Ooh La La La La La

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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Machisma

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.

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

Shaman's Harvest: Dragonfly

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

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

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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The Oldest Story in the World

"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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Prey

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

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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Crap

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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The Pumpkin Truth

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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The End

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?

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

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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Exit Light

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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Everybody Knows That

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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**This is the New Shit**

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

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

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.