I Really Am Doing Well

I really am lucky.

I am. It's not true I don't have friends. Acquaintances should count as friends. How cruel to think otherwise, how inconsiderate of them. I have polite acquaintances who can be invited for meals. I have a good job which gives me money and status within my community. I can have whatever I want for lunch. I have as much health is typical for my age.

My job is easy. Actually my job would be very difficult to do well. I should have to keenly exert myself. Fortunately, effort is not praiseworthy. It is not looked upon well. I am mediocre at my work. Everyone is pleased with me. My mediocrity is commendable.

Above all, I am comfortable. Did you know I can set my bathwater to the precise degree that I desire? Even the floor is heated during winter.

A city where strangers never speak is highly conducive to reading.

Actually it's typical for people my age to not have many friends. This is not college. People are focused on their families, on success. I am very lucky, of course, to have neither of these things. It gives me a lot of spare time. Think of all the money I save, just by not having children!

I am not alone. I'm lucky to not be alone. I have a good husband. My good somnolent husband. I'm quite good myself. At least I am not evil. Being evil, at least in an obvious way, would entail making an effort. Evil is not something I need. I am a salaried employee. Pay day is the 20th of the month. It's direct deposit, you don't have to DO anything.

Isn't that lucky?

It's very lucky.

And so it is very embarrassing, very guilty liberal, very adolescent that I feel myself verging on tears as the bus arrives at the airport and I have to clamp my lips together to trap the pernicious weeping cheering voice that wants to shout:

Escape from the land of death!

Escape from the land of death!

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

GAY BUSINESS.

Randy Mesmer was all in favor of loving men, and sucking cock, and being queer, but this business of being gay—and a business was what it was—seemed an abundantly bad idea.

As far as Randy could figure, some time in Seventies a gaggle of rich white guys had sat down-- over a meal of white wine, Cornish game hens, and crème brule--to figure out the most profitable way to stay consistently miserable.

Happiness was all well and good in theory, but there wasn’t much money to be made from it, not compared to misery, that wish-fulfilling cow.

(The cows and the wishes, alas, are always someone else’s.)

Someone was getting rich, you can be sure, from all the exotic varieties of underpants, from lemon vodka and eyebrow waxing, from all the money spent for rainbow flags and 501s, for six hours at the baths, for moisturizer, for timeshares in Provincetown, for self-defense classes, for temporary and permanent tattoos and penis enlargement, for colored contact lenses and ginseng supplements, for books of everyday affirmations, for realistic flexible washable models of horse penises, for cigarillos and Nicoderm, for gym memberships, for hair implants, for socks to match everything, for coke, for tina, for Marianne Williamson, for recovery bumper stickers, for poppers, for E, for bottles of water to go with the E, for retrovirals, for queer theology, for beard trimmers, for grapefruit-scented non-sticky water-soluble lube.

What use were you, if you were happy and had a man you loved? You stayed home and boned him all day and hardly spent any money at all.

This was to be avoided, at all cost.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

ASHAMED.

Randy Mesmer got kicked out of the monastery for fellating a monk. The monk didn’t get kicked out, just Randy.

This was the trouble with virtue. It wasn’t enough to be good once. It wasn’t enough to be good for one day, or just until lunch.

To Randy, it seemed very unfair to demand that the monks never be fellated. There’s nothing like fellatio for improving morale. And it was Losar, Tibetan New Year, when the Dalai Lama says that even monks should kick up their heels a little.

The monks must not kick their heels up too high, however.

Who told the authorities? Were the walls thin or had the monk turned himself in?

Was it really so wrong?

Randy Mesmer was forever asking that question. When he got thrown out, he asked the manager of the monastery.

Was it really so wrong?

The manager, a pious American convert, looked at him with disgust. “You ought to be ashamed,” he said.

Which was, of course, the answer Randy Mesmer always got.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

DREAMS.

Occasionally, for very short periods, Randy Mesmer managed, actually, to be good. If you saw him during these times, you’d notice that he even looked surprised, like Wile E Coyote when he runs off a cliff and you can see him thinking, “What’s holding me up?”

He thinks that—and at once plummets a mile down into a tiny puff of smoke.

Randy Mesmer wished to think highly of himself during these brief periods of virtue, but unfortunately his dreams were a non-stop porno saturnalia, a hard-core sex channel with fast-forwarding capacity. The men in dreams, it seems, were clearer than real-life: every hair visible and every fine line of the Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed in blue on the backs of the uncut horsedicked Latino brute of his dreams and he’s crouched on the clammy tiled floor with some lug’s nutsack banging against his cheek while he shoves a bottle of amyl up against one nostril.

Jeez. Couldn’t my dreams at least skip the poppers? He muttered to himself, as he woke hearing the 4am bell at the monastery and opened his eyes to see the monsoon rains flowing down the crumbling wall inside his meditation hut.

Tucking his boner into pants, he pulled a shawl around him and sat down in half-lotus to complain to each of the 35 Purificatory Buddhas that he could really be a very holy person if not for world and, specifically, men.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

ROBES.

Randy Mesmer decided to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk because he looked good in maroon. The Thais, of course, had better food, but saffron is not the color for white people.

He spent a winter in the foothills of the Himalayas so cold he never undressed further than taking his dick out to piss or jerk off. He didn’t even shit until well into Spring.

Insurgencies / 2

On my way out of the park which surrounds Senzoku Pond, I stopped in shock at the street corner. Two workmen, their heads wrapped in pastel dish towels, stood painting an apartment house. One man’s paintbrush was steeped in red, the other’s steeped in blue and together they were painting over twenty years worth of gray. That gray which is the official color of industry, despair and Tokyo.

The apartment house was the usual jumble of haphazard angles, but now the curb and first storey were blue and the staircases on both sides, red. A triangular outcropping which jutted toward the street had turned an uncompromising green.

The remaining gray, commandeered on the second storey, served as a charming accent beneath the blue eaves. The mismatched angles of the apartment house, which had seemed ugly and careless, had been rendered as awkwardly appealing as a child’s set of building blocks.

In order to survive Tokyo, a secret internal reserve of color must be maintained. The small park at Senzoku Pond is an essential cache. For the red shrine, the iridescent pigeons and the orange carp. In this season for the yellow gingko leaves pressed to every path.

Now, however, it appears that color is spreading.

Is it too dangerous to hope that color may be making advances, might be making inroads even here in this gray city? In clear December air, the color sweeps silently down from the shrine to the carp in the stream and out to the street and the color bursts unstoppable up the red staircase and into our lives.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

REGRET.

Full of regret one morning, Randy Mesmer decided the best thing about the baths was what a relief it was, after, to return to the world outside. After ten hours of steam, cock focus, wet tiles, wrestling, lube and porn on seven channels—after a night of relentless skin—what a relief to walk out the door and discover the overcast morning, a crow in the air, people on their way to work. He wanted to call out to strangers, “Thank you for wearing pants!”

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

HOSE.

Randy Mesmer believed he could win a wet underwear contest entirely through the power of positive thinking.

“I’m sexy!” he said out loud to the mirror in the toilet of the Midtowne Spa. “I’m totally hot! I’m a first-class bit of masculine meat! Fuck,yeah!”

Standing on the fenced-in patio at the baths, the contestants in tight white underpants awaited their turn with the hose. The winning contestant would be determined by the strength of applause.

Randy Mesmer was not handsome and he knew it. His idea of Heaven: to be so beautiful you never had to talk.

Then again, beauty was an awful lot of work. So he wished he had a preposterously large penis. Amazing how an extra large uncut penis trumped all other attributes. Those men, the stars of the baths, didn’t have to do anything. Their personalities often became entirely vestigial.

The water from the house was ice cold. Randy Mesmer felt his positive thinking go limp and retreat.

No one clapped for Randy Mesmer. Then, way in back, one drunk guy started to whoop and holler and clap for all he was worth.

“Woo—hoo!”

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

HELP.

Randy Mesmer decided to seek professional help. Because it really was a compelling thought—that you could just take a pill and become a reasonable person.

He told his therapist about the compulsive sex, the nights at the baths, the blowjobs in bricked alleys, the glory holes.

Still he wasn’t sure she’d understood. Somehow she’d missed the mystic glory of it all. The way the lights looked in Chicago when no one was around and he was on his way to the Eagle at 2am.

“Do you imagine you know things no one else knows?” the therapist asked and she sounded so depressed he did not dare continue.

Guttersnipe Das in the Tokyo Advocate

Check out the new Guttersnipe Das column in this month's edition of the Tokyo Advocate.

On the last Wednesday in October, the man sitting next to me on the train died between Iidabashi and Ichigaya stations. . .

Continued on page 21 of December's Tokyo Advocate. Sporadically available at unpredictable locations throughout Tokyo -- or download it here.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

TEST.

When Randy Mesmer’s AIDS test came back negative, his friends embraced him, teary-eyed.

“Promise to be good,” they said. But Randy did not promise. Randy continued to spend every Tuesday and Thursday at the all-you-can-suck. Randy fucked and got fucked and still his AIDS test came back negative.

Well, his friends got understandably upset. They warned him of the disastrous effects of grasping desire, excess of rajas, gross lust. As time—and wickedness—progressed they grew baffled, then frustrated.

“I use condoms and a water-based lubricant,” Randy explained.

“You are putting yourself at a terrible, terrible risk,” they said. But they did not sound so happy or so sure.

Of course they did like Randy Mesmer. In spite of—you know. They liked Randy Mesmer very much but—to be frank—by going unpunished he was calling the whole system into question.

His continued sluttish larky existence was undermining the checks and balances and they had their marriages to consider.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

GOOD-FOR-NOTHING


Growing up, Randy Mesmer had a good-for-nothing young uncle who lived on the couch. Uncle Ian was entirely agreeable and also entirely useless. He was not interested in being someone or getting on in the world.

As such, of course, he was continually criticized. And at the same time no one much minded him. Everyone felt so much better about themselves. “At least I am making an effort!” they exclaimed.

Randy Mesmer disapproved of Uncle Ian--and lived in awe of him. Randy Mesmer wanted terribly to be handsome and smart and athletic, to be correct and moral and spiritual. Randy Mesmer wanted to be A Better Person.

At age 3 he wanted this. And by the age of 10 he’d already figured out he was going to fail.

Uncle Ian was the product of Grandma Preston’s late life affair with a good-for-nothing. What had she seen in him?

Uncle Ian spent his life in boxer shorts. His large penis was forever poking out, along with his low-hanging balls, which he shifted frequently from one side to the other with as much self-consciousness as a dog. He could be real good looking, Uncle Ian, if he’d just fix himself up.

Uncle Ian didn't care about that. He took it easy.

Taking it easy is like rolling your tongue. Some people don't even have to think about it. For other folks it's completely impossible.

Randy Mesmer tried to take it easy. He made a concerted effort. He spent several afternoons on the coach next to Uncle Ian playing Asteroids. He tasted beer. He practiced shrugging and saying 'Fuck'.

Randy Mesmer marveled at his Uncle Ian’s reckless courage. How was it he dared play video games, dared channel surf? All while the sands of life slipped unceasingly away!

It was no use. Randy Mesmer was doomed to self-improvement.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

SANCTUARY.

At age 17, Randy Mesmer discovered the Cambridge Bird Sanctuary. Predatory, promiscuous homosexuals, it turned out, weren’t nearly sinister as advertised. Men stumbled in and out of the reeds like professors lost at garden party. Some even carried little plastic baggies with a few forlorn wild fruits so that when the Vice Squad appeared they could say, “Officer, I’m just gathering berries!”

All summer, as the wind bent the reeds in the sun, men ruined their good shoes chasing each other through the muck.

Randy Mesmer was immediately hooked. Happy to romp with the Harvard boys, with the loons and the trolls and the unemployed.

“I’ll take a later bus,” he said. Pretty soon it was dark. (It’s important to note that this wasn’t a stage to which Randy later sank, this was the starting point.)

Still hopeful in the pitch black, Randy Mesmer found a marvelously tall stranger standing very still just at the edge of the reeds.

Just this one more, Randy promised himself. Then I’ll go home.

He walked past the guy and waited. Then he turned and looked again.

Oh hell. The tall mysterious stranger was only a nice-looking birch tree.