The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 10

Of all the devil’s lovable qualities, the most endearing must be his endless concern for the needs and sufferings of lonely people. What a ministry! Who else is concerned with the miseries of solitary adolescents, skinny women in trailers, old men no one likes? When I was fifteen I went into the swamp to await a visitation. Beaver had flooded thirty acres but in one place land jutted out and at the end of the spit was a stand of cat o’ nine tails. These cat o’ nine tails, turned golden in winter, formed a kind of spiritual antennae. To speak here was to be heard in the other world.

I talked to God and the Devil. I had no doubt they were in cahoots. “Show up either one of you,” I said. “But wear a flannel shirt and blue jeans and shit-kicker boots.”

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 9

For a long time I had a non-fraternal identical twin, born from different parents on the same day. Anthony was a confidence artist, a honey-tongue shoplifter, a smack-addicted hustler. He was pure charisma, I liked him a lot, that is, until I started making comparisons between my dear brother and myself.

I was in college, I worked part-time, I lifted weeks thrice weekly. I meditated and prayed.

(What was I doing, then, in that dead-end beached-whale alcoholic hustler bar, that bar where you could get arrested for just showing up and crabs just by sitting on a stool? I was slumming. Of course I was. Slumming and making some pocket money.)

Anthony, on the other hand, was clearly on The Wrong Road.

Other differences: Anthony had a warm animal in his walk, a better smile, his boyfriends were all rich or well-hung and they nearly ran each other down competing to rescue him. He wore beautiful clothes he stole fresh every day. Anthony had more friends. Of course he did. He was more fun to be around.

Maybe I was down on my luck, just scraping by, but I’d contracted Presbyterianism as a child and I was certain that this was not how things were supposed to work.

Late one night Anthony and I were sitting tucked behind a dumpster off 8th and Broadway. Anthony had a bottle of Peach Schnapps. I’d bought us nachos from the Circle K. He’d just gotten out of detox; I was supposed to take the GRE in Colorado Springs the next morning.

“I was raised in a good Catholic family,” Anthony told me. “I was raised to believe in Jesus Christ the Redeemer.” It was getting cold and we huddled close together. He smelled like schnapps and smoke, like the polyester and starch of that day’s stolen shirt.

“Anthony,” I said. “Let's suck each other off."

We’d never done that before. Of course not. We never had any money and we weren't, either one of us, free.

“Twenty bucks,” he said.

“I paid for the nachos.”

We looked around us at the narrow space between the dumpster and the wall.

Anthony had the most beautiful warm brown eyes. Those eyes he kept right to the end. “It’s not just the Holiday Inns I miss,” he said. “Sometimes I even get nostalgic for motels.”

He went along with it, right there in a corner of the parking lot. I suspect it was partly out of sympathy for me.

In this way our fates were cast together, two brothers tumbling in the dark behind a dumpster off Tenth and Broadway, until it was impossible to tell, who was lucky and who was not.

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 8

Doug was my role model the whole time I worked at the sex club, right up to the time he stole his boyfriend’s money and car, and disappeared. I still wish him well. I hope he never gets caught. I hope his life in the next place is better than it ever was here.

We worked together, Doug and I. I was maintenance, went around all night with a spray bottle and a rag, wiping come off the floor. Doug was the doorman. All night men came in off of Colfax, shame-faced mostly, impatient, breathless, already regretful. They carried a grudge against the hunger that had brought them to this place, again. Doug always smiled, and he spoke to everyone gently. Even the way he passed strangers their change was tender. He absolved everyone twice, once when he buzzed the door to let us in and again when he buzzed and let us out again.

Doug wasn’t young anymore, he had AIDS, but he still looked like a kid, a very pale sad-eyed kid, and just the way he said ‘Hello’ and ‘Good night’ made you feel like no matter what you did, no matter what your sheets looked like when you were done, Doug would always root for you, would always argue that, no matter what, the future you deserved was a good one.

Tags:bathhouses,gay,compassion

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 8

Doom. Certain doom—and meanwhile constant surprises.

The basic situation: children fall into the street on the first day of school. Americans go on bombing weddings. Young men decide to do the right thing but don’t get around to it in time.

How many times have I sensibly decided, henceforth I will be sad? Sorrow, I thought, is like a black suit in Japan. You ought to be able to wear it for anything.

Then even doom is a fuzzy blanket is snatched from us. Disaster withheld.

Here comes another fool now, hauling blueberries into intensive care.

Just when everyone is assembled and the widow begins to cry, the guest of honor coughs, sits up in his coffin, and even the Japanese must hurriedly change their ties.

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 7

In the foothills of the Himalayas I learned to hide from nuns. Those nuns lived in mud huts and, after sufficient austerities, they started legal battles against each other. Threw subpoenas through windows. ‘Your mud hut is six feet over the boundary’ etc.

The monks were just as bad. One monk brought his favorite cheese from New Delhi and when someone stole half of it he went on a rampage for days. (People aren’t apple trees, you know. There’s no telling what you’ll get from us.)

The master announced, “Send a delegation to New Delhi. The cheese must be restored.” The monk started to cry and said, “Please, no. I don’t care about my cheese anymore.” He had to beg the master not to get on an all-night bus to buy cheese for him. For weeks if anyone even said the word cheese his eyes would fill with tears and he'd apologize all over again.

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 6

The last time God spoke to me—which generally happens only annually and then with something that sounds like it came out of a fortune cookie—what God said was:

Choose the right rebellions.

I could only hope that this was a clarion call for more beer, more porno, and more nights at the baths.

But that, alas, would not be the rebellion. That’s the routine.

The struggle to find the living thing and stay with it as it shudders through me. To be awake the morning I wake up alive, like Margarita Nikolaevna after she’d wept for her beloved master every day for a year and one morning she woke up and knew: something is going to happen.

That same night she was flying naked over Moscow, smashing out the windows of prominent literary critics.

Oh Margarita, Yes! The right rebellions!

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 5

It is enough to allow the entire sky to hang above you, to return to it when you can, and not perpetually retreat to a series of dark, cramped, consolatory rooms.

The sky, unnerving as it is, is enough.

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 4

One of the first men who ever fucked him, he explained, was an albino with a cock ten inches long. “Everyone had to experiment with him, men and women both.

“The trouble was they’d always tell him that afterward, that they were just experimenting. Me, I tried to be kind--but to say so is to already be cruel. I was just seventeen. What did I know?

“He went a little crazy, drank all the time. His face covered over with soft downy white fur. He still came to parties and stood in the corner with his sunglasses on. All night long he called people over, one by one, showing them first his huge pale cock, then his delicate pink eyes.”

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 3

The Giant Squid, did you know, has a penis eight feet long. As long as any other tentacle and, indeed, he is constantly tripping over it. (All of this is scientifically documented.) The Giant Squid, when aroused, has little power of discrimination and will inject its semen anywhere it can: in females, in males, even in one of its own tentacles.

(Is anyone else relating to this?)

The Great Squid lives very deep in the ocean; even an eight foot penis doesn’t get you far at such depths and the lonely Great Squid are almost never seen, though they do turn up, now and then, in electronic chat rooms:

Lonely male, lives at the bottom of the sea. My penis is eight feet long!

Found: Wherein they feel lost . . .

"The cynics and the moralist agree in placing the pleasures of love among the enjoyments termed gross, that is, between the desire for drinking and the need for eating, though at the same time they call love less indispensable, since it is something which, they assert, one can go without. I expect about anything from the moralist, but am astonished that the cynic should go thus astray. Probably both fear their own demons, whether resisting or surrendering to them, and they oblige themselves to scorn their pleasure in order to reduce its almost terrifying power, which overwhelms them, and its strange mystery, wherein they feel lost. I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such things exist) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favorite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder."

Marguerite Yourcenar, from Memoirs of Hadrian

Mary Todd Lincoln

As a gift for my 33rd birthday my dear friend, Akemi Shinohara, presented me with this portrait of my idol, my inspiration, my guardian angel, the fabulous, the impossible, the much-maligned, the inestimable, the infinitely magnificent: Mary Todd Lincoln.

Isn't it marvellous? Please visit Akemi's site (see links) and make her rich and famous.

Mary Todd Lincoln

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 2

Inevitably it begins to seem incongruous, even uncomfortable, to offer earnest prayers to the Blessed Virgin that she might grant one, this very hour, the right to administer tender affections upon a horsehung thug.

Holy Mother, grant us this day a rugged bruiser!

That hunger sticks. Cold baths, pure intentions and bleached underpants do nothing to allay it. One prays without meaning to, in odd corners of the day.

Doesn't it only seem fair, if heavenly men tattoo across their back a blue ink Virgin, that the Holy Mother ought to keep, beneath her skirts, a man or two?

Just the same, the Mother blushes at our prayers and so, clutching our clipboards, we continue on a little further down the hall. . .

The Devil, Dearly Loved, Renounces Evil / 1

Lust shish-kabobs me, drives a spike asshole to throat. Pinned there, wriggling, I comfort myself: what’s more respectable than being martyred? Screwing up my neck and crossing my eyes I examine the skewer of lust that has skewered me thus. Not iron, not silver or stainless steel—oh horrors!

It’s one of those cocktail swords for fruity drinks. It’s plastic baby pink. Oh the indignity! The sword’s hilt protrudes from my neck—seeing all this is a heck of a yoga—and on the back of the hilt—

Oh hell.

It’s an olive. A juicy green olive spraying its vinegar and olive guts into the lustful mouth of this cocktail canned St. Sebastian.

Found: Exorcism

"Exorcism, a reaction in force, with a battering ram, is the true poem of the prisoner.

"In the very space of suffering and obsession you introduce such exaltation, such magnificent violence, welded to the hammering of words, that evil is progressively dissolved, replaced by an airy demonic sphere--a marvellous state."

Henri Michaux, from 'Ordeals, Exorcisms'
Collected in Darkness Moves, translated by David Ball

Art by Akemi Shinohara, Illustrator
(See links for website.)

In Praise of Chartres' West Portal

Tea, a brimming cup, tucked into the corner on the bottom left. Steam rises from it taking shape: a man shovels snow, a woman shimmies up a coconut palm. A loving mother eats the kids, another mother shops at Sears. A comprehensive display of sexual acts so that no need be disappointed or (worse) consider themselves unusual. A man whittles a stick in the shape of happiness. A baby says, “Why? Why not?” Several people who manage nonetheless to look bored. 1000 acres of prairie, a modest polar region, a homemade scooter. A young man jacks off in a cybercafé, attempting to hide his gigantic penis. The Apostles, the Prophets, the Pointer Sisters. A mosque, temple, church and gurudhwalla, someplace cheap for lunch, someplace where your picture sits on the TV and is even, now and then, kissed.

Continue through the entrance then. Don’t stand all day gaping at the door.

The Care of Days

Because time is short and I accept that I am rooted in the days and won’t escape them.

The days I can’t make count or sense of. The season’s out the window, the calendar’s for the year. (And this country—what are they calling it now?)

Everyone I love appears in the newspaper--Births, Weddings, Obituaries--on three successive days. Some go backwards.

Every morning a new old face in the mirror. All day, determined this time to learn, I cram my head full of books and voices. At night I forget everything.

This day, all I have, stumbling out into a morning so bright I can’t even open my eyes.

The feeling most people have at the top of stairs, when you’re sure you came up for something, but can’t remember what. That feeling doesn’t move.

A businessman knows he’s forgotten something, remembers, lunges for a taxi, and rushes to an appointment on the other side of town. So much time has passed. He’s late already, maybe too late.

Pausing at the edge of the day--

Swallow panic swallow never. Never mind panic mind.

Try to remember--

For something.

What for?

Comfort / 2

For once we agree completely about Tokyo.

My husband dreams we’re camped out in a ruined city. There’s a big crowd, everybody’s got a mattress, and I’m bitching about ours.

My husband gets up, goes from mattress to mattress, and measures with his thumb and forefinger. As he walks he argues with me: our mattress is thicker than theirs, theirs is much thinner, our mattress is better, this one too, our mattress is much thicker, much better, much thicker than theirs.

Spiritual People

He’s got twenty years Tarot experience, the home numbers of enlightened masters and star charts on his Palm Pilot. Cutting through (over coffee) is what we’re meant to do. Instead it appears we’re lost again in the winter coat closet.

Appreciation. Super-consciousness. Unlimited abundance!

What I hear you saying is. . .

It’s the usual trouble with spiritual people. They seem so much less spiritual than the unspiritual people--the ones left with nothing to go on but kindness.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the retrovirals, but still I miss the friends who cut me off— "My doctor gives me six months. I don’t take any crap."

Only one of the nuns I ever knew was kinder than the average sex club doorman, the kind who's seen your sheets and still smiles when he passes back your keys at the end of the night.

That was Ani Rita, the knife throwing nun, who’d been a very dangerous cook once upon a time in Switzerland. A woman came to her saying she’d had a terrible premonition, that she’d be dead in a year.

Dead in a year, laughed Ani Rita. You could be dead tonight.

Rat Good

So peculiar, irregular and quirky, the little ways we keep ourselves alive—notebooks the size of matchbooks and going to movies alone—it’d be charming, really, if the ways we killed ourselves (and everyone else helped) were not so gigantic, loaded with weight, speed and municipal involvement, like city trains.

Everything good in me survives like one of those rodent mammals from the age of the dinosaurs, darting from one prehistoric fern to another.

God help this rat, good, god give it speed. Give it claws.

Sermon for April Fool's Day

It is important—also reassuring—to recognize that most people are funny-looking. One ought not feel ashamed to be among them.

Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Clearly, if there ever was a plan, it involves being gawky and lop-sided. Also: bald, lumpy, bow-legged, jug-eared. These are the true fashions. Almost no one, after all, has navel rings or platform shoes, whereas bellies and crow’s feet are absurdly popular.

We shall laugh in our mirrors then, and not save up for the knife. It is right to be funny-looking and it is all right.

There is, I presume, some evolutionary benefit: the lions all look at me and laugh.

Found: first by way of sex

From the great Luis Cernuda, holy be his name:

"You've said it before: you can neither perceive nor want nor understand a thing that doesn't come into you first by way of sex, and from there to your heart and then your head. And that's why your experience, your mystic harmony, begins as a sexual foreshadowing. But it isn't possible to seek it out or provoke it willingly; it's given only when and the way it wants to be."

from "Harmony" in Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda