal mission to toughen me up; that Marine has nothing on this shaman.

So, to the point of this post. As I said a week ago, I had planned to review and input the edits I’d previously made to Chapter 6, just as soon as I found them.... Well, I found them alright. This morning. Here’s the best part. I looked everywhere. I mean I looked everywhere and then some. I turned the place inside out. I could have printed the chapter again and started from scratch, but what I wanted was what I’d already done, dammit. Chapter 6 is a tome. Last I looked, it was in need of some serious from-the-ground-up editing, and I had done that....!

The irony is not lost me that this chapter, Chapter 6, is entitled One Easy Thing. ~sigh~ For my part, I am working diligently to remember that going through old shit, which is what the shaman says is happening right now, that going through old shit is just that and not some divine comeuppance. I am not convinced. Again the irony: One Easy Thing is about a time in my life when not a single damn thing was easy. Not one.

Cut back to the week from hell. For the first four days, I was a dog with my tail between my legs. Then Friday night I partied on BLIP.fm with a couple of friends. I partied till nearly 5 Saturday morning and it was Hey-la-my-mojo’s-back! kind of night. Along with my lost mojo came a lot of penis jokes, penises being one of the things I am currently forbidden, and I don’t remember what brought it up but I wasn’t kidding about having a penis pen, and YES, it did just appear by my car. Three times. So I finally gave it a home. But I digress. It’s what I do best these days. Before I move on, however, I have to say that there are actually bands named Butch Penis and Crazy Penis. Hand to God. It was too much to resist. But that was Friday night.

Saturday I slept till three in the afternoon, ten hours, and I awoke in such a state of pain and exhaustion that my body could not roll over in bed and my mind could not turn away from a depression the likes of which I have not experienced since I was a very sick puppy on a dozen medications and suicide watch. I could do nothing. I called the shaman and did as he said. I sat in the sun. I breathed. I worked at remembering that going through old shit is just that and not some divine comeuppance, which is how it’s felt, no matter what my happy shaman says.

I keep falling off the planet and Saturday was by far the worst, but I had a pile of laundry that’s been building up. Doing laundry is not hard. I did laundry. It took three months. Or maybe it was three months of piled up laundry I was doing, honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference. It’s still not done, but I no longer feel as though I am living in quicksand, and this morning I got out of bed and to the computer without pain. I sat at my computer where I sit every day, looked to the left, for what reason I have no idea, and there on the floor covered by a single sheet of paper was One Easy Thing. Edits and all. I went right to it, picking it up as if I knew what was there all along. And who knows, maybe I did.

Tomorrow I go back to plan A: edit Chapter 6 - maybe with my penis pen, who knows - and keep moving forward. The chapter looks in pretty rough shape, so it may not make its appearance tomorrow, but I will: me and my old luggage, trudging past the flea bag motels and the power lines.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

1 a.m.

2010-04-19T02:20:00.000-07:00

Dear sweet readers, tonight’s title song, “You’re My Star” by the Stereophonics, is one I include here as a thank you to a reader on Blip.fm. He sends it to me when I head for my writer’s cave. I’ve become quite fond of it.

It’s one in the morning and I have nothing to say. Usually this is prime writing time for me, but I have reached a transition point. It’s time to sit and ponder: what has gone before, what can come after. I’m rather happy to say that I’ve had no time to truly ponder, which isn’t usual, but the Universe has seen fit to send friends to drag me out into the world, a place I seldom go except as a way to get to the gym, the shaman, the doctor. But for two days I have enjoyed wonderful food, wine, and real conversation, my favorite form of recreation. Tomorrow evening I get to do it again, and I get to talk about my work, too. It still astounds me that this should happen.

At this point I have no ready-for-prime-time thoughts to share here, not even any not-ready-for-prime-time thoughts. Everything I could say is a rooted in an old life, and that life fell away somewhere between Thursday’s shamanic work and yesterday’s blog post. I felt it go. I’m not sure what that means. I do know that I have allowed my life to spin out of balance or, wait, maybe the out of balance part is just the old life falling away. It is still too early to tell. This is why I’m happy that I’ve been out in the world, for had I been home, I would have spun my wheels trying to sort out what is not ready to be sorted and I would have stranded myself in mud.

So for now, know that I plan to review and input the edits I made to the next chapter, just as soon as I find them. My life, and my apartment, looks like a hurricane hit it; change is messy, very messy.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

2010-04-18T06:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I looked up and realized that 1994 was gone, that it is, quite literally, history. That was a realization I thought I might never have. I have carried the bodies so far. I did not anticipate ever setting them down. Today I sat in the living room of a new friend and heard him say, “When our class, 1994, when our class left...” and I did the math. He was speaking of his high school class. I finished grad school in 1990. I knew, even before I answered his questions about The Movie Lovers and this blog, that I was speaking to the generation I’ve been waiting for. It is so fitting that this should be the class of ’94, and I know Jose would appreciate that as much as I do, being a writer of fiction and a man of consummate timing.

I used to do so much counting. Days since Jose died. Years. 1994 became my Year Zero. Everything from that moment separated into two categories. Before Jose’s death. After Jose’s death. People began to ask “Isn’t she done yet?” They didn’t mean the book. “It’s been a year. Isn’t she done yet?” Grief doesn’t have a time line, but today when I heard that year and I did the math, today I realized that I no longer needed to say “It’s been a decade and a half since Jose died.” I no longer wanted to measure my life from that fateful point; I no longer had to.

Tonight I let the bodies hit the floor.

LONGTIME SURVIVOR (HIV University), part 3/end

It was May of ‘94, early in the month I think, and it was hot, too hot: too hot to stand in the sun, too hot to move without sweating, and too hot for an already nauseated Jose to ride comfortably in the back seat of an old car without air-conditioning. Somehow I feel I should have known that last one, but we can only see as far as our experience allows.

Jose’s parents and I had brought him home from the hospital in the heat of the afternoon, and I parked my Rambler next to the back stoop because it was the quickest way into the apartment. But Jose was disoriented that day and uncharacteristically stubborn and he simply, for no reason we could discern, refused to go. A debate broke out in Spanish. Standing in the heat of the sun, what I noticed was the side of the building. Its gray paint had begun to blister but not yet to peel. A moment’s observation. In the time between that day and Jose’s death I would have many hours to study this tabula rasa, hours spent in five and ten minute increments sitting on these steps or atop the retaining wall, Frank chain smoking to the filter, me picking at the brown grass and dirt, both of us breathing the overheated smell of garbage as we worked to save the man we loved, something which we both knew couldn’t be done. I ended the debate between Jose and his parents by taking Jose firmly by the arm, walking him around to the front of the building, up the front steps, over to his front stoop, up those steps, and into his stuffy south-facing apartment. A distance of maybe forty or fifty feet, the trip took ten minutes and left us bathed in sweat. At each set of stairs, each step, I instructed Jose how to walk. Which foot to lift. When.

I got him inside. I got him comfortable. Then he began to vomit. And vomit and vomit and vomit. The jarring ride in my old car, the unseasonable heat, the long walk to his apartment, the toxoplasmosis, the drugs for the toxo, all these had conspired against him. His mother grabbed a bucket. His father brought a cool cloth. I held Jose close to my body, held the bucket close to his face, stroked his hair, and told him, “It’s all right sweetie it’s all right sweetie it’s all right.”

When I got home that night my left eye burned with the splash of vomit that was no longer there and my head burned, as with a fever, with the words Jose had spoken so often: all body fluids are dangerous. Even urine might have blood invisible to the eye. Certainly bile could have blood from an inflamed esophagus or stomach. Later -- days? weeks? -- I called an ICU nurse who told me it’s standard procedure to wear goggles when intubating a patient; when a person coughs or chokes, internal fluids get sprayed out along with the exhaled air.

“How careful is too careful?”

“It only takes once,” she said. It’s what we once heard in sex education classes about the risk of getting pregnant.

That night I returned home to my husband after holding my best friend in my arms while he puked, holding him not because he was drunk or heartbroken but because he was too sick to know what was happening to him; home to my husband and the dark of our back deck, home to make small talk and then to quietly to say, I’ve been exposed; home to make love -- the first time in a long while -- with no questions and no protection.

Jose died a month later.

*****************

The year Jose died, Philadelphia made a star of Tom Hanks and the title song remains an anthem to the devastation of that opportunistic collection of diseases we call AIDS. Philadelphia, as I mentioned, also bears the dubious distinction of being the first feature-length film to deal explicitly with AIDS since Longtime Companion came out in 1990. But in the summer of ‘89, the year in which the story of Longtime Companion draws to a close, I didn’t know anyone who had died of AIDS. I hardly knew anyone who had died. I wasn’t yet thirty. Thirty was when AIDS was still considered news and Congress passed the Ryan White CARE Act and a small but certain segment of the nation was saying, It’s about time. Thirty was when Frank and Jose were becoming fast friends with Cliff and me, when the four of us saw Maya Angelou speak and heard the resonance of truth in her voice when she said, “Those who have gone before you have already paid your way.” Thirty was when Jose called weekly to announce which movie he and I just had to see. We were crazy about the movies and crazy about each other; seemed we were best friends in an instant, though that can’t be true, but it was. Thirty was the start of Jose’s tenure as my best friend, the very last best friend I’ll ever have, because to be best friends you have to be young in a way that I’ll never be.

*****************

It took me a year after Jose’s death before I worked up the courage to have myself tested, a year of alarms sounding in nightmares, a year of immobilizing grief. At some point during that year I finally realized, for certain and forever, that the world isn’t safe. It never was, of course, and I can’t tell you if the moment at which that became clear to me was when the bile hit my eye, when the best friend I’ve ever had stopped breathing, or if I simply found myself having a lot of those moments and finally stopped counting them, stopped tracking, stopped backtracking, and began letting it all wash over me like waves on the beach. What I can tell you is this: what they say about ignorance is sometimes true.

Wondering whether I’d been infected was frightening, but I needn’t have worried. At the turn of this new century, the CDC Surveillance Report on HIV and AIDS cases in the US had three things to say about how a person is exposed: Sex, drugs, and blood. It’s a chant that plays like the B-side to the boomer generation’s mantra: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll! All the rest, all that we imagine about how we may become exposed to HIV, is simply variations on this theme, variations on a theme of fear. I’m okay. But I’ve been watching my little corner of the Postmortem Bar, and it’s filling up like a last minute barbecue on the first real day of summer, filling up with my close friends and family friends, casual friends, co-workers, acquaintances. The three people walking on the beach at the end of Longtime Companion are very much alive. How they get to be at that bar as their dead friends and lovers reappear, I don’t know, but miracles like that are just one of the things I love about the movies; Jose, too.

Here, then, is the miracle in my movie: at the Postmortem Bar I’ll get to see Carl, the English department secretary from the university where I was a graduate teaching assistant, and I’ll catch up with a beloved linguistics professor there, too; I’ll see Jim, the eldest son of my grandmother’s best friend, like an uncle to me, the man whose mother still believes, as the Seventh Day Adventist church wills it, that her son’s death was caused by the sin of his lifestyle; I’ll see Gryphon, the clothing designer with the sterling bone pierced through his nose, who hand-constructed one-of-a-kind, antique-fabric kimonos for my auntie’s boutique; I’ll meet the young men, fifteen or twenty of them, whose pictures were pasted in a handmade shadow box that sat atop a red silk-draped altar in Jose’s room and to which he had gestured and said simply, “My friends who have died”; I’ll see Randy, my younger sister’s best friend and roommate, so dear to the family that our aunt referred to him as “one of the kids,” the man who would later arrive at my doorstep with books and pamphlets, tissues and kind words, and answers to questions I didn’t even know I had; I’ll see Garrett, who was always “going to beat this thing” with yoga, special diets, positive thinking, and who looked so bad after Jose died that Frank locked eyes with me and said, “Garrett’ll be next”; I’ll see Aaron, who died a year after Jose, and he’ll hug me and tell me he was always one to feel that he had to take care of those he loved, that he was dying and didn’t have the energy to take care of one more person and that’s why he sent me away, tears, astonishment, and all; I’ll finally get to meet Michael, the partner of my closest friend, Jim, the love of his life; I’ll meet the brothers and partners dear to all the men and women I met in my AIDS grief group; I’ll most likely see the neighbor from across the street and he’ll see his live-in “nephew,” whose empty hospital bed was all I ever knew of him; I’ll see the acquaintances, co-workers, and neighbors who haven’t died yet but will; I’ll see Jose; and I’ll see all the friends I held in my mind’s eye when Jose entered the hospital for the last time and I called my father in tears to tell him something that, even then as a man of fifty-odd years, he could not imagine: “In ten years, half my friends will be dead.”

It’s been nine years so far, and that circle of friends is gone. All dead.

Or shell shocked.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Butterfly

2010-04-17T03:46:00.000-07:00

Queer. In Spanish it is mariposa, butterfly, and just like the word queer, the word mariposa was originally an epithet. So many words have been rehabbed since 1994. So many things are possible that were inconceivable a decade and a half ago. So let me make a little confession. It’s after 3 AM and tonight’s installment was ready before midnight but I got caught up in, well, the past. I thought I was circling the drain on how to introduce this piece, but the fact is I could have posted it without any lead-in. Something occurred earlier today that had me back in 1994, when Jose died, when we lived in a world that reviled gay men and believed that God was raining down hellfire and damnation on the sodomites who brought us AIDS. That’s the world I wrote HIV University for, but that chapter, in fact all of The Movie Lovers, couldn’t be read until now, when everything is different. Because in 1994 - hell, in 2004 - I was queer. Not gay. Strange. What I wanted to say about the time of AIDS, how I wanted to say it, and who I wanted to say it to just wasn’t possible. Oh I said it, but everyone who was to read it had a new argument for why I could not, should not, would not. And so I waited.

Today I looked up and realized that 1994 was gone, that it is, quite literally, history. But when I set out to celebrate that tiny but entirely awesome fact, I got pushed back in time, back to a time when I had a voice and I sang it out loud but no one could hear it. So today, as I tried to imagine how to lead into my diatribe against ignorance, aka HIV University, I lost traction. I forgot that I have you, dear sweet readers, who Tweet me and Blip me and Face Book every day to say that you enjoy being here, or as one of you said last night, “Yes, U are right.. tonight’s blog was just a taste, not much more than a tease of what's to come.. fine, i'll hold my breath..” ~laughs~ So although I have circled the drain without inspiration for more hours than I care to say, I am here, now, confessing, because I was not about wimp out and leave a blog tease again.

Queer. Look it up in the dictionary. All it means is to deviate from the usual or expected; what we call normal is just that: the usual, the expected. But by now, I’m sure we’re all clear that while I may be just a girl who likes boys, I am entirely queer.

LONGTIME SURVIVOR (HIV University), part 2

Today less than half my friends are gay. Not long ago most of my friends were gay, but there’s been some attrition. That’s where my education began. My AIDS education. For most of mainstream America it’s fair to say that AIDS education didn’t get rolling until the 1994 release of Philadelphia; until that time, Longtime Companion was the only feature length film to deal explicitly with the subject. In 1990, the same year it hit movie theaters nationwide, Longtime Companion aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting and that’s where I saw it, right here in my living room with my husband, Cliff, my best friend, Jose, and his partner, Frank. The movie closes on an empty beach on Fire Island, the same beach that is packed belly-to-back with laughing, tanning, cruising gay men at the beginning of the story; at the end it lays as abandoned as the rumpled sheet of an unmade bed. A woman and two men walk across the sand, just the three, talking about those who’ve died, and as the credits roll a place called the Postmortem Bar appears, repopulating the scene with lost companions. Afterward, this ending was all we could talk about, and odd as it sounds, I think I believed our conversation focused on this scene because we found it to be so moving, not because we thought any of us would ever end up there. At least, that’s not what I thought. Not then.

When the story line in Longtime Companion ends, 1989, I was still half a year away from meeting Jose. I was maybe a year away from his long distance phone call: “I’m gay.” Next sentence: "I have AIDS." Not HIV positive; AIDS. Gay I'd already figured and I was touched that he wanted to make an official announcement, but AIDS . . . that knocked the breath out of me.

When the story line in Longtime Companion ends, I was still two years away from Jose sitting on my couch, ashen, silently contemplating his death. I was over four years away from the time when Frank would ask me if I thought Jose’s memory was deteriorating and I would lie -- automatically, just the way I would answer Jose when he asked the same question for the third time in less than five minutes -- automatically and without question. By then, Jose had contracted CMV, cytomegalovirus, among other things. It had lodged in his brain and was slowly closing things down, a kind of Alzheimer’s of the boardwalk at the end of the season.

Longtime Companion opens on a sunny spring morning in 1981 to a tableau of beautiful buff men reading a New York Times article, the first about the new “gay cancer.” Immediately each of these men calls his best friend, his lover, his partner. The straight, single woman in the movie calls her best friend: “Did you read the paper this morning?” At the time, Kaposi’s sarcoma was so rare only doctors had heard of it. And while we all pretty much know what getting Kaposi’s means now, back in 1981, summer on a Fire Island beach was still carefree and, well, gay.

In the summer of 1981 I had just finished my first year at community college. I don’t remember reading about a “gay cancer.” That fall, the CDC declared the disease that would come to be known as AIDS to be an epidemic, but I didn’t hear about it. I suppose it’s human nature to need a particular individual, a face, someone to be drawn into our orbit or we into his, before we can care about an entire group of individuals. At that time there were no openly gay men in my circle of friends.

Just two years later, in the spring 1983, the men in Longtime Companion have moved on from reading about a cancer that an unlucky few might develop to talking about a disease called AIDS. They know it’s sexually transmitted. They alternate between worrying and reassuring themselves about past behavior. They practice safe sex. In the spring of ‘83, while I was finishing my associate’s degree, I accepted a dinner invitation from the man who would become my husband. We had sex on the first date. We had sex before we had dinner. Actually, we had sex instead of having dinner: glorious, mind-numbing, lean-against-each-other-and-gaze-in-the-mirror-afterward-in-total-awe sex. We didn’t practice safe sex. We came of age in the ‘70s; we’d never heard of safe sex. Fact is, we probably couldn’t have practiced safe sex even if we’d had a mind to, since the first “safer sex” guidelines weren’t even proposed until 1983, right around the time Cliff and I hooked up. Had those guidelines been available our sexual histories should have inclined us to exercise caution, but again we probably wouldn’t have. This isn’t just because, like most heterosexuals, all we worried about was birth control (and the occasional heartbreak) nor because we hadn’t heard about AIDS, though we hadn’t, but because even if we had heard about AIDS, we would also have heard that AIDS was a gay disease, a virus with a bent preference.

But sitting here in a brand new century with all the available facts, I can tell you that 1983 was also the year researchers documented that the so-called gay disease could be transmitted from males to females. Still, facts notwithstanding, AIDS was and seemingly always will be a gay disease to Americans. It’s not that people didn’t care. They just didn’t see how this affected them. But those with HIV knew. And they cared.

From Jose I learned how dangerous any infection is for a person with AIDS, and so when one of my cats accidentally scratched him, I went for disinfectant. I reached to swab the cut with a cotton ball, but Jose drew back and told me to let Frank do it. “It’s only a scratch,” I said, “I’ll be careful.” I felt silly saying even that. The dot of blood was no bigger than an aspirin, but Jose who was never forceful, insisted. Let Frank do it; Frank was HIV-positive. Facts were facts. Jose always very careful around his uninfected friends and family, and he took the education of others on the subject of HIV/AIDS as a personal responsibility.

Once Frank had bandaged the scratch and I’d put away the disinfectant and cotton balls, Jose turned to Cliff and said, “You know Cat Scratch Fever?”

Cliff grinned. He’s a metal head from way back. “Yeah. It’s a Ted Nugent song.”

Jose was not smiling. “No, the disease. It’s a disease.”

Cliff, Frank, me, we all chimed in: “It is not!” Jose’s trickster sense of humor was legendary and so the three of us stood grinning at him like a colony of Cheshire cats. We were not to be fooled.

“It is very dangerous,” Jose assured us solemnly.

With Jose there were two things that never ceased to amaze me: the silly “facts” that would pop out of his mouth like gumballs, for example, Cat Scratch Fever, which could not possibly be true, and the not so funny fact that half the time he was not joking; some of these things could, and eventually would, kill him. As it turns out, “cat-scratch disease,” or CSD, is quite common not only in Central American countries like Nicaragua, where Jose was born and raised, but all over the world, including the United States. In Texas, where Frank was raised, the number of confirmed cases of CSD the year Jose died was higher than over a half-dozen other animal-borne diseases combined, including Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Even so, CSD is primarily a child’s disease in the US. It is not considered serious, and treatment is normally considered unnecessary. For the immune compromised, however, cat-scratch disease can cause neuropathy, pneumonia, problems in the central nervous system, and encephalitis. It can be fatal.

In Longtime Companion, 1984 is marked by one of the men discovering he has a six-inch lesion on his brain: toxoplasmosis. He smiles brightly at his partner. “This explains why I’ve been throwing up.”

I remember 1984 for Cliff’s promotion from boyfriend to live-in partner and for two fabulous forays into urbane culture. The first involved spending spring in Manhattan. Not only did this trip mean three glorious months of theater, art, and music while I studied American culture, but at the advanced age of twenty-four it also marked my first time in a big city for more than just a day trip, my first time away from home without a family member, and my first (well, only) time being mistaken for a boy. It was in the Village, naturally. Back home in Portland, my newfound acculturation ushered me straight to the performing arts center where I gained part-time employment and my second entree into urbane culture: theater, opera, music, dance, and as often as not, the chance to chat the night away with a gay co-worker. Although these co-workers were out to most of the younger crew, a few of the older women on staff were still trying to arrange dates between their nieces and some of these “nice young men.” One of these nice young men and I became friends. We’ve been friends for over twenty years now and the last time I saw him he introduced me to a friend of his who referred to him as her ”best gay friend” -- as opposed to her best friend, who was someone else. It’s worth saying that this distinction struck me as far stranger than my being mistaken for a boy.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this friendship would mark a turning point in my life. As a child I had been aware of those “nice young men” in the family circle the way most people in American families are aware, vaguely: inevitably there was some male friend of the family, some uncle or nephew or cousin, who straightened the table settings, who helped repaint the kitchen or paper the dinning room, who was so thoughtful; someone who could cook. I was a teenager when my mother demonstrated through the unspoken bond of friendship that all men are created equal, no matter what gets whispered about them. The generation after mine, the HIV generation, grew up with out gay men as just another stripe in the rainbow of humanity. For my generation the education was different. For some, the learning began with the shock of a phone call: “I’m gay.” Others, like me, had a gradual accumulation of experiences: school boys who hung around for protection as much as friendship, college boys who risked their not-yet-ready-for-prime-time coming out stories, young men who shared confidences about what went on behind their closet door. So, my friendship with one of these nice young men didn’t mark the first time someone came out to me, nor was he my first “best gay friend.” No, as I look back, what I see is that this friendship was the turning point in my friendship with gay men. I was twenty-four when this man and I became friends and my life began to become more densely populated by gay men; by thirty-four I was knee-deep in bodies. Truth is, I don’t know that I’d be writing any of this were it not for the fact that my circle of friends became very gay and then, too rapidly thereafter, very dead.

When I graduated from college in the spring of ‘85, I considered myself educated, socially conscious, knowledgeable about what was important in the world; yet looking back, I’m none too pleased to see my younger self more self-involved than aware. Oh, I thought I was aware. I was aware of apartheid in South Africa. I was aware of the starving in Ethiopia and on my twenty-fifth birthday took donations in lieu of gifts. I was aware that the man in the White House was making lousy decisions. (Those who can’t recall who was in the White House probably aren’t movie buffs.) I was aware of chlamydia and herpes and that venereal diseases were now called STDs. But mostly I was aware of my pride at having successfully put myself through college and my joy over the diamond class ring my auntie had purchased to mark the occasion. What did I know?

Several of the peripheral characters in Longtime Companion have died by 1985, and I want to say that most heterosexuals had no idea what was happening at this point, not unless we knew someone who was gay, but that’s not quite the case. A national poll taken in 1985 revealed that 72 percent of Americans favored mandatory testing for HIV, over 50 percent wanted to quarantine those with the virus, and 15 percent of us would have preferred the infected be identified by tattoo. When I see statistics like these I wonder how I managed to be so oblivious. Then I remember the collective gasp and the slammed door: Rock Hudson had AIDS, and thirteen-year-old HIV-infected Ryan White wanted to attend public school. I remember the reactions of my family members and non-gay friends, too. I remember the fear, the judgment: parents, some of them doctors, fearful that their child might try to become blood brothers with the infected; friends who, though they could not tell me to my face, would not allow their children to eat off my plates nor drink from my clean glasses because Frank and Jose used them as well. I remember everyone was afraid. By 1985, the talk in Longtime Companion has shifted from AIDS to opportunistic infections and drugs: which drug will work best under each circumstance, each individual combination of infections, each version of the compromised life. One of the central characters, Sean, has developed CMV. It eats your brain. After Sean’s memorial, the next scene is his partner’s memorial. Those in the know reel off the latest research: HIV is in saliva. Lovers are afraid to kiss, much less make love. Friends surreptitiously scrub their hands after hugging a hospital-bound buddy.

When Jose died, at the age of thirty, AIDS was the leading killer of American men aged 25 to 44. All men. City boys and country boys. Homo and hetero and bi. The United States is the only country in which HIV originated and flourished in a marginalized and stigmatized population that was, for the most part, out of sight and easy to put out of mind. Because AIDS began here in the gay community, gay and HIV have became fused in our minds. While it should go without saying that gay does not equal HIV positive and HIV positive does not equal gay, HIV/AIDS continues to be considered a predominantly gay disease in the US, statistics to the contrary be damned.

For things we do not wish to look at, we have closets.

In the early days of the AIDS epidemic (an experience for those on the front lines that had the feel of a holocaust, this word with its meaning rooted in burnt offering and sacrifice; not an epidemic, which simply implies prevalence, something widely or commonly occurring), The New York Times refused to acknowledge gay relationships. The Times’ obituary column referred to surviving partners as “longtime companions” of the deceased. “Widows,” Frank called them, his mouth smiling but his eyes serious. It is from this denial of acknowledgment that Longtime Companion takes its name.

I know from my own experience how hard it is to say what others do not, cannot, or will not acknowledge. For the remainder of the 20th Century, whenever I talked about Jose and the circle of friends I had when he was alive, I usually got one of two responses. One felt like no response in particular inasmuch as I was talking to those who found my lifestyle or life history to be unremarkable, maybe even similar to their own. The other was some combination of shock, awe, and/or multiple questions about why all my girlfriends were men. Being around men whose hearts lead them to partner with other men has never struck me as strange. Love is love, as far as I can tell, attraction is attraction; we go where it leads. What strikes me as strange is that so many of my friends and so many of my friends’ partners died before any of us reached middle age. What strikes me as strange is the fear and anger that splashed back at me when I talked about gay men or AIDS in what appeared to be an educated perhaps even liberal-minded group of individuals. And, finally, what strikes me as strange, strange that it is still here, strange that it is still so strong, is the denial that still surrounds both homosexuality and HIV/AIDS (oh, how I wish these two were not so often bound together in the same sentence). My father, for example, a man whom I consider to be clear-eyed and open-minded, a man who makes his home in places where land and sky are wide and spacious, says to me from his couch one day, “I don’t know any gay people.” I tell him, “Yes you do, Dad.”

Knowingly or unknowingly, what we deny we sacrifice.

AIDS was declared an epidemic just as the ‘80s opened, but most of us didn’t know much about it until 1988 when, seven years after declaring an epidemic, the Surgeon General mailed out 107 million copies of a small pamphlet entitled Understanding AIDS. “Finally,” Cliff and I said, and we laid the pamphlet out on the coffee table. We hoped that our friends, family, visitors would read, discuss, and disseminate this vital information. But instead of encouraging communication, the effect was like holding up a condom in church: whenever anyone came over, silence ringed the coffee table. Now when I look back, what I find most telling is not the silence, nor that Cliff and I felt the need to show solidarity with those who’d been openly maligned in the media and on the street for “infecting innocent victims,” but that the two of us didn’t talk about getting tested. If we had any doubts, we each did the math and kept it to ourselves.

The spring of 1986, I found myself working my first full-time job since college graduation and that spring is acid-etched on my mind’s eye because it arrived with an AIDS joke, the first -- and last -- told to me in anticipation that I would enjoy it: “What’s meaner? A junkyard dog with AIDS or the man who bit him?” My curt response cost me an office friendship. I was naive enough not to understand why, but so be it. AIDS is not a joke. AIDS is not a movie. There are no house lights coming up at the end. There is no walking home. Every gay man who has died because of AIDS was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s uncle, nephew, cousin, maybe even someone’s father. In the decades since AIDS was declared an epidemic and safe sex replaced birth control as the number one concern of the sexually active, an entire generation of children has been born, grown, and come to sexual maturity under the Damocles’ sword of HIV. The HIV generation was raised to fear sex in a way that even the Church never conceived of. They never got the freedom that the generation who came of age in the ‘70s had, we with our rallying cry of “If it feels good do it,” but they’d like to; over half the new HIV infections among those under the age of 25 is from sexual contact, heterosexual contact. Abstinence remains as useful a safe sex plan for this generation as it was a birth control plan for mine.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Teaser

2010-04-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

Today in my shamanic work I experienced a life altering shift. That was early this afternoon. The rest of the afternoon and evening I spent at the hospital with my nephew. He’s out of danger and should be fine. I, however, am too tired to post anything more than teaser of tomorrow’s blog. Goodnight all. See you tomorrow.

LONGTIME SURVIVOR (HIV University) teaser

Today less than half my friends are gay. Not long ago most of my friends were gay, but there’s been some attrition. That’s where my education began. My AIDS education. For most of mainstream America it’s fair to say that AIDS education didn’t get rolling until the 1994 release of Philadelphia; until that time, Longtime Companion was the only feature length film to deal explicitly with the subject. In 1990, the same year it hit movie theaters nationwide, Longtime Companion aired on public television and that’s where I saw it, right here in my Portland, Oregon, living room with my husband, Cliff, my best friend, Jose, and his partner, Frank. The movie closes on an empty beach on Fire Island, the same beach that is packed belly-to-back with laughing, tanning, cruising gay men at the beginning of the story; at the end it lays as abandoned as the rumpled sheet of an unmade bed. A woman and two men walk across the sand, just the three, talking about those who’ve died, and as the credits roll, a place called the Post Mortem Bar appears, repopulating the scene with lost companions. Afterward, this ending was all we could talk about, and odd as it sounds, I think I believed our conversation focused on this scene because we found it to be so moving, not because we thought any of us would ever end up there. At least, that’s not what I thought. Not then.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

HIV University

2010-04-15T01:47:00.000-07:00

Tonight we start Chapter 5, Longtime Survivor, and I admit that I’m anxious. I don’t know how this chapter will work as a serial. It’s not episodic like the others, and for all I know I’ll decide to post ten pages of it tomorrow, as there seems no dividing it before that part of the story has gathered strength. The original title of this chapter was HIV University. When Jose died in 1994, I lived in a world that reviled gay men and believed that God was raining down hellfire and damnation on the sodomites who brought us this dread disease. It wasn’t just the crazy TV evangelists who believed this, most of the country did. So I set about writing HIV University. It’s a very different world today, and I’ve no doubt that those of you born after the mid-80s don’t know what I’m talking about. Which is a very good thing.

LONGTIME SURVIVOR (HIV University) part 1

In 1995 I had myself tested for HIV. Long before that, I knew to use a condom, to stay away from intravenous needles that weren’t fresh from the package, and to treat blood as a biohazard. The day before I received my test results, I wrote a letter to one of my sisters. I didn’t grow up with this sister, nor anyone in my father’s family, but less than two months after my best friend’s death I found myself on the Oregon coast with the whole family: dad, step mom, both sisters, their husbands and kids. I arrived at the family vacation awash in the grief with no name; neither orphan nor widow; the crush of living in close quarters, the push to have fun with people I loved but did not know, these slammed up hard: grief buggering family fun. My sisters, so young, neither within spitting distance of thirty -- or twenty-five, for that matter -- death had never touched them. I could not speak my feelings to them. Hell, I could barely contain those feelings, but I tried, mentally packing my nitroglycerin grief between layers of cotton batting and ice. It wasn’t long before my husband drove me up the coastline while I screamed.

Before going to the coast, I had called a friend. “How can I do this? How do I talk about Jose? How can I not talk about him? They’re Seventh Day Adventists. I know how the church feels about homosexuality.” When this friend told me to bear witness, I found myself remembering the beauty of Jose dying:

eyes closed, chin
lifted, cheekbones carved and wood-brown
translucent as petals, lips rounded, reaching
for water, eager
almost singing.

At the coast each night, I lay awake in the shared room where my husband, my father, and my stepmother lay sleeping. Each night I slipped out of bed, got my pictures of Jose, and fell asleep with them spread around me. I didn’t know what I was doing. This was a time in my life when my favorite picture was of my best friend just days before he died; with light caressing his cheekbones, illuminating his brow, his eyes rolled heavenward; here Jose is retablo, altar, ecstatic saint. Here he is Christ reclining before God in the final hour, terrific to behold, and I was possessed of a grief that had me sharing an eight by ten of this picture with all comers, exclaiming its beauty. But not at the coast.

Nearly a year later, as I waited for my HIV results, I composed that letter to my sister. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing to do what I hadn’t known how to do at the coast: to find, or maybe to create, a space for the emotions I felt and also to create a place for my friends, my dead and dying friends, whom the world so often condemned or simply denied. That was a part of the world I could not understand, but I think on some level I understood that, at least as represented by my father and my sisters, this world did care about me and so perhaps it could care about those for whom I bore witness. To my sister I wrote, “Another friend has died.” I had been practicing that phrase. From the time Jose died, I practiced saying it to those whose lives remained unmarked by AIDS.

To my sister, a nurse, I wrote that my friend Frank had only nine T cells left. This sister worked on a small reservation in rural Idaho at the time, so I wasn’t sure how much she knew about T cells. The T cell is a principal type of white blood cell. Its job is to identify foreign antigens in the body and to activate the other immune cells. Each human body starts out with approximately 1000 to 1500 T cells. When the body gets down to 500 it's in danger of contracting thrush, a fungal disease that erupts in a white, yeasty coating on the throat and tongue; usually accompanied by fever and diarrhea. At 200 T cells the body is in danger of contracting pneumocystis pneumonia, a standard indicator of AIDS. I told my sister that a count of 200 T cells is what the CDC -- the Centers for Disease Control -- defines as AIDS, that when you have HIV and your T cell count dips below 200, you’re considered to have AIDS whether or not any opportunistic diseases are present. I hoped these numbers could convey to her just how scary it was to know that Frank was down to nine, a tiny committee of nine to fight off all infections. I didn’t tell her that we had named them. Silly names like Tabitha and Endora and Jose Jr.

As I wrote, I found myself remembering when Jose had only two T cells. He gave me the news over the phone, pronouncing his fate with the astonishment of a scholarship boy discovering he’d gotten into an Ivy League college.

“You have two?” I said. “What are you going to do with them?” It was the same voice that had popped out of me when Jose learned that one of the opportunistic infections was causing his brain to shrink. After that, whenever Jose forgot something I’d say, “Well what do you expect, Jose, your brain is shrinking,” and we’d laugh. Longtime survivors say attitude is everything. People who give up simply die.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Angel

2010-04-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

Tonight we finish Chapter 4 of The Movie Lovers. Last night, as I read over the end of this chapter, I couldn’t help but remark on how it felt like the end of the book as well, and in a way I suppose it is. The closing chapter of the book is an elegy, a kind of lullaby farewell to my friend, but before the elegy and after Chapter 4, the story takes on a different tone. I won’t tell you more. I’m just thinking out loud here. And tomorrow comes extra early for me, so without further comment, here is...

AT THE MOVIES, part5/end

It's spring in Northwest, Portland’s only truly urban residential neighborhood, the trees are leafing out, it’s cool and sunny, and Jose and I have just been to Cinema 21. We didn’t sit in the balcony this time because Jose's legs can't manage the stairs, two flights. We don't discuss this, just as we never discussed sitting in the balcony our first time together at this theater; we just headed there. This time we head to the double swinging doors on the main level. I get Jose settled in our seats -- not too close for him, not too far away for me -- before I come back out to grab us some popcorn and cinnamon tea. I don't recall which movie we saw; a movie lover isn't necessarily someone who remembers the title of every movie. Oftentimes a movie lover can't even describe the plot. It’s the meaning that is important, the force of feeling conveyed that defines a movie. When Jose and I leave the theater through the twilight of the lobby, he is wearing his black and white hound’s-tooth checked scarf, the soft one I now wear as he did, tossed across the neck and back over each shoulder. The sunlight is blinding. It darkens our sight and we have to stop to let our eyes adjust. When we start up again, it is Jose's walk that I notice: measured, each footstep something I can both feel and not feel, just like Jose's feet, numb and cautious with neuropathy, guessing at where the sidewalk is.

We walk from Twenty-first Avenue to Kornblatt's on Twenty-third, and as we walk Jose is talking about his novel. I feel spring in his words and in the two of us strolling to lunch after a matinee. Jose might have been wearing that canvas field jacket, the one he wore constantly and had nearly worn out, the one that had me saying to Frank as we sorted through the clothing, "What jacket? I don't remember that jacket." I can't say for sure. All I remember is the walk, paced as I would later pace myself with my infirm grandmother, walking hand in hand through the Chicago neighborhood of her youth. At Kornblatt's we order cheaply. Surrounded by the corned beef smells and big city sounds of this New York style deli, we talk over the whole movie, the previews of the next movies, and the movies we want to see after those. We eat slowly -- Jose is the first friend since my best friend in second grade who eats as slowly as I do -- and we make the grumpy, tip-scrounging waiter bring us napkins and more napkins for our matzo ball soup and our half sandwiches of pastrami and our rice pudding dessert. When we're full, we thread our way through the crowded tables and I hold open the heavy glass door as we exit to the sidewalk.

As for what happens next, I can’t say for certain. Some scenes play over and over in your mind while others become blank tape. Suddenly, Jose isn't beside me. I turn: he's standing four steps back, stock still. Somehow I know this is because he will fall if he tries to move. I can see that he can't see me; he stares straight into my face, not registering a thing. I walk back and take him by the arm. I help him to sit in a plastic chair by a white metal table on the sidewalk. I command him -- Stay right there -- like I'm speaking to a small child -- Stay, don't move. Then I run. Past the new leaves and the spring smell and the sun on everything, I run to my car though I can't recall where I parked it. I don't recall driving back. I don't recall whether my car was big or small or whether it was easy or hard for Jose to get into it. I only remember the beauty of the white car parked at the curb, between me and Jose. No place to park, so I stop in the middle of the street, right next to this pristine Chevy Bel Air with picnic table fins carved into its flanks like horizontal wings. 1959. A very good year for cars. I have one eye on Jose; one eye is admiring the Bel Air; one eye is on the rearview mirror and the traffic, always thick and ornery on Twenty-third Avenue; and one eye, my internal eye, is clamped shut and I can't pry it open. Did Jose make his own way to the curb, slipping through the narrow passage between the Bel Air and the car parked behind it? Did I open the passenger door for him? I don't know. I know the Bel Air has smooth clean shiny white paint. Like new. I know the day is bright and suddenly hot, but I am cold. I know, as if it were my own body, the stillness of my friend, the quietness of his legs as he tries to rise and walk over to me. I know the distance, the long distance, of six feet.

We didn't talk about what happened. . . after hours of sitting side by side in the dark watching the same flashing figures, sighing the same sighs, sharing tissues, laughing; I think we laughed on the way home. I dropped Jose off, drove home, parked the car, and I don’t recall what I did after that. Cry? Smile at my husband and say, "Jose gave me a little scare today"? It doesn't matter because all I could see, what I still see, is my friend looking like any beautiful man at a sidewalk café on a fashionable city street: he is in white -- white shirt, white pants, black boots, no scarf or jacket; he sits in a white halo of light at a table in the sun -- and I am stuck in a too large and empty vehicle with an insistent line of traffic pressing in behind me while I sit with my foot on the brake; and my eyes on Jose.

Massive Attack - Teardrop
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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Sacred Blood

2010-04-13T01:22:00.000-07:00

Dear sweet readers, not long ago I told you that Jose doesn’t just die in The Movie Lovers, he dies a lot, and that you’d best get used to it. Well, he doesn’t die tonight, not in the movies he doesn’t, and tonight we’re watching movies.

AT THE MOVIES, part 4

While I was in college, I lived in Northwest Portland and was within walking distance of Cinema 21. I met Jose years later, when I was in grad school and living on the opposite side of town, but that theater remained my favorite. Whenever Jose and I went to Cinema 21, we always sat in the front row of the balcony. Anyone who went there with me sat in the front row of the balcony. It’s my place; some of those seats bear twenty years’ imprint of my bony ass. I saw Eraser Head there. I sat through Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God and through Tarkovsky’s Solaris. All through my twenties I returned yearly to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock and Days of Heaven, to see Siddhartha showing with Steppenwolf, Nosferatu with Freaks. Cinema 21 is where my junior high French class, mouths agape, watched Cousin Cousine. It's where Jose took me and his mom to see Twist, a movie about the first coupleless dance and the downfall of Western civilization as our parents knew it.

Frank, Jose, and Cliff and I saw Tongues Untied at Cinema 21. A documentary, it was originally scheduled to show on OPB, Oregon Public Broadcasting, which had also aired Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City the previous year to much acclaim, but this time, OPB balked. Tongues Untied was just too much: too much about being gay, too much about being black, and most subversive of all, about being out. Inside the dark of the theater, the four of us, we felt the drum-beat-poetry, rap, snap-queen power of the movie enter our blood and dance us out into the heat of the summer evening. We celebrated Tongues Untied by going out for dessert and listening to Frank’s coming out story, beginning to end, about a skinny white kid touring with a black Southern Baptist choir. Jose never did tell his story, not really. Neither he nor I shared any ritual telling of the past. We focused on the present, and we paid attention to the past the way we paid attention to illness and the encroachment of death: we went to the movies.

In addition to the film buff's classic favorites, Jose loved the movies of South American directors. Our favorite was Santa Sangre -- Sacred Blood -- about a family of circus performers. It is a Dadaist film. Completely surreal. Completely real. Broken hearted and enraged, a man pins his wife to the red and white knife-thrower's wheel, slices her arms off at the shoulder as their son stands by helpless. The boy kills his father and spends his life being his mother's arms. When she needs to do her hair, it is the boy now who stands behind her, and slipping his own long arms into the red sleeves of her dressing gown, he raises first the comb and then the mirror to her black hair. When she wishes to play the piano, it is his arms in her white silk blouse sleeves and his manicured fingertips moving up and down the keyboard. By the end of the story, the son is a grown man desperate to escape the mother who has murdered his every girlfriend. He tries to escape but cannot: his mother is already dead. Her memory lives on in a life-size rag doll that her son slips into, his arms drawing a hug around her from behind as he becomes his own mother. In the end, it is his girlfriend, the only girlfriend his mother has not killed, who quietly leads the man to raise his arms in surrender to the police. Her name is Alma. Jose whispers to me, "Alma means 'soul' in Spanish." Under my breath I say it, "alma."

* * *

Jose wanted to die at home. Like many men of his generation dealing with AIDS in the ‘80s and ’90s, Jose assembled a circle of friends to help. First we helped him with eating. Then bathing. Then other bodily functions. A “good” night meant that Jose would get up four (or five or six) times to pee, to eat, or just to talk. With a little assistance he could use the plastic urinal, but because of the dementia, he sometimes got his signals crossed and couldn’t say he had to pee until it was right now. Or too late. After the urinal came the Depends, first at night, then around the clock, just in case. Jose could still move under his own power with the help of a walker and he usually had enough warning before a bowel movement to get out of bed and head for the toilet. But, like the Depends, we were there in case.

It was my first night to stay with Jose after he began using Depends. I was asleep on the couch when he called out. He had to go, he said, Now. So, I scramble to get him out of bed and down the hallway but halfway to the bathroom he can’t walk. Such complications happen without warning for those with dementia, and Jose and I find ourselves in a slow-motion race, he with diminished strength trying to push the walker while I pull him along with words of encouragement. When we get to the bathroom, my suspicions are confirmed. Jose’s legs couldn’t move because his bowels were. Standing over the toilet now, Jose grips the walker while I remove the Depends, and then it’s shit everywhere. Loose. Copious. Like applesauce, a quart of it. By the time I get the diaper off but before I can reach for a cloth, Jose’s bowels have begun again and it’s shit hitting the toilet seat and shit on the walker, shit dripping down his bare legs, shit on the legs of the walker and shit dripping down onto his white socks and the floor. Shit. New fathers squeamish about diaper duty got nothing on this. Eventually I think to grab Jose around the middle, the way the nurse showed me, and I slowly lower him to the raised toilet seat. I let him finish while I dispose of the diaper.

As I wrote this scene I tried making it comical and in a movie perhaps it could be, but it just wasn’t. Corey Baker, who helped hundreds of men in Jose’s situation, had arrived earlier that evening to walk me through the protocol. First I must ask permission: Is it okay for me to care for you in this way, Jose, to change you and clean you? Yes. Then I asked Jose if it was okay for Corey to walk me through it. Yes. Once I’d been shown the ropes and Jose was finally asleep, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. With Tinactin. A cream for athlete’s foot. This is how I learned that my methodical calm masks anxiety, but I was never so anxious that I forgot the cardinal rule: always glove up, clean everything with bleach.

When Jose is finished, I have gloves, and with latex between his skin and mine, I help him to stand. He braces against the walker, bare from the waist, and says he is too weak to shower. Shaking, shit covered, determined, he hunches there like an old homeless man leaning into the storm. The linen closet is to the left of the commode. I reach in. There is one washcloth, white with pale peach stripes; one. Not even a towel. So I pick up the ten square inches of terry cloth, I put my arms around my friend, press my cheek against his and whisper the only words that can be of any use: “I love you.”

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Blues for an Indian Summer

2010-04-12T02:03:00.000-07:00

Here’s what I learned today:
Sometimes love itself is worth more than the thoughts that others create about it.

I know that in my friendship with Jose I knew this truth in a way that I never questioned and I thought I would always know it, but today when I heard those words I was stopped short by the realization that I had, indeed, forgotten. Worse, I had turned my back on this truth. I haven’t quite recovered from that, and so I have little, no, really nothing to say about tonight’s installment, but I can say this. The shamanic work I have been engaged in these past six months has intensified to the point that I am mostly speechless about it. No one could believe what I am in the middle of. I hardly believe it myself. It was the same in my last six months with Jose. Just as I could never have predicted that I would be here, I could never have predicted what my journey with Jose would turn out to be. I just went, consequences and whatever the rest of the world thought be damned.

Here is part three of Chapter 4 of The Movie Lovers.

AT THE MOVIES, part 3

It was an Indian summer the first time Cliff and I stayed the weekend with Frank and Jose and our first afternoon was sun-soaked, luxuriously hot, languorous, and a little sad; not in spite of the sunshine but because of it. A short drive from their Mount Hood home that day brought the four of us to a wild spot where bushes grew thick with purple berries, huckleberries by the handful. Fanning out under the slanted sun, we began picking and very quickly found our containers full. We pooled our harvests and went out for a second time and a third. We picked till Jose was saying to Frank, for the second or third time, “I need to rest.” Even at this early stage in our friendship, when he was still healthy enough to pick wild berries and to weed his hillside garden, Jose was easily fatigued. It didn't help matters that Jose's brown skin broadcasted health and vitality; no one could believe he was sick. But I heard him, quietly almost to himself, saying "I need to rest," and I became his champion. Because of this, Jose told me things he couldn't tell his lover, things he couldn't tell his mother, things he needed to say but which, in his attempt at telling them, came out as nonsense to other people's ears. "It's the dementia," they would later say, and as he lay dying they said, "He's out of it. He doesn't know what he's saying," but I knew it was only that they couldn't hear him. So I became his voice. And I found that I was calmed by the sound of it rising from my throat, forming clear, delicately enunciated words on my lips.

The week that I learned we were no longer caring for a terminally ill man -- "He's dying," the hospice nurse said, as if her words could make us believe it -- was the week Jose quit speaking. That night, as water rushed and pots banged in the next room where Jose’s mother vigorously washed her sorrow along with the dishes, I sat by my barely conscious friend and listened to what would turn out to be his last words. Moonlight streamed in the south-facing window as Jose’s arms and legs threshed the bed, his heels moving back and forth as if he were going somewhere, and his breath coming out in little pants. Suddenly he cried out, "Why is it so hard?" I just stood there, not knowing what to say. More agitated, louder, though not loud enough to draw anyone’s attention but mine, he cried out again, "Why is it so hard?!" All I could do was say "What's hard, baby?" All he could do was repeat the question. So I promised to help him figure it out, and he quit talking. To me. To anyone.

In the year after Jose’s death, Cliff and I visited Garrett in the hospital room from which he would go directly into hospice. He lay sprawled over and around white sheets, skin bare, his thinning hair pushed into a kewpie curl, and as I regarded this man now become a doll, body wasted away but calves still chorus-girl beautiful, I recalled that Indian summer afternoon in the foothills of Mount Hood: how we all smelled of sun and summer dust when we returned to the house; how Jose, wearing white, looked the least marked by our hip-wading through the brambles; how Garrett, arriving late, immediately baked the marble-sized berries into a pie; and how we gobbled that pie as soon as it was cool, finishing it off for breakfast the next morning. I remembered that after Jose had rested and Cliff had finished a cigarette we crossed to the south side of the road where the bushes grew thick and close, the trees towered broad and high, and the land dipped and rose suddenly like the sea. We waded deeper into the forest, separated now, tossing the breadcrumbs of our voices.

Hello?
Where are you?
This way.
Where?
Here, Jose. We're over here.

Picture this: The Movie House, one of my favorite places on the planet. On the street, a black and white awning marks an understated entrance into what was once a women’s social club. Inside and to the right popcorn is sold at a tiny counter. To the left a broad staircase mounts to a spacious double parlor: wicker furniture, chessboards, high-class magazines, back-to-back twin fireplaces; deluxe; arrive early, sip tea, be seen. Just off the parlor, and not much bigger, is a theater whose bright orange seats are as hard on the backside as the color is on the eyes, but next Cinema 21 The Movie House is my favorite film venue. It is the first theater where I got to make out with a boy I had a crush on, the first theater where I enjoyed soft chewy Milk Duds, having previously had only the jaw breaking variety at lesser cinemas, and the first theater where I learned to enjoy the pleasure of my own company.

The first movie I went to alone was just out of high school. La Cage Aux Folles is a French flick about a gay couple confronted with the necessity of appearing "normal" in front of the parents of their son's fiancée; her father is deputy minister of morality, or some such, and the boy's father owns a nightclub in which the boy's other father performs in sequins, heels, and the not unoccasional feather boa. I'd been a fan of French cinema since my ninth grade French teacher took the entire class to see Cousin Cousine, so while I was teenager raised in the suburbs, subtitles didn't seem odd. A foreign culture didn't seem odd. No, what seemed odd was going alone. To a girl raised in the suburbs, going alone to a movie meant that you were somehow deficient, not sociable, not desirable, not . . . right. A loner. I'd tried to get my boyfriend to go. Tried to get my best friend to go. Tried my sister who had seemed so happy to have me living at home again. Even tried my mother. No, No, No, and No. I resisted going alone, I did, but in the end a movie was what I wanted. So I turned up the AM radio and steered my '64 Bel Air wagon toward what felt like the wilds of downtown.

I don't recall why I chose La Cage Aux Folles or why I decided to see it at The Movie House, only that I had the best time I'd ever had at the movies. I went again. This time I took my boyfriend and two more friends: all boys, all straight, and all stone-faced throughout the movie. Not even a grin. As for me, when la femme of the couple, the drag queen chanteuse, la maman, the swish-and-dish flaming better half shrieked in horror or surprise or delight, I shrieked; the man was a scream. (Yes, Nathan Lane and Robin Williams are funny in the later American remake, but I say it is impossible to be as funny as the French.) My friends didn’t seem to get the joke. I tried translating the quirky French humor, thinking that the French sensibility might need more explanation for American high school boys. Straight boys, all of them -- ah, the part I hadn’t considered -- and they shrugged off my translations with the same indifference they shrugged off a movie about a gay cross-dressing cabaret act. For my part, I shrugged off friends who thought the world turned only one way and became, until Jose, my own favorite movie partner.

I suppose it is worth saying here that high school for me was a long time ago, and so the time that I first saw La Cage Aux Folles was also a long time ago. Things that barely raise an eyebrow now could blow the average person out of his socks then. So, for all I know, this movie experience of mine doesn’t translate either. I think perhaps we do not realize how many things must come together for understanding to occur. That blessed state of understanding and being understood, not needing translation, is something we all experience too rarely and something I had so much of with Jose.

Over the years, taking myself to the movies became my primary source of solace, my cure for all discomforts from boredom to desire to heartbreak, and especially for loneliness. In college, I spent a term off campus with a group of students in New York City. I loved roaming the city and searching out new places to hang out and write on the cost of a single cup of coffee, but in many ways I remained lonely, displaced, homesick. When it got to be too much, I would take myself to the movies. One night I saw a movie that was set in the very city that had me pining for home but, and this shows how great a narcotic movies are for me, I laughed so hard and fell into the story so completely that I forgot: forgot my dingy residential hotel room, forgot the other students with whom I never managed to connect, forgot the darkness and the cold and the rain outside, forgot the entire city of New York. I was happy. When the movie was over and the credits rolled, I was still laughing, laughing and walking past Cliff's apartment on the way to my own, in my head anyway. Then the house lights came up and I rose to leave. That’s when it hit me: three thousand miles. This wasn't Cinema 21. Home wasn't a dozen blocks away. There would be no easy way home.

In February, the grayest, rainiest, crankiest month in western Oregon, my favorite place to watch movies is at the Portland International Film Festival. Jose’s the one who got me started, and while he and I usually went for the foreign films -- we could see a movie in English any time -- our final year included a British flick, a comedy. The Movie House was filled with people and with laughter, but whenever Jose leaned over to whisper that question moviegoers ask each other all the time, “What'd he say?”, I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know. At first I blamed the trouble on language, American English versus British English, but no one else seemed to be having trouble with that. Then I tried listening harder, but nothing helped me understand the words. In retrospect, I know all too well this feeling of syllables sliding past without spaces, without markers to delineate the shape and sound that we call words. Not many years after this movie with Jose, I became so ill that the effects of the depression and the side-effects of the drugs I took for the depression slid all things together like raindrops into puddles. I could hear the voices of friends and know that these sound vibrations connected into discreet words with distinct meanings, but my ears could not translate. In the theater that day with Jose something was wrong, I knew it, I just didn’t know what. It wasn’t our hearing. It wasn’t the language. And it wasn’t because Jose or I resisted the picture of life that was playing on the screen before us, as my high school friends had, but we were resisting. As Jose neared his own closing credits, as his senses began to fail, as body and mind became brittle with premature age, we resisted the admission that we were losing each other.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Catch and Release

2010-04-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

“Pardon me while I live in a fantasy
quietly show you everything you’ll ever need.”

As I serialize each chapter of The Movie Lovers, I let myself have a little more control, worrying less about consistency - the length of the blog, the potential attention span of readers, any expectations about continuity of storyline - returning to the kind of writer I am, the kind that created a story compared to On the Road and the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson. (Dear sweet readers! You literally make my year when you say such things.) That was the long way of saying that this section of Chapter 4, At The Movies, is short. It wants to stand on its own. It needs to stand on its own.

And I had something more to say here, but it swam off. Catch and release, some thoughts are that way. All I know is that in serializing I have come to view this book as the love story that it is. It is uncommon to write a love story between two who are not lovers, not potential lovers, not even desiring to have reality change so that they might become lovers. And now, for the first time, I can see where that might confuse readers, flashing as it does like a bright lure in the water. Or is it everything I’ve ever needed?

AT THE MOVIES, part 2

Einstein once dreamed of a master theory that connected everything and today string theory posits that everything, everything, in the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings, strings smaller than the particles most of us were taught about in school, smaller than atoms, smaller than quarks. Deep inside the particles we call atoms and quarks are tiny filaments vibrating to a particular frequency and the vibrations of these filaments are what we perceive as matter. Knowing that all matter is made up of tiny filament-like strings, vibrating the world into being; that the vibration of a single filament creates the light we see every day in our homes; that the vibration of a different kind of string creates the music we hear from a piano or a violin; all this brings new layers of meaning to phrases such as “seeing the light” and “making beautiful music together”; and it makes me think that opposites like Cliff and I are attracted not to learn how to vibrate at the same frequency, which might never happen, but to find the hum of harmony. I don’t know. I don’t have a master theory. I have the movies. And when I had Jose, he and I vibrated like strings on the same violin, chords on the same piano, lights twinkling on the same strand; we were the movies, flickering along together as the interplay of light and dark in an old black and white movie.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Everlong

2010-04-07T01:53:00.000-07:00

“The only thing I’ll ever ask of you
you gotta promise not to stop
when I say when.”

Chapter 4 is entitled At the Movies and, as you might guess, is the chapter in which you get to see what Jose and I spent all our time doing. We loved the movies. I mean we LOVED the movies. This is also the chapter in which Jose dies. What? You’ve seen Jose die in this story already? Get used to it. He dies a lot in this book. “Death is a dance. A ballroom. A glove. An extension of total abandon in/love.” That’s Patti Smith and she had it right. There is nothing straightforward about love or death.

I had planned on taking a little break after Chapter 3 to give you, my dear sweet readers, a chance to breathe between bouts of The Movie Lovers and to read something different, but at this point my head is deep into the book. Perhaps just as salient are the twin facts that a) I’ve been fighting the headache from hell, on and off for four days now, and that hasn’t given me a lot of creative time; and b) the best, albeit temporary, remedy for the headache has been an online flirtation with a certain cowboy. I rest assured that you’ll all forgive me for not sharing the details. So on with The Movie Lovers it is!

Those of you who’ve read from the beginning know that Frank and Cliff are Jose’s and my husbands, respectively. For those of you who’ve just begun the story, Frank belongs to Jose and Cliff belongs to me. Catch up.

AT THE MOVIES, part 1

Jose and I became friends over a movie, a really bad movie; worse: a bad film. Movie lovers, both of us, we were destined to become fast friends, but we didn’t know that at the time. We didn’t even know each other, not outside the Writing Center where I tutored. It happened like this. Jose invited me to an art film at the Northwest Film Center, something about an impressionist painter -- I forget which one, but that doesn’t matter; it was our first movie together. When I told this story to a friend, her response was to say that Jose and I had not yet established our movie protocol, those unwritten codes of conduct and procedure that people develop between them over time, but that’s not it. Jose and I were never as formal as all that. Or maybe it’s love that cannot formal; love, even with its needs and its courtesies, that cannot be contained by protocol. But forget all that. Think of it this way. This friend of mine enjoys the movies, films too, but she isn’t what I would call a movie lover, not like Jose and me. A movie lover lives for the interplay of light and shadow. A movie lover is someone obsessed with the emotion of a camera angle, the truth of a close-up or a cut, the rhythm of the heartbeat behind the story behind the pictures on the screen. A movie lover is someone who gets to the theater in time to see the previews and the opening credits, someone who sits through all the end credits and all the music until the screen goes dark and the house lights come up. A movie lover doesn't expect a movie in which gratification is instant or continuous but is willing, happy even, to sit through even an agonizingly paced film until the last frame transforms it, retroactively altering the entire nature of the story. After this art house film, Jose and I drove back to my house in that blank silence only people unknown to each other can have. Finally, I blurted, "That was really awful." Jose let out his breath. "Yes," was all he got out before we broke up laughing. “I promise to do better next time,” he said. And so we were friends.

Going to the movies left Jose and me like children after a trip through the haunted house: laughing, gasping, waving our arms and contorting our faces, our truncated sentences all starting or ending with, Wow! That was incredible. The same thing happens whenever someone asks me to describe our friendship. My words fall out in a heap, or they careen out of control, first running amuck then abruptly dead-ending: inarticulation again. Me and Jose? I just shrug and smile. And day I asked my husband to describe us. "Best girlfriends," he said. "You used to get together and squeal." "Squeal?" He shrugged. "Well, Jose's was a manly squeal.”

I don’t know about squealing, but we did giggle a lot. And we went to the movies a lot where, eventually, we fell into a ritual. It started with Jose smiling one day and saying, “My treat.” It wasn't a you-got-it-last-time-so-I'll-get-it-this-time deal, nor was it based on who had money, since neither of us ever had much of that. It was simply our ritual, and I, whose idea of being on time is rushing around in a hell-fire hurry five or ten minutes behind schedule, I began to arrive early so that I might be the one to smile and say, "My treat." We went on like this for over four years, but my husband was right when he said we were still in the romance stage of our friendship. "A truncated courtship," Cliff called it. A movie lovers' courtship.

Being movie lovers, Jose and I attended the Cans Film Festival religiously. This festival is an entire day in November during which movie lovers can escape to the alternate reality of their choice for, at that time, two cans of food donated to the Oregon Food Bank. And when I say we attended, I don't mean we saw a movie or two in the evening, I mean we plotted a timetable. We calculated the quickest mode of transportation between shows -- my car, the bus, MAX, or our feet -- and we saw our first movie when the first theater opened, at eleven, shuttling throughout the day between three downtown theaters on one side of the river and a Cineplex on the other. We had two goals: to see the movies we wanted most to see, and just as important, to see as many movies as possible.

The morning of the festival, Jose and I would meet for breakfast with our backpacks full of cans. This in itself required planning. Each year we scoped out the sales and discussed the cheapest, the most nutritious, and (since we carried these packs all day) the smallest can of food we could offer up in exchange for our tickets to movie lovers' heaven. Tuna always won, hands down, but we tried to give no more than one can at a time. We'd hand over tuna and a can of pork and beans, tuna and a can of soup, tuna and a can of vegetables. There wasn’t much variety in the menu we offered; we were poor. Sometimes Jose went to Esther’s Pantry for food, his AIDS status and poor finances granting him access. The one time I chided him about receiving food for the poor only to give it away to the poor in exchange for a movie ticket, Jose said, “I don’t just take what I like. I take a little of everything,” and while I pondered the logic of that, the coup de grace: he offered me his extra cans.

Each year Jose and I started our festival date with a couple of movies at the Lloyd Cinemas, happy smugglers snacking on apple slices, cheese and crackers, grapes, chocolate. When it came time to go downtown, we would abandon my old car for the train. My husband, Cliff, bused to the parking lot after work to pick it up, and sometimes he and Jose's partner, Frank, joined us for that movie or two in the evening. We always finished at the KOIN Center downtown, the only chain theater that played foreign films and art-house fare, and most importantly, the theater that ran the latest festival showings. One year, my festival total reached a record six movies in thirteen and a half hours. That was the year, the first year, Jose had to go home early.

Now I go to the Cans Film Festival alone. I don't plan the day. Sometimes I don't even plan the movies. I’ll see one in the afternoon at the Guild, maybe another in the evening if the day has gone well. The first year I went without Jose I saw only one movie, Pulp Fiction, and I cried all through the end credits; it would have been our new favorite. The next year I managed to take in three movies, the third late at night -- last showing -- after Cliff and I argued. Bundled up in Jose's wool overcoat, the tan one with the blue flecks, and driving Frank’s Miata, I put the top down, turned the music up, and took the long way to the cinema, speeding down Front Avenue into the pink sodium-lit industrial district, chanting with Rush on the radio: “We are young . . . learning that we're only immortal for a limited time.” The pocket of my Levi’s held a tiny blue ceramic vase with a cork in it, a chestnut-sized urn of Jose's ashes. At the movies, I curled my fingers around it.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

The Room, the House, the Heavens

2010-04-06T00:39:00.000-07:00

We are at the end of Vermilion, the final installment. I know the piece so well that I can fill in all the blanks: I read it in three or four sittings and it still makes the same sense as if I had read it in a single sitting. But I don’t have any way, any reliable way, of knowing if it holds together for you, dear sweet readers, as you read a chunk here and a chunk there. Yesterday I reminded you of how the chapter started: At the center of every good story sits a lie, an exaggeration that turns the pumpkin truth into a golden carriage. The lie in this story is that Jose was perfect, but that’s not really a lie.... And today I want to remind you of the many other threads that weave the tapestry of this chapter, but I won’t. Instead I will tell you what happened to me when I read the chapter this time.

I noticed the unswerving devotion of my love for Jose, how our friendship became the North Star of my existence, and so of course I saw, finally, what others have seen and questioned. I’ve been asked to define this friendship in terms that others understand: Was he like a brother to you? If he had been straight would you have married him? How did your husband feel about you spending all your time....? I don’t have answers to these questions. What I have is text, the words in which I have chosen to contain my experience, extraordinary as it was.

But I can tell you this. My favorite color is Van Gogh yellow, the yellow of the moon and stars in Starry Night, and I can tell you that I was blessed to have had a friendship that shined for me as those stars shined for Vincent.

VERMILION, part 6; the end

My friendship with Jose was like the movies he and I watched on his 13-inch television: small in actual size but in power all encompassing. In my field of vision, the scenes on that 13-inch screen expanded to fill the room, the house, the heavens. Years before I met Jose, I had watched Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles on a black and white television, but what I remember is in color, the tan-skinned Martians in their white white flowing robes, the gold glitter of their seamless eyes, huge, seeming to see all things and nothing. For me this movie takes place in my living room. Right before me are Martians standing tall as trees, graceful as animals. Their presence makes me catch my breath, and yet mesmerized as I am by them, I cannot tell you what they said. Not a word. And so it was with Jose. His presence and the soulful nature of our friendship eclipsed the moon, the stars, my pain, even my husband at times. When Jose’s life began to wane I let him become everything to my heart, and my heart is where I live. Then. Now. Always.

So if I must show Jose to have faults, if faults are required for the perfection of our friendship be believed, for you to be certain that Jose was indeed human and not simply a figment or wish fulfillment of my imagination, then I choose machismo. It is the worst I can say about Jose. It may also be the best. In truth, I cannot say that in Jose machismo was a fault so much as it was a surprise. Maybe I thought my friend was beyond it. Maybe I thought being gay somehow canceled it out. (It would be another ten years before my husband would look at me and say of another gay friend, “Don’t try to process your emotions with him; he’s a guy.”) In any case, I didn't expect it, this machismo, and I didn’t know what to do with this man on my couch, hunched under a blanket and ready to die but not to speak of death. But that is not a time I often think of. More often I think of the times when I could have started the conscious, straight-talking conversation. I had opportunities. Like the time Jose returned the collected cards and letters I'd written to him. And the time he suddenly gave me an Italian coffeepot that had been in his family for generations. I knew what the gift meant; just before she died, my grandmother began parceling out her possessions. But that was to happen years later, and under circumstances where I knew to expect such things. As Jose handed me the ceramic coffeepot, as he asked if I wanted it, what I noticed was the roses: hand painted with a stylized realism that the women of my grandmother’s generation loved, in detail so crisp that they seemed etched, almost silver-edged, roses the color of dried blood. As Jose handed me the coffeepot, as he asked me if I wanted it, I berated myself for not taking the bold route, for not pushing the door that says pain on one side and relief on the other. But I had no earthly idea how to say to him, I know this means you’re dying. As Jose handed me the coffeepot, as I thought about wanting it and waited for him to talk, waited for him to open that door, he said, “Do you want the coffeepot?” and I heard that this was a gift meant for someone who appreciated its significance, someone in the family. I accepted.

Machismo. It is the door to the inside of a man.

Machismo. It is the door to a man snapped shut. It is what makes my husband unable to share his fears with me. It is what makes my husband unable to tell me the tender things I know he feels. It is also what drives him to ask whether there is enough gas in the car, whether I know the roads are slick with rain, to say, “Drive carefully.”

Machismo. It's what had me upstairs in the loft that weekend, weeping with a migraine, weeping silently under the sound of The Mamas and the Papas.

Machismo. Jose stood on the other side of that door and protected me, the friend who loved him like a child loves a fairy tale.

When Jose opened his eyes that last day in the hospital and caught me crying, I smiled at him. I said, because I had no words for what I was feeling, "If I had a brother, I'd want him to be just like you." In a tone of voice I did not know, which came from a man I knew but did not recognize, Jose promised to take his father aside. “I will tell him,” he said, “you are my special friend"; that I was family. The words themselves made no more sense to me than my own, really, both sentences from some gift shop greeting card, but I recognized the familiar inflection, which put the accent on special.

* * * *

We live in an age of information, an age in which it is easy to believe that there are words for everything and that all things can be spoken. But this is not true.

The moment before something happens, we think we will have words to describe what we have not yet experienced. The moment after, perhaps long after, we take aim at our feelings and speak as if setting loose the words crystallized like diamonds in the volcanic heat of experience. But this isn’t so. No words formed in that moment. Some moments preclude speech. The moment of death. The moment of birth. The moment of orgasm. The moment of getting or losing exactly what we always wanted. At each of these moments we cannot speak, not coherently.

Jose and I did not say, I'll miss you.
Jose and I did not say, I'm sorry to leave you.
We did not say, I wish this weren't happening.

We did not question the tenets of our lives, at least not to each other. Perhaps to Cliff, to Frank. Perhaps alone, each in our own beds, each in our own heads in the dark. But not in the bright white-water of everyday life, not when the boat tipped, certainly not in the shock of plunging into icy reality: it takes the breath away, that first moment, speech as well.

Away from Jose, I suppose I had words -- they ran endlessly in my head if not out my pen -- but being together always came with the forgetfulness of the pleasure we took in each other’s company; and later, the shock of the boat tipping over. Still, I never cried out. I breathed, I navigated the rocks, and I focused on the dark uneven texture of Jose’s face, deciding minute to minute, that I would do whatever it took to be near him. I wasn't thinking, not in words, not in any language. If I was thinking at all it was in terms of survival, but then that's not something we have to think about.

Did Jose and I ever speak of death? Some things must be spoken in an older language. I drove him to the doctor for his appointments. I took him to the hospital for his procedures. I walked beside him on the street and on the stairs as if his creeping, careful pace were my own. I listened to all the reports from all the doctors and to the ever-growing list of pills and side effects. At the other end of the telephone line, I talked him through his fears and listened for his voice to became stronger, waiting for the inevitable words: No, no. You don't need to come over. I read his novel; read his fine words in a foreign tongue, and helped him to compose, in proper English grammar, this coming-of-age-just-in-time-to-die story. I sat beside him and watched Jose’s fictional boy grow up in a brothel on the edge of a Central American jungle, saw the boy experience first love, mutual masturbation, incest, rape; I followed as he searched for his mother's lost love, the days pealing back to reveal betrayal, magical healing, murder; when Jose’s boy had grown into a young man, I escaped with him to “the dream country,” learning as he did about the drag queens, how to be prostitute, and that disease they called the plague; and I felt just as Jose felt the heartbeat of love -- gained and lost, gained and lost -- that filled the life of this beautiful, reviled, mother-worshipping, man-loving, fantasy-driven boy; until one day Jose looked at me and said,

"But, Dina, you are unshockable."
This isn’t true, of course. It is the lie at the center of my own story.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Ooh La La La La La

2010-04-05T03:03:00.000-07:00

No preamble tonight, just a short bit before the culmination of Chapter 3 tomorrow. And a reminder that this is where the chapter began:

At the center of every good story sits a lie, an exaggeration that turns the pumpkin truth into a golden carriage. The lie in this story is that Jose was perfect, but that’s not really a lie; perfection has nothing to do with the attributes of self and everything to do with the needs of others. So while we alone may hold responsibility for our shortcomings, it is others who make us perfect.

VERMILION, part 5

* * *

The man in my weekly writing practice group wrote:

My hour with Jose, the only one I had, was at the famous Red Dress Party. I'd just met Tom Spanbauer and all these white-hot writers, had just come face to face with how much I had to learn as a writer, with how lucky I was even to be invited into the Dangerous Writers group, and I'm at a party where I'm cross dressing for the first time in my life -- in a red dress -- my blond hair in a frumpy bun on top of my head and my beard shaved off and make-up on and my own friends don't even know who I am till I speak. And there was Jose: tall, beautiful, big-hair wig, serious cleavage, and a spangled strapless number he was clearly comfortable in. Comfortable was the last thing I was feeling.

I glommed onto Jose so I wouldn't have to spend the entire party in a corner or wandering around endlessly trying to look like I was having such a good time I was too busy to stop and chat. Jose was easy to talk to. His Spanish accent made him more approachable somehow -- I figured I could throw in a Spanish sentence here and there and charm him. Jose told me about his novel, told me the plot and what he was trying to accomplish, told me he had AIDS, told me he liked to dress up as a woman and perform for his friends, told me how to use scotch tape and make-up to get serious cleavage on a man's chest.

For somebody as shy as I am at a party, Jose was the perfect companion: if I asked him a question, he'd talk for five minutes; if I asked him another, he'd talk for ten. We spent an hour together, then I was ready to mingle. Jose got me through that party, that marvelous party where everyone, all 200 people, wore a red dress and where I came away remembering not the prettiest woman but the man with the most outrageous dress. Jose was a real human that night. Vain enough to talk about himself for an hour when that was exactly what I needed.

* * *

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Machisma

2010-04-04T02:03:00.001-07:00

Dear sweet readers. Here we are, back to Vermilion, Chapter 3 of The Movie Lovers. Vermilion is the twenty-dollar word for blood red. It’s a color constantly shifting, which is what I do in this chapter. I try running. I try facing things head on. I try to make sense of what makes no sense. I try and I try and I try, but Jose’s blood is filled with poison and he will die no matter what I do.

VERMILION, part 4
Machisma. It’s my own word. It means when people cover their problems with a shrug and a smile or with light-hearted banter or laughter saying, "Fine, fine, things are great." So many women I know do this. So many gay men. When Jose and I went to see Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, he and Frank were newly split up and Cliff and I were having trouble, though I wasn't telling Jose about it. I like to think Jose never knew, he admired Cliff so, but the truth is that Cliff and I hadn’t been married a year when Jose began to ask, "Are you and Cliff okay?" and I always had the same answer. "Yes, yes, we’re fine." Then Jose would say, "Sometimes when people marry after living together for a long time" -- in our case the better part of a decade -- "sometimes things fall apart." But I'd laugh. I laughed it off the same way Jose and I laughed at those too true, too painful scenes in Husbands and Wives. In self-defense. Not against Jose. Against the truth.

In the first years of my friendship with Jose, Cliff and I often spent the weekend in the mountains with him and Frank. This was when they were still a couple, still in love, before Cliff and I were married, when Jose was in seemingly good health. One weekend Frank had bought a video of The Mamas and the Papas singing and reminiscing, and with Frank every latest discovery is so exciting, so wonderful, it must be shared right now. So we let him put the tape in and then puttered, sitting down to watch when it got good. I had a headache that day and soon retired to the loft to peer at the video and my friends from between the bars of the rail. I was sad that weekend, sad near the surface for no reason I could discern. Maybe it was the headache, a migraine no doubt, although I didn't know at the time that’s what those were, or maybe it was just music sung in a minor key. In any case, I couldn't help crying and I couldn’t stop crying, but I did it the way I expressed many emotions in those days. Silently. If anybody suspected, no one said; it was a house full of men, and I was trying to hide my tears, not share them.

This is also the way I conducted my friendship with Jose. I never let him see me upset about his illness or his dying. While we shared every feeling -- sometimes spoken, just as often not -- shared the way some share a cigarette, it is ironic, or perhaps fitting, that we hid our pain from each other. We were careful, the way Jose was careful with the blood that flowed just beneath the surface of everything in his life, lest the vermilion spill. It cost me. Each time I would sit down, for his birthday, at Christmas, upon the occasion of the completion of his novel, each time I bent to put the words of affection or pride to paper, the ink dried in my pen. I had no words, only the devotion of my actions. Even today I cannot rightly say whether Jose and I were alike in this way, this need to act rather than speak, or whether I was following his lead, learning his rules of relationship. Then again, it is with men whom I have always formed my closest bonds, so how could I know the difference between the rules of love and the rules of men?

I knew Jose was scared. I operated on that premise. And on the premise that he would not tell me directly. This emanated from a place in me far below the level of conscious thought and informed all my actions. I do not know if Jose knew that I was scared; he caught me crying only once. Okay, twice, and I'll bet it was the same day, the day Jose’s father flew in from LA. That was two years after I worked at the Learning Center, two years after the time Jose got CMV and sat mute and ashen on my couch, all the color of his lovely brown cheeks withdrawn to the poison in his veins. He and I spent those two years like kids at a carnival, riding every ride and eating every kind of food on a stick like we’d never get older, never get tired, never get sick and have to go home. Our lives were not perfect, nor our hearts trouble free, but when we were together ours was a brighter, prettier world than most mortals inhabit.

I knew Jose would not recover from this new round of diseases. I knew he did not want to spend his last days living with his immigrant parents in his sister’s husband’s house, not in that atmosphere of the-pin-has-been-pulled-but-the-grenade-hasn’t-gone-off . . . yet. But until that day, until Jose lay in his hospital bed before me, side by side with this fear of having to go “home” to a home that wasn’t his, until that day when I sat beside him and felt his father draw closer, closer, I had never considered the possibility that Jose might actually leave me. Still, I didn’t stay by his side to say good-bye. I stayed to ease the transition, the waiting period that marked the culmination of years of filial distance, the hours before the dying son welcomed the Latino father who now knew that he had AIDS, but not that he was gay; the father who had never visited him in Portland, not while Jose had lived with Frank, not while he had lived alone, not when Jose’s mother came to see him, not in the entire seven years he’d been here; now this father was coming to take Jose home to die, as family is privileged to do. That I, Jose’s best friend, was here, that Frank had stepped in to care for Jose as a partner again, that Jose had an entire family here, a chosen family, was of no consequence. This is when I cried.

As we waited for his father, Jose and I talked. At times he seemed to speak metaphorically of his nearing death, and at times like a fevered patient on morphine: There are many around me, he said, and they are waiting, waiting for me, but they are afraid of the dark, afraid of nightfall. But the light will help, he said, and my father is bringing the light. The doctor stopped by and said, “He may as well go home.” This is when I cried.

When I hit the wall, when my car, my vermilion and rust and steel extension of my desire to run broke down on the freeway and angry rush-hour commuters honked their horns and rode my ass and flipped me off because I was creeping along at ten miles an hour while they crept along at twenty, I breathed. I breathed hard, sucking air like an overheated engine, sucking air like a horse that had been run till it dropped. I breathed and I breathed, but it didn’t help. I broke.

. . . into tears.

At work a Latino student had accused me of insulting him. I had told him he couldn't sit at the long table in the writing section of the Center. He was doing math; he had to sit at the math tables. He protested; I cited the rules. Nicely, politely. Enforcement, alas, was part of the job. He remained, I explained, he argued. Finally, realizing I didn't recognize him and thinking that perhaps he was new to the Center and hadn't noticed, I pointed to the sign posted on the table. The young man exploded from his chair: "Who are you to say I cannot read? You saying I can't read? I can read. I can read! I am sitting here."

Stunned, I assured him that wasn't my intent. I validated, I mediated, I apologized, I soothed, I calmed. Then I ducked into the staff room, surprised at the hot tears rising behind my composure, and even more surprised at my own explosion: "My friend is dying, I'm afraid he's dying at home on my couch, and he won't talk to me."

Silent.
Macho.
Latino.
He does not need this woman's help.

Shaman's Harvest: Dragonfly

2010-04-02T00:09:00.000-07:00

"Maybe the world's gonna spin out of control. I don't care anymore." No blog tonight, just a hello, a goodnight, and a lovely song.

Shamanic work manages to be both liberating and tiring, creating both the experience of insight and of forgetfulness, allowing me to become both less of who I have been and more of who I am.

Today I rested. After I post this goodnight and before I sleep, I will infuse a crystal with my desire and direction: what I wish to be, to give, to receive. Such moments are worth making a note of.

Tomorrow Vermilion continues with "Machisma," my own word, meaning the covering of problems with a shrug and a smile or with light-hearted banter or laughter, saying, "Fine, fine, things are great." So many women I know do this. So many gay men.

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

The Do-Good White Women's Society (Massive Attack “Unfinished Sympathy”)

2010-04-01T02:09:00.000-07:00

Tonight’s installment is longer than usual. The storyline just won’t work any other way. As I reread this portion of Vermilion, I remarked upon two things, how steadfastly I have refused to call The Movie Lovers a memoir and how much of this chapter is, in fact, about me, about my struggle to know how to be in relationship to a man who is dying, and about my struggle to be in relationship to a life I could not make work.

VERMILION, part 3

My first car after graduate school was a 1963 Ford Falcon station wagon. My husband, Cliff, hates reading this part about the Falcon because he remembers the details differently, but so it is: our memories are unreliable and often our version of things can be as annoying to others as our personality quirks. The 1963 Falcon wagon had the first automatic window Ford ever installed, which meant the back window rolled up with the push of a button at the driver's seat instead of the crank of a handle at the tail. Theoretically. Ours was more inclined to jam than to close. Cliff worked long and hard to fix the problem, but once the back window was down, it could never be relied upon to go back up. The 1963 Falcon wagon sported the first-ever transistor radio installed in an automobile, which meant no more vacuum tubes and so no more waiting for the radio to warm up: it was like magic. But then the rainy season came and the show was over. Some things just can’t be put back the way they were. In 1963, the new Falcon hit showroom floors in a variety of designer colors such as aqua and lemon chiffon. Ours was vermilion. That’s the twenty-dollar word for blood red, but by the time we bought it in 1991, our vermilion car looked more like tomato soup made with milk. Bottom line, my Falcon wagon was a two hundred dollar car and looked it. All the same, after grad school I was so excited to get a car, any car, that I hung up on a long distance friend only to call him back with a tail-to-grille description.

Humphrey, for that was my new car's name, was a steady-as-you-go three speed -- three on a tree, for those of you who remember -- and while I might have wished he were faster, I always loved the clunk-ka-chunk sound of his shifting gears. It was a sound that suited the plodding pace of an out-to-pasture gelding with the sturdy, friendly face of a mule. My internal combustion steed had a faux air scoop nestled into the hood where a nose might have been, and on his sides were branded what appeared to be chrome rockets but were, in fact, industrial age falcons. For inspiration only, I'm afraid; Humphrey was a slow starter. Oh, he ran well enough when I got him on the freeway, if I got him on, and therein lay the challenge. Portland is a city of freeway on-ramps that double as off-ramps, and so each time I tried to set Humphrey to running loose, I also faced 500-horsepower stallions cutting us off both left and right. We didn’t always make it. Sometimes, just as my old mule was getting up to speed to merge, the two of us got herded off in another direction. However, back on the streets of my city neighborhood, I loved the slow, whining wind-down sound of the engine as I let off the gas and rolled to a stop. It was a comforting sound, the sound of something sturdy and reliable, and I enjoyed it all the more for the fact that I had little comfort in my life at that time. Not long after I got my new car, for example, the same long-distance friend I’d hung up on, a man of 5'9" who’d longed to play professional basketball and who made his living as a sports writer, called looking for my reaction to Magic Johnson's announcement. My straight friend was stunned at the news. I was stunned. But his was the disillusionment of hero-worship, while mine was just plain disillusionment. A philandering celebrity sports figure was worthy of concern because of his HIV status, but not my friend Jose. No matter how I drew parallels, this friend did not -- could not -- see Jose’s situation as being worth his attention.

When I got Humphrey, I was working as a part-time writing tutor at the Alternative Learning Center, a drop-in center at a community college on the north end of town. It was the first job since I'd completed my degree nearly a year prior for which I’d been hired to do the work I'd been trained to do. It took me two buses to get to the Learning Center and cost me a dollar and an hour each way. I worked a four-hour shift twice a week. After we got the Falcon, I was often tempted to drive. Who knows what that cost me. Humphrey got maybe eight miles to the gallon, and I'd rev the engine up to the top of every gear before shifting, getting the most power I could out of my three-in-tree speeds. I drove that car as fast and as hard as I could push it, like it was my own body, my anxious legs pumping and churning hard, harder, hardest. So, while on the bus it seemed I sleep walked to work and back, in the Falcon it seemed like I ran. Then, one day, not twenty yards from the uptown freeway off-ramp and the circuitous route that winds me round the edge of the city and across the river to my rented home, I hit the wall.

The wall runners hit.
The wall writers hit.
The wall families hit. And friends. No one warns you about that wall.

Things fail. The people we love, the bodies we rely on, the cars that get us to our jobs and homes, they break down on us at the moment we least expect. It can’t be helped; we are not immortal and although they remain longer than we in the world, neither are the mountains nor the seas nor stars. It is a universal truth that all things perish. Fast or slow, with warning or without, it all goes. One day I’ll go. I find myself looking at old people (that’s over seventy or eighty by my current definition) and thinking, Someday that will be me. But even though we know this, even though we know our loved ones will cause us pain, our cars break down, our houses collapse, our lives screech to a halt, we are surprised when it happens.

I wonder if a star is surprised when it finally winks out of its existence as a being of adoration and light and tornadoes into the gravitational unknown. Star, supernova, black hole; even on a celestial time table, the end -- the transmutation from this form to that, from motion to stillness -- must come as a shock. And so it is no less with human beings. We super-glue and duct-tape and patron-saint our cars and our bodies, hoping they’ll take us that last extra mile, deliver us to that last important destination; and in the midst of nothing important, a run to the grocery store, or of everything important, rush hour; they stop. The vermilion of their days spilling like pollen onto the airwaves.

It was on a spring morning, the same spring that brought me Humphrey that Jose called to tell me he had AIDS and more: he was sick. Fever, chills, night sweats, all the result of some opportunistic infection, no doubt, but he didn't know what it was. Worse yet, the doctor didn't know. It would actually be more than two years before the infections and diseases overtook him, but we didn’t know that then, and Jose was alone: alone in fear, alone in pain, alone in a body that no longer worked properly, and too long alone in a house in the mountains with no companionship but the dogs. He began commuting into the city, Frank dropping him off at six in the morning in a neighborhood just across the river from where I live, and there Jose would sit on the curb, in the dark, waiting for the HIV Day Center to open. Without discussion, Cliff and I gave him a key. We said, Come and go as you like. In my journal I wrote:

Jose has come twice this week. This morning I talked with him briefly before dropping him off at the Center. This afternoon he will have tests run on his liver. He thinks perhaps he is experiencing the beginning of his death. I am at a loss as to how I can reach out to him. I am reaching, but we're not connecting, not able to touch, only sending sound signals (and silences) across the distance.

When he got no better, we said, Move in. You and Frank both. We gave them the attic, narrow stairs made narrower by a sagging handrail, moss green carpet, a futon lying on it, a bare bulb in a ceiling so steeply sloped that only a child could stand under it, and plywood walls that the previous renter had painted bright public-swimming-pool blue. You could lie on your back and feel like you were drowning. It was what we had to offer. They stayed the night one time. Then another. Then two nights in a row, then three. . . . Jose just kept getting sicker. In my journal I reminded myself:

I wished for this. In the wake of deaths experienced at a distance I invited Death to walk a little closer to my door. I wanted to better hear this song. And now Death walks down my street humming under his breath, softly humming.

Each morning, when Frank got up, Jose would come downstairs to sit on my sofa. It wasn't a proper sofa but the loveseat-sized end of what was once a sectional, cunningly striped in two shades of golden brown like a brindled cat, but that would have been back in the days when the Falcon was just a colt. The sofa Jose sat on was a straight-backed, one-armed, taxidermied version of the original with the stuffing poking out of one corner. There was no love left in this loveseat, which made sitting awkward and lying down impossible, but each morning there Jose would hunch under a blanket, brown skin ashen, mouth clamped shut. His mother, who normally visited this time of year, did not know he was sick, not how sick. His father did not know he was gay. I knew everything but what to do. Normally unwilling to speak before coffee and at least half a newspaper, mornings found me chattering endlessly as I waited for my turn in the bathroom. One morning I hit a spin, like a car on black ice. Skidding in slow-motion circles, I ran on and on and on about the transformation the women in my family make every day before going to work or out shopping, and when I ran out of my own tale to spin, I began asking Jose what rituals the women in his family had. I suppose I was apologizing for my disheveled state, or perhaps for the fact of living in close quarters, but mostly I was longing to fill the silence; I who craved silence.

Running late more and more, I began driving to work. There I began to hear laudatory remarks from my co-workers as I let out, like a slow leak from a punctured tire, the fact that my friend with AIDS was ill; that he was staying with me because he and his partner lived an hour away; that he couldn't be that far from a doctor; that he had nowhere else to go. The lauding came in hushed tones and included words like "brave." Brave. In pursuit of a career in writing or something like it, I was slowly going broke; putting off my student loans just one more quarter and then one more so I could bus to a part-time, eleven-dollar-an-hour job at a community college, a job I loved, in the part of town that news-watching suburban whites regarded as our version of the Bronx; and then drag myself through drug-infested Old Town to an afternoon job in a repo department in the suburbs. Each was an hour's commute by bus; one way. When I drove, it was in a red rust bucket with lint-covered seats and bad brakes. I may have been a lot of things, desperate comes to mind, but I don’t know that brave was one of them; I was in no danger, except for feeling sorry for myself. What I felt was ridiculous. Wearing my eggplant colored Valerie Steven's suit or my heather gray Jones New York, purchased on close-out, I must have looked like a neon advertisement for the do-good-white-women's-society as I rushed to arrive on time to teach teen mothers and displaced middle-aged homemakers to read college texts and write compositions on outdated Apple computers. From my point of view, bravery was what was going on around me; from the man in his sixties who had raised up a family and held down a job but was just now learning to read, to the overweight, gap-toothed woman in tight pants who talked about loving Jesus and wrote about sexual abuse and being beaten; black, brown, white, I tutored a spectrum of adult basic education students most teachers never see, mostly women, mostly middle-aged. There were few men at the Learning Center, and they tended to be shy with me, except for the young blond with palsy in his limbs and on his lips. He had arrived at the Center by way of collision: drugs, speed, and the immovable object. He kept trying to get me to go out with him, out on a date, out to the parking lot, out to his car; he didn't care, anywhere. I adored them all, even the woman who wrote about kicking her son out of the house when he confessed his homosexuality. She loved her son, she said, but she loved Jesus more. At the Center, I helped her to read the literary essays assigned in her comp class, word by word, sentence by sentence, idea by idea. The day I left that job, she pressed a five dollar bill into my hand, and when I declined, her eyes got teary and she insisted: You need to have something to see you through, she said. At home Jose, my one-time student, my dearest friend, and now my housemate, sat on my couch in silence. No matter what I said to draw him out, he would not talk. Then one morning, he said, “I want to die.”

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

The Oldest Story in the World

2010-03-31T00:13:00.000-07:00

"You lost the key to paradise. That's oldest story in the world."

I'm not lost, but you could say that I am in pursuit of a key to my inner paradise. Today I entered what may best be called Shamanic Boot Camp. I was not expecting to be conscripted quite this soon. Appropriately, I began watching Merlin this evening, but alas I am not being trained as a sorceress. If I were, dearest readers, you would have a blog to read. I will continue Vermilion, and I promise it will get more interesting. As chapters go, it's a slow starter, but it grows on you.

If you are hoping for tales from the shamanic crypt, I must disappoint you again, for I have already learned the password and the secret handshake. Were I to share anything with you now, I would have to blind you on the spot. And nobody wants to surf the web in brail.

Now I'm off to set into motion events that I hope will draw money to my door, and also to sleep. I'm sure it comes as no surprise to you that boot camp is a bit tiring.

Love and kisses,
Sins

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Prey

2010-03-30T01:27:00.000-07:00

Cast of Characters for The Movie Lovers
Frank Stovall - Jose’s partner.
Sonia Sequeira - Jose’s mom.
Jose’s Care Team: Corey Baker, Caterino, Lupin, Kay, and others.

Vermilion, part 2

As far as Lupin was concerned, Jose Sequeira was something of a snob. As far as Jose was concerned, Lupin’s pronunciation of Spanish was so misshapen that he could not abide listening to him speak it. Who knows what others might feel or say about my own love of sound and meaning. I know my husband will tell you I seem constitutionally incapable of letting a word slip by mispronounced, in English or any language. But I will tell you that as a child I suffered from a tongue-knotting shyness within myself and a consistent mangling of both my first and last names by others. It marked me. So, naturally, when I began working with Jose, I asked him to pronounce his name. My eyes read "sequeera," but when Jose said it, my ears heard "cicada," like the bug. Jose didn’t know what a cicada was but he approved the sound my tongue made, and when he did, I experienced that particular happiness that comes with calling something by its true and rightful name. It is a gift to know a person, place, or thing by its true name, and it is a pleasure to be known and called by your own. Names, like language, are many things; markers for culture, status, familiarity; opportunities for communication and affection; signs that announce age, class, heritage. A true name and a given name can be, but are not necessarily, the same. When they are, they are so only after the one named has become known, unknown, and then known again to his intimates; only after he and another have stared heart into heart.

Not long after Jose and I became friends, I attended a reunion of my father's family, people I'd not seen since I was small child, and I noticed that my cousin Jose's name was properly pronounced by family members as "Hoseh," with an s sound, not "Hozay" with a z; that the last syllable of his name was not the "ay" American tongues make it out to be, but the "eh" of red. I returned home and began calling Jose Hoseh. Jose said nothing. Our circle of friends, including Frank who speaks fluent Spanish but says "Hozay," said nothing. My Hoseh was identical to the sound Jose’s mother and sister made when they spoke his name, but no one remarked on my pronunciation, not even Frank; and though I carried on awhile for the principle of it, the feel of Hoseh was awkward in my mouth and so I reverted to the Americanized version. I never asked Jose what he thought or what he preferred, and I want to tell you that I don’t know why, but I think I do. What drove me to say Hoseh was the same need which also drove me to say, whenever Jose asked if I knew of so-and-so and then mentioned an author or artist I thought I should know, “Yeah, that name rings a bell,” even when I had no earthly idea. Jose, for his part, said nothing.

When Jose lay close to death in the hospital, years after he'd sat shivering and wishing for death on my living room couch, I read to him from Renaldo Arenas' autobiography, Before Night Falls. It has many words and phrases in Spanish and, while I do not speak Spanish, I could not imagine mangling -- anglicizing -- these words written in Jose's native tongue, so I resurrected my best European vowel sounds and made an effort to say Spanish words in something approximating Spanish. Jose said nothing. During the first days and weeks after we took Jose home to his apartment and I struggled to communicate with his Nicaraguan parents who spoke little English, I often fell back on my college French or something resembling childhood Italian, something vaguely recalled from growing up in my Grandma Dina's household, hoping that Sonia would supply the proper Spanish pronunciation. For example, when Sonia called me to dinner one evening, and I said, "Moment," and she obligingly replied, "Momentito." But Jose said nothing. One evening I asked Jose to teach me how to compliment his mother’s cooking and we got hung up on my pronunciation of delicious -- delicioso in Spanish. Jose made me repeat and repeat and repeat -- delicioso, delicioso -- but I apparently had no ear for it. Although he said nothing, I could see Jose was exasperated when he finally -- finally -- approved my new sentence. It wasn't until my first Spanish class, after Jose's death, that I understood the problem. My tongue had stubbornly formed the word just like Anna Maria Albergetti (remember her Good Seasons salad dressing commercials?) with the first s coming out with a t stopped in front of it: delitsioso, the sound Italian, like my blood.

Jose’s death approached slowly, over a period of months, and so we could have but we never did speak of death. Afterward, I imagined standing next to Frank and watching the approach of the next death in my life, his, and I decided that if he and I could just talk about what was to come, the experience would be easier to accept. But to talk of death at such a time is like pausing in front of a speeding car, watching its approach from half a block away, looking at your partner in crime, and the two of you rationally considering the appropriate action to avoid destruction. While that’s more like the movies than real life, I still thought I could do it, at least until I found myself in front of that car.

I’m at home, parked at the corner, head in my arms on the steering wheel, crying after a long day spent in the hospital at Jose’s side. When I finish, I step out into the warm night air and onto the swath of grass between the curb and sidewalk. I hear the squeal of tires. I turn. I see a pair of headlights swing wide, nearly missing the left-hand turn. They swipe through an extra-wide driveway half a block away as I stand watching, waiting for the driver to overcompensate a second time and speed past me like the idiot he clearly is; waiting to see the headlights become a pair of taillights receding in the dark; but the headlights careen back across the street and thump up onto the curb between a telephone pole and my detached garage; they swerve, squeal, accelerate. Down the sidewalk. Toward me.

Suddenly I'm on all fours, slick-bottomed sandals, grass slope, scrambling toward the house and safety the way I once ran in dreams as a teenager, scrambling like an animal. In dreams I could never outrun the beast at my heels; but tonight that beast, a silver pick-up, wheels sharply, shoots the space between my car and the one parked behind it, and high-tails it down the road into the dark from whence it came. I run into the street screaming, as if it could help, "Who the hell do you think you are?"

That’s what it’s like to watch death. You stand in front of it, blinded by surprise and the bright light of survival, too stunned to realize you’re no match. And then you run, like the prey that you are.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Red Wine and Rust

2010-03-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Vermilion, Chapter 3 of The Movie Lovers. Vermilion is the twenty-dollar word for blood red, or as I’ve taken to calling it, red wine and rust. It’s a color constantly shifting, which is what I do in this chapter. I try running. I try facing things head on. I try to make sense of what makes no sense. So don’t strain too much over the song link tonight. It’s nonsensical, almost perverse. Like birth. Like death. It entrances you, it bores you, you wish it to go on forever, you wish it would hurry up and be done already. Who knows, that may even be the way this next chapter goes.

Vermilion, part 1
At the center of every good story sits a lie, an exaggeration that turns the pumpkin truth into a golden carriage. The lie in this story is that Jose was perfect, but that’s not really a lie; perfection has nothing to do with the attributes of self and everything to do with the needs of others. So while we alone may hold responsibility for our shortcomings, it is others who make us perfect.

I don't know why this is. I know that at Garrett's memorial, I heard a lot about how tender and loving he was, how spiritual, how giving. I heard nothing about the pissy queen who bragged of numerous and unverifiable degrees in philosophy and literature, and who hung up on me whenever I couldn't get him the pot he wanted the minute he wanted it. When the time comes to memorialize Frank, I know I'll agree with the words that are spoken: He was a loving and generous friend, giving of himself and all that was his, a joyous and playful spirit. It’s true. He is. But he’s also someone who can lash out at me without warning, making his predicament -- usually something about being out of time, patience, or money -- my fault. The Frank Stovall I know can be every bit the pissy queen Garrett was, just as self-centered, just as grasping and demanding. Damn, but can't we all?

"He expected all of your attention,” she said, “all of the time." I wasn’t there to hear her say this, but when these words ring in my head, words spoken just days before Jose died, I imagine them coming out in a yell. Best friends since high school, this Texan flew to Frank’s side because of a dream that had awakened her in the middle of the night in the middle of her vacation in the middle of the Colorado mountains, miles from any car or road. And now, as she stood jet-lagged in front of Frank’s dream house in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades; the house that had saved Frank from a slow-lane commute to an LA job he’d hated, the house in which he regularly hosted all his California and Texas friends, the house guarded by two smiling, wagging dogs who pranced behind a chain link fence on shit-covered concrete; as she stood in front of Frank’s house, his words swerved like a car on the freeway with a blown tire. If he killed himself -- and the dogs, he’d have to kill the dogs -- if he killed himself when Jose died, then maybe they’d end up together. That could happen, couldn’t it?

This is not what Frank’s best friend had flown from Colorado to hear, and I imagine her words were intended to splash Frank with a little of the cold water of reality, but I still don’t like it. "When Jose lived with you,” she said, “he was just a prima donna, and you know it.”

There had been problems, it’s true, and it didn’t help that Jose got an apartment in town an hour away. Still, the relationship didn’t end all at once. It was more of a slow, foot-off-the-gas-but-not-on-the-brake, winding-down-to-a-stop kind of end. Jose was lucky to survive the CMV he’d battled on my couch, and so when he qualified for subsidized housing near his doctor, he went. His new apartment was near the hospital, the bus, his friends, a branch of the library, a movie house; all the things Jose needed. Except Frank. Jose spent every weekend on the mountain, and over a year later he and Frank were still smiling together at my fall wedding reception, but spring announced their separation. Not long afterward, Jose called me near tears. Frank refused to cut and deliver the flowers that stubbornly continued to grow in Jose’s garden at Frank’s house: daffodils and narcissus, tulips and foxglove, a sea of lilies. "But I love those flowers," Jose cried. "How could he not do this for me?"

I could not make Frank cut or deliver flowers, and I could not tell Jose that such an expectation was unreasonable, but what I could do I did. Jose started a writing group after moving to town, and although I’d been working with him on his short stories, I wasn’t invited. So I advised Jose on how to make the group run smoothly and helped him edit his novel. I did not talk to Jose about my own writing, and Jose didn't ask. I told him once that I admired his ability to share his work with just about anyone, something all but impossible for me at the time, and I shared my own writing on only one occasion, a poetry reading. Jose came and listened to me read. Afterward he did not comment. I did not comment. I thanked him for coming. He thanked me for inviting him. Then both of us smiled big smiles, somehow pleased, so pleased. I know it sounds odd, and I suppose I could root around here a bit, scrape at the dissatisfaction such interactions might have left behind, but this isn’t the essay where I dig at my regrets. Fact is, I had not a care about Jose, what he thought, how he acted, who he was in the world; I loved him. I loved everything about him. I could fill a book with what made Jose who he was and what made me love him -- his silly horse laugh, his practical jokes that always included me as silent co-conspirator, his sense of timing, his eclectic taste in movies, his worship of words and books and art, his opinions spoken so freely, his beautiful face and dark eyes that looked right in -- but I could not give you the one thing, the feeling of the one thing, that held us fast: being together. That’s it, the essence of our friendship: it felt good to be together.

I have a friend who followed The Bhagwan, living at Rancho Rajneesh here in Oregon until it disbanded, and he once tried to describe the bliss -- that’s the right word -- the bliss that arose in him in the presence of The Bhagwan, but he couldn't. I understood. My friendship with Jose had caught me up in the same star gazing, reality-twisting happiness. The two of us spent our days at the movie house immersed in pictures, symbols of the mythology of emotion, imprinting identical light impressions directly onto our brain stems, not a word between us. And we spent our friendship awash in words, swimming in the love of words, their supple texture, sculling, dipping our laughing mouths, shooting words like Greek fountains high into the sky around us. That’s how it was. We inhabited a magical reality, a wondrous place wherein all things could at once, as in dreams. It was only those around us, and later those listening to me tell the tale, that saw any contradiction.

A man in my writing practice group, the place where I wrote the first draft of this book in a white-hot heat, listened to me pour my heart out about Jose for more than a year, and then one day he wrote this:

Listening to Dina root around for the foible or flaw which will make Jose seem human, watching her come up empty or with only some gossip from Frank or friends, but never anything cruel or unkind which Jose did directly to her -- oh, he didn't invite her into his gay men's writing group, but I think most people will forgive Jose this, even if Dina hasn't quite -- but listening to this one might argue that she is avoiding something, afraid to face some terrible truth, but I don't believe it; I don't think Dina hides from much of anything about Jose. He may have been miserly and penny-pinching with Frank, he may have been a pedant with Lupin, but Jose and Dina had one of those friendships where they brought out the best in each other. And Jose has always seemed quite human to me.

His illness, his suffering, his fear of dying, these are flaws enough. That Jose didn't complain or whine or impose, that he kept his Latino good manners and courtesy with him past the point where others might succumb to pain and fear, these are his strengths. . . . And as Dina points out, Jose's death from AIDS is ample proof of his humanity.

* * * *

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Crap

2010-03-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

I’m the man in the box
Buried in my fate.

That’s my misheard-lyrics version of “Man in the Box.” And that’s where I’m sitting right now, squeezed into my box, afraid both of being crushed if I stay and of being eaten alive if I dare to venture out. There’s no a human being on the planet who doesn’t know this feeling.

So, there’s no Vermilion tonight. At first I thought I felt dissatisfied with last night’s post because the opening section needed an edit, and it did but nothing earth shattering. No, what’s earth shattering is the way in which my daily life, my headspace, my body, my emotions, my everything, is coming unraveled. So tonight I’m going to take a step back and let you all in on my headspace. I’ll return to Chapter 3 of The Movie Lovers in the next day or three.

Right now Alice in Chains is helping me feel some version of normal, though louder would be better of course, if the neighbors weren’t home. This is not unlike what I did as a teenager when I had headaches so severe that from time to time I would slam my head against the wall just to equalize the pressure. Somehow pain was easier if I had it on both sides of the skull.

No, I’m not beating my head against the wall, not even metaphorically. Okay not much.

Last night I had a realization that rocked my world to its foundation. My first response was to yell to The Powers That Be, “Hell yes! Bring it on!” No doubt those of you on Blip heard me. I was all about it. Then, right before bed, something else hit. It went like this. I am wrong. I am doing everything wrong. And there will be no correcting this wrong. I am so fucked. By that I mean, among other things, that I’m in danger of losing all my funding because of something I did, something wonderful for me.

Not surprisingly, today I unraveled.

I called my shaman and told him that I’m doing all the right things, but I’m still feeling wrong, inalterably wrong. It’s like I’m in a game of chicken, the silent treatment version of chicken. I remember this game. My marriage was built around this game. My childhood was founded on it. To lose connection with the people I love eviscerates me; I’m always the first to yield. I show my belly and then they say, You poor fucked up thing. We told you that you couldn’t do it. Now let’s start over. Here, you do it THIS way, by which they mean their way, always, because I clearly don’t know what I’m doing. At least that’s how it’s been up till now.

Last week I made an agreement with the shaman, the short version of which is this: he owns my ass. The point of this agreement is to keep me safe (read: he’s got my back) while I learn to see just very how submissive I’ve been in my life thus far. The most interesting thing is what happened directly afterward. I felt calm. I felt safe. I was able to detach from judgments about myself, and my choices, in a way that I’ve never been able to do before. I lived that glorious Zen moment for exactly three and a half days.

Then the sky fell and I became Chicken Little running around with my head cut off. No, that’s not a mixed metaphor. That is exactly what this feels like: fucked squared.

I’m the dog who gets beat.
Shove my nose in shit.

Tonight the shaman told me, This is what you get. No, not really, but it’s true. I’m clearing out all the old crap that doesn’t belong to me, and believe me it truly feels like crap, as in could I please just take a dump and let all this crap out. I got a headache trying to make enough sense out of things to be able to talk my shaman, but what he said was simple: This isn’t your crap. How many of you would kill to hear that? Really, he said that. It isn’t my shit I’m buried in and my job, he says, is to refrain from trying to make sense out what I’m experiencing, any sense at all. Just let it pass right through.

Okay now I’m having a flashback to Grandma with the enema bag and me pleading, “No! I’ll go. I promise!”

Fuck me.... Wait. I said I’d stop saying that. Bless me!! And just so we’re clear, Grandma wasn’t mean. Like my shaman, she was doing what needed to be done to keep me healthy. It still felt like crap. Feels like crap. The shaman says that every time I do something the way I’ve been told to it, it’s not gonna work, not anymore. Has he been spying on me? Up side, I get to be as willful and rebellious as I want. I mean, at this point who’s to tell me otherwise?

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

The Pumpkin Truth

2010-03-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

No preamble tonight folks. I’ve got an early busy day tomorrow. So while I’ve decided to go ahead and post Chapter 3 of The Movie Lovers (entitled Vermilion) tonight you’ll be getting just a taste. More tomorrow, I promise. Goodnight!

Vermilion

At the center of every good story sits a lie, an exaggeration that turns the pumpkin truth into a golden carriage. The lie in this story is that Jose was perfect, but that’s not really a lie because perfection has nothing to do with the attributes of self and everything to do with the needs of others. While we alone may hold responsibility for our shortcomings, it is others who make us perfect.

I don't know why this is. I know that at Garrett's memorial, I heard a lot about how tender and loving he was, how spiritual, how giving. I heard nothing about the pissy queen who bragged of numerous and unverifiable degrees in philosophy and literature, who hung up on me whenever I couldn't get him the pot he wanted the minute he wanted it. When the time comes to memorialize Frank, I know I'll agree with the words that are spoken: He was a loving and generous friend, giving of himself and all that was his, a joyous and playful spirit. It’s true. He is. But he is also someone who can lash out at me without warning, making his predicament -- usually something about being out of time, patience, or money -- my fault. The Frank Stovall I know, at least the one I knew when Jose was on this earth, could be every bit the pissy queen Garrett was, just as self-centered, just as grasping and demanding. Damn, but can't we all?

With Jose, it was different. I loved everything about Jose; I still love everything about him, and I cannot see imperfection in him but that I must first see it in myself. My connection with Jose was such that I could not question his choices, his motives, his needs without questioning my own. I could reveal to you my faults, and they are many, but I cannot show you Jose's. For me they do not exist. Perhaps this is simple self-delusion. Perhaps it is a feeling as common as hunger. But it is uncommon for me.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

The End

2010-03-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

I am of the generation who finally began to understand the Viet Nam war, the generation that came after the soldiers lost to the horrors they witnessed there, the horrors that duty often commanded them to commit. It was through the lens of Apocalypse Now that so many of us began to realize why our fathers reflexively took cover or maybe even wept at the sound of a certain kind of helicopter. And then Generation X had its own Viet Nam, its own “police action” of an undeclared war: AIDS. There is no movie for us.

Prelude, part 5: TheEnd

This is the end. This is where I take you through the looking glass that leads into the dark wood where we fall down the rabbit hole. There is no coming back. The emotion you’ll be feeling doesn’t have a name; it’s one part roller coaster, one part mad mouse, and a big ole swig of that ride where you’re spinning so fast centrifugal force squishes you against the wall like a bug on a windshield.

And then the floor drops out. You know that one?
Good.
Here we go.

From the moment of Jose’s death, questions pelted me like a hard rain; no, like hail. Everyone wanted to know:

how could you do it, wasn’t it hard being so close to death, who was Jose to you, why did you stay to help him die, what do you get out of being friends with people who are sick;
what does it say about you that your friends are all men, why do you have so many gay friends, but you’re married aren’t you, why do you surround yourself with people who are dying, what does it mean that you had to be guardian angel for a circle of dying men;
was Jose like a brother, if he’d been straight would you have married him, what about your husband didn’t you care about him, what was your husband doing while you were gallivanting off to care for other men, so why do you have so many gay friends;
what’s it like to be near death, how did you get the strength, how could you put yourself through it, weren’t you ever scared, how were you feeling, why don’t you talk about your feelings, and why are you hanging out with these people anyway;
how you can write about this and not tell us how you felt, you don’t think you’re better than the rest of us do you, because everybody dies, you’re not the only person who’s ever lost someone you loved you know;
why is it you think you know more about this than anybody else does, to hear you tell it sounds like you always know the right thing to do and are unendingly loyal and always informed and tolerant and you have no fears no inadequacies;
you’re married right, kids you have kids don’t you or you want kids right, didn’t your husband get tired of you always leaving to help other people, what’s it like to be close to the dying;
how did it feel to watch your best friend die?

Before I answer, let me ask one more question: Dear reader, how are you feeling right now?

As for me, historically I’ve had two responses to this barrage. My first was not to: to decline to respond at all. My second response went something like this: What the hell do you want from me? I didn’t say that, of course. In fact, you are the first to hear it, but now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, it occurs to me that I have the choice of a third response. Here it is. Watching your best friend shrink fast-motion into an old man, listening to him talk and talk (and talk was once all the two of you ever needed), fading in and out like so much static on a road-trip-radio stuck between stations, this is a lot like having strangers demand that you reveal your feelings because you’ve done something they don’t understand, something maybe they’re afraid of; and while I want to say that this can’t be done, maybe what’s more important is the question it raises. By what device do people develop the sense of privilege that empowers them to ask, no, to demand to know – and then to know more – about private and painful emotions?

Curiosity. Of course.

Curiosity and fear, those two in equal measure push us forward, a hand pressed at our backs whenever we run into the closed door of the unknown. And as I stand in the doorway of the unknown and open my mouth, or rather, begin moving my pen, I make myself something of a moving target. I see that now. Used to be I thought I had a story to tell, simple as that. Two people, four years, a transformation. I’d have made it up and sold it as fiction, but I’m no good at that and it’s the truth anyway. So, let me be clear: if you don’t like the subject matter, don’t like that this story is about gay men or that it includes gender bending, drag queens, and same sex love; if you don’t like being made to examine the choices you’ve made, if you’ve got no reason to look at the boundaries drawn by all of us around love and self and sex; if you don’t want to look at death or disease or see love that strays off the middle path and defies logic; if you don’t like how I tell the story, think I’m on my high horse or just a bitch, then honey, quit reading. This story just ain’t for you.

Ahhh, at last I hear it, that sound I’ve been waiting for: Paul Monette’s partner whispering to him, “You tell ‘em, Paulie.” It means I’m on the right track. So many cautioned Monette when he wrote about AIDS , which he rightly named as just another form of genocide; “the national sport of straight men,” he called it, “especially in this century of nightmares.” Eyes open, heart wide, full-voiced, and in complete awareness of the lightning-rod emotions running through him, Paul Monette spoke the truth: “We are creatures of the cruelties we witness.” Maybe it has taken the transition to a new century for us to see this.

Of course we don’t hear much about AIDS now, and part of this is because we all feel more comfortable with the subject when we can think of it as curable, and after all it is old news. As I sit here writing today, it’s halfway through 2004. That makes two decades since the Center for Disease Control warned blood banks of a possible problem with the blood supply and two decades since the first safe sex guidelines were proposed. Still, as you read this, some of you may find that you know about as much as I did when I started, which was nothing. I’m also guessing, or maybe just hoping, that there are some of you who will remember when living in the ‘80s and ‘90s meant polishing tiaras and emptying bedpans. For you, for the fact that I will cover old ground as if it were new, I offer Jose’s perpetual refrain: “But, Dina, everybody knows that.” For those of you who know nothing about how AIDS landed on the American scene and gutted a glittering generation, let me shelve the attitude -- at least try -- and tell you a story. Call it my coming out story. My path through life has led me down some unexpected roads, and frankly I’m not sure where I am right now but I do know this isn’t the neck of the woods where I went in, it’s not Kansas, and it sure as hell ain’t Oz, honey.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Do You Wanna Die?

2010-03-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Sweet Readers, Do you wanna be my angel? (That’s a wink and some extra love to my readers from BLIP.fm.)

I can promise you
You’ll stay as beautiful
With dark hair
And soft skin
Forever.

Okay, here we go. This time I’ve given you a cast of characters, so you don’t go cross-eyed trying to remember names. No intro tonight, except to say that if you think I have attitude now (and I do), then just wait for the final installment tomorrow.

Cast of Characters for The Movie Lovers
Setting: 1960 to mid 1990s, when gay men were dying in droves.

Jose Sequeira (pronounced cicada, like the insect) Main character; Dina’s best friend and former student.
Dina Narrator; loving friend and devoted caretaker; sometimes pissy with her readers.
Frank Jose’s former partner; later his primary caretaker, and always his love.
Sonia Jose’s mom; from Nicaragua, she speaks very limited English; she and Dina share a March 2nd birthday.
Cliff Dina’s husband; loyal friend to Frank and Jose; Leo and would-be drag queen.
Jose’s Care Team Corey Baker, Caterino (Cat), Lupin (a Radical Fairy), Kay Exxo, and others.

Prelude, part 4 ....That year at the university was not the simple success I had hoped for. Nothing was.

Here’s a picture of me just a month before Jose died:

Tonight’s my night with Jose. Tonight’s also our Care Team meeting. Only Cliff, Frank, and I will be there. Yesterday I spoke strongly to Cliff about his not having stayed with Jose (he has Friday night, but Frank’s been taking Jose to the mountains for the weekend). I told him I thought he should trade nights with Frank and stay with Jose during the week (pull his weight is what I meant). Last night Cliff spent the night with Jose -- at the last minute because Kat, who had already switched with Frank because of a scheduling conflict, said he couldn’t make it last night either. This isn’t the first time he’s been late, switched, or couldn’t make it. I’m tired. I. Am. Tired. Lupin and Kaye have not been irresponsible, but they have done their share of missing meetings and not being here on their scheduled nights. Corey has bailed out of caring for Jose during the day, a promise he made to both Jose and Frank; he is the one we looked to when Jose’s parents had to leave suddenly. Frank has called Sonia. She’ll be here in a week. When Corey quit, he left Jose’s social worker with the impression that the nighttime Care Team was falling apart. It was a misapprehension -- and a jump to conclusions -- but now I am beginning to feel the same way.

We’re all tired. We’re all at different stages of grieving. I fill my hours and my head with work, and I spend my time burning with self-righteousness. Silently burning.

Back then, I was burning a good deal of the time: at work, in my marriage, over the actions of anyone whose level of commitment didn’t match my own. And every time I tried and failed to figure out why I couldn’t make my life work, I burned. Because I did not speak these feelings aloud, I prefer to think that no one noticed. Then again, before Cliff and I got into marriage counseling, we thought we were doing a good job of covering our feelings. Turns out no one could stand to be in the same room with us.

At work, my husband was my office assistant. And about the same time that Jose’s Care Team was struggling to hold together, my husband had come to realize his complicity in a power struggle that affected both my standing in the department and my ability to perform my job, a situation from which there was no extricating myself. He apologized, but there are some things that once you have allowed them to be done cannot be taken back nor undone. You just have to live with them. At work my psyche had begun to react to the cumulative effect of eight months of disrespect and helplessness the way my body might have reacted to eight months of Twinkies and Easy Cheez: my gut burned with a sickness that was my own fault. I had taken a position that carried responsibility but no authority, and when the graduate assistants working under me rebelled, I responded by gripping the reins even tighter. It’s what you do when you know you’re losing control and you’re out of options. Anyway, it was what I did. In retrospect, I can see that I took responsibility for problems that were mostly not of my own making. It was easier for me to believe I was in control and exercising that control badly than to admit I had no control at all, easier to accept responsibility for problems I had not created than to examine how poorly equipped I was to be an administrator: willful, rebellious, certain my way was right.

But with Jose, even when I didn’t know what to do, which was all the time in the final months of his life, I knew what to do: I loved him. That’s how I remember it, anyhow; I am learning that memory is a strange and sometimes over-flexible thing. It’s odd what the mind runs together and calls memory. Sometimes I think we need a different word. What we call “memory” is more often an attempt at understanding than a simple recalling of the events. Going through my I Ching workbook as I wrote about Jose, I came upon an entry with his name on it. I had posed this question: What may I expect of and from my friendship with Jose over the next six months, especially in terms of demands on my time and energy and rewards for time and energy spent? I was appalled when I read this. I have no recollection of thinking of Jose or our friendship in this way. I'm not entirely certain what I meant nor am I certain I want to know. I know that the date of the entry is less than a year before Jose died, right around the time I realized I needed to spend time with him now, and instead of stepping forward into that realization, I let the demands of my personal and professional lives engulf me. The I Ching responded to my question with the hexagram known as Inexperience, or “youthful folly”:

In its static form, inexperience suggests that a heretofore great mystery or a misunderstood part of your nature must unfold and come forth before further progress can be made. . . . Success is indicated. In fact, once the mystery is unraveled you may experience what is known as "beginner's luck."

The final line of this response, "Don't let this go to your head,” must have sunk in because while I bulldozed through the rest of my life full of “the right way” and “the wrong way”, with Jose I took a different path.

Here’s a picture of me with Jose during the last two months of his life:

6 May 1994 -- Home from the hospital today. He puked and puked and puked and I held him close, held the bucket and the paper towels, held a cold cloth to his head. Exhausted, we napped.

As we step out into the dark unknown, will our feet fall on something solid? Will we learn to fly?

9 June 1994 -- Last night Jose said, “What’s done is done, isn’t it?” He spoke of a journey. I promised to go with him as far as I can.

At breakfast he sits motionless before his oatmeal, his eyes following the movement of a figure I cannot see. He says, “I want to go with her.” When I ask him where she is going, he says, “Home.” I place the spoon in his hand and show him how to grasp it, but he does not know what to do with the spoon. I call the VNA nurse. Then I feed him.

17 June 1994 -- We took snapshots of ourselves today. Then we snuggled between the bars of the newly rented hospital bed and watched a video. Jose fell asleep halfway through. When he woke I remarked on how happy he looked. Quietly he said, “You know.”

When I am with Jose I radiate. When I realize that all this seeming normalcy is not, I collapse into darkness. Like a star I pulse bright and dim: joy and fear, joy and fear. “Yes,” I said, and then silently, I know.

And then he died.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

It Happened Like This

2010-03-23T23:08:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the next installment of The Movie Lovers. I’ve included the last paragraph from Prelude Part 2, just for a bit of continuity.

Intro:
I grew up in an outwardly happy culture that was inwardly steeped in rage and sorrow, raised as I was by the generation who fought a “war” that was, in fact, a never ending police action. Some of this I began to understand when, as a young woman, I saw Apocalypse Now and later met my soldier father as if for the first time. And some of it I came to understand when I experienced my own generation’s unofficial war: AIDS. My comrades-at-arms were spit upon just as my father and his were. We still don’t have a movie to explain us.

Prelude, part 3

As fate would have it, my father died to me when Jose was born, in February of 1964. And when Jose died thirty years later, my father died all over again, buried memories surfacing like hungry ghosts. Haunted by my own forgotten past, I began to grieve for the first time, to mourn for what I had lost decades before my friendship with Jose had even begun.

It happened like this.

In the winter of 1963 President Kennedy was shot and killed, which I don’t actually remember, but some time after Christmas that year I flew with my mother to a little town in Oregon to attend my great grandfather’s funeral, which I do remember even though I was only three; my father, a soldier serving in Viet Nam, disappeared right after. I asked my mother where he’d gone, but instead of explaining service or duty or divorce, she gave me the same answer she’d given when I asked where grandpa went: “Away. And he’s never coming back.” My first experience with death -- my first two experiences -- came at a time when every American family seemed to be losing fathers and grandfathers; sons; a time when the whole country watched in shock as the complications of an undeclared war abroad and civil unrest at home murdered the men we had built our lives around. But war, protest, assassination, divorce, these were not words spoken in my mother’s family. Few words were spoken in my mother’s family that did not revolve around work or meals or any of another thousand daily tasks, and so in the rhythm of daily life I learned that the people I loved could go away and never came back.

Allowed neither to question the parameters of my world nor to grieve, I did what so many do: I made the pain disappear by refusing to let it show. Problem was, who I was and how I felt wasn’t just hidden from the world, it became hidden from myself as well. By the time I met Jose, I was a stranger in my own life. I just didn’t know it. Growing up, I was an outwardly compliant, intelligent, even eager child, but my inner life spun on a knife-edge. Perhaps I’d be considered just an average kid today. Maybe I was even then. In any case, I grew up in a world where children didn’t have tempers and teenagers couldn’t have depressions. They had attitudes. For me, puberty heralded not only hormones but also head-slamming headaches and suicidal ideation, but the only words I’d learned to describe my experience were “the curse,” “bitch,” and “baby!” It was a childhood guaranteed to produce the woman I became, someone for whom every relationship -- every close friendship, every sexual encounter -- was an opportunity to suck at a breast that had run dry long before I was born. My composed exterior masked an interior that leaked out only through my taste in music: fast, hard, screaming-loud. No one was listening.

My family didn’t fail me. And they didn’t fail to love me. They just failed to see me. From family I learned the pain of saying not what I felt but what was expected, the punishment of asking not for what I needed but for what was possible. I can’t say that meeting Jose changed all this, we were friends for only four years before he died, but I can say this: Jose’s friendship marked the first time I loved anyone without making the child’s bargain I had come to understand relationships to be. It wasn’t what I had with Jose so much as what I didn’t: I didn’t have to fantasize the impossible; I didn’t have to take what was given but secretly wish for something else, something more; I didn’t have to second-guess what the other person was feeling before I decided how I felt; and I didn’t have to be anyone but myself. Through Jose’s friendship I experienced the joy of being seen, and for the first time I knew the freedom of being loved for who I was, instead of in spite of it.

Jose and I loved books, we loved writing, we loved movies, and we loved each other. And although Jose was gay, brown, and from a privileged landed class who lost everything to communism and the subsequent emigration to the US, while I was straight, white, and a third-generation American from a working class family that raised its kids to think they were middle class, inside we were alike. And it was from the inside that Jose and I saw each other. How we differed was mainly in the way others saw us. Jose had the common touch: he could say anything to anyone about anything. He could talk about his novel, his travels, himself; about being gay, being ill with the effects of HIV, being on disability; about being from Nicaragua, not Mexico, becoming a Sandinista to teach the poor to read and then learning that the Sandinistas executed homosexuals. No matter what he said, everybody loved Jose. Me, I was nervous about sharing who I was and how I felt, and when I did, others tended to have strong reactions. Just as it was with my family, these weren’t necessarily positive reactions.

Upon viewing the stars as they mapped themselves out at my birth, an astrologer friend once told me that I bear something called a grand cross. Some might call this a fancy way of saying I had a big chip on my shoulder, for a grand cross indicates someone who is sure to bristle when demands are made to reveal emotion; one who is inclined to be in a near-constant state of rebellion; a willful person who must do things her own way and who puts up defenses at the first sign of being challenged. For such a one as this, tolerance must be a feature and not an accident of one’s behavior, or so I’ve been told. I’ve often find myself wishing I were more like my father, a man who remains proud of me no matter how many knots I tie myself into or how many times I must say I screwed up, again; a man who somehow knows that each person is always doing his or her best, no matter how piss poor the results.

The year Jose activated his Care Team, which is what he called the circle of friends who helped him as his health declined, I was the administrator at a place called The Writing Center, a tutoring facility at the university where Jose and I first met. The position was temporary, transitional, a nine-month appointment while a search was conducted for a Ph.D. to run the place, but the offer had come after three frustrating years of trying to cobble together work as a writer, an editor, a tutor, anything in my field, and since I had trained at The Writing Center as a grad student, the job seemed a shoo-in. I accepted in anticipation of experiencing some much needed success. See, it wasn’t just my career that wasn’t working at that time. My friendship with Jose was one of the few bright spots in a life that wasn’t working in so many ways, including in my marriage. I could say that I felt like a failure; I never slowed down long enough to feel much of anything. Except intolerance. I felt that often enough, though I wouldn’t have believed it if you had told me at the time. I thought the way I felt was just fine: I was intolerant of intolerance, intolerant of others who were intolerant. I have come to understand that this is my biggest character flaw. I’ve tried -- I am still trying -- to be accepting of faults, to keep in mind the fact that we all learn our lessons in our own way, at our own pace, in our own time. I want to be tolerant, I do. All the same, I was quick to judge human failings then, and I am quick to see them now. Jose’s mother, Sonia, may have seen me as an angel because I loved and cared for her son as he died, but too many of the graduate assistants who worked at the Writing Center during the same time period would have painted the flip-side, the portrait of a woman with exacting and inflexible standards, someone unyielding. That year at the university was not the simple success I had hoped for. Nothing was.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Exit Light

2010-03-23T00:25:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Chapter 2 of The Movie Lovers. In Prelude you get the back-story of how I came to be caring for a dying man, what kind of life it was that led me to such a place.

Prelude, part 2

Like Jose, I was trained as a fiction writer, so it’s not unusual that I should try writing a novel; an impossible task, I might add. I don’t write fiction anymore. What I managed to accomplish was written and forgotten the year before Jose’s death, and so when I came across this bit of fiction while writing Jose’s story a decade later, I was surprised to see myself, the very self I had become during the intervening decade, a decade during which I had also become the same age as my main character, a woman who had just lost the person she loved most in the world:

I’m driving home in the dark after my father’s funeral.

I keep saying that. Reminding myself where I am. Explaining to no one why I’m hurtling west through the night air, radio blaring. For a week I haven’t slept, haven’t tasted the food I’ve eaten, haven’t taken a shit. The best I’ve felt was during the service when I sat next to my father’s sister, an aunt I barely remember, who let me cry and didn’t try to fix what can’t be fixed.

It’s Sunday, almost midnight, and home is five hours away. I have the window partway down, but the air is sticky and warm, as it has been since this afternoon when thunderheads rolled in, bringing summer lightning, low-rolling thunder, a full moon, and no rain. I’m speeding. My father always drove fast. I suppose the love of speed can be genetic, like the inclination to be strong willed or tender hearted. I’m doing ninety, foot pressed hard against the gas pedal. I don’t know how long -- or why -- I’ve been doing this, but my thigh and calf muscles are clenched and starting to tire. Metallica has just finished “Enter Sandman” -- though for me this song is and always was, simply, Exit Light -- and since this might be what drives my foot to the floor, when the first chord of the next song rings out, I ease off the gas. It’s a ballad, and declares itself so through the achingly pure, electric-acoustical guitar riffs that metal bands sound as an anthem to the quietly withheld pain underlying the energy, the anger, and the sheer heart-pounding noise their fans call music.

Headlights flash in my rearview mirror, and on the road ahead I see a dark spot the size of a child. A single guitar note strikes, I swerve left, and the dark spot turns, eyes flashing mirror-clear. In the illumination, I recognize a Great Horned Owl. Lights slash the rearview mirror and my eyes as behind me the car gathers speed and veers left to pass. I look ahead into the eyes of the owl. Two high notes sound; he spreads his wings angel-wide. Three low notes progress upward and the owl goes with them. The next chord wings him low over the passenger side of the windshield and roof of my car just as taillights swerve in front of me and recede into the future.

This instant lasts a lifetime. At the end of it I’m flying backward in the wake of the wind, transported into a hundred-thousand vibrating particles hovering together in the dark somewhere over southeastern Washington, listening to the moon sing.

I knew nothing of death when I wrote those words, and yet I had unwittingly described the very experience I would have a year later when Jose stopped breathing, a sensation of mind and body hovering somewhere between the nuclear and the sublime. All but one detail of that scene was true; even when I thought I was writing fiction, I had been recording life. My father isn’t dead, of course, he wasn’t dead when I wrote that opening scene to my would-be novel and he hasn’t died since, but he did die. He died when I was three. It happened the month before my birthday.

As fate would have it, my father died to me when Jose was born, in February of 1964. And when Jose died thirty years later, my father died all over again, buried memories surfacing like hungry ghosts. Haunted by my own forgotten past, I began to grieve for the first time, to mourn for what I had lost decades before my friendship with Jose had even begun.

It happened like this.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Everybody Knows That

2010-03-22T03:03:00.000-07:00

Here it is, Chapter 2 of The Movie Lovers. In Prelude you get the back-story of how I came to be caring for a dying man, what kind of life it was that led me to such a place.

I’ve imbedded “Fire” by Kasabian, though I can’t tell you why it speaks to me so. I can tell you that Jose contracted HIV from a man who turned out to be an IV drug user; a partner who hid his other life. I can tell you that when Jose died, his father still believed that his only son had contracted AIDS from a hooker, a story that was preferable to his learning that his son was a gay man.

That was the ‘90s. That was the time of AIDS. That was the time when no one, not even parents, wanted to know who these men were.

Prelude, part 1

This story is about a man named Jose and that which makes life worthwhile: friendship; friendship and the deep, abiding, even surreal permutations of love that true friendship can engender. Here’s the picture:

me and Jose, a darkened movie house, and my heart happy like it hasn’t been since I was a child of three;

me and Jose, a rented hospital bed, and my forehead dripping like a runner in the midday sun as I hold Jose to my body, hold the bucket to his face, stroke his hair and whisper, "It's all right sweetie it's all right sweetie it's all right";

me and Jose, the back deck of my house, and our intertwined voices high with laughter over some prank Jose has played, some tale he’s told, or more likely, how shocked someone has gotten over what he did, and on this day Jose turns and says to me, “But, Dina, you are unshockable.”

Some will read this story and think it’s about me, although that’s not what I set out to write; for me this story is about Jose. Some will think the story is about death and dying, that it’s about AIDS before drug cocktails made it a chronic but not fatal condition, and those things are certainly in here. Some will even think this story is about my need to preach to the choir, and as for that I can’t say, except that it’s true I don’t have a problem voicing my feelings about friendship, gender bending, gay men, or HIV/AIDS. Because I write about my friendship with one gay man in particular, Jose Sequeira, and about my friendships with gay men in general, this story is inevitably about AIDS. Jose died because of it. Most of the friends I had when Jose was in my life died because of it. And let’s get one thing straight right now: you don’t die of AIDS. You die from the complications that come from living with a compromised immune system. These complications run the gamut from opportunistic infections that lodge in the physical body to psychological infections that permeate our social and religious bodies, but that’s not what this story is about either, any more than disease is about punishment or redemption. Sometimes I think this story is simply about the difference between that which is considered normal and acceptable and that which is considered shocking. I laughed when Jose said I was unshockable and I never asked what he meant. Now I think maybe I should have. Now I think maybe this is not such a good thing, being unshockable, being someone who accepts individuals and behaviors considered outside the norm. In the ten years since Jose’s death, as I talked about my friend and told the twin stories of our friendship and his death, the transformation these afforded me, the price they exacted, I found myself shocking people all over the place. I wasn’t entirely certain why.

What I am certain of is this. When I met Jose, I was a stranger in my own life, and unaware that anything was amiss. And I am also certain of this. While I was born into the mainstream of life, I am not of it, and although I understood what words I was expected to speak and what path I was expected to walk, I could not make the middle way -- the expected path through life -- my own. Like a gay man, I can look like anyone else and I can sound like anyone else, but my internal experience has always been that of an outsider, someone who knows what it means to be invisible to others and lost to myself, and so it should come as no surprise that while I’m hopelessly heterosexual gay men have gravitated to me. I haven’t missed being in the mainstream, the path that even Dante called the straight way; I knew where it was, and I knew that I preferred life closer to the edge of things. This perspective worked just fine for me, until Jose died.

When Jose died in the mid ‘90s, gay men were the scapegoat for AIDS, and like any proper scapegoat they were heaped with the sins and secrets of society and sent into the woods to be devoured. Jose’s last year of life was a journey marked by this savagery. It was also a journey marked by love, the beauty of love unexpected, the grace of love unconditioned. At the end this journey with Jose, I remember waking to an oddly familiar sensation, one of being in that “dark wood where the straight way was lost.” This dark, lost place described by Dante is one I have known on and off since childhood, only this time, the experience was a little different. Through my friendship with Jose, I had gained a true sense of myself and found my place in the world. Or so I thought. But I’d wandered out into the woods with the goat and, like that scapegoat, I was not expected to walk back out. Family and friends, peers even, looked me as if I were a stranger, a lost soul, someone to be regarded with a potent mixture of awe, curiosity, and fear. Very few wished to hear the tale I had to tell.

Since the teller of any tale must be trusted to be believed, and since the story I have to tell is for everyone, from those treading the straight way though life to the boys in the band and even those who feel themselves lost in some dark place, let me begin by telling a little bit about myself, because this story is also for me. Simply put, I need to tell it. By the time I’ve finished telling it, I hope the love story that was Jose’s life is seen as simply one of the many facets of all life, gay, straight, or otherwise, a life that Jose used to kid me about by saying, “Dina, everybody knows that.”

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

This is the New Shit

2010-03-21T00:19:00.000-07:00

How cool is this: “Pisces [that’s me], you’ve got a mandate to fatten up your soul. So gravitate toward situations that incite you to express the most daring brand of innocence and the most benevolent wickedness you can imagine.”

I can get behind that. Hell, I am that. And while I’m guessing that fattening up my soul has little or nothing to do with cookies or donuts, I can now feel better about that brand of fattening, too. Hey, somebody’s got to eat them. The economy needs us to continue consuming, does it not?

I have the most fun expressing this so-called daring brand of innocence and benevolent wickedness posting music on BLIP.fm, and I’ve had too little time there as of late. When one door opens, it gets harder to find enough time to run in and out of two doors, no three doors, no four! An embarrassment of riches is what they call this, but I’m not embarrassed. I’m just tired and disorganized - no organizationally handicapped - and tired, did I say tired? The shaman warned me, but I laughed. Ha-Ha!! I have been death warmed over before, I said. Be careful what you say you can handle.

Today the best I could do was drag my ass out of bed after eight hours of sleep, which culminated at noon, and focus on un-tornado-izing my place before my BFF got here for his belated birthday meal. Cap it off with a little social media and I’m toast. No, I’m Zwieback; a crispy critter.

Yesterday I did things out of order. Exhausted - again! - at the gym, I came home to take a salt bath, which is a simple but highly effective detox. One box of salt, cool water (I use hot, but the recipe says cool), some lavender essence, twenty minutes to an hour. Ding! You’re clean inside and out. No really, it is just that simple. There’s a reason the ancients used salt to preserve. Salt is a universal cleanser for all things physical, energetic, and psychic. Usually when I take a salt bath it is very late and when I get out I pour myself directly into bed, but yesterday I did things out of order. I ate lunch while in the tub, fruit with custard and yogurt - not junk food! - and after my bath I sat in the afternoon sun on my deck. I never sit out in the sun. Every once in awhile I squint at it from the window in front of my computer; oh, yeah, daylight. But yesterday I sat on my deck and, starting the cocktail hour early, I called family.

Perhaps it was the bourbon, but yesterday I enjoyed telling family about my plans and accomplishments, including getting my 1k badge on BLIP, which still thrills me like a diamond ring from a Cracker Jack box. Like sitting in the sun, this just never happens - the enjoying talking with family part - because when asked, I do say what I’m up to and then I listen to the brief silence that follows, and then we go directly back to our regularly scheduled programming, by which I mean whatever the other person was talking about. It’s amusing, really. Whenever I talk about my work, I am for all intents and purposes a momentary blank in the phone reception. Can you hear me now? Perhaps I should always start family phone calls with a cocktail. Perhaps that is why my mother drinks.

I did not plan to rest and renew myself yesterday. Believe me, if I had it would have been a lot of work and I would not have enjoyed it. The whole rest and renew thing sounds, to me, like a fancy way of saying you should eat more vegetables. Yeah. Sure. Of course. And then I wander off in the direction of my computer screen, just let me do this one last..... There are supposed to be two kinds of people who work at home, those who don’t know how to get started and those who don’t know how to stop. I relate to both. In this life I have two speeds, fast and stop, or as I have been practicing them lately, full speed ahead and collapse. For months now, the shaman has been doing the fancy shaman version of “So how’s that working for you?” Don’t bother me, I’m trying to get something done here.

But yesterday, I didn’t do that. Yesterday, I couldn’t do that. Yesterday my body sat my ass down in the tub, and then afterward, planted it in front of the sun. After an hour or two of that, I didn’t feel like I had to get much of anything done. I’d say that I felt serene, but I didn’t notice feeling that way, I just was. When the last of the sun left the deck, I came in and sat down to catch up on social media, just a little, and suddenly all things literary and blog-ish were making their way to my doorstep. Just like that. In the space of half an hour, I connected with enough writers, blog sites, literary magazines, and publishing recommendations to stock me up with a week’s worth of reading. Planning and researching for weeks could not have yielded as much.

And then I sat down to write this blog. The four paragraphs with yesterday in the first sentence? Yeah, those got written yesterday. Then my brain quit. I sat here for another... year.... and I wrote or rewrote or read or something, but the blog just would not be finished. Would. Not. Be. Finished. Finally I admitted defeat and rather than post what I had, I went to bed where I slept a death-like, dreamless sleep. I think it was sleep. I woke this morning - per force, the phone ringing - but I never woke up. I haven’t woken up for weeks now, and my shaman is as thrilled about this as my trainer is about sweat. Really, she loves it when she makes me sweat.

Note to self: You asked for this. So now that you’re here, what do you plan to do?

I’ve been debating the merits of serializing the second chapter of The Movie Lovers. While it could be done in five installments, I haven’t been certain that it lends itself to being chopped up that way, and some of the installments would be long by blog standards, but what the hell. I mean, the mash up is my new darling; my new framework for this pimped out, cookie fueled, spiritually mainlined, suck-ass tired life I’m leading.

Sinfully innocent? Benevolently wicked? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Evanescence v Marilyn Manson [MashUp] Going Under - **This Is The New Shit**
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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Nothing to See Here, So Let’s Move It Along Folks, Part 2

2010-03-19T02:24:00.000-07:00

“We got no fear, no doubt
all in, balls out!”
Nickelback. That’s always good for getting my ass in top gear. And I am an all-in, balls-to-the-wall kind of girl. Right this minute I’ve also got The Black Eyed Peas singing “Pump it. Louder! Pump it. Louder!” while the trumpet and guitar ride that famous surf riff in the background. Love it. LOVE. IT. Wait. Slight miscalculation. I can’t type while I’m dancing.

It’s well after midnight as I write this, which isn’t unusual, but having my trainer move our gym date up by two hours - at midnight! - is. Doesn’t that sound successful? “My trainer.” Love that. Actually, it’s not nearly as sexy as it sounds. I can’t afford tires for my car or the last rabies shot for my cat, but I make sure I have someone to kick my ass twice a week. Is this because I’m athletic? Hell no. I sit here in front of my screen eating junk food all day, and even so, I would not knowingly make myself sweat, no matter how good it might be for me. Hence the “trainer.” If I didn’t have to meet her (and pay whether I show or not), I’d never leave the house. Really. And while I was lucky enough to land in the slim end of the gene pool, DNA does not last forever, people, I can tell you that. So I’ve got to pump this little ditty out fast. This ZeroBirthdayBody needs its rest.

I’m feeling flush with success tonight. Hmm, maybe that “You say you wanna be a star?” line I used yesterday is paying off. Heh. Today I got to move forward in negotiations for a professional blog site: domain name, custom design, search engine optimization, the whole nine yards. While in the middle of this nego- wait - back up.

Today I got shamanized. That’s my new word for encapsulating what happens when I do shamanic work. To give you perspective, during shamanic work it’s a good thing when my head gets so foggy I can’t put two and two together. In fact, it’s a good thing when I stop being able to hear. I’m not kidding. The shaman is speaking, I know the words are directed to me and that they are in everyday English, and I have no fucking idea what he’s saying. Sometimes I have to have him repeat it several times. And this is a good thing. It means my head is no longer in charge. Okay. I signed on to be deconstructed.

Fast forward to tonight. I know nothing about web... anything. I don’t speak the language and even if I could, I don’t know what it means. So I’m discussing what will be what with this web designer and my head is as functional as a hangover on Monday morning before coffee and a long shower. Minus the nausea, thank God. The one day I really need my brain power, and the shaman has put it on ice. They don’t tell you about that in the brochure. So I am flip-flopping through this blog design conversation like a fish suffocating on dry land, totally unprepared but all about it, when I realize that my BLIP.fm station has just hit 1000 listeners.

This is where I’m supposed to tie this all up, say something pity, focus the previous five paragraphs toward a final statement about life, love, the pursuit of happiness, and I got nothing; my brain is fried. I got that the hard work I’ve put into my spiritual/energetic life is starting to make a difference, just a bit, even though I feel lost. I got that I’m finally on the road to having a real home for my writing, which is beyond awesome or any other exclamation made with words, even though it comes with a steep roller coaster learning curve. And I got that now I have a really cool star next to my Blip avatar that says, 1K. Of all the good things that happened today, it’s that last one that made me clap and grin like an idiot. I’m such a Girl Scout. One that can swear like a longshoreman when it’s called for. ^_~

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Nothing to See Here, So Let’s Move It Along, Folks.

2010-03-18T03:32:00.000-07:00

Pearl Jam is screaming, “It’s evolution, baby!” while on every side death and destruction rain down; the wages of humankind’s “growth” as a species. It would sound disingenuous of me to say that this is my life at present, but it is; the wages of my growth as a human being. I can’t say that death and destruction are raining down, exactly, because there isn’t anything others might recognize as that, but I can say that not a goddamn thing in my life fits me. Not even my own skin, and I would shed it if I could.

Oh yeah, here we go: Uncle Ted Nugent has come along to roll me out with that sexy summer-heat beat, and I feel much better even if “Stranglehold” does say it all. Add a little bourbon and it has me thinking of. . . . Never you mind what it has me thinking of. Let’s just say that a little more of some things wouldn’t hurt. In lieu of what I could really use, I have stocked my apartment with awesome amounts of chocolate, ice cream, cookies, booze, and flowers. Hey, I’m allowed one indulgence that isn’t bad for me.

All this evolution, yeah, I asked for it. Transitions are a bitch. You say you wanna be a star? Great! Now change your name, your hair, your clothes, your friends, the way you speak. Next get used to the peeps who know you - put that word in quotations because they haven’t known who you are for some time, but no one has bothered to notice - get used to them being unhappy or unnerved or simply impervious. The new people you know? They’re great, but they don’t know you. So you don’t know if they enjoy you or just want something from you. Real life or cyber life, it’s always hard to know for sure.

Am I famous? No. Am I on my way to becoming famous? Let’s just say that no reality show is calling me. So why am I using this little scenario? Honestly part of me wants to say that I have no idea, that it just came to me, but the fact is that I’m shifting so much in my life the famous thing is all that came to mind as an example-free explanation of how it feels to be here. I mean y’all don’t need a blow by blow of my life. (I heard that snigger. See if you get any more details now.) Mmm, Led Zeppelin v Black Sabbath singing “Whole Lotta Sabbath.” Perfect match: Whole Lotta Love with War Pigs. Yeah, that’s my life, too. Contradictory. Fucked up. Or Mash up. Your choice.

I’ve been walking through these changes for the better part of six months saying, “Fuck me!” It’s my new favorite way to swear and there has been so very much to swear about! Did you know that the Universe cannot tell when you’re being sarcastic? Tin ear, totally. “Bless me!” sounds beyond lame. However, “Fuck me!” is not having the desired effect. Seems I have quite literally been asking the Universe to give it to me in the ass, and no, I don’t mean that in a good way. Think prison sex. With hemorrhoids.

On that note, we arrive at Lunatic Calm. That’s actually the name of the band singing right now, “I wanna take you on a roller coaster.... I wanna push it right over the line,” but I think I’ll adopt the name for myself. It expresses both my feeling state - lunatic, absolutely - and what I remembered today as I talked with a friend about the shamanic work I’ve been doing. (Yes, I can work with a shaman and still swear like a longshoreman.) I forget what he was saying, I’m not sure I was paying attention, but then he said something that did me a V-8 slap. “Surrender!” that’s what I said, “I forgot about surrender.”

Surrender does not mean submission; it’s not about getting used to being fucked in the ass. Surrender means to give up, to abandon what cannot be held. Surrender is an altered state of grace - think the best part of sex - a realization that this river is going to run through you, like it or not, and the only thing that can make it harder than it already is is to resist. Lie on your back. Ride it to wherever it takes you; you’re going anyway.

On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man
in a dusty black coat with a red right hand.
....
There won’t be a single thing you can do.
He’s a god. He’s man. He’s a ghost.
He’s a guru.

That doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just that Nick Cave and The Seeds started singing “Red Right Hand,” and I went with it. I mean the mash up is a kind of upside to the whole you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter scenario, only with music, right? What if I’m not screwed? What if my life isn’t a fuck up? What if it’s just a mash up? Let’s say Lunatic Calm v Lunatic Fringe. Yeah, that’s it! Now run along. If you were paying attention to the title, then you know that I said I had nothing to say tonight. And I don’t.

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Maybe Not

2010-03-17T00:08:00.000-07:00

People die. It can’t be helped. In the ‘90s it happened every day.

Not long after Jose died, Garrett died, and after that it was Aaron, and then my Grandma Dina died, too. Grandma’s death was a surprise, but I was there to hold her as she left this world, just as I was with Jose. Frank retired to live out whatever life he might have left on 35 T-cells, staying with Cliff and me in between jaunts to Mexico and Spain, looking more and more like a skeleton with every passing month.

Tonight’s blog is extra long, for tonight we finish The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. I had planned to divide the conclusion of this chapter into two parts, but after last night’s death scene, I don’t have the heart to drag it out.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys
conclusion

For me, Jose’s death yanked out the tent pegs of the universe, and in that one swift motion, all that I had thought permanent in my life began to collapse: star; black hole. Needing a sense of control -- over something, anything, in my life -- I decided to raze what little remained, make a clean sweep of it. I would divorce my husband. He hadn't understood what I needed before Jose died and he didn't seem to be learning now. Without Jose's friendship, there was no way I could endure the fissures in my marriage. That's what I told a friend who then said to me, "One crisis at a time." So I waited, figuring I could divorce just as easily next month as this.

During this time, Frank got two tickets to Portland's La Femme Magnifique, the local competition for a national drag queen contest, and invited me to go with him. Cliff, who had long since quit accepting my invitations to go anywhere, decided to buy himself a ticket and come with. When Cliff and I arrived ahead of Frank, we found ourselves entering a sky-high hall aflame with lip gloss, glitter, sequins: a veritable skyline of resplendent bigger-and-better-than-reality beauty. All the ladies in this flight of fantasy were ‘70s stewardess gorgeous, the preflight drinks strong, and the cruising direct nonstop. Being a mere RG (real girl) under these conditions can be dangerously ego-deflating unless you are a) drop-dead gorgeous and dressed to the teeth, b) a stone lesbian in a killer tux, or c) hanging with a cute friend who needs you to check out all the guys he’s checking out. Frank was late. I didn't know anyone else. In less than forty-five minutes, I'd crowded up to the bar twice, made the looky-lou rounds, chatted up the shy table mates to my right, and was in danger of getting drunk before the festivities if I had one more gin and tonic. Finally with nowhere left to go, I turned to my husband, even though I knew he wasn't one to flirt, not even with me. What I saw made me rethink my plans for divorce.

My husband, man whose posture and movements make clear that he owns not only his place in the world but the seats on either side, whose personality and fashion sense produce an image somewhere between hippie surfer dude and long-haired redneck, was chatting with the near-twin blonds seated to his left. The voice raised an octave, the expansive hand gestures, the scattering of "girl" and "hon" and "doll" as he talked with these men, all the signs were there: my husband was dishing. Don't ask me why I was surprised. I never made a list of the qualities the man I married would have to have, simply assuming that any man I loved would look at the world the same way I did. If I had made such a list, however, being man enough to enjoy the company of gay men would've been in the top five. Jose was my best friend -- not gay best friend; dearest friend -- and when Jose lay dying, Cliff had argued with me as much as he had consoled. More. He was a man who had raged about the checkbook and the daily chores, a man who coped with his friend’s dying and his wife’s disappearance by focusing on the unraveling disorder of things, and I had hated him for it. But as I watched my husband on this evening, I heard Jose’s words. “Cliff is my hero,” he had said. “He’s the model for how I believe a straight man is supposed to be.” And who knows, maybe Cliff is. I know I never contradicted Jose when he said this, nor offered any example that might make him think otherwise. Jose adored Cliff. Every gay man does.

“Oh, Jose would have loved this,” Frank declared as friends and family gathered. At Frank’s suggestion, we drove caravan from Jose's apartment in the city to the memorial an hour away, as a formal funeral procession: single file, headlights on, all the way up the mountain. I was dressed in black, complete with black hose and a fashionable hat. Oh yes, Jose would have loved that, all of it, not because he was such a drama queen, though Frank thought as much, but rather because Jose lived his life guided as the stars are guided. Call it timing, call it style, Jose knew how to play to the mood of a moment. He always dressed for the occasion of meeting for lunch, for example -- casually of course, but with care. That’s how it was with our friendship as well. Whether staying in to watch a video or going out to eat, our demeanor was casual, yet we held each other’s hearts with care, in full awareness of the needs of the moment. Sometimes, as we entered a restaurant or a movie house, our reflection would flash into the room from a mirror, a window, art under glass, and in those moments I could almost hear the glass sound of hearts breaking.

I love the movies. On the big theater screen, on the small glass screen, all movies are marvelous. The television in my living room is just small enough that I don’t have to say I own a big screen TV, but at twenty-seven inches, it’s big enough that the glass reflects everything in the room. The TV was a gift to my husband, given by me for saying “I love you” every day, for picking flowers and arranging them in my favorite vases week after week, for booking a moonlight cruise for our anniversary, which came just two months after Jose’s death. Our marriage survived, of course, for the same reason it had survived up to that point: Cliff and I always gave each other the space to be exactly who we are, and who we are is not exactly what most people expect. I haven’t any close girlfriends to speak of, at least not any that aren’t gay men, and for years Cliff’s closest friend has been a single woman who’s straight and a decade older. I don’t do shopping with the girls; Cliff doesn’t do football with the boys. At our house, it has always been Cliff who does the cooking, while I put away the dishes, recycle, and take out the trash. I’m also the one who takes the car to the mechanic and mows the lawn. Cliff does the laundry and cleans the toilet. (Okay, so I’m the one who does laundry that requires special care; he is still a guy.) So naturally, even though the television was purchased for my guy, I control the remote. Cliff doesn’t mind. He goes to bed early. I‘m the one who stays up late. I stay up watching videos, like Jose and I used to.

The first color TV Cliff and I ever owned was a hand me down from Jose, a thirteen-inch portable, making it a full two inches larger than the black and white set that preceded it. Cliff loved having color, but I loved the TV itself; not because it was color, although that was novel, and not because it came with my first remote control, although that too was novel -- and fun, once I learned that I didn’t need to point directly at the TV -- no, the reason I loved that TV was that it had been Jose’s; we had watched years of movies on it, the two of us sitting side by side against the wall on the living room carpet or the bed, all propped up with pillows. Whatever we couldn’t see on the big screen we watched on the little one, scooted up as close as humanly possible, so that thirteen inches could become thirteen feet, could become Cinescope, could be the world.

After Jose died, I watched movies just to be close to the world we once inhabited. After Jose died, what I wanted most to watch -- but could not -- was the video we made of our trip to the falls. Multnomah Falls is one of the most scenic spots in Oregon. Jose had only been out of the hospital a couple days, but ever the host, he had arranged to drive his visiting parents up the Columbia River Gorge to show them the sights. We stopped at all the roadside attractions, Frank, me, Jose, and Jose’s parents, looking at this waterfall, taking in that view, and reading every other historical marker, a feat made more remarkable by the fact that getting in and out of our rented car was a comedy of elbows and good manners. Picture five adults squeezing into a subcompact meant for four, five adults sucking in their bellies and clutching their packages until every door can be closed and the high hum of the highway can be countered with polite conversation in two languages; then, at each stop, all five adults burst forth like happy candy from a piñata.

At each stop, we’d get ourselves upright and smoothed out and then stand a moment to wonder whether we ought also to take out the wheelchair, packed in the trunk three layers down. Then out came the video camera, and we’d roll tape on Jose narrating the history of the Gorge, Jose posing with his parents next to an historical marker, Jose leaning on his cane before a scenic vista, Jose speaking to the camera as he read from a list all the names of family members in LA to whom he wished to send greetings and thanks. It wasn't long before I could see that Jose was getting tired, hungry too. I could see it in the way he walked, even more slowly than usual, and in the deliberate way that he exercised patience, with himself, with us. And because I saw Jose losing ground, I took the camera from Frank and told him to go stand next to his sweetheart, not yet knowing that this was to be the last thing recorded that day, in fact, the last video altogether; not knowing that after lunch we will have to cut the trip short and return home.

With the camera rolling, Frank cracks a joke about how much Jose loves him. "How much do I love you?" Jose says response. He smiles. He licks his pasty lips. He makes a false start, clears the phlegm from his throat, smiles again. "It's not that I don't want to say," he says in a voice suddenly hoarse. He laughs. The joke is that when he and Frank split up it was over love, displays of love. For Jose, the Catholic from Nicaragua, love was something you showed through your actions, not something you said. For Frank, the white southern Baptist, love was the words “I love you” spoken out loud and often. Standing high above the floor of the Gorge where the mile-wide Columbia slow-rolls to the sea, Jose recovers himself enough to say, "I love you more than I could ever say." Then, as if to show proof, he adds, "Just wait till we get home." Frank smiles, raises his eyebrows. "A little hoochie coochie?" he says. Everyone laughs. For a moment we are, all of us, silly, embarrassed; in love.

Jose's eyes keep rolling up into his head, his long lashes falling, eyelids drooping like those of a child determined to stay up till the celebration at midnight. Patiently, he brings his eyes back down, smiles, flexes the charm he still has so much of. Frank is wriggling his hips in a little happy dance over getting some hoochie coochie tonight when Jose grins at him, a huge smile that says, You know I love you. Out loud, in his lightly accented English, he says, "Maybe." Jose’s eyes roll back into his head. He closes them, opens them, smiles, and in a voice thick as river gravel, "Maybe not."

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are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

“Ah, sex, it is life”

2010-03-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

Before you plow into this next installment of Low Spark, it’s worth saying that this is where the rubber hits the road. This where you, my sweet readers, learn what heart beats at the center of The Movie Lovers. Jose is the whole reason I began telling this story, but of course at this point you’ve barely met him. That can’t be helped. And I can’t prepare you because nothing can. I had as much preparation as any human being possibly could, and I still wasn’t ready. People die. It can’t be helped. In the '90s it happened every day.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys
Part 6

How do we know what things are? Is it the inside that counts? Is it the outside? How do we know when something is what it appears to be? How about when a facade covers the true nature of a thing? By what measure do we judge? Appearances? Intuition? Our knowledge of the facts? What is a fact, exactly, and when is a “fact” actually a philosophy, a theory, an opinion? Once I learned that all scientific facts down through the ages were, at bottom, based upon the philosophy of the day, I stopped expecting reality to be anything outside of or independent of my own point of view. I mean it was once a fact that the world was flat -- you could fall off the edge of it! -- and now that’s just a hopelessly outdated opinion. In the end, what we focus on is what we create, that’s reality. And right now, that’s the only thing I am truly sure of.

Cliff was a swinger when I met him, but because I have only one relationship rule, which is you can’t cheat on me, he gave up the life without a backward glance. So I was taken completely by surprise when, out of nowhere one day, Cliff volunteered that his tolerance for gay men stemmed from the long-held belief that, as long as there was consent, sex was sex: gay sex, straight sex, swinging sex, kinky, bi, or simple onanism, none of it was anybody’s business but those participating, just like he’d said when we met. Stunned to hear my husband -- or anyone, for that matter -- say he did not imagine love to be a part of the equation for any but heterosexual lovers, I sat silent and pondered the fact that the man I loved seemed to “tolerate” our friends only because all sex was fair game. Meanwhile, Cliff kept going. It was our friendship with Frank and Jose, he said, seeing the love they felt for each other, it was this that had changed his view. He went on to elaborate, but I was only half listening. Instead, I was remembering the early stages of our friendship with Frank and Jose. While at first there had been the pretense of being roommates, soon that fact gave way to the truth of being a couple and the two of them began to embrace and kiss when we were in their home, as we all do with our mates. I remember how excited -- that’s the right word -- how excited Cliff and I were over this new development. Engaging in couples behavior meant that our new friends trusted us, that they felt safe. Wonderful! How could we facilitate more of this behavior? Cliff and I had gotten a couple more sentences into this private conversation before we heard ourselves. What were these men to us, anyway, animals in a zoo? And what did that make us?

To be fair, almost any dance with the unfamiliar can elicit the animal-in-a-zoo response. What is this new thing, we wonder. Is it interesting? Is it funny? Do I like it? What happens if I tap on the glass? This activity is fun when you are on the outside looking in. Being on the inside is another story. My own experience on the wrong side of the glass came as a girl of ten. My parents had made a stop after church at the home of a couple who had two boys and a big tree in the back yard. Looking forward to showing how well I could climb, I changed from my good dress and patent leather shoes into the cotton shirt and shorts my mother had brought, took my little sister by the hand, and went outside to where the boys were. I wasn’t asked to play or to climb. I wasn’t spoken to at all. Instead, I heard the younger brother say, “She’s alright, I guess,” to which the older replied, “The bigger one looked better in a dress.” The younger one nodded. And then. . . . silence. The sun, warm bright, sparkled and winked through the leaves of the cherry tree. I stared into it awhile. Then I went inside.

* * *

Love, beautiful Jose said nothing of love, but love rose from him like the childhood scent of beans and rice for breakfast. Jose talked about sex. He talked about sex like it was love. He‘d sigh and say, "Ah sex, it is life."

Frank once repeated to me the words of his and Jose’s couples’ counselor, who told Frank early on, “Jose has an unusual definition of sex.” For Jose sex was, to put it in the words of an eighteen-year-old, when you, well, you know, when you “did it.” Penetration was sex. But mouths didn't count in that definition. Not when kissing. Not when tonguing other things. Certainly backs and bellies didn't count, and arms -- the embrace -- that counted for love but not for fidelity. Now, if you’re gay or a swinger, this may sound like a lifestyle choice. But if you are straight, particularly if you are married, such a definition might have you calling Jose, what's the word, easy? sleazy? a slut? Words with attitudes like those a teenage boy might lob at a girl who’s turned him down and then made out with someone else at the same party; ugly words that couldn’t be further from the truth of Jose. But then, when it comes to sex, we all tend to speak as if our definition and point of view are the only possibilities.

As Jose lay dying; dying the death that sex had brought him, dying into his short, wildly-bright candle of a life; as he fell away from life and his body shrank like an inflatable love doll unplugged and abandoned in the corner of a rented room, Jose became love. Sex was gone -- “Ah, sex, it is life” -- and now life ebbed, trickled, seeped away. As the body receded into the folds of the bedclothes, sloughing off its muscle tone, its modesty, its toilet training, its words and codes and thoughts, its social graces; as the body lay dying, Jose’s spirit rose up, flooding the room as the sun floods the earth with light. And all who entered there became flushed, breathless, starry-eyed in a universe wholly and completely nourished by the light emanating from Jose. Awash in love, furniture floated, ties to the outside world came loose at their moorings, plans bobbed and drifted away. Freed from the gravity of the everyday, the creases in our faces relaxed, cheeks plumped, mouths lifted into beatific smiles. Each day when I arrived to care for Jose, I flew to him, held as the planets are held to the sun, the sun that burns its own bright body, its yellow-orange emotion, its incandescent, cannibalized light.

* * *

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Jane Mansfield

2010-03-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

The fifth installment of The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, and as promised, here you will find me in my underwear (more or less) and my husband in a size 48 DD, truly not to be missed. Scroll on down if you’d like a recap of my storytelling style or to catch up on earlier scenes, and do be careful when you do, as I am just on the other side of the screen sneezing my fool head off. I am, most assuredly, contagious.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

"Do you have any Jockey briefs like these in medium?"
"We have this kind," said the sales clerk. She pulled out a three-roll pack of briefs with various colored stripes.
"No, I like solid colors," I said. "Those are the right colors, but I don't do stripes. You have the briefs I want in small and large, but I need a medium."
The clerk looked up from the roll of shorts in her hand. "My small days are over," I said.
"Are these for your boyfriend? husband?" she said, both doubtful and hopeful.
"They're for me."
"They're . . . for you." It was a question, but it didn't sound like one. The clerk continued holding the tube of striped Jockey briefs, the kind without the flap.
"I've always had skinny thighs," I said. "These fit better than women's underwear ever did." The clerk set the three-pack back on the table.
"Did you know they make Jockey for women now?" she said.
"Look, if I buy a pair of women's underwear, Jockey or otherwise, I might as well buy a thong because that's what they're going to turn into as soon as I move. Know what I mean?"
"Uh," she shifted from one foot to the other, looked at the cash register. No one was waiting.
"I found the colors I want in the bikini, but I prefer the regular briefs. Do you have them in back stock?"
"I've just never heard that before," she said.
My lunch hour was ticking away. "Would it make you feel better if I told you they were for my husband? Okay. They're for my husband. Now do you have them?"

It's a straight party, and when Cliff and I enter the room no one recognizes us. This seems odd because I am wearing no make-up, no mask, and no glasses -- I forgot the Groucho Marx glasses I’d meant to wear -- and in a suit, fedora, and eye-pencil mustache, I am so lightly disguised as to be, for Halloween anyway, naked. So there we stand in the archway as the whole room laughs, all their pink college-kid mouths stretched wide: me a down-at-the-heel but nonetheless dapper Italian man in a plaid suit and striped suspenders escorting a hot babe clad in a clingy blue knit that sweeps up into a turtleneck and down into a hip-hugging, knee-length dress. Sultry but demure. Below the hemline, my hot date sports great calves in sheer hose, two pair, because she shaved her face but not her legs and any drag queen will tell you it takes two pair of pantyhose to cover the hair. No one can figure out who we are. Not after a minute. Not after two. Finally a curly-headed man says, "I only know one woman that big."

Because of his size, Cliff is accustomed to being drafted to help with jobs requiring strength. Before the party, in fact, Cliff was at the home of friends who’d just purchased a big screen TV. I was to meet him there to do hair and make-up. When the delivery guy knocked, it was Cliff who answered the door, and in a big voice that matched his big body he said, I'll help you with that. Keep in mind, this was the ‘80s and Cliff wasn’t dressed in some hooker outfit -- the kind straight guys like to wear now to show their girlfriends that their masculinity isn’t threatened by a little make-up and heels -- no, Cliff’s frock was a thrift-store cast off, made by someone’s elderly aunt. So imagine a football player, say six-four, 250, in a skin-tight, hand-knitted, electric blue dress, his hair in hot rollers, wrapping his arms around the end of a box nearly as big as he is. On the other end of the box is the delivery guy. He looked up at Cliff, looked back down at the box, said nothing. Cliff, wearing no make up and walking backward with his size twelve feet stuffed into a pair of red jellies, said, Watch that corner, and, Over to your right a bit, and, Okay, let’s set it down here. The delivery guy said nothing. As they hefted the television out of the box, Cliff caught his reflection: a bit thick at the waist, he thought, but what a pair of knockers! To the delivery guy he said, I'll bet you get a real workout on a job like this. Delivery guy said nothing. But Cliff noticed a slight flick of the eyes -- across the size forty-eight, double D chest -- the kind of half-conscious, half-fearful glance preteen boys have for busty girls. Cliff looked down, paused a moment, and then realizing the problem -- and before the delivery guy could make his exit -- pulled up the dress and reached down into his bra, turning the balloons there knots-forward. “I need nips,” he said. The delivery guy didn’t even wait for a tip.

At the party later, I catch the curly-headed man, one of my classmates, eyeing Cliff's chest. A sneak here. A peek there.
Cliff sidles up to him and says "Go on. Touch 'em."
The curly-headed man shakes his head. "No," he says, but his mouth twitches into a shy smile.
"Come on, man, they're balloons, but they feel real."
The man shakes his head, "I can't."

Many years from now at a high drag affair -- gay, of course, and stuffed like a twelve-year-old girl in her mother’s push-up bra, complete with stilettos and a feathered hat -- Cliff will win the Best Camp award with an over-the-hill-Liz-Taylor muumuu, lime green leggings, fuzzy slippers, and a middle-aged gut. But at the college party tonight, Cliff is svelte in a knit dress, pouty red lips, bedroom eyes, and a hand-on-the-hip stance that would make Jane Mansfield look butch. He focuses his movie-star gaze on the curly-headed man.

"Sure you can," Cliff says and he -- er, she -- snatches the man's right hand and places it on her left boob, palm turned inward against that knotted nipple, fingers wide to embrace a tit so big that even a man’s hand can’t contain it. A circle gathers. Hand still on Cliff’s boob the curly-headed man looks side to side. He makes a tentative squeeze and then, as if propelled by a jolt from a hot wire, his body suddenly rockets backward as he screams -- ”Ahhhh!”

The crowd busts up. The curly-headed man lands on his feet a couple yards away, looking at the offending hand. Then he looks at the Jane-Mansfield chest on Cliff. Her face. Then at his hand again. "Oh, God!" he says. He looks at those pouty lips, the lashes shading Cliff’s eyes. "I'm sorry," he says. The crowd laughs harder. "I'm sorry. Oh, God, I'm sorry."

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

But You Smiled at Me

2010-03-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

Here it is, the fourth installment of The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, which is the first chapter in The Movie Lovers. We’re at the halfway point. If you want to know more about The Movie Lovers, scroll back to Hello Dad? I’m in Jail!

A quick recap for those who just joined us. My storytelling style is a bit like abstract art. Each chapter is a whole story divided into visual chunks. You might imagine it as a group of postcards on a refrigerator door arranged by Picasso. The order is not chronological so much as a tumble of memories that collide and fall into patterns like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope. I hope it entertains you.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

As a college undergrad I spent ten weeks in New York City on an arts and culture study where I was not completely ready for all the culture I would encounter. My first lesson came in the form of schooling in a new set of street rules. The most important rule I learned by returning the smile of a good-looking man; he followed me for three blocks. Now Manhattan blocks are easily four times the size of any city block from my neck of the woods, and unlike the men in a smaller city such as Portland, this one would not take my backside nor my determined walk as an answer. Finally, I gave up, whirled around, and half yelled half pleaded, “Why are you following me? Quit following me!”

“But you smiled at me.”
I blinked.
“I’m from the West Coast. We smile at everyone.”

Newly chastised about the devastating power of my feminine smile, I decided to explore the city to find a spot where I might feel at home, and I found it in the Village. I spent many hours writing in the coffee shops and parks there. Then one sunny afternoon as I sauntered down the street, a good-looking man walking toward me on the sidewalk smiled. I looked over my shoulder. No one behind me. Then another man smiled at me as he walked by. I did a quick mental inventory: no make-up, dressed in my favorite blue cotton blouson pants and one of Cliff's shirts, a pale blue plaid number from some ‘50s sitcom; braless, but that couldn’t be it since I was so thin my breasts didn’t bounce; new haircut, sheared short just the day before at a Village barbershop that specialized in haircuts for punks, but I hadn’t bothered to style it that day. In other words, I hadn't gotten any better looking than the day before when no man had smiled. I knew the rule. They knew the rule.

As I pondered this, another man smiled -- a beautiful man -- and this time I smiled back. He didn't follow me. After that, all the men seem to be smiling at me and I'm smiling back, feeling sassy, feeling like my old West Coast self again, thinking, Why are all these men suddenly giving me the eye, the once over, the look? After all, this is the Village and these guys are . . . . And then it hits me. They think I'm a boy.

I stayed in New York only a short time, less than three months, but I missed the arts and culture as soon as I returned home. So I got a night job ushering at the local performing arts center, where I was paired with an usher who was a schoolteacher by day -- closeted, naturally -- a mild man with salt and pepper hair and a quiet disposition. He not only showed me the ropes but, by way of example, an understated and impeccable standard of usher etiquette as well.

Between curtain time and intermission, ushers have very few duties and so most would sit in on the show or talk in the hallway. Patrons were one subject of conversation. For example, an opera regular in the second balcony was a middle-aged, not terribly attractive man who attended each show as a conservatively dressed matron. With her bland beige dresses, the braided belts that snaked around her apple middle, her low-heeled pumps, and the snapped-shut handbag that hung from her elbow, this matron was as badly dressed as anybody's auntie from the old country. But she was composed and courteous and we felt a kind of protective affection for her. Still, after seating our old-country auntie, the schoolteacher and I often found ourselves remarking ruefully on her sense of style, her choice of color -- does beige even count as a color? -- not to mention the grandma-style wig that lay matted and fuzzy around the edges. She was far too easy to spot as a cross-dresser, and we wanted nothing so badly as to take her out for a makeup session or to buy her a more flattering frock. Of course we couldn’t say this.

One night after seating our auntie, my trainer exited the auditorium door with a mime-white face, his eyes and mouth stretched as wide and long as the Minister of Morality in La Cage Aux Folles at the exact moment he realizes he has, with one feather-boa-wrapped gesture, sunk his entire political career.

He looked at me and said, "I called her sir.”
"You what?"

"She had trouble with her heels, you know, the carpeting and the narrow stairs, so I held her elbow to steady her, helped her to her seat, and when she said thank you I said” -- and at this point his face sunk like a punctured beach ball -- “You're welcome, sir.”

~ Dear readers. Tune in tomorrow to see me in my underwear. ~

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

Hello, Dad? I’m in jail!

2010-03-12T23:24:00.000-08:00

I’ve got this book, The Movie Lovers, and what follows is the third installment of the first and most popular chapter, entitled The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. The first two scenes of Low Spark were posted last night and the night before, and response being what it was, I’ve decided to serialize the full chapter.

My storytelling style is a bit like abstract art. Each chapter is a whole story divided into visual chunks. You might imagine it as a group of postcards on a refrigerator door arranged by Picasso. The order is not chronological so much as a tumble of memories that collide like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, and that’s The Movie Lovers: a kaleidoscopic carnival ride; an adrenaline-driven, road-trip-in-heels kind of story that rearranges the happy family portraits, scribbles graffiti, and raises single-finger salutes to the standard ideas about sex, family, and intimacy. From the beautiful to the unbearable to the ballsy, all is laid bare in this story of love, death, and friendship.

I have no idea if this will work as a serial told scene by scene, more or less, rather than chapter by chapter. We shall see. I hope it entertains you.

PS - Tonight you’ll meet Rob, but really you’ve me him already. Low Spark opens with him and me and the first pair of boy’s underwear I fell in love with.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

He was crying when he called from jail. When he talked the next day at school, he was back to his old self, running on like a tape-loop voiceover, the one from an animated short he took me to at Cinema 21, the one with the heavy back beat and the voice that yells, “Hello, Dad? I’m in jail. Hello, Dad? I’m in jail. I like it here.”

My first openly gay friend and I became best friends my last year in high school. It was Rob, we’ll call him Rob, who introduced me to classic black and white movies, the Animation Film Festival at Cinema 21, and Patti Smith, reigning Queen of Punk in the late ‘70s. We met when he sat next to me one afternoon on an airport-style ottoman in the student commons. I was an Oregon Scholar senior skipping chemistry. He was a scruffy-looking junior who clearly spent most of his time outside of class. Depressed and irritable, I was giving off the don’t-bother-me vibe, but he walked right over in his torn jeans and his uncombed wire-brush hair, hair that alternated between being matted down and sticking straight out, sat down right next to me and said,

“Some people are over the line.”

“They are,” I said, both a question and a statement.

“Yes,” he said, “on a different side.” And then he gave me one of those loopy grins I would come to think of as his trademark and drew a line in space. “Here’s where most people are,” he said. Then he pointed to another point in space somewhere off the continuum. “And some people are over here. That’s where I am, over the line.” It was the ‘70s, like I said, and it wasn’t the thing back then to come out of the closet in high school. It certainly wasn’t in vogue. Hell, it just wasn’t done. All the same, I knew what he meant, gay, which meant no come-on line; he just wanted a friend. Okay. I let him stay. We became inseparable. Now, I don’t know if I was the first best friend he ever had who was a girl, but for sure Rob was my first best friend who was a gay guy. I make this point because of an odd experience I had not long ago. In getting to know another woman at a party, I indicated that the man I’d arrived with was my best friend. The woman looked confused and then said, “But he’s gay.” Yes, I said, now confused as well. Her face cleared up when she said, “You mean he’s your best gay friend,” as if a person might have a wardrobe of best friends from differing categories. “No,” I said, “He’s my best friend. He’s also gay.” I’ve had a number of best friends over the years -- I’m a best friend kind of girl -- and these best friends have been male and female, gay and straight, intellectual snobs and partying fools, white people and brown; some have disappeared the way people do as circumstances change, some remain Christmas-card friends, some suddenly decided we were enemies, and some have died. The woman at the party made several other attempts at defining best friend categories for me, and then she sighed and told me she was from Utah. I laughed. I laughed because I liked her and hoped we would be friends, and I laughed because I have to laugh whenever others feel the need to edit or reduce the terms of my life to simple categories. It was a need for simple categories that had landed my high school friend in jail.

Rob’s favorite place was Mildred’s Ballroom, an underage gay disco housed in the old Knights of Pythian building downtown. Sometimes he took me with him. Sometimes I danced with a girl, if one asked me. And whenever Rob went to Mildred’s, he wore his favorite boots: thigh high, spike-heeled, shiny patent leather boots. Every once in awhile, he’d complain about how hard it was to walk in them, to which I would snort, “Tell me about it!” Like all teenage girls at the disco end of the ‘70s, I was a veteran of the strappy, spike-heeled, platform sandal made of solid wood. Like I said, my best friend and I shared just about everything. The night he got pulled over he was just outside the disco, and sitting next to him in his black Rambler sedan was a regular from Mildred’s, a crop-haired bleached blonde with dark roots. (Hello, Dad?)

It’s after midnight, so the cop snaps, Outta the car, which is when he sees those boots, those leather-sexual-fantasy boots, and he starts rapid-fire, first about my friend, Where you been? Where you headed? then about the girl, Is she really a girl? Has she always been a girl?

Hello, Dad? I’m in jail!

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All contents of Sins of the Eldest Daughter / dinarozellebarnett.blogspot.com/
are copyrighted © and may not be used without permission from the creator.

*Sins of the Eldest Daughter*

Dissolve /TheRapture, ch.6

Hell Above the Water /The Rapture, ch. 5

And There It Was /The Rapture, ch. 4

Wild Horses /The Rapture, ch. 3

Amazing: He Called Me Baby // The Rapture, ch. 2

Amazing: Spring Tease ^_~ // The Rapture, ch. 1

Three gorgeous celestial bodies, Venus, Chiron, and Ceres, are converging in Pisces. Vibrations of love and healing.

It's My Birthday!

The Rapture // Prologue

Best Friends, Wet Dogs, Birthdays and Jose

War. What Is it good For?

Because Thank You Sounds So Much Better Then I Feel Like Crap

Stealing Tomorrow from Today

Halley’s Comet: My Zero BDay Blog Resumes

One Last Breath

Carnival of Rust

Hello from Me and My Monkey

Another Loose Cannon Gone Bipolar

White, straight, married. Educated.

The Shape of My Heart

"Zero": My Zero BDay Blog Resumes

Final Straw

On the Borderline

Turn Right Over to the TV Page

Powerlines: The Transformation Landscape of Nowhere

1 a.m.

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

Butterfly

Teaser

HIV University

Angel

Sacred Blood

Blues for an Indian Summer

Catch and Release

Everlong

The Room, the House, the Heavens

Ooh La La La La La

Machisma

Shaman's Harvest: Dragonfly

The Do-Good White Women's Society (Massive Attack “Unfinished Sympathy”)

The Oldest Story in the World

Prey

Red Wine and Rust

Crap

The Pumpkin Truth

The End

Do You Wanna Die?

It Happened Like This

Exit Light

Everybody Knows That

**This is the New Shit**

Nothing to See Here, So Let’s Move It Along Folks, Part 2

Nothing to See Here, So Let’s Move It Along, Folks.

Maybe Not

“Ah, sex, it is life”

Jane Mansfield

But You Smiled at Me

Hello, Dad? I’m in jail!

Sins of the Eldest Daughter

This is the New Shit