short essays from Santiago: series 1
A Guide for the Fearful
I often imagine that I would like to write a sort of travel guide for those who are perpetually afraid. I am well-qualified to do so: I am afraid of everything. For a long time I was afraid of cars, people, dogs, crowds, public speaking, fine breakables, hard work, guns, knives, family members and fireworks. Finally, I decided to simplify, and also to tell more of the truth. Thus: I am afraid of everything.
I suspect that there are others like myself. And I would like to say to them: It is all right. You can be afraid of everything. There is no reason to stay home.
Of course, choosing to act in spite of overwhelming fear does not in any way excuse a person from the necessity of making sensible, judicious, and pragmatic choices. As indeed I fully intend to make someday.
As it is I have landed here, in Santiago de Chile, in the house of a man I barely know. I have no job, no Spanish, no pretty face. I don’t have that marvelous thing called confidence, that fabled positive outlook that Americans are supposed to come equipped with. I am very much afraid. And that is all right. I would have been afraid, too, if I had stayed home.
Learning to Say Ola
Late yesterday afternoon -- which, in Santiago, may mean as late as 9 -- G. announced that he had located the root of the problem. I could not say Ola. In fact I was absolutely awful at saying Ola. My Ola sounds like the squeak a schoolgirl would make if she woke to find a grizzly bear in her small tent.
G. says, “I see you in the shop when one man come in. He say Ola to you. Your shoulders go bad. Your head go bad. And you say Ola. Your Ola is terrible!”
He insists I must stand up straight. I must open my chest. I want to explain to him that I couldn’t possibly. Not in the first six weeks.
“You stand straight! Like man! Say, Ola!”
“Ola.”
“Ohmygod, no. Not like that. This is the very worst Ola I ever hear in my life.”
“Ola.”
G. winces. “You are a big strong man. You see this in the mirror sometime? Iz true.”
I try to explain to him that I am only 45 kilos, 4 foot 11. The muscles, beard and 5’11’ are only decorations. Like clouds seen out an airplane window. He’s not having any of it.
Over and over again we say Ola. It is remarkable how many ways I find to a small thing wrong. G. can’t decide what is worse, the way I say ‘O’, or the way I say ‘la’. In particular, he despairs at my tendency to turn suddenly into a high soprano.
“You do this in front of my father he will look at me like ‘what you bring into my house?’”
Again and again we say Ola. I squeak. I bow like the Japanese. My Ola comes out singsong, or does not come out at all. Ola and ola and ola all over again. The neighbors, presumably, are exchanging quizzical looks.
No doubt G. is asking himself why he ever extended an open invitation to such a self-evidently loony person.
“Ohmygod,” he says. “Now I have new job. I just teach you how to say Ola.”
The War Between Fear and Enthusiasm
Fear and enthusiasm are perpetually at war within me. I am vastly and comprehensively afraid and would no doubt spend my life in a secure institutionalized setting if not for the fact that I am also brimming over with entirely immoderate enthusiasm. An enthusiasm so vast and exaggerated, hovering always near hysteria, that I frequently forget my terror long enough to leave the house and sometimes even get as far as the airport, which lands me in situations like this one.
Alone in Santiago for the first time, I scuttle awkwardly along the sidewalk, darting among pedestrians who are all as dazzling and put together as neon billboards. Crossing the street, I am hampered somewhat by my disbelief that cars, which stop for other people, will stop for me as well.
Arriving at the curb, I stop and admire the Andes in the distance. If the Andes are unavailable, I pretend to be engrossed in the contemplation of a radio tower. I wait for an upright citizen, someone whose life is really worth saving. A mother with a stroller is ideal. I then attempt to shadow that person across the street without them noticing. I repeat this routine at every intersection, at the end of every block.
I suspect that I am as subtle and inconspicuous as one of the Marx Brothers.
Economy / 1
I brought a small suitcase to Santiago, the kind that works as carry-on if you don’t pack it too full. I also brought a small backpack full of books. I unpacked my bags in G.’s apartment and now I have more things in his apartment than he does. Of course he has larger things: a sofa, a dining table, a CD player – but I think I have more actual items.
My first thought was that this was some elaborate set-up, he didn’t really live there, that I would now be a middle-aged gay princess held hostage in Santiago.
I almost never watch TV. And still I get these ideas. Perhaps they are floating in the air?
G. explains that he does not like to have too many things. He only keeps what he intends to use that week. The rest he gives away. He doesn’t see anything elevated or holy about this.
“It is easier to think,” he says. “And easier to clean the house.
Disciplines
Cell phones, it is reported, make life simpler and more convenient. But not always. And not for everyone.
G. has two phones, but cannot make a call from either one. If he wants to talk to his sister, he sends her a numeric page and she calls him. If he wants to call someone else, he pages his sister, she calls him, and he asks her to make a call on his behalf.
For some reason, this system does not always work. Then he must page his mother. When she calls, he asks her to walk across the street to his sister’s house and ask her to call him so he can tell her to make a call for him.
To me, this system seems likely to result in homicide, but I cannot find any evidence that any of them mind it. G. says, “When I can make calls, I make calls all the time! It is very expensive. This way it is better.”
G. is similarly disciplined in other areas of his life. For breakfast he blends fruit in the blender and adds raw oatmeal. To his tea he adds only stevia, which friends bring him from Peru. He never drinks coffee or alcohol or smokes cigarettes unless he is at a party.
How fortunate therefore that there is always at least one birthday party a day, and sometimes two. Birthdays are considered extremely important in Chile – to not attend the celebration is to jeopardize the friendship. Thus he is able to maintain strict discipline, and also to take breaks from it every day.
I have not yet been able to discern if everyone in Chile has five hundred friends, or if Chileans simply celebrate their birthdays six to eight times a year.
Cures for the Rash
Living in a city where you do not speak the language is like having a rash. A pink and minor, itchy rash. All over your body.
A rash which lands you in a perpetual state of low-grade irritation, which makes you shy away from every contact. Which means that you are cast forever in the role of the idiot and appear always in a cloud of apology and irritation, with a deplorable tendency toward self-pity. Unable to ever appear dignified or settle down. Because you have this rash, this officially non-serious, non-life-threatening, misery-making rash. This rash all over your body and your face, even in your voice, your stance, the way you wait in line. This pink and unpleasant rash of not being able to speak the language.
What can be done? Options include limiting activities so as not to induce irritation – to stay as much as possible within five star hotels and sightseeing buses, in faux Irish bars around the world. You can attempt being so drunk and/or horny you don’t care you have a rash -- and are a total ass.
Another option of course is to learn the language – a total cure, but very slow and requiring, in the beginning, the willingness to make everything drastically worse. Before you were quietly the idiot, sitting in the corner, signaling for the bill – now you are the idiot jumping up and down!
Other options? One more. You can be so submerged in wonder that you couldn’t care less, like a very old woman, heedless of pain, at home in her garden. The tourist has forgotten his camera, his charge card, the word for bathroom, the fact that he is again today an entirely ridiculous fool.
Foul Play
Walking past a newsstand I see the face of Pablo Neruda. The headline underneath contains the word ‘asasinado’. The family, it is reported, now suspects foul play and wants the body exhumed. Until now it has been said that Neruda died of prostate cancer, or of a broken heart after the assassination of Salvador Allende.
“Assassinate Pablo Neruda!” I say. “Who could even think of such a thing?”
G. gives me a look. “Not everyone reads poetry,” he says.
Sponsor.
This clear morning looking out on Cerro San Christobal, this morning with birds singing, with a hairy neighbor in the window across the way padding around in his underpants, with bright sun and the last of the jacaranda blooming, this moment (please remember) is sponsored by Tokyo. It’s Tokyo I’m burning now.
The misery I piled up for years, along with stacks of ichiman-en notes, my appalling Tokyo layer cake: work, porn, alcohol, work, porn, alcohol. With isolation for a crust, with lovelessness for frosting.
What makes Cerro San Christobal so lovely? It is the jacaranda, the shadows and the birds, and it is the memory of the platform at Meguro station in Tokyo, the lines of black- suited commuters staring into their phones, the memory of evenings so exhausted I would only just get inside the door, and lean there, in my dull wrinkled suit with my head against the wall, shuddering until I finally got a beer from the refrigerator and sat down at the computer.
Thich Nhat Hanh says, “We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from the moon.”
Rapture
I spend much of my time here in Chile as I assume all newcomers must, astonished and humbled by the discovery of how much extreme pleasure, ungodly ecstasy and unbridled voluptuousness it is possible to undergo, simply by eating an avocado.
Amongst all my conquests (darlings I adore you all) the avocados of Santiago de Chile hold an honored place.
Now, mind you, the avocados of California are nice enough. The avocados of Tokyo are particularly fine, if your assets are such that investing in one is a possibility for you, but the avocados of Chile – it’s something spiritual really, Saint Teresa in ecstasy before a small bowl of avocado, mashed with a little lemon and a little salt, the texture that of homemade whipped cream, the richness surpassing anything found in the Old Testament.
I fully support you in coming to Chile simply to eat avocados. It is enough. (The mountains also are nice.)
Up to now, I have only eaten from the market the cheap and medium-priced avocados. The expensive ones would no doubt prove perilous – both to my fragile nervous system and to the peace of my neighbors, who assume, no doubt, that I spend my afternoons being ravished by incredibly spectacular lawyers, or abogados.
Economy / 2
On my second day here in Chile, G. took me to a friend’s birthday party – old friends from when he worked in advertising, pretty girls unafraid of whiskey, chainsmoking Lucky Strikes. They fed me sausages and pisco sour; everyone was overwhelmingly kind.
When we returned to G.’s apartment I asked if I had done all right, as a cancer patient might after a PET scan, or several cups of barium. G. said, “Everybody they like you” and, true to form, I cried inconsolably for several minutes.
Everyone had been so kind and still I had been so frightened the entire time, as though I’d been given the job of replacing the bulb on a skyscraper.
G. was patient with me, patting my back and cooing to me exactly as he would to a beloved elderly relative he was visiting in the asylum. I tried to explain my fear of everything, which conveniently came equipped with a universal sense of shame, like a razor you can plug in anywhere.
When I was finished he said, “When I have a problem it is because somebody is sick, or maybe somebody is die.”
The Wall of Glass / The Dais
Funny how I misremember the name as Receptivo. The map reminds me that, of course, the street I mean is Recoleta, which runs down the edge of the neighborhood of Bellavista and intersects with Dardignac, and which I had just crossed when I looked at the neat and proper workers hurrying to work through the enormous open square at the neat and thought, “I am going to be all right.”
My fear shattered all at once, like a sky-high wall of glass, and left me standing there, on the corner of the open square, feeling as if I would never be scared again.
In fact I had perhaps ten minutes, tops, before I found the ceiling-less wall of fear miraculously reconstituted, clear and hard as ever. But in the meantime I had this opening, this gap, for liberty and looking out.
Santiago!
Have I ever been so entirely wrong about a place before, or found something so totally contrary to that which I imagined? As I confessed to G., “Please forgive me. Everything I know about South America, I learned from reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez and watching porn.” He was appalled. Deservedly so.
How surprised I would have been if someone had told me that, in imagining Santiago, I ought to think of a city like Stockholm. or perhaps Singapore. A green and flowering city of commerce, control and good manners. Without the army of students studying and protesting and remaining liplocked for remarkable lengths of time the city might well feel two sizes too tight, buttoned up and sensible to within an inch of its life.
It is no exaggeration to say that the city in the U.S. from which I departed to come here seems nearly barbaric in comparison.
G. explains to me that the center of Santiago is meticulously maintained by the government and the police and may thus be accused of being a false front. Still, that appearance involves the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of people and would be the envy of nearly any city on Earth. Who can be blamed for valuing beauty, cleanliness and safety?
However, as I was numbered for many years among the undead of Tokyo, I cannot be relied upon to gush rapturously about the glories of convenience and order.
On Sunday afternoon G. and went out to the park beside the Mapuche to visit the ‘Gourmet Fair’. The park was lush in the gentle late afternoon light, the people beautifully put together and the food stunningly devoid of flavor. There was not a single item that would have appeared out of place in a supermarket in California: organic jam, Irish stout, avocado oil, flavored honey, pimento pickle with cream cheese on a Ritz cracker. No spice but in the sauce for barbecue.
That evening I read in Neruda’s Memoirs: “The absurd ‘racial’ pretentions of some South American countries, which are themselves the results of many national origins and mixed breeding, are a colonialist vice. They want to set up a dais where a handful of snobs, scrupulously white or light-skinned, can appear in society, posturing in front of pure Aryans or pretentious tourists.” (Memoirs, 163.)
It seems possible to me that Neruda may have had central Santiago in mind. (“Blue eyes are only in the city center,” G. tells me. “So much money for blonde hair! So much for skin white cream!”)
At a party on Via Italia, drinking champagne to celebrate the opening of a new jewel-box row of boutiques in this the up and coming part of town, I had an interesting talk with two sisters.
I admitted that I was surprised to find Santiago’s center more wealthy, clean and well-maintained than that of any city in the U.S.
The older sister spoke proudly of her city, which was wealthy and safe, where poverty and trash were not often in view. The city was a symbol of country and a region that was gaining prominence in the world and, best of all, it was simply a delightful place to live.
This seemed to me undeniably true. As did what the other sister had to say.
The younger sister was a student of anthropology and, though she understood English well, was uncomfortable speaking it. Nonetheless, I watched her consider her opinion and gather her words. She stretched out her arms as much as she could in the crowd of champagne drinkers. She beamed.
“This is all fake,” she said.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Forthcoming in Epiphany: Juice Box
Please check out my essay "Juice Box" in the forthcoming issue of Epiphany: a literary journal. "Juice Box" is about Dharamsala and Denver, about hustling and praying, and about surviving when nobody gives a fuck if you do or not.
Thank you to everyone who supports my work including K. Timmer, C.E. Zeeb, and M.K. Riddell. S. Bear Bergman also encouraged me a great deal when I wrote this essay.
Above all, I owe thanks to my friends Anthony and Sunny. And to Stinky, the black and white dog who kept me awake at night.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Gentle reader:
I wanted to see what happen if I just gave up and wrote as myself, in the way that comes most naturally to me. Without grasping after the structures I am quite hopeless at anyway. What follows is the result: 137 very short sections from a book length project titled ALL ELSE FAILS. Please be advised: parts of it are explicit, even graphic.
I am grateful to anyone who reads my writing and indebted to anyone who responds to it. Never more so than in this instance. Please feel free to send me a note at guttersnipedas(at)yahoo.com.
I wanted to see what happen if I just gave up and wrote as myself, in the way that comes most naturally to me. Without grasping after the structures I am quite hopeless at anyway. What follows is the result: 137 very short sections from a book length project titled ALL ELSE FAILS. Please be advised: parts of it are explicit, even graphic.
I am grateful to anyone who reads my writing and indebted to anyone who responds to it. Never more so than in this instance. Please feel free to send me a note at guttersnipedas(at)yahoo.com.
ALL ELSE FAILS
to the friends I lost to death or meth: come back.
from the Prologue
(#)
Because there is so very little time.
(#)
The way a whale’s mouth opens (didn’t he read that it actually unhinges?) the way it feeds by letting in great expanses of the ocean.
(#)
Every day he wakes up beneath a sign. A sign with parts that flip, like in a tacky office in the Seventies.
TODAY IS WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 21ST AND STILL YOU AINT DONE SHIT.
(#) reminder
That every day you should remember death.
Which is sure to come and may come at any time.
That we are as fragile as soap bubbles and at death must leave everything behind.
Resolve therefore to make the best possible use of your life.
(#) naturally he overdid it
He overdosed. Not on drugs. On death awareness.
Therefore he got no further than: There is something I ought to be doing! Time is running out! There is something I’m supposed to be doing! But what but what but what?
(#)
Proud of himself for not wearing a watch. Thinks he’s more free than most people.
But then he wonders, “What time is it?” And, before looking at a clock, he guesses.
Even hung-over, even with a lover, even in a foreign city – his guess is always correct within three minutes.
(#) Q:
Now that he is alone, he wonders, “Should I have said to my lover, “Let’s be as unhappy as most people!” And to my brother, “Drink!”
Should I have said to my father, “You, sir, are a great king!”
Is that what I should have said?
(#) his family
As evident from their strained expressions.
(#) family theory
His theory: his family decided to be polite. Of course. They were polite people. Beyond that they resolved to have as little as possible to do with him.
Some months later, he was born.
(#)
Presumably everyone else has already noticed that one gets in the very biggest trouble not for arguments or insults but for saying things that are absolutely spectacularly obvious.
(#) A:
The answer to the previous question is: No.
(#) thanks!
His father writes: my affection has been boundless. The problem is that you are difficult to love.
(#)
What is the inspiration actually? How to Turn Ordinary Complaints into Thousands of Dollars?
(#)
Boiling nettles.
(#)
Burning shit for fuel.
(#) on prophecy
Fortune cookie says: Keep your eye open for an opportunity soon to come!
He wonders: why only “eye”? One?
Like Odin? What’s my other eye supposed to be doing? Is this that one-eyed snake business?
Soon to come!
(#)
Not that he’s so interested in money, really. Not, like, compared to sex. (Sex!)
He just thought this might be enough. Just this.
(#) reassurance
He tells himself that, even if he was the very ugliest man in the world he would still have the chance to see a giant turtle swimming.
Followed swiftly by the fear that he may very well outlive all the giant turtles.
(#) everybody needs a motto
Fellatio. Because it’s not always possible to go snorkeling.
(#)
This panic. Turn it over. It is the intolerable underside of a blanket woven with birds, colors and stars.
(#)
Can anyone remember why I was called? Was it something about plumbing? Was it about the lights? Are we saving something? May I alphabetize? Are there boxes to carry?
(#)
Don’t tell me to be reasonable! Do you have any idea what this day is worth!
(#)
Courage was accumulating. He could feel it. It would be several hours before he had even a quarter-teaspoonful.
But still
from My Acrobat
(#) grapes
He agreed to help Anita with the grapes. No big deal, he thought. Only two vines. He didn’t even see any fruit. Really just a country way to decorate a cyclone fence.
It wasn’t until he actually climbed inside with a plastic bucket and lifted up the vines –
Hour after hour after hour plucking grapes.
Such a relief to be given a simple repetitive task.
(#)
Back in Denver, he saw half a dozen guys from the bad old days. Old lovers. Which is not to say anything particularly romantic. Or even specific.
(#) Denver
New and abandoned. The sky and strategies for living with it, ignoring, narrowing it.
Denver: the sidewalks are empty and the bars are full. Everyone is here. No one walked.
(#)
By the time he left Denver, age 25, he’d pretty much sucked off every guy who didn’t jump back fast enough.
And guys didn’t jump back. Almost never. Let no one suggest the kid was good for nothing.
(#) Denver / 2
Plastic banners along the street. 50 McNuggets for $9.99. Pitchers three bucks all day!
And most people apparently decided, What the hell why not?!
To judge by their stunned expressions.
(#) America
America. The body yearns to bloat. The face swells and the eyes recede inside the head.
The United States of it’s-so-hard-to-stay-Awake.
(#) America / 2
One of those reclining chairs that take up half the living room. Pull the lever. Your feet fly up and your head falls back.
So cozy until you think, how the hell do I get out of this thing?
(#) flattery
“I can’t believe you still have such a baby face!” said the big floppy cocked blonde who, it turned out, after all these years and minus most of his hair, was named Mark.
He was very happy to hear this. He was flattered. It was several minutes before he realized that Mark was just surprised his face was not sunken from retrovirals or gnawed by meth.
(#)
The bathhouse still had corridors the color of rotten eggplant and carpet that could take the skin right off your feet. When he’d used to come here in the 90s, the place was a hospice party, the cubicles full of companionable dying men calling out, hey you can come in my mouth.
Now it was just a gay-themed drug den, a spooky playground. Guys didn’t even bother to undress. They waited in their rooms and stared into their phones.
(#) meth
Such a thing as evil spirits.
(#)
Here he was back at the baths and everyone who was still alive was doing what they’d done before except now it was mostly rapturous finger-fucking since they couldn’t get it up. (Spirits.)
(#) consolation
Mark still had his all-star cock, impressive even floppy.
Who knows, without that cock maybe he would have had to put on his pants and get a life.
(#) potato
He even saw his old boss, who, when he’d known him before, was still wearing his ghoul on the inside. He had been an entrepreneur – made money turning junk houses he’d fixed up and taking in developmentally disabled sex offenders. He used to boast all the time about one of them, who was hung like an ox.
Now here he was, the old boss, crouched in the triple X video lounge. He looked like he’d been boiled so long he’d popped his skin. Like a forgotten potato.
(#) dumb question
He asked Gerald, “Why don’t they shut the place down? Everyone there is on meth. Even the doorman’s on meth.”
Gerald said, “The cops don’t want to go to no faggot fuckfest.”
Thank you, Gerald.
(#)
Gerald was half Ute, half Lakota Sioux. “Do you know what the purpose of the universe is?” Gerald announced. “The purpose of the universe is to HIDE from the universe.”
(#) nametag
Protagonist must have a name. Despite the fact that names are seldom used in the places he goes and real names almost never.
What use is a name? Pass it through a gloryhole: HELLO! The cock you are sucking belongs to __________ .
(#)
A name. Because in America it is now illegal to travel without identification.
A name. Because otherwise, when two gay guys have anonymous sex, there’s no way of telling who is doing what and to whom. (Even with names it’s often difficult.)
Shaun. Because it is the plainest name the narrator can think of at the moment.
(#)
Shaun met Gerald at Broadway’s, at Broadway and 10th, but both of them remembered the place from when it was called Mr. Bill’s and they were both under-aged hustlers sneaking in the back.
(#) buffet
They remembered the grand old days of Mr. Bill’s free Sunday meal, the legendary Petty Crime Buffet, when the drunks and the hookers and the thieves and the losers gathered together for the only decent meal most of them would get all week.
Beloved old Mr. Bill, who looked like a bloated corpse even on his good days, stood right beside the salad to make sure no one picked out all the shrimp.
(#) losing track
Shaun saw Gerald later at the baths. Above his towel he was wearing a black t-shirt to hide his tits and belly.
“Hey Gerald. Didn’t expect to see you this early.”
Gerald looked kind of embarrassed. “I thought it was six in the morning. But it’s six at night, innit?”
(#) truth and beauty
Shrimp!
Because crazy old drunk Mr. Bill decided that, not only would the petty criminals of Denver be given a free meal, they would be given spinach salad with shrimp. And roast chicken. And fruit salad with berries. And homemade bread.
(#)
Lest anyone imagine that compassion is practiced only by pious Anglicans, with their bologna sandwiches.
(#) concern
Why is it he is unable to hear the dance version of “Love is in the Air” without imagining nuclear holocaust?
(#)fantasy
See the dull-faced workman. His eyes are empty and his back strong. His shoulders up around his ears. No one in camp cares he doesn’t talk. He works.
Here’s the newcomer, curly-haired and dark-skinned. From somewhere nearer the sun. “What’s up with him?” asks the newcomer.
“Never mind him. He’s always like that.”
(#)
The two men work alone in the field. Workman doesn’t talk. Late in the day, the light changes. Newcomer is tired of silence, of shoulders up around the ears.
Without thinking, Newcomer touches Workman’s back. “Hey buddy, loosen up.”
Surprised, Workman shudders and pulls away. He has started shaking and cannot stop.
(#)it’s magic, that’s why
Newcomer understands. He holds Workman. He does not stop holding him.
The two men tumble to the ground beneath an immense and ancient tree.
It cradles them.
(#)
Workman sobs so much he falls asleep, exhausted. Newcomer continues to hold him.
In the middle of the night the men wake up, blazing with moonlight, and fuck like mad beneath the stars.
Their semen nourishes the tree.
(#)
The two men wake up at dawn beside the roots of the great tree.
There is light in the leaves of the tree and in the eyes of the men.
(#)
This is the story Shaun tells himself so that he will be able to sleep. Jacks-off, or doesn’t. Night after night.
Imagines himself held by the man from somewhere nearer the sun, whose hair is curly, whose eyes are like rich brown bread.
(#) blessed
Miss DeeDee rubs her giant jeweled hand against Shaun’s crotch and asks, “Are you blessed?”
The pock-marked Latino at the recreation center is an evangelist. “Brother, are you blessed in the Lord?”
And, no matter how lucky Shaun feels, to appear just now in the bright crumbling world, he has no choice but to say, “Not in the way that you mean.”
(#) fashion
Bags are stolen, valuables taken, and everything else gets tossed onto the narrow tarred shores of 8th Avenue or 11th. So that, in a few weeks time, Shaun has no problem accumulating an entire wardrobe of stolen clothes. Evidently everyone robbed was about his size: plain average. No one had much money. There are sweatshirts with frayed sleeves and bargain jeans, an acrylic ski cap. Nothing is fashionable, there is no 100 percent anything.
Shaun takes home the clothes and boils them. Dresses himself in theft. Fits right in.
(#) lice
Shaun got two kinds of lice. (As if one were not sufficient.)
First he got crabs, which were a nuisance, albeit an exceedingly familiar one. Two rounds of insecticide and three loads of laundry cleared that up.
Except he still itched. Even after six more applications of Nix and nine more loads at the laundromat – each of which gave him a holiday of maybe three hours before he started itching again.
Finally the bitter truth dawned: he’d caught invisible lice. Invisible lice were maybe a fraction less disgusting – since you couldn’t pluck them off and watch them wriggle in the glow of the desk lamp.
Trouble was those invisible fuckers were almost impossible to eradicate.
(#) lice / 2
And were they invisible really – or just very very small? Exceedingly small – but certain to swell into visibility if he ever had an actual date with a halfway decent, employed, tender-voiced man, a gentleman almost, albeit a very hairy one. On whom the invisible lice would then be found, big as blood-engorged ticks.
Shaun considered himself an expert on the ordinary and extraordinary effects of sleeping around. But he had no idea what to do about the invisible lice. All he could do was wash and wash and wash.
(#) refuge
Cigarettes, vacations, beer, beliefs, television.
But the body is its own escape. You can follow the animal. You can burrow into the mechanism.
What a relief to be horny, so horny it obliterates everything else, like the hunger of the saints.
(#) mantra / 1
Drunk, late at night, walking home in a blizzard, convinced he knew a new and powerful mantra, which he shouted as he stumbled through the snow –
Grace!
by definition
comes
to those
who do
not
deserve it!
(#) winners
Late Sunday afternoon at the baths – these men all have something. Anyway you can tell they had it once. Some reason this all worked very well for them. Once upon a time. As even the most wretched gambler (if you’ll just lend him a dollar) will talk of jackpot wins, these men all have tales of Spectacular Sexual Success.
(#) gods
The attendant beams at Shaun. “Man! The guy you were with the guy in Room #3 – do you know who that was? That was Morgan Steed!”
Shaun gets to bed even later that night (the sun is already up) but he swears he feels less tired. It helps to remember he was chosen by one of the gods.
(#) repeat
Even more satisfying than the first time with a porn star (he’s ashamed to admit) is the second time, when he knows it’s Morgan Steed in Room #3 and makes him wait, a little. Not too long, just a little. The third time he passes the open door he stops. The god nods to him and he goes in.
(#) Morgan Steed
Oh the porno expanse of Morgan Steed! Every cultivated inch of him. The chest hair buzzed to an elegant bristle, the teeth white as correction tape. The Herculean shoulders and luxuriant armpits. The cock as from box covers – the length indisputably his, the girth reportedly augmented.
It’s true his penis doesn’t feel exactly real, not any more real than it feels to be having sex with an actual porn star. His face is the same as it was in movies from the Nineties. The eyes and mouth still move.
Overall Morgan Steed is remarkably lifelike.
(#) hockey
Shaun has his mouth on the giant smooth balls of the star and the star has his eyes on the television. The porn star stares up at the porn as Shaun licks his balls, his perineum and finally his famous porn star asshole which is as smooth and as groomed as a hockey rink. And Shaun believes he’s doing well when Morgan Steed begins to gasp and groan and swear and what comes out of his mouth is a high-speed distillate of Nineties porno dialogue: “Fuck yeah.” “Suck that cock.” “Hell yeah, motherfucker.” And finally he says, “You’re killing me.”
(#) pardon?
You’re killing me. Shaun stops and looks up. Logan Reid takes his eyes off the porn, looks down at Shaun and grins.
OK, so “you’re killing me” doesn’t mean, for example, “watch out for the teeth.” This is just how Morgan Steed expresses pleasure.
“You’re killing me. You’re killing me.”
(#) switch!
Abruptly Morgan Steed apologizes, “I’m making you do all the work!” (This is a job they are doing.) Then Shaun is on his back on the bed and Morgan Steed is sitting on top of him, vast, verdant and sculpted, like a designated national monument. Morgan Steed is touching him, looking at him.
He wishes Morgan Steed wouldn’t bounce so much. He’s afraid he’s might throw up. Not really from the motion, really. From fear of visibility.
(#) let’s just admit it
Because the goal is to be successful, finished, and away. To get out of there before Morgan Steed can say, “Hey one of your ears sticks way out” or “your forehead resembles an accordion” or “what happened to your leg?” To have sex with a porn star and feel oneself to be endorsed, just a tiny bit taller. The actual sex just a vulnerable place in-between.
(#) cum shot
Shaun’s happy when Morgan Steed gasps, cusses, blows his load. Porn star spunk. Except nothing actually comes out. The voice of Logan Reid is now aw-shucks all-American boy. “Too much edging, man! Sorry! I’m shooting blanks!” Morgan Steed is the very definition of good gay sportsmanship: willing to kiss someone who has spent much of the last hour licking his asshole. Shaun doesn’t push it however: declares his great happiness and pleasure, his vast and abject gratitude, then moves swiftly backwards out the door. As in the movies.
(#) apocalypse
He dreamed of apocalypse, most commonly. Fighting for his life with a few others on what green scraps of Earth were left.
As time went on, these dreams became increasingly unnecessary. Apocalypse was more and more often the day’s programming as well.
(#) in defense of the world
Despite its abundant trap doors and shoddy broken-down appearance, despite the ascendancy of cell phones and the onrush of old age, 99.9% of the time the world remains vastly preferable to contents of the mind.
(#) how extremely unfortunate
Human beings, it turned out, were spectacularly bad at considering the big picture or the long term.
Thus they had arrived in a world which they were ill-equipped to think about. And even less inclined.
Meanwhile, the old goals were increasingly beside the point. The usual victories turned out to be overwhelmingly toxic.
(#) therefore
No refuge other than the moment, which could neither be cut apart nor located. The indivisible, a demon saint with an axe: now now now now now.
The moment as a life raft then. An attempt to add an oar and a sail to the paragraph.
Miniscule prayers – if you believe in such a thing. Otherwise – small superstitious gestures.
(#) mammal
Such as the likely superstitious notion that acting like a human being mattered even now. Presuming the human was a positive opportunity and not some kind of cosmic shorthand for the condition of having blinders. Human, i.e. blinkered.
What do you think? Do pigs insult each other by saying, Man!
Like a great hearted animal then. Like a true mammal. An elephant aspirant. With a heart like a whale’s open mouth.
(#) early reviews
The critics are scathing. Already Narrator hears them.
A sort of potpourri of promiscuity and deep thoughts.
(#) the truth about yourself
An acquaintance reported on him. “I watched you walk down the street. You duck your head down and shuffle along. All the way until you arrive at the next corner. At the corner you look around like you’ve never been there before in your life. Like you just arrived on the planet.”
(#)
This acquaintance didn’t like him much. Obviously. Felt that he ought to hold up a mirror. That people ought to see the truth about themselves. And become normal.
(#)
He was perfectly aware he was ludicrous. His ludicrousness was a hard thing to miss.
He simply knew no other way to proceed. Shuffle shuffle awe shuffle awe shuffle awe shuffle shuffle.
(#)
Smart enough to understand that his stupidity was what he had going for him. Overall he understood nothing. Parts only.
All he could do to proceed one broken piece at a time. Pick it up. Turn it over and over in his hand. Then put it down.
(#) concern/2
The fact that, over the last 5000 years, the human brain has shrunk.
Which is the same thing that happens to animals that have been domesticated.
(#) no meaning, or too much
One of those tacky pictures that look totally different depending on where you’re standing.
From one angle: chaos in a broth of wasted time. From another: Divine Providence is running a schedule tighter than the Tokyo Metro.
(#) the good news
Up at 3 am sodomizing a Mormon!
Lest anyone should think life is bereft of hope or purpose.
(#)
How alarming, with almost no warning, to find oneself in the arms of a man who is actually paying attention.
This lean blonde Mormon, the way he cocks his head and says, “Hey! One of your ears is flat to your head and the other sticks way out!”
How scary is that! No way to say, “Please, sir. Pay me no mind. I am only the invisible man who has swallowed your cock.”
(#)
Among the principal dangers of anonymous sex:
At any moment you may turn into a real person.
(#)
He’s a hell of an exceptional Mormon, really. If he was any better looking it would be impossible to do anything with him.
After sex he plays with Shaun’s hair, which is heavy and dense like a dog’s. “Now that we’ve done the sleazy part – can I take you out to dinner and hold your hand?”
Shaun reckons he’s never heard anything so sweet in his life. The sensation in his chest is akin to that of lung collapse. Of course he agrees.
How could Shaun possibly forget something so wonderful, so piercing?
Nonetheless, he will forget. He will be sure to.
(#) grapes / 2.
The task of plucking grapes. Simplicity comes as sweet relief. Washed and de-stemmed, the grapes may then by crushed or boiled down.
The simplest process however, requires only placing a heaping cup of grapes into a sterilized jar, adding a quarter cup of sugar, then filling the jar to the rim with boiling water.
In this way juice is produced although the grapes remain intact. Green or purple, the juice has a delicate color, and makes a suitable gift for those who do not mind humble things.
After several months the grapes appear nearly translucent. A few float at the top. Others nestle at the bottom of the jar, dense as honeycomb.
(#) public transportation
He imagines the talks buses must get into, on those rare occasions when a bus wonders if human actually think, or even have feelings. Who knows, maybe humans even talk amongst themselves!
Oh that screwball bus! Everyone knows that only buses think. Humans get on and off – that’s it.
(#) veteran
Shaun wonders if new arrivals, just learning the language, sometimes made the mistake of thinking the word “veteran” meant “a ragged figure standing on a street corner holding a cardboard sign”.
(#) nope, didn’t see him.
Two angry bicyclists stop fast in front of him.
“Hey! D’you see a red-haired guy, pink polo, runnin’ this way?”
“No. A pink shirt? Definitely not.”
The bicyclists speed off.
Shaun feels incredibly happy. What a pleasure it is to be asked a question to which the correct answer is so self-evident and clear!
(#) buddy booth
In other words, a hole in the wall. Lanky black guy won’t take it out, just lets Shaun feel it through his jeans, so hard Shaun thinks it must be fake but, no, it’s real. Or at least it is firmly attached.
(#)
Something’s wrong, Shaun thinks, and buckles up and walks back into the shop, back into the bright afternoon, to stand among the pink dildos and the magazines.
The clerk is standing there like he’s a greeter at church. The men in the store aren’t nearly furtive enough.
Vice.
(#) invisible buttons
When Shaun was a child he believed that streets were dotted with invisible buttons. Take one step and you might in an instant teleport into another time or nation. Into a wholly different situation, a battle or a jungle. Outer space, a lover’s quarrel.
About this it turned out he was entirely correct.
(#) prayer
Before his cock is even soft he’s back on his knees – this time on a red leather pad among the pews before the Holy Virgin at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
To Shaun the Virgin always looks as though she can’t quite make up her mind.
He prays. In case the Vice Squad is in pursuit. In case the Holy Mother has taken charge of horny morons in triple-X video arcades.
(#) impossibility
If it was enough to be handsome, well, maybe he could manage that. The 99th time someone wanted him – or maybe the 999th – that would be the magic trick.
The problem is that what he’d really like to feel, if only for a moment, is undamaged.
Which unfortunately does not appear to be an option.
(#) whole
The way people describe the almost unimaginable bravery of their elderly relatives.
He eats the fat right off the roast!
She drinks real milk!
(#)
The towering otherworldly whiteness of the basilica, with its stone gods and jewel-box windows, like a spaceship landed among the pawnshops, bars and payday loans of Colfax Avenue.
As Shaun kneels before the Virgin, a man runs in shouting, “I saw a man killed running a red light on his bicycle!”
(#)
The priest walking up the aisle only nods. He is immune to distress. The man who has just seen a man die runs a lap of the saints and hightails it back to the street.
The basilica on Colfax. It is possible that help was once intended. As it is, God has built himself a fortress. He stays hidden inside it. Does not look out.
(#) dogs / 1
He is like a man with a yard full of dogs. Mad half-dead dogs. Can anything be done with them really?
Would a man who was honest, wise and kind – just pick up a gun and start shooting?
(#) dogs / 2
He doesn’t know what to do with all these dogs. One by one he carries them into the house. Pats and examines them.
What sorry-looking dogs!
The dogs lick his hand, growl, bite, shit, die, wag their tails, shed fur.
(#) every character has a history!
Therefore, this summary of the past.
A bookish hustler fell asleep at the baths.
(#) education
A very strange convoluted dream in which he was awarded a scholarship and completed his studies in a branch of knowledge entirely luxurious, the kind of education the rich buy for their daughters after they’ve already purchased the most exquisitely gorgeous carpet.
(#) marriage / employment
At which point he found himself in a foreign city that resembled both a pinball machine and an airport transit lounge, wherein he married a man (!) and became a lecturer.
He wore a suit and stood before a line of desks. The words that came out of his mouth never made any sense.
The man he married never touched him.
(#) travel
Exotic destinations flickered past, as in a Bollywood music video. Like a flying dream, albeit strangely bereft of exhilaration.
(#) history (finish)
He woke up. A bookish hustler at the baths. As ever.
It was true that a significant amount of time had passed.
(#)
To interpret the events of the day like events in a dream.
Even when the most obvious message would be: Buddy! Fucking A! Keep it zipped already! Dude!! Less coffee!
(#) Denver / 3
Bulldozers and yellow poplars, red table umbrellas, dollar refills, tight jeans, burrito supremes, pitchers of beer.
Denver, city of the teasing dare:
you could not possibly enchant me.
(#) fox
At one a.m. walking down Speer past the little park called Sunken Gardens, he sees a fox. The fox bounces on all four feet and has a great bushy tail that appears, at first glance, to be highly impractical.
Beneath the street lamp, the fox plays in the snow. Runs in circles, rolls on his back.
Shaun allows himself to feel encouraged.
(#)
The medical students beside him at the cafe are preparing for their big exam.
What is it called when you try to use your coffee cup to mow the lawn?
(#) staff / 1 (our apologies)
If the same guy would show up to write two days in a row – that would help a lot. That would be invaluable!
Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be possible. As it is, this book is being run with a staff of day laborers, guys who hardly know each other, all of whom are prone to wasting time, to the bottle, to throwing everything over in favor of some fresh (or even tawdry) beauty passing by.
(#) shy.
Years before, when Shaun worked as a towel boy at the baths, he had two nicknames. One of them was SLUT. The other was SHY. Because he often was heard to say, “I’m shy” and equally often was found fucking in a hallway or halfway down the stairs or even in the parking lot. As if performing a demonstration. In case anyone had questions. About technique. Or other considerations.
It was true that he was also uncommonly shy.
(#) catapult
The kind of cowardice that functions as a catapult. The occult force generated by ten thousand times cowering, or flinching as if about to be struck. A force which may be dissipated in addiction or which may, on exceedingly rare occasions, result in actual acts of bravery.
(#) crow, unicorn
The young man at the next table has a young crow perched on his shoulder. The crow stays entirely still and leans slightly forward, as if concentrating very hard on what the pretty young woman with glasses across the way is saying.
The crow is a fake crow twenty-three hours a day.
The woman is talking about a woman she met at dinner party who said, “Could somebody please explain it to me? Are unicorns endangered, or are unicorns extinct?
(#) outlook
Entirely screwed-up. A mess. A busted head. A poisoned river. The chance of positive future developments – exceedingly slim.
Then again, it seems equally unlikely that such a person would be able to wash and dress himself or make words and gestures comprehensible to other people.
As happened today again.
(#) two cents
Killed a cockroach.
Prayed it might be reborn as a honeybee.
(#)
The night before, as he walked on Broadway past the Capitol building – this message in blue chalk:
Clearly we have all gone INSANE.
(#) staff / 2. (apologies continue)
If only a professional and conscientious staff were available – this book would be great!
Even better, a truly skillful and pragmatic team would swiftly decide that, considering its premise, promise and subject matter, this book had better remain unwritten.
Saving both money and time!
(#) point of view
This him, this you, this I, this quadrillionth. Infinitesimal ambulatory fragment of sky and sea. The immense throttling air, the fertile fucked-up plasticine sea.
The cod may go ahead and die.
Or the cod may grow another eye.
(#)
The way a whale’s mouth opens. How it actually unhinges. And swallows the ocean as it goes along. Millions and millions of gallons, innumerable microscopic lives, mysterious abyss – all flows into the whale’s gullet.
Questions beyond number.
Uncountable grief.
(#) mantra / 2
Drunk, late at night, walking home in a blizzard, convinced he knew a new and powerful mantra, which he shouted as he stumbled through the snow –
Incredibly!
good news!
to those
whose dreams
did
not
come
true.
(#) my acrobat.
My acrobat. He likes to say.
How often does a person get a chance to put those two words together? This must be a very peculiar life we’ve stumbled upon! One of those lives in which things that almost never happen, happen.
Which must also be very common and ordinary. Enough “almost nevers” for everyone to have a few sprinkled on.
In this case the chance to say, “my acrobat”.
(#)
To his credit, he is aware the second word negates the first, that ravenous possessive.
Makes a mockery of it, even.
(#)
The acrobat. Shaun noticed him the second time they had sex. (Let’s assume it was the second time.) As soon as he was in the door at the baths, before he’d even gotten to his locker, a man put his arms around him from behind, kissed his neck.
(#)
He was very young, maybe twenty, and looked like a tremendously sad angel, who’d never saved anyone.
Shaun knew he wasn’t eligible for a guy like him – and also he was fairly certain he’d had sex with him in the last ten days. He wasn’t exactly sure.
(#) clef
The young man told Shaun to find him when he was ready. Then he turned and walked back toward the showers.
At the top of the spine was a bass clef. That was when Shaun remembered. The bass clef.
Yes – he was an acrobat.
(#) forget
As essential thing about promiscuity, which sure as hell nobody had ever told him: you won’t remember.
All those lovers from the baths – the half-dozen from this week, the half-dozen from the week before – they are all stored someplace exceedingly temporary, like dreams.
(#) forget
Damage is memorable: warts, brush-offs, amputees. Every cold dismissive word. All that is yours to keep. Otherwise, the men dissolve. Even the pretty ones, even the lucky ones. The perfect ones especially.
(#) forget
He knew exactly how to grin when a brand-new lover said, “Hey Shaun, good to see you again!”
(#) forget
He’d even forgotten an acrobat. How could he forget an acrobat? When so few acrobats will ever be vouchsafed to one’s arms!
How could he forget? Like forgetting one’s only sight of a giant sea turtle, or the Northern Lights, or a whale breaking the surface of the water.
(#) tender
Tender acrobat. Not like the gods who just stand there awaiting tribute, shoot their load, shrug, walk off without a word.
That was easier actually. You be the god. I’ll be the devotee. He knew how to do that.
The acrobat was crouched down on the floor. And here he was – excessively visible. He reached over and dimmed the light some more.
(#) monster
“You’re pretty much what crippled boys dream about,” Shaun said.
“You’re not crippled.”
“My left leg is crippled.”
“Didn’t notice.” More kisses. “Anyway if the monster comes, I’ll defend you. You won’t have to hobble very fast. Or else you can hobble away while the monster’s eating me.”
(#) work
The acrobat acted as if he beauty were entirely beside the point.
As if this was just what he did for work – dress up as a Apollo, naked.
(#) aspiration
Being an acrobat was just an aspiration actually. So far he’d been a dancer.
“I never had to do anything more than that,” he quickly added. “Just tease.”
(#)
The heaviness in the face of the acrobat – the darkness beneath his eyes and his face as hewn from stone. Was that the habit of sadness – or just a side effect of retrovirals?
(#) monster / 2
He thought maybe the acrobat could explain. Every day at least somebody offered it to him. Was it was just something about Denver, or was America now on meth?
“They’re curious,” said the acrobat. “You’re sort of butch. Your cock is thick. They want to see what kind of monster you would be.”
(#) hooked.
“So – were you ever hooked?” Shawn asked.
“Only when I was a kid,” said the acrobat.
(#) childhood.
“My dad was a mule,” said the acrobat. “Back and forth to Mexico. So I was a mule too. I was ten. So much coke. But then he went away to jail.
“When I was 12 my mom said she was tired of buying my clothes. She faked all my paperwork and made me 2 years older. So I could go to work. But then, guess what, pretty soon I could take her to court and I was, like, you are pretty much the worst mother ever and I became an emancipated minor. And I was only 16, like, on paper.”
(#)
The way he said all this was off-hand and matter-of-fact, the same way he said, “You can fuck me if you want.”
(#) woods.
Lying there, in a cubicle at the baths, the acrobat said, “I’d really like to get way out into the woods with you.”
Shaun agreed. He had dreams like that.
They said they would exchange numbers. Of course. They even promised.
Shaun wondered, did anyone ever make it out to the woods?
(#) remember.
My acrobat.
Here he is again.
Please, this time, remember.
from the Prologue
(#)
Because there is so very little time.
(#)
The way a whale’s mouth opens (didn’t he read that it actually unhinges?) the way it feeds by letting in great expanses of the ocean.
(#)
Every day he wakes up beneath a sign. A sign with parts that flip, like in a tacky office in the Seventies.
TODAY IS WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 21ST AND STILL YOU AINT DONE SHIT.
(#) reminder
That every day you should remember death.
Which is sure to come and may come at any time.
That we are as fragile as soap bubbles and at death must leave everything behind.
Resolve therefore to make the best possible use of your life.
(#) naturally he overdid it
He overdosed. Not on drugs. On death awareness.
Therefore he got no further than: There is something I ought to be doing! Time is running out! There is something I’m supposed to be doing! But what but what but what?
(#)
Proud of himself for not wearing a watch. Thinks he’s more free than most people.
But then he wonders, “What time is it?” And, before looking at a clock, he guesses.
Even hung-over, even with a lover, even in a foreign city – his guess is always correct within three minutes.
(#) Q:
Now that he is alone, he wonders, “Should I have said to my lover, “Let’s be as unhappy as most people!” And to my brother, “Drink!”
Should I have said to my father, “You, sir, are a great king!”
Is that what I should have said?
(#) his family
As evident from their strained expressions.
(#) family theory
His theory: his family decided to be polite. Of course. They were polite people. Beyond that they resolved to have as little as possible to do with him.
Some months later, he was born.
(#)
Presumably everyone else has already noticed that one gets in the very biggest trouble not for arguments or insults but for saying things that are absolutely spectacularly obvious.
(#) A:
The answer to the previous question is: No.
(#) thanks!
His father writes: my affection has been boundless. The problem is that you are difficult to love.
(#)
What is the inspiration actually? How to Turn Ordinary Complaints into Thousands of Dollars?
(#)
Boiling nettles.
(#)
Burning shit for fuel.
(#) on prophecy
Fortune cookie says: Keep your eye open for an opportunity soon to come!
He wonders: why only “eye”? One?
Like Odin? What’s my other eye supposed to be doing? Is this that one-eyed snake business?
Soon to come!
(#)
Not that he’s so interested in money, really. Not, like, compared to sex. (Sex!)
He just thought this might be enough. Just this.
(#) reassurance
He tells himself that, even if he was the very ugliest man in the world he would still have the chance to see a giant turtle swimming.
Followed swiftly by the fear that he may very well outlive all the giant turtles.
(#) everybody needs a motto
Fellatio. Because it’s not always possible to go snorkeling.
(#)
This panic. Turn it over. It is the intolerable underside of a blanket woven with birds, colors and stars.
(#)
Can anyone remember why I was called? Was it something about plumbing? Was it about the lights? Are we saving something? May I alphabetize? Are there boxes to carry?
(#)
Don’t tell me to be reasonable! Do you have any idea what this day is worth!
(#)
Courage was accumulating. He could feel it. It would be several hours before he had even a quarter-teaspoonful.
But still
from My Acrobat
(#) grapes
He agreed to help Anita with the grapes. No big deal, he thought. Only two vines. He didn’t even see any fruit. Really just a country way to decorate a cyclone fence.
It wasn’t until he actually climbed inside with a plastic bucket and lifted up the vines –
Hour after hour after hour plucking grapes.
Such a relief to be given a simple repetitive task.
(#)
Back in Denver, he saw half a dozen guys from the bad old days. Old lovers. Which is not to say anything particularly romantic. Or even specific.
(#) Denver
New and abandoned. The sky and strategies for living with it, ignoring, narrowing it.
Denver: the sidewalks are empty and the bars are full. Everyone is here. No one walked.
(#)
By the time he left Denver, age 25, he’d pretty much sucked off every guy who didn’t jump back fast enough.
And guys didn’t jump back. Almost never. Let no one suggest the kid was good for nothing.
(#) Denver / 2
Plastic banners along the street. 50 McNuggets for $9.99. Pitchers three bucks all day!
And most people apparently decided, What the hell why not?!
To judge by their stunned expressions.
(#) America
America. The body yearns to bloat. The face swells and the eyes recede inside the head.
The United States of it’s-so-hard-to-stay-Awake.
(#) America / 2
One of those reclining chairs that take up half the living room. Pull the lever. Your feet fly up and your head falls back.
So cozy until you think, how the hell do I get out of this thing?
(#) flattery
“I can’t believe you still have such a baby face!” said the big floppy cocked blonde who, it turned out, after all these years and minus most of his hair, was named Mark.
He was very happy to hear this. He was flattered. It was several minutes before he realized that Mark was just surprised his face was not sunken from retrovirals or gnawed by meth.
(#)
The bathhouse still had corridors the color of rotten eggplant and carpet that could take the skin right off your feet. When he’d used to come here in the 90s, the place was a hospice party, the cubicles full of companionable dying men calling out, hey you can come in my mouth.
Now it was just a gay-themed drug den, a spooky playground. Guys didn’t even bother to undress. They waited in their rooms and stared into their phones.
(#) meth
Such a thing as evil spirits.
(#)
Here he was back at the baths and everyone who was still alive was doing what they’d done before except now it was mostly rapturous finger-fucking since they couldn’t get it up. (Spirits.)
(#) consolation
Mark still had his all-star cock, impressive even floppy.
Who knows, without that cock maybe he would have had to put on his pants and get a life.
(#) potato
He even saw his old boss, who, when he’d known him before, was still wearing his ghoul on the inside. He had been an entrepreneur – made money turning junk houses he’d fixed up and taking in developmentally disabled sex offenders. He used to boast all the time about one of them, who was hung like an ox.
Now here he was, the old boss, crouched in the triple X video lounge. He looked like he’d been boiled so long he’d popped his skin. Like a forgotten potato.
(#) dumb question
He asked Gerald, “Why don’t they shut the place down? Everyone there is on meth. Even the doorman’s on meth.”
Gerald said, “The cops don’t want to go to no faggot fuckfest.”
Thank you, Gerald.
(#)
Gerald was half Ute, half Lakota Sioux. “Do you know what the purpose of the universe is?” Gerald announced. “The purpose of the universe is to HIDE from the universe.”
(#) nametag
Protagonist must have a name. Despite the fact that names are seldom used in the places he goes and real names almost never.
What use is a name? Pass it through a gloryhole: HELLO! The cock you are sucking belongs to __________ .
(#)
A name. Because in America it is now illegal to travel without identification.
A name. Because otherwise, when two gay guys have anonymous sex, there’s no way of telling who is doing what and to whom. (Even with names it’s often difficult.)
Shaun. Because it is the plainest name the narrator can think of at the moment.
(#)
Shaun met Gerald at Broadway’s, at Broadway and 10th, but both of them remembered the place from when it was called Mr. Bill’s and they were both under-aged hustlers sneaking in the back.
(#) buffet
They remembered the grand old days of Mr. Bill’s free Sunday meal, the legendary Petty Crime Buffet, when the drunks and the hookers and the thieves and the losers gathered together for the only decent meal most of them would get all week.
Beloved old Mr. Bill, who looked like a bloated corpse even on his good days, stood right beside the salad to make sure no one picked out all the shrimp.
(#) losing track
Shaun saw Gerald later at the baths. Above his towel he was wearing a black t-shirt to hide his tits and belly.
“Hey Gerald. Didn’t expect to see you this early.”
Gerald looked kind of embarrassed. “I thought it was six in the morning. But it’s six at night, innit?”
(#) truth and beauty
Shrimp!
Because crazy old drunk Mr. Bill decided that, not only would the petty criminals of Denver be given a free meal, they would be given spinach salad with shrimp. And roast chicken. And fruit salad with berries. And homemade bread.
(#)
Lest anyone imagine that compassion is practiced only by pious Anglicans, with their bologna sandwiches.
(#) concern
Why is it he is unable to hear the dance version of “Love is in the Air” without imagining nuclear holocaust?
(#)fantasy
See the dull-faced workman. His eyes are empty and his back strong. His shoulders up around his ears. No one in camp cares he doesn’t talk. He works.
Here’s the newcomer, curly-haired and dark-skinned. From somewhere nearer the sun. “What’s up with him?” asks the newcomer.
“Never mind him. He’s always like that.”
(#)
The two men work alone in the field. Workman doesn’t talk. Late in the day, the light changes. Newcomer is tired of silence, of shoulders up around the ears.
Without thinking, Newcomer touches Workman’s back. “Hey buddy, loosen up.”
Surprised, Workman shudders and pulls away. He has started shaking and cannot stop.
(#)it’s magic, that’s why
Newcomer understands. He holds Workman. He does not stop holding him.
The two men tumble to the ground beneath an immense and ancient tree.
It cradles them.
(#)
Workman sobs so much he falls asleep, exhausted. Newcomer continues to hold him.
In the middle of the night the men wake up, blazing with moonlight, and fuck like mad beneath the stars.
Their semen nourishes the tree.
(#)
The two men wake up at dawn beside the roots of the great tree.
There is light in the leaves of the tree and in the eyes of the men.
(#)
This is the story Shaun tells himself so that he will be able to sleep. Jacks-off, or doesn’t. Night after night.
Imagines himself held by the man from somewhere nearer the sun, whose hair is curly, whose eyes are like rich brown bread.
(#) blessed
Miss DeeDee rubs her giant jeweled hand against Shaun’s crotch and asks, “Are you blessed?”
The pock-marked Latino at the recreation center is an evangelist. “Brother, are you blessed in the Lord?”
And, no matter how lucky Shaun feels, to appear just now in the bright crumbling world, he has no choice but to say, “Not in the way that you mean.”
(#) fashion
Bags are stolen, valuables taken, and everything else gets tossed onto the narrow tarred shores of 8th Avenue or 11th. So that, in a few weeks time, Shaun has no problem accumulating an entire wardrobe of stolen clothes. Evidently everyone robbed was about his size: plain average. No one had much money. There are sweatshirts with frayed sleeves and bargain jeans, an acrylic ski cap. Nothing is fashionable, there is no 100 percent anything.
Shaun takes home the clothes and boils them. Dresses himself in theft. Fits right in.
(#) lice
Shaun got two kinds of lice. (As if one were not sufficient.)
First he got crabs, which were a nuisance, albeit an exceedingly familiar one. Two rounds of insecticide and three loads of laundry cleared that up.
Except he still itched. Even after six more applications of Nix and nine more loads at the laundromat – each of which gave him a holiday of maybe three hours before he started itching again.
Finally the bitter truth dawned: he’d caught invisible lice. Invisible lice were maybe a fraction less disgusting – since you couldn’t pluck them off and watch them wriggle in the glow of the desk lamp.
Trouble was those invisible fuckers were almost impossible to eradicate.
(#) lice / 2
And were they invisible really – or just very very small? Exceedingly small – but certain to swell into visibility if he ever had an actual date with a halfway decent, employed, tender-voiced man, a gentleman almost, albeit a very hairy one. On whom the invisible lice would then be found, big as blood-engorged ticks.
Shaun considered himself an expert on the ordinary and extraordinary effects of sleeping around. But he had no idea what to do about the invisible lice. All he could do was wash and wash and wash.
(#) refuge
Cigarettes, vacations, beer, beliefs, television.
But the body is its own escape. You can follow the animal. You can burrow into the mechanism.
What a relief to be horny, so horny it obliterates everything else, like the hunger of the saints.
(#) mantra / 1
Drunk, late at night, walking home in a blizzard, convinced he knew a new and powerful mantra, which he shouted as he stumbled through the snow –
Grace!
by definition
comes
to those
who do
not
deserve it!
(#) winners
Late Sunday afternoon at the baths – these men all have something. Anyway you can tell they had it once. Some reason this all worked very well for them. Once upon a time. As even the most wretched gambler (if you’ll just lend him a dollar) will talk of jackpot wins, these men all have tales of Spectacular Sexual Success.
(#) gods
The attendant beams at Shaun. “Man! The guy you were with the guy in Room #3 – do you know who that was? That was Morgan Steed!”
Shaun gets to bed even later that night (the sun is already up) but he swears he feels less tired. It helps to remember he was chosen by one of the gods.
(#) repeat
Even more satisfying than the first time with a porn star (he’s ashamed to admit) is the second time, when he knows it’s Morgan Steed in Room #3 and makes him wait, a little. Not too long, just a little. The third time he passes the open door he stops. The god nods to him and he goes in.
(#) Morgan Steed
Oh the porno expanse of Morgan Steed! Every cultivated inch of him. The chest hair buzzed to an elegant bristle, the teeth white as correction tape. The Herculean shoulders and luxuriant armpits. The cock as from box covers – the length indisputably his, the girth reportedly augmented.
It’s true his penis doesn’t feel exactly real, not any more real than it feels to be having sex with an actual porn star. His face is the same as it was in movies from the Nineties. The eyes and mouth still move.
Overall Morgan Steed is remarkably lifelike.
(#) hockey
Shaun has his mouth on the giant smooth balls of the star and the star has his eyes on the television. The porn star stares up at the porn as Shaun licks his balls, his perineum and finally his famous porn star asshole which is as smooth and as groomed as a hockey rink. And Shaun believes he’s doing well when Morgan Steed begins to gasp and groan and swear and what comes out of his mouth is a high-speed distillate of Nineties porno dialogue: “Fuck yeah.” “Suck that cock.” “Hell yeah, motherfucker.” And finally he says, “You’re killing me.”
(#) pardon?
You’re killing me. Shaun stops and looks up. Logan Reid takes his eyes off the porn, looks down at Shaun and grins.
OK, so “you’re killing me” doesn’t mean, for example, “watch out for the teeth.” This is just how Morgan Steed expresses pleasure.
“You’re killing me. You’re killing me.”
(#) switch!
Abruptly Morgan Steed apologizes, “I’m making you do all the work!” (This is a job they are doing.) Then Shaun is on his back on the bed and Morgan Steed is sitting on top of him, vast, verdant and sculpted, like a designated national monument. Morgan Steed is touching him, looking at him.
He wishes Morgan Steed wouldn’t bounce so much. He’s afraid he’s might throw up. Not really from the motion, really. From fear of visibility.
(#) let’s just admit it
Because the goal is to be successful, finished, and away. To get out of there before Morgan Steed can say, “Hey one of your ears sticks way out” or “your forehead resembles an accordion” or “what happened to your leg?” To have sex with a porn star and feel oneself to be endorsed, just a tiny bit taller. The actual sex just a vulnerable place in-between.
(#) cum shot
Shaun’s happy when Morgan Steed gasps, cusses, blows his load. Porn star spunk. Except nothing actually comes out. The voice of Logan Reid is now aw-shucks all-American boy. “Too much edging, man! Sorry! I’m shooting blanks!” Morgan Steed is the very definition of good gay sportsmanship: willing to kiss someone who has spent much of the last hour licking his asshole. Shaun doesn’t push it however: declares his great happiness and pleasure, his vast and abject gratitude, then moves swiftly backwards out the door. As in the movies.
(#) apocalypse
He dreamed of apocalypse, most commonly. Fighting for his life with a few others on what green scraps of Earth were left.
As time went on, these dreams became increasingly unnecessary. Apocalypse was more and more often the day’s programming as well.
(#) in defense of the world
Despite its abundant trap doors and shoddy broken-down appearance, despite the ascendancy of cell phones and the onrush of old age, 99.9% of the time the world remains vastly preferable to contents of the mind.
(#) how extremely unfortunate
Human beings, it turned out, were spectacularly bad at considering the big picture or the long term.
Thus they had arrived in a world which they were ill-equipped to think about. And even less inclined.
Meanwhile, the old goals were increasingly beside the point. The usual victories turned out to be overwhelmingly toxic.
(#) therefore
No refuge other than the moment, which could neither be cut apart nor located. The indivisible, a demon saint with an axe: now now now now now.
The moment as a life raft then. An attempt to add an oar and a sail to the paragraph.
Miniscule prayers – if you believe in such a thing. Otherwise – small superstitious gestures.
(#) mammal
Such as the likely superstitious notion that acting like a human being mattered even now. Presuming the human was a positive opportunity and not some kind of cosmic shorthand for the condition of having blinders. Human, i.e. blinkered.
What do you think? Do pigs insult each other by saying, Man!
Like a great hearted animal then. Like a true mammal. An elephant aspirant. With a heart like a whale’s open mouth.
(#) early reviews
The critics are scathing. Already Narrator hears them.
A sort of potpourri of promiscuity and deep thoughts.
(#) the truth about yourself
An acquaintance reported on him. “I watched you walk down the street. You duck your head down and shuffle along. All the way until you arrive at the next corner. At the corner you look around like you’ve never been there before in your life. Like you just arrived on the planet.”
(#)
This acquaintance didn’t like him much. Obviously. Felt that he ought to hold up a mirror. That people ought to see the truth about themselves. And become normal.
(#)
He was perfectly aware he was ludicrous. His ludicrousness was a hard thing to miss.
He simply knew no other way to proceed. Shuffle shuffle awe shuffle awe shuffle awe shuffle shuffle.
(#)
Smart enough to understand that his stupidity was what he had going for him. Overall he understood nothing. Parts only.
All he could do to proceed one broken piece at a time. Pick it up. Turn it over and over in his hand. Then put it down.
(#) concern/2
The fact that, over the last 5000 years, the human brain has shrunk.
Which is the same thing that happens to animals that have been domesticated.
(#) no meaning, or too much
One of those tacky pictures that look totally different depending on where you’re standing.
From one angle: chaos in a broth of wasted time. From another: Divine Providence is running a schedule tighter than the Tokyo Metro.
(#) the good news
Up at 3 am sodomizing a Mormon!
Lest anyone should think life is bereft of hope or purpose.
(#)
How alarming, with almost no warning, to find oneself in the arms of a man who is actually paying attention.
This lean blonde Mormon, the way he cocks his head and says, “Hey! One of your ears is flat to your head and the other sticks way out!”
How scary is that! No way to say, “Please, sir. Pay me no mind. I am only the invisible man who has swallowed your cock.”
(#)
Among the principal dangers of anonymous sex:
At any moment you may turn into a real person.
(#)
He’s a hell of an exceptional Mormon, really. If he was any better looking it would be impossible to do anything with him.
After sex he plays with Shaun’s hair, which is heavy and dense like a dog’s. “Now that we’ve done the sleazy part – can I take you out to dinner and hold your hand?”
Shaun reckons he’s never heard anything so sweet in his life. The sensation in his chest is akin to that of lung collapse. Of course he agrees.
How could Shaun possibly forget something so wonderful, so piercing?
Nonetheless, he will forget. He will be sure to.
(#) grapes / 2.
The task of plucking grapes. Simplicity comes as sweet relief. Washed and de-stemmed, the grapes may then by crushed or boiled down.
The simplest process however, requires only placing a heaping cup of grapes into a sterilized jar, adding a quarter cup of sugar, then filling the jar to the rim with boiling water.
In this way juice is produced although the grapes remain intact. Green or purple, the juice has a delicate color, and makes a suitable gift for those who do not mind humble things.
After several months the grapes appear nearly translucent. A few float at the top. Others nestle at the bottom of the jar, dense as honeycomb.
(#) public transportation
He imagines the talks buses must get into, on those rare occasions when a bus wonders if human actually think, or even have feelings. Who knows, maybe humans even talk amongst themselves!
Oh that screwball bus! Everyone knows that only buses think. Humans get on and off – that’s it.
(#) veteran
Shaun wonders if new arrivals, just learning the language, sometimes made the mistake of thinking the word “veteran” meant “a ragged figure standing on a street corner holding a cardboard sign”.
(#) nope, didn’t see him.
Two angry bicyclists stop fast in front of him.
“Hey! D’you see a red-haired guy, pink polo, runnin’ this way?”
“No. A pink shirt? Definitely not.”
The bicyclists speed off.
Shaun feels incredibly happy. What a pleasure it is to be asked a question to which the correct answer is so self-evident and clear!
(#) buddy booth
In other words, a hole in the wall. Lanky black guy won’t take it out, just lets Shaun feel it through his jeans, so hard Shaun thinks it must be fake but, no, it’s real. Or at least it is firmly attached.
(#)
Something’s wrong, Shaun thinks, and buckles up and walks back into the shop, back into the bright afternoon, to stand among the pink dildos and the magazines.
The clerk is standing there like he’s a greeter at church. The men in the store aren’t nearly furtive enough.
Vice.
(#) invisible buttons
When Shaun was a child he believed that streets were dotted with invisible buttons. Take one step and you might in an instant teleport into another time or nation. Into a wholly different situation, a battle or a jungle. Outer space, a lover’s quarrel.
About this it turned out he was entirely correct.
(#) prayer
Before his cock is even soft he’s back on his knees – this time on a red leather pad among the pews before the Holy Virgin at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
To Shaun the Virgin always looks as though she can’t quite make up her mind.
He prays. In case the Vice Squad is in pursuit. In case the Holy Mother has taken charge of horny morons in triple-X video arcades.
(#) impossibility
If it was enough to be handsome, well, maybe he could manage that. The 99th time someone wanted him – or maybe the 999th – that would be the magic trick.
The problem is that what he’d really like to feel, if only for a moment, is undamaged.
Which unfortunately does not appear to be an option.
(#) whole
The way people describe the almost unimaginable bravery of their elderly relatives.
He eats the fat right off the roast!
She drinks real milk!
(#)
The towering otherworldly whiteness of the basilica, with its stone gods and jewel-box windows, like a spaceship landed among the pawnshops, bars and payday loans of Colfax Avenue.
As Shaun kneels before the Virgin, a man runs in shouting, “I saw a man killed running a red light on his bicycle!”
(#)
The priest walking up the aisle only nods. He is immune to distress. The man who has just seen a man die runs a lap of the saints and hightails it back to the street.
The basilica on Colfax. It is possible that help was once intended. As it is, God has built himself a fortress. He stays hidden inside it. Does not look out.
(#) dogs / 1
He is like a man with a yard full of dogs. Mad half-dead dogs. Can anything be done with them really?
Would a man who was honest, wise and kind – just pick up a gun and start shooting?
(#) dogs / 2
He doesn’t know what to do with all these dogs. One by one he carries them into the house. Pats and examines them.
What sorry-looking dogs!
The dogs lick his hand, growl, bite, shit, die, wag their tails, shed fur.
(#) every character has a history!
Therefore, this summary of the past.
A bookish hustler fell asleep at the baths.
(#) education
A very strange convoluted dream in which he was awarded a scholarship and completed his studies in a branch of knowledge entirely luxurious, the kind of education the rich buy for their daughters after they’ve already purchased the most exquisitely gorgeous carpet.
(#) marriage / employment
At which point he found himself in a foreign city that resembled both a pinball machine and an airport transit lounge, wherein he married a man (!) and became a lecturer.
He wore a suit and stood before a line of desks. The words that came out of his mouth never made any sense.
The man he married never touched him.
(#) travel
Exotic destinations flickered past, as in a Bollywood music video. Like a flying dream, albeit strangely bereft of exhilaration.
(#) history (finish)
He woke up. A bookish hustler at the baths. As ever.
It was true that a significant amount of time had passed.
(#)
To interpret the events of the day like events in a dream.
Even when the most obvious message would be: Buddy! Fucking A! Keep it zipped already! Dude!! Less coffee!
(#) Denver / 3
Bulldozers and yellow poplars, red table umbrellas, dollar refills, tight jeans, burrito supremes, pitchers of beer.
Denver, city of the teasing dare:
you could not possibly enchant me.
(#) fox
At one a.m. walking down Speer past the little park called Sunken Gardens, he sees a fox. The fox bounces on all four feet and has a great bushy tail that appears, at first glance, to be highly impractical.
Beneath the street lamp, the fox plays in the snow. Runs in circles, rolls on his back.
Shaun allows himself to feel encouraged.
(#)
The medical students beside him at the cafe are preparing for their big exam.
What is it called when you try to use your coffee cup to mow the lawn?
(#) staff / 1 (our apologies)
If the same guy would show up to write two days in a row – that would help a lot. That would be invaluable!
Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be possible. As it is, this book is being run with a staff of day laborers, guys who hardly know each other, all of whom are prone to wasting time, to the bottle, to throwing everything over in favor of some fresh (or even tawdry) beauty passing by.
(#) shy.
Years before, when Shaun worked as a towel boy at the baths, he had two nicknames. One of them was SLUT. The other was SHY. Because he often was heard to say, “I’m shy” and equally often was found fucking in a hallway or halfway down the stairs or even in the parking lot. As if performing a demonstration. In case anyone had questions. About technique. Or other considerations.
It was true that he was also uncommonly shy.
(#) catapult
The kind of cowardice that functions as a catapult. The occult force generated by ten thousand times cowering, or flinching as if about to be struck. A force which may be dissipated in addiction or which may, on exceedingly rare occasions, result in actual acts of bravery.
(#) crow, unicorn
The young man at the next table has a young crow perched on his shoulder. The crow stays entirely still and leans slightly forward, as if concentrating very hard on what the pretty young woman with glasses across the way is saying.
The crow is a fake crow twenty-three hours a day.
The woman is talking about a woman she met at dinner party who said, “Could somebody please explain it to me? Are unicorns endangered, or are unicorns extinct?
(#) outlook
Entirely screwed-up. A mess. A busted head. A poisoned river. The chance of positive future developments – exceedingly slim.
Then again, it seems equally unlikely that such a person would be able to wash and dress himself or make words and gestures comprehensible to other people.
As happened today again.
(#) two cents
Killed a cockroach.
Prayed it might be reborn as a honeybee.
(#)
The night before, as he walked on Broadway past the Capitol building – this message in blue chalk:
Clearly we have all gone INSANE.
(#) staff / 2. (apologies continue)
If only a professional and conscientious staff were available – this book would be great!
Even better, a truly skillful and pragmatic team would swiftly decide that, considering its premise, promise and subject matter, this book had better remain unwritten.
Saving both money and time!
(#) point of view
This him, this you, this I, this quadrillionth. Infinitesimal ambulatory fragment of sky and sea. The immense throttling air, the fertile fucked-up plasticine sea.
The cod may go ahead and die.
Or the cod may grow another eye.
(#)
The way a whale’s mouth opens. How it actually unhinges. And swallows the ocean as it goes along. Millions and millions of gallons, innumerable microscopic lives, mysterious abyss – all flows into the whale’s gullet.
Questions beyond number.
Uncountable grief.
(#) mantra / 2
Drunk, late at night, walking home in a blizzard, convinced he knew a new and powerful mantra, which he shouted as he stumbled through the snow –
Incredibly!
good news!
to those
whose dreams
did
not
come
true.
(#) my acrobat.
My acrobat. He likes to say.
How often does a person get a chance to put those two words together? This must be a very peculiar life we’ve stumbled upon! One of those lives in which things that almost never happen, happen.
Which must also be very common and ordinary. Enough “almost nevers” for everyone to have a few sprinkled on.
In this case the chance to say, “my acrobat”.
(#)
To his credit, he is aware the second word negates the first, that ravenous possessive.
Makes a mockery of it, even.
(#)
The acrobat. Shaun noticed him the second time they had sex. (Let’s assume it was the second time.) As soon as he was in the door at the baths, before he’d even gotten to his locker, a man put his arms around him from behind, kissed his neck.
(#)
He was very young, maybe twenty, and looked like a tremendously sad angel, who’d never saved anyone.
Shaun knew he wasn’t eligible for a guy like him – and also he was fairly certain he’d had sex with him in the last ten days. He wasn’t exactly sure.
(#) clef
The young man told Shaun to find him when he was ready. Then he turned and walked back toward the showers.
At the top of the spine was a bass clef. That was when Shaun remembered. The bass clef.
Yes – he was an acrobat.
(#) forget
As essential thing about promiscuity, which sure as hell nobody had ever told him: you won’t remember.
All those lovers from the baths – the half-dozen from this week, the half-dozen from the week before – they are all stored someplace exceedingly temporary, like dreams.
(#) forget
Damage is memorable: warts, brush-offs, amputees. Every cold dismissive word. All that is yours to keep. Otherwise, the men dissolve. Even the pretty ones, even the lucky ones. The perfect ones especially.
(#) forget
He knew exactly how to grin when a brand-new lover said, “Hey Shaun, good to see you again!”
(#) forget
He’d even forgotten an acrobat. How could he forget an acrobat? When so few acrobats will ever be vouchsafed to one’s arms!
How could he forget? Like forgetting one’s only sight of a giant sea turtle, or the Northern Lights, or a whale breaking the surface of the water.
(#) tender
Tender acrobat. Not like the gods who just stand there awaiting tribute, shoot their load, shrug, walk off without a word.
That was easier actually. You be the god. I’ll be the devotee. He knew how to do that.
The acrobat was crouched down on the floor. And here he was – excessively visible. He reached over and dimmed the light some more.
(#) monster
“You’re pretty much what crippled boys dream about,” Shaun said.
“You’re not crippled.”
“My left leg is crippled.”
“Didn’t notice.” More kisses. “Anyway if the monster comes, I’ll defend you. You won’t have to hobble very fast. Or else you can hobble away while the monster’s eating me.”
(#) work
The acrobat acted as if he beauty were entirely beside the point.
As if this was just what he did for work – dress up as a Apollo, naked.
(#) aspiration
Being an acrobat was just an aspiration actually. So far he’d been a dancer.
“I never had to do anything more than that,” he quickly added. “Just tease.”
(#)
The heaviness in the face of the acrobat – the darkness beneath his eyes and his face as hewn from stone. Was that the habit of sadness – or just a side effect of retrovirals?
(#) monster / 2
He thought maybe the acrobat could explain. Every day at least somebody offered it to him. Was it was just something about Denver, or was America now on meth?
“They’re curious,” said the acrobat. “You’re sort of butch. Your cock is thick. They want to see what kind of monster you would be.”
(#) hooked.
“So – were you ever hooked?” Shawn asked.
“Only when I was a kid,” said the acrobat.
(#) childhood.
“My dad was a mule,” said the acrobat. “Back and forth to Mexico. So I was a mule too. I was ten. So much coke. But then he went away to jail.
“When I was 12 my mom said she was tired of buying my clothes. She faked all my paperwork and made me 2 years older. So I could go to work. But then, guess what, pretty soon I could take her to court and I was, like, you are pretty much the worst mother ever and I became an emancipated minor. And I was only 16, like, on paper.”
(#)
The way he said all this was off-hand and matter-of-fact, the same way he said, “You can fuck me if you want.”
(#) woods.
Lying there, in a cubicle at the baths, the acrobat said, “I’d really like to get way out into the woods with you.”
Shaun agreed. He had dreams like that.
They said they would exchange numbers. Of course. They even promised.
Shaun wondered, did anyone ever make it out to the woods?
(#) remember.
My acrobat.
Here he is again.
Please, this time, remember.
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Four Canadian Perverts and Some Associated Reflections
Or, Still More For Nothing
I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. – SB
ONE
To the youth of the world, gazing toward me, awaiting tips on sexual success: be extremely wary of anyone with a fetish for playing barbershop.
His pants were around his ankles; he had an uncapped bottle of poppers in one hand and electric clippers in the other. To my credit, I did think, “Is extreme arousal the best time to give or receive a haircut?”
By the time the poppers wore off he’d shot his load. I had no hair.
I am upset because I am on the verge of having nothing. Ditto being.
What’s next? Shall I rage against the sun? Or time – that’s a good one!
Idiocy is believing special rules have been made, and just for you. The
compensation is feeling part of the popular crowd. So tremendously
special!
The stripper boys this evening are more attentive than ever. It used to be obvious I’d be getting it elsewhere for free. Now – not so much.
The black muscle hunk arrives to breathe on my neck. He wants me to buy a private dance. Optimistically speaking, it is entirely possible that I could die before it came time to pay. And die happy.
Some people rely on virtue. Personally I find that being broke, while not nearly so glamorous, is vastly more reliable. For goodness it helps to be broke.
A cap of dark stubble and a bushy gray beard. Although I have occasionally acted like a crazy person, and very frequently felt like one, this may be the first night I have actually looked the part.
Aside from when I wore a bandanna and a ponytail and then I was 18 and thus, I hope, excused.
Am I excused?
That is all right. I did not expect to be.
Life is random and appears so. Absolutely everything is accident and
chance. Everything except bad luck, which has been meticulously, even
divinely, designed and tailored to oneself. This particular pimple,
exactly now. This latest arrogant cuss who has divined those few perfect
cruelties to which one is not yet inured.
With such precision our infections are embroidered! For each small
opening, exactly the right despair. A job by chance, a random marriage,
and suddenly here it is: the perfect cancer.
AUNT
After we’d been out all evening – first to coffee, then to dinner – my aunt turned to me in the car and broke the news, “People find your gentleness disconcerting.”
Gentleness gets out of hand and runs roughshod over my life.
TWO
Guillame has some requests. He would like to kidnap me, knock me unconscious, and abuse me. His daily emails are just full of ideas!
There’s a problem however. Guillame is very shy and entirely tenderhearted. He’s going to need a lot of guidance if he’s ever going to be a halfway passable kidnapper and assailant.
The only abuse Guillame can think of is forcing me to suck his cock (Guillame you evil monster!) but then I suggest that he is welcome to punch my chest and slap me in the head as well. He promises to try.
G. regrets to inform me that the walls of his apartment are very thin so that, while he hopes I’ll put up lots of resistance (until the washcloth soaked in imaginary chloroform) actual screaming is out of the question. “Moaning is probably OK,” writes G.
I assure him that I will put up plenty of fight. And curse him under my breath.
We here at the Bureau of Truth and Misinformation would like to attest,
again, that it is possible to feel at the same time totally lucky and
entirely wretched.
I may be nobody with nothing and no chance of much but that doesn’t
mean I’m not grateful, grateful as anyone would be who has all that I
have.
THREE
This elderly man in his floppy hat in the chair across from mine – for the last hour he’s been penciling his Sudoku as he gums a cookie. Now I look and he’s struggling with the thick plastic wrap on a bottle of poppers.
Unnecessary to mention, really, that the cafe is in Montreal.
Are poppers actually legal in Canada? Or is it in the gray area, i.e. the cops have better things to do than bust gay guys who like to self-administer small doses of brain damage while masturbating?
He doesn’t look like he’d survive a whiff, the shaky old duffer. Perhaps he intends to pop a Viagra and self-deliver.
He pick pick picks at the hard red plastic wrap. This is a very fashionable cafe. A croissant is nearly six bucks.
I remember my pal Vito in Bangkok who tried to pry the cap off a bottle of poppers with his teeth till the whole damn thing exploded and took an incisor as well as two in the back.
Finally I say to the duffer, “That plastic sure is tough, isn’t it? I can never do that!”
But the old man wants no part of me or my help. Is he making progress now? What happens when he gets the cap off?
Sometimes I can almost hear them, the voices whispering. Should we tell
him? Absolutely not! A little even, just a smidge? No, he must know
nothing.
GENTLENESS
Which is a punishable offense in New York, Amsterdam, and Rome.
Which is generally looked down upon, even in those areas in which it is officially tolerated.
Which is welcomed only in minor places, in West Bengal and Laos and certain parts of Oregon.
Which is not only onerous to the general public, but burdensome above all to he who is afflicted with it.
Which used to be acceptable for women. Not anymore.
FOUR
How this guy managed to sneak up on me, here in the video room at the Oasis Baths, I have no idea. Considering that he is wearing enormous rubber galoshes and gigantic rubber bib overalls, overalls so big he has enough room to put both his arms inside to beat off.
I’m not sure what his fantasy is, exactly – but it seems to mean a great deal to him that I will even tolerate it in my vicinity.
I think I’m supposed to press myself against him – though how he can feel anything at all inside all that rubber is a mystery to me.
As I watch he takes out his delicate penis and thwacks it against the rubber, pleased as a boy with a paper clip. He is not old but his hair is colorless; he wears glasses and seems overwhelmingly sad, as is appropriate for a man indoors dressed for a cataclysmic storm.
It upsets me that I must always understand exactly nothing. Why can’t I know a little? Would it interfere so much if I was given even the slightest inkling of the plan?
BACK TO TWO
A thing that is difficult: to pretend you are unconscious while a hairy film student crawls naked over you and shoves his thick tongue in your mouth.
You can try it yourself or you can just take my word for it.
The game he wanted: I’m a mean jock looking for a room to rent. I show up late and look bored as I sniff around his messy basement room. I need a place where I can bring my girlfriend.
As I sneer toward the bathtub he attacks me from behind. We grapple against the wall until he whispers, “You’re losing control.” Agreeably I slump to the floor.
I’d recognized the problem as soon as he’d answered the door. My assailant had the body of a baby bear and eyes like Jesus.
I felt absolutely totally safe.
How difficult it must be to be Guillame. Anytime he mutters, “Gonna fuckin’ rape yer ass in an alley”, the victim pipes up, “OK sure whatever! I know just the alley! Private yet atmospheric! OK to bring a blanket?”
Naturally even while playing dead I’m worrying, am I doing it right?
Stockholm Syndrome sets in early. Slipping in and out of mock unconsciousness we fight, I cry, I plead for mercy, but then things get out of hand, deteriorate, and soon we’re making out like a couple of lovestruck puppyboys.
Oh, terrible, tyrannical and relentless gentleness, don’t you see how we suffer? To all our attempts at perversity, tenderness adheres like lice. Why, in the name of depravity, can’t you give us a ten minute vacation? Let us be as awful as the world, as bad as the weather.
Guillame brandishes the washcloth soaked in imaginary chloroform. Just one more time, he says. Please? Play dead.
I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. – SB
ONE
To the youth of the world, gazing toward me, awaiting tips on sexual success: be extremely wary of anyone with a fetish for playing barbershop.
His pants were around his ankles; he had an uncapped bottle of poppers in one hand and electric clippers in the other. To my credit, I did think, “Is extreme arousal the best time to give or receive a haircut?”
By the time the poppers wore off he’d shot his load. I had no hair.
I am upset because I am on the verge of having nothing. Ditto being.
What’s next? Shall I rage against the sun? Or time – that’s a good one!
Idiocy is believing special rules have been made, and just for you. The
compensation is feeling part of the popular crowd. So tremendously
special!
The stripper boys this evening are more attentive than ever. It used to be obvious I’d be getting it elsewhere for free. Now – not so much.
The black muscle hunk arrives to breathe on my neck. He wants me to buy a private dance. Optimistically speaking, it is entirely possible that I could die before it came time to pay. And die happy.
Some people rely on virtue. Personally I find that being broke, while not nearly so glamorous, is vastly more reliable. For goodness it helps to be broke.
A cap of dark stubble and a bushy gray beard. Although I have occasionally acted like a crazy person, and very frequently felt like one, this may be the first night I have actually looked the part.
Aside from when I wore a bandanna and a ponytail and then I was 18 and thus, I hope, excused.
Am I excused?
That is all right. I did not expect to be.
Life is random and appears so. Absolutely everything is accident and
chance. Everything except bad luck, which has been meticulously, even
divinely, designed and tailored to oneself. This particular pimple,
exactly now. This latest arrogant cuss who has divined those few perfect
cruelties to which one is not yet inured.
With such precision our infections are embroidered! For each small
opening, exactly the right despair. A job by chance, a random marriage,
and suddenly here it is: the perfect cancer.
AUNT
After we’d been out all evening – first to coffee, then to dinner – my aunt turned to me in the car and broke the news, “People find your gentleness disconcerting.”
Gentleness gets out of hand and runs roughshod over my life.
TWO
Guillame has some requests. He would like to kidnap me, knock me unconscious, and abuse me. His daily emails are just full of ideas!
There’s a problem however. Guillame is very shy and entirely tenderhearted. He’s going to need a lot of guidance if he’s ever going to be a halfway passable kidnapper and assailant.
The only abuse Guillame can think of is forcing me to suck his cock (Guillame you evil monster!) but then I suggest that he is welcome to punch my chest and slap me in the head as well. He promises to try.
G. regrets to inform me that the walls of his apartment are very thin so that, while he hopes I’ll put up lots of resistance (until the washcloth soaked in imaginary chloroform) actual screaming is out of the question. “Moaning is probably OK,” writes G.
I assure him that I will put up plenty of fight. And curse him under my breath.
We here at the Bureau of Truth and Misinformation would like to attest,
again, that it is possible to feel at the same time totally lucky and
entirely wretched.
I may be nobody with nothing and no chance of much but that doesn’t
mean I’m not grateful, grateful as anyone would be who has all that I
have.
THREE
This elderly man in his floppy hat in the chair across from mine – for the last hour he’s been penciling his Sudoku as he gums a cookie. Now I look and he’s struggling with the thick plastic wrap on a bottle of poppers.
Unnecessary to mention, really, that the cafe is in Montreal.
Are poppers actually legal in Canada? Or is it in the gray area, i.e. the cops have better things to do than bust gay guys who like to self-administer small doses of brain damage while masturbating?
He doesn’t look like he’d survive a whiff, the shaky old duffer. Perhaps he intends to pop a Viagra and self-deliver.
He pick pick picks at the hard red plastic wrap. This is a very fashionable cafe. A croissant is nearly six bucks.
I remember my pal Vito in Bangkok who tried to pry the cap off a bottle of poppers with his teeth till the whole damn thing exploded and took an incisor as well as two in the back.
Finally I say to the duffer, “That plastic sure is tough, isn’t it? I can never do that!”
But the old man wants no part of me or my help. Is he making progress now? What happens when he gets the cap off?
Sometimes I can almost hear them, the voices whispering. Should we tell
him? Absolutely not! A little even, just a smidge? No, he must know
nothing.
GENTLENESS
Which is a punishable offense in New York, Amsterdam, and Rome.
Which is generally looked down upon, even in those areas in which it is officially tolerated.
Which is welcomed only in minor places, in West Bengal and Laos and certain parts of Oregon.
Which is not only onerous to the general public, but burdensome above all to he who is afflicted with it.
Which used to be acceptable for women. Not anymore.
FOUR
How this guy managed to sneak up on me, here in the video room at the Oasis Baths, I have no idea. Considering that he is wearing enormous rubber galoshes and gigantic rubber bib overalls, overalls so big he has enough room to put both his arms inside to beat off.
I’m not sure what his fantasy is, exactly – but it seems to mean a great deal to him that I will even tolerate it in my vicinity.
I think I’m supposed to press myself against him – though how he can feel anything at all inside all that rubber is a mystery to me.
As I watch he takes out his delicate penis and thwacks it against the rubber, pleased as a boy with a paper clip. He is not old but his hair is colorless; he wears glasses and seems overwhelmingly sad, as is appropriate for a man indoors dressed for a cataclysmic storm.
It upsets me that I must always understand exactly nothing. Why can’t I know a little? Would it interfere so much if I was given even the slightest inkling of the plan?
BACK TO TWO
A thing that is difficult: to pretend you are unconscious while a hairy film student crawls naked over you and shoves his thick tongue in your mouth.
You can try it yourself or you can just take my word for it.
The game he wanted: I’m a mean jock looking for a room to rent. I show up late and look bored as I sniff around his messy basement room. I need a place where I can bring my girlfriend.
As I sneer toward the bathtub he attacks me from behind. We grapple against the wall until he whispers, “You’re losing control.” Agreeably I slump to the floor.
I’d recognized the problem as soon as he’d answered the door. My assailant had the body of a baby bear and eyes like Jesus.
I felt absolutely totally safe.
How difficult it must be to be Guillame. Anytime he mutters, “Gonna fuckin’ rape yer ass in an alley”, the victim pipes up, “OK sure whatever! I know just the alley! Private yet atmospheric! OK to bring a blanket?”
Naturally even while playing dead I’m worrying, am I doing it right?
Stockholm Syndrome sets in early. Slipping in and out of mock unconsciousness we fight, I cry, I plead for mercy, but then things get out of hand, deteriorate, and soon we’re making out like a couple of lovestruck puppyboys.
Oh, terrible, tyrannical and relentless gentleness, don’t you see how we suffer? To all our attempts at perversity, tenderness adheres like lice. Why, in the name of depravity, can’t you give us a ten minute vacation? Let us be as awful as the world, as bad as the weather.
Guillame brandishes the washcloth soaked in imaginary chloroform. Just one more time, he says. Please? Play dead.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Jan Morris
Jan Morris, Hav Introduction by Ursula K LeGuin
New York Review of Books, 1996
I read as much as I can. I particularly love to scout out books that are unusual and perhaps a little neglected. Once a year I settle on a favorite – and then I irritate my friends (and anyone who will listen) begging them to read it.
In the past I’ve chosen books by Halldor Laxness or Gyula Krudy, by Bruno Schulz or Robert Walser or Clarice Lispector. Writers well-known in certain circles – but not nearly so celebrated, it seems to me, as their brilliance warrants. I call these books my “holy books” – they sustain me as I try to live and write and think in my own way.
Jan Morris’ Hav is the best book I read all year. Here is your chance to tour Hav – a country which does not exist, though Jan Morris knows it intimately and, indeed, has friends there.
This book actually contains two books. The first, “Last Letters from Hav”, was written in 1985. Morris' account of Hav is jam-packed with wonderment and peculiarity – and meticulous as a guide to the Louvre. Hav returned me to the mystery of places I knew when I was young, places I loved without ever quite comprehending – to Delhi and Kathmandu and Hyderabad most especially.
Twenty years later, the New York Review of Books asked Morris to write a kind of sequel. I am grateful to NYRB for many reasons (such as making available GV Desani, Nirad Chaudhuri and Robert Walser) but this was a stroke of brilliance. Unwilling to settle for nostalgia, the second book, “Hav of the Myrmidons”, is remarkably different from the first.
Given the chance to return to Hav, Jan Morris did the bravest and most honest thing to the tangled old city. She destroyed it. Hav rebuilt is convenient and comfortable – the resort is world-class. However, the bears however are extinct. And the troglodytes live in apartments. The famous snow raspberries are genetically modified. And canned. Also, the history of Hav has been rewritten – and any visitor with a sense of self-preservation would do well to keep that fact in mind.
Jan Morris claims her story is an allegory, even claims to not fully understand it herself. Yet she has somehow managed to capture, better than anyone else, what has become of the world. Fiction gets to the truth better than the facts can. What has become of Hyderabad since 1991? Read Hav. Shanghai? Hong Kong? Lhasa? You must read Hav. (I was unsurprised to learn that some of the plans and funds to rebuild Hav originated in China.)
When people ask why I had to leave Tokyo despite its convenience and comfort – I’ll tell them to read Hav. When people want to know what’s become of the family farm – I won’t try to explain, I’ll hand them a copy of Hav. I’m telling you, you must read Hav -- it's the best book I read all year.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen, Dreams
Seven Stories Press, 2011
A few years ago I started to read books about ecology and climate change. First I read books like Thomas Friedman’s Hot Flat and Crowded, that claims we can use a “green revolution” to save the earth and get rich. (It’s embarrassing to think that just four years ago this seemed to me a reasonable idea.) Then I read the more serious books, that argued that profound sacrifice would be necessary: Orr, Brown, McKibben.
Meanwhile, natural communities are destroyed at ever-increasing pace. Meanwhile, government and business are wholly unwilling to make real changes to avert destruction. They can’t even manage hollow gestures and window dressing! Meanwhile, many of the smartest and best people I know -- who appear otherwise thoughtful -- say they can’t be bothered or hide themselves away in easy nihilism or nauseating New Age vapidity.
People act as if they had someplace else to live. They appear to be waiting for an new iphone application that will save the Earth in just one click.
Now here is Derrick Jensen, every cell in his body radiating outrage, kicking in all directions in his fury. I think Derrick Jensen is wrong about plenty of things. I only wish that he was wrong about the things that matter most. He’s not wrong. He’s right: there is no reason to believe that the system of which we are a part, and which is destroying the Earth, is going to voluntarily dismantle itself for the good of all. It isn’t going to happen.
I groaned aloud when Jensen related yet another zombie nightmare but the zombie metaphor is hideously apt: what are we doing but moving in stunned lockstep toward the destruction of the basis of our own lives and spirits?
Naysayers will find this book effortless to dismiss. On page 9 he talks about how pet dogs communicate with him in dreams after their deaths. And on page 12 he’s back calling for the end of civilization as we know it.
I’ve spent enough time in Cambodia and China for my blood to run cold when I hear someone calling to remake society but – there is no other option that I see. We are headed off a cliff.
Derrick Jensen’s style is extremely casual. The chapters invite us to think and fume and dream along with him. Sometimes it seems that he can write about as fast as I can read. (At one point in the book he provides times.) I often wished that, since I had to spend so much time, he’d spent more time too. Is Jensen so revered that someone is afraid to edit? The strongest chapters are brilliant: Extinction, Fungi, The Bear, Reciprocity, Wisdom. Others could have been condensed or cut entirely. Sometimes he sounds like a visionary, other times like a peevish eighth grader. He is often brilliant. He is often downright snarky.
I am very glad I spent many days reading this book and taking notes. I wrestled and sighed, complained -- and learned a tremendous amount. I hope that portions of the book can be edited and tightened and made available to people who cannot or will not read the entire book.
As for me, I’ve taken to hauling the book around and begging people, “Could you just read the chapter ‘Reciprocity’? Please! I’ll make you tea. I’ll rub your feet. I’ll wait. Please, please! Read ‘Reciprocity’.”
Seven Stories Press, 2011
A few years ago I started to read books about ecology and climate change. First I read books like Thomas Friedman’s Hot Flat and Crowded, that claims we can use a “green revolution” to save the earth and get rich. (It’s embarrassing to think that just four years ago this seemed to me a reasonable idea.) Then I read the more serious books, that argued that profound sacrifice would be necessary: Orr, Brown, McKibben.
Meanwhile, natural communities are destroyed at ever-increasing pace. Meanwhile, government and business are wholly unwilling to make real changes to avert destruction. They can’t even manage hollow gestures and window dressing! Meanwhile, many of the smartest and best people I know -- who appear otherwise thoughtful -- say they can’t be bothered or hide themselves away in easy nihilism or nauseating New Age vapidity.
People act as if they had someplace else to live. They appear to be waiting for an new iphone application that will save the Earth in just one click.
Now here is Derrick Jensen, every cell in his body radiating outrage, kicking in all directions in his fury. I think Derrick Jensen is wrong about plenty of things. I only wish that he was wrong about the things that matter most. He’s not wrong. He’s right: there is no reason to believe that the system of which we are a part, and which is destroying the Earth, is going to voluntarily dismantle itself for the good of all. It isn’t going to happen.
I groaned aloud when Jensen related yet another zombie nightmare but the zombie metaphor is hideously apt: what are we doing but moving in stunned lockstep toward the destruction of the basis of our own lives and spirits?
Naysayers will find this book effortless to dismiss. On page 9 he talks about how pet dogs communicate with him in dreams after their deaths. And on page 12 he’s back calling for the end of civilization as we know it.
I’ve spent enough time in Cambodia and China for my blood to run cold when I hear someone calling to remake society but – there is no other option that I see. We are headed off a cliff.
Derrick Jensen’s style is extremely casual. The chapters invite us to think and fume and dream along with him. Sometimes it seems that he can write about as fast as I can read. (At one point in the book he provides times.) I often wished that, since I had to spend so much time, he’d spent more time too. Is Jensen so revered that someone is afraid to edit? The strongest chapters are brilliant: Extinction, Fungi, The Bear, Reciprocity, Wisdom. Others could have been condensed or cut entirely. Sometimes he sounds like a visionary, other times like a peevish eighth grader. He is often brilliant. He is often downright snarky.
I am very glad I spent many days reading this book and taking notes. I wrestled and sighed, complained -- and learned a tremendous amount. I hope that portions of the book can be edited and tightened and made available to people who cannot or will not read the entire book.
As for me, I’ve taken to hauling the book around and begging people, “Could you just read the chapter ‘Reciprocity’? Please! I’ll make you tea. I’ll rub your feet. I’ll wait. Please, please! Read ‘Reciprocity’.”
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Philip Hoare, The Whale
The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
Philip Hoare
Ecco, 2010
The book’s original title, “Leviathan”, is more appropriate, if less marketable. Expecting a natural history, I found instead a history of humankind’s obsession with the whale. The book is composed of elegant meandering essays which explore literary history (particularly Melville and Thoreau) along with whaling ports (New Bedford, Nantucket, the Azores) as well as natural history and the business of whaling.
If someone had told me this book was largely a history of the whaling industry, I would have put it back on the shelf. I am grateful for my mistake – and all that I learned by reading. I had no clue what a driving force whaling has been in history or the extent to which the early industrial world was built on the bodies of whales.
As a long-term resident of Japan, I was especially grateful for the detailed and unsparing discussion of whaling in Japan. (Japanese nationalism has made a fetish of whaling, which it claims is an essential part of Japanese culture. The actual sources are more complicated. Whaling was encouraged by McArthur during the Occupation.) May this book be swiftly translated into Japanese!
The book strives to be elegant and literary -- and occasionally tries too hard. I sometimes felt as if I had been trapped at a high class dinner party with far too much silverware and not nearly enough wine. He wants to be WG Sebald – and who can blame him? Although I sometimes rolled my eyes, I didn’t really mind. If the journey is marvelous, a little melodrama from the guide is easily accommodated.
The details he provides are delicious. In a day’s reading I learned that the milk of humpback whales is so rich it resembles cottage cheese, that Moslems believe that the whale that swallowed Jonah is one of ten animals that will enter heaven (I imagine it there, hanging in mid-air, like an exhibit in a museum) and that young Melville lost a job because of his atrocious penmanship.
There are sections that are irresistible, such as a history of sea monsters in the 19th century. The section about the arctic whales, which leads to a discussion of whale life spans – some live more than 200 years – is unexpectedly moving.
In a mania of greed we nearly destroyed the whale. Now we belatedly and halfheartedly attempt preservation. Not surprising, our ignorance has proven remarkably durable. The whales remain mysterious. This book is an elegant ticket to that mystery.
Philip Hoare
Ecco, 2010
The book’s original title, “Leviathan”, is more appropriate, if less marketable. Expecting a natural history, I found instead a history of humankind’s obsession with the whale. The book is composed of elegant meandering essays which explore literary history (particularly Melville and Thoreau) along with whaling ports (New Bedford, Nantucket, the Azores) as well as natural history and the business of whaling.
If someone had told me this book was largely a history of the whaling industry, I would have put it back on the shelf. I am grateful for my mistake – and all that I learned by reading. I had no clue what a driving force whaling has been in history or the extent to which the early industrial world was built on the bodies of whales.
As a long-term resident of Japan, I was especially grateful for the detailed and unsparing discussion of whaling in Japan. (Japanese nationalism has made a fetish of whaling, which it claims is an essential part of Japanese culture. The actual sources are more complicated. Whaling was encouraged by McArthur during the Occupation.) May this book be swiftly translated into Japanese!
The book strives to be elegant and literary -- and occasionally tries too hard. I sometimes felt as if I had been trapped at a high class dinner party with far too much silverware and not nearly enough wine. He wants to be WG Sebald – and who can blame him? Although I sometimes rolled my eyes, I didn’t really mind. If the journey is marvelous, a little melodrama from the guide is easily accommodated.
The details he provides are delicious. In a day’s reading I learned that the milk of humpback whales is so rich it resembles cottage cheese, that Moslems believe that the whale that swallowed Jonah is one of ten animals that will enter heaven (I imagine it there, hanging in mid-air, like an exhibit in a museum) and that young Melville lost a job because of his atrocious penmanship.
There are sections that are irresistible, such as a history of sea monsters in the 19th century. The section about the arctic whales, which leads to a discussion of whale life spans – some live more than 200 years – is unexpectedly moving.
In a mania of greed we nearly destroyed the whale. Now we belatedly and halfheartedly attempt preservation. Not surprising, our ignorance has proven remarkably durable. The whales remain mysterious. This book is an elegant ticket to that mystery.
Monday, September 12, 2011
The Story of the Spell
The state should keep me. I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose. -- Franz Schubert
Because the essential thing, it seems to me, qualifies just as well as mental illness as it does as art. Thus, if no creative grants are available – can I just go ahead and apply for disability?
Not in America, obviously. Someplace Scandinavian and enlightened. Or Canada, maybe?
The conviction that ordinary words, if arranged exactly right, might function as a spell. Or as the numbers of a combination lock. That something new might appear or something old unlock.
This is the goal, isn’t it? And does it not also transparently qualify as nuts?
The primary purpose of the Devi Mahatmyam is neither entertainment nor instruction. If you recite the scripture, which relates the story of Durga’s victory over the buffalo-headed demon, your demons will be subdued as well. Because what good is listening to old stories of victory if you have demons of your own?
How’s that for literature! Never mind self-help. (Every time I see the word, I want to add: As if!) Divine intervention – now there’s a thing worth reading, writing, listening for.
But maybe it isn’t possible anymore? How satisfying it would be if people reading my stories found themselves, for example, comprehensively deloused. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? How much pleasure it would give me to overhear, for example, “I have been reading the stories of Jonathon Mock every day for a week -- and my toenails look great!”
Seriously, if I can’t do as well as one of those little disposable hand-warmers, what the hell is the point?
As I’ve been sitting here in the cafe, three very pregnant women have walked past. There may have been other pregnant women whom I missed. Three very pregnant women. That’s got to be a good omen. I am going to allow myself to feel encouraged.
The story is underway. It is not necessary to make up hoards of imaginary people. People are already sufficiently imaginary.
I’m not certain if I was born a fictional character, but I have been one as long as I can remember. Seriously, I am completely made up. I’m not even particularly convincing.
Every day a man is here at the coffeehouse, standing at the counter near the door. He always wears a suit and carries a briefcase. His bowtie is askew and his thinning hair is lank, as though in allegiance to Crazy People Regulations: if you’re going to be crazy, you ought to look crazy.
His every move is purposeful. He straightens his coat on the chair, goes to get another sugar, stirs, sips again, gets another sugar, straightens his coat.
He writes standing up, in a thin blue booklet, like students used to use for writing exams. He peers thoughtfully, his pen moves. His head tips obediently forward, like a schoolboy receiving dictation. Then he must straighten his coat again, get another sugar, stir it round his silver cup.
He always carries a silver cup. He doesn’t use the regular cups, only his own special cup. I hope his silver cup helps him feel a little better, a little safer, a little more in control.
This man appears here at the coffeehouse every day. He never sits down, his every move is purposeful, he takes careful notes. He repeats his routines for hours: stirring, straightening, writing.
Reports differ as to whether there are actual words on the paper. Some people say the words are gibberish; others claim the page is blank. I do not have the heart to look.
My husband pointed this man out to me and said, “You’re not like that, are you?” To his credit, he was very sorry when after watching the man for a moment, I started to cry.
My husband is not a cruel person, I don’t think. Still, whenever he sees the man in the suit, he says, “There’s that man.” Always standing, always wearing a suit, drinking out of his silver cup.
(I am watching this man right now. After each sip he wipes the rim of his silver cup with a napkin, as though it were a chalice for communion.)
I prefer to sit in the corner. I strongly prefer. At least by the wall. I particularly dislike sitting in the middle of a room. Still, it is not required. OK, it is rarely required. Occasionally there are times when I must sit in the corner. At least if I want to think about anything other than the fact that I am not sitting in the corner.
Those are also the times when I find it acutely painful to hear two songs playing at once. And many people seem to be chewing more loudly than is necessary -- or even polite.
As a small child, alone in the ancient farmhouse, I believed in the power of odd and even numbers, in Jesus Christ, in house cats. All these were powers to array against the ghosts and bogeymen of that vast dark house.
The cats were number one. Jesus and math might or might not come through. And so I ran night after night through the dark corridors of that house with a cat twisting in my arms.
I’m sipping my coffee. Strictly speaking, I probably should not be allowed to have a refill on a large. But it’s not like I am being supervised. I am expected to moderate myself.
As if!
If coffee suddenly vanished, would writing also cease? Do other people worry about this?
Is my vocation simply a side effect?
I wrote my fears to my sister. Maybe it isn’t real writing at all, I wrote. Maybe it’s just a symptom.
My sister wrote back, You make art because you are an artist you nitwit.
I was strenuously grateful for this. I copied her words on a note card and taped them to the inside of my door.
Unfortunately her opinion cannot be entirely trusted. She’s on the list. Of people who are biased. And thus cannot be entirely trusted.
What a pity that that list includes everyone who loves me.
Recently I discovered that all my stories have a plot. (I, too, was shocked.) They are absolutely plot-driven. There is almost nothing but plot.
The plot is: a man is on a quest. He is looking for divine providence. He wants to know if it exists. He thinks probably not. Almost certainly not. Nonetheless, this doesn’t discourage him. Or anyway does not stop him. He asks, am I delusional or is the divine participating? Or is the divine attempting to participate and I am only getting in the way?
I am obsessed with plot!
Thus I am extremely interested whenever anyone appears to set up their life in a way that appears to demand a response from God. Most commonly when they say: Next month’s rent will come from somewhere!
In the last year I’ve known two people that have done this. One was an evangelical Christian missionary. Donations were down because of the economy and the weak dollar. He didn’t know if he’d be able to pay the rent and continue his ministry.
The other was a budding New Age luminary who wanted to teach Tarot. Both gentlemen had rent bills in Tokyo of nearly three thousand bucks. Both felt that, if God supported their work, then goddammit he could come up with his share of the rent.
I awaited the outcome with interest. Who would prevail, I wondered, Jesus or Tarot?
A year later, the missionary is moving out and the Tarot master is still at home.
Unfortunately the seeming clarity of this outcome is totally fake. After all, Jesus did come up with eleven months’ rent. Maybe it was just time to move on? Why Jesus would want anyone to live for long in Tokyo is a fathomless mystery to me.
Also I seriously suspect that the Tarot master is actually loaded and just says “I don’t know where the money’s coming from” so he and his affirmations can score a victory, so he can pretend to be like us.
Obviously further investigation is required. And that means reading t-shirts in crowds and billboards on buses and counting pregnant women as they walk past. Constantly examining events and asking oneself, “Is this random, or am I being directly addressed?”
Close attention must be given to sudden pronouncements from total strangers. In particular, I am slavishly obedient when odd strangers tell me what to read. Why else would I read Celine? Or Million Dollar Mermaid? How would I ever have been able to survive without A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or Esther Williams?
Are the things that happen to us meaningful or not? -- is widely considered a reasonable question.
But then: how can anything be meaningful unless everything is meaningful?
See how quickly one arrives at total nuttiness? It’s right next door. It might not even be a different door. There might not be a door at all.
Here we are.
As soon as you even ask, “What matters?” --
Then, God help you.
Or not.
Disability payments are more regular than grants, presumably. And no lectures are required. Still, there’s the matter of glamour. Presumably it is easier to maintain one’s self-esteem as “artist” than “sick fuck”.
I should admit it does not much matter to me personally, as long as I am permitted to go on writing sentences on blank white three by five cards.
Here, then, is the story. It’s finished now. Please feel free to forward it to whatever authorities you deem appropriate.
Because the essential thing, it seems to me, qualifies just as well as mental illness as it does as art. Thus, if no creative grants are available – can I just go ahead and apply for disability?
Not in America, obviously. Someplace Scandinavian and enlightened. Or Canada, maybe?
The conviction that ordinary words, if arranged exactly right, might function as a spell. Or as the numbers of a combination lock. That something new might appear or something old unlock.
This is the goal, isn’t it? And does it not also transparently qualify as nuts?
The primary purpose of the Devi Mahatmyam is neither entertainment nor instruction. If you recite the scripture, which relates the story of Durga’s victory over the buffalo-headed demon, your demons will be subdued as well. Because what good is listening to old stories of victory if you have demons of your own?
How’s that for literature! Never mind self-help. (Every time I see the word, I want to add: As if!) Divine intervention – now there’s a thing worth reading, writing, listening for.
But maybe it isn’t possible anymore? How satisfying it would be if people reading my stories found themselves, for example, comprehensively deloused. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? How much pleasure it would give me to overhear, for example, “I have been reading the stories of Jonathon Mock every day for a week -- and my toenails look great!”
Seriously, if I can’t do as well as one of those little disposable hand-warmers, what the hell is the point?
As I’ve been sitting here in the cafe, three very pregnant women have walked past. There may have been other pregnant women whom I missed. Three very pregnant women. That’s got to be a good omen. I am going to allow myself to feel encouraged.
The story is underway. It is not necessary to make up hoards of imaginary people. People are already sufficiently imaginary.
I’m not certain if I was born a fictional character, but I have been one as long as I can remember. Seriously, I am completely made up. I’m not even particularly convincing.
Every day a man is here at the coffeehouse, standing at the counter near the door. He always wears a suit and carries a briefcase. His bowtie is askew and his thinning hair is lank, as though in allegiance to Crazy People Regulations: if you’re going to be crazy, you ought to look crazy.
His every move is purposeful. He straightens his coat on the chair, goes to get another sugar, stirs, sips again, gets another sugar, straightens his coat.
He writes standing up, in a thin blue booklet, like students used to use for writing exams. He peers thoughtfully, his pen moves. His head tips obediently forward, like a schoolboy receiving dictation. Then he must straighten his coat again, get another sugar, stir it round his silver cup.
He always carries a silver cup. He doesn’t use the regular cups, only his own special cup. I hope his silver cup helps him feel a little better, a little safer, a little more in control.
This man appears here at the coffeehouse every day. He never sits down, his every move is purposeful, he takes careful notes. He repeats his routines for hours: stirring, straightening, writing.
Reports differ as to whether there are actual words on the paper. Some people say the words are gibberish; others claim the page is blank. I do not have the heart to look.
My husband pointed this man out to me and said, “You’re not like that, are you?” To his credit, he was very sorry when after watching the man for a moment, I started to cry.
My husband is not a cruel person, I don’t think. Still, whenever he sees the man in the suit, he says, “There’s that man.” Always standing, always wearing a suit, drinking out of his silver cup.
(I am watching this man right now. After each sip he wipes the rim of his silver cup with a napkin, as though it were a chalice for communion.)
I prefer to sit in the corner. I strongly prefer. At least by the wall. I particularly dislike sitting in the middle of a room. Still, it is not required. OK, it is rarely required. Occasionally there are times when I must sit in the corner. At least if I want to think about anything other than the fact that I am not sitting in the corner.
Those are also the times when I find it acutely painful to hear two songs playing at once. And many people seem to be chewing more loudly than is necessary -- or even polite.
As a small child, alone in the ancient farmhouse, I believed in the power of odd and even numbers, in Jesus Christ, in house cats. All these were powers to array against the ghosts and bogeymen of that vast dark house.
The cats were number one. Jesus and math might or might not come through. And so I ran night after night through the dark corridors of that house with a cat twisting in my arms.
I’m sipping my coffee. Strictly speaking, I probably should not be allowed to have a refill on a large. But it’s not like I am being supervised. I am expected to moderate myself.
As if!
If coffee suddenly vanished, would writing also cease? Do other people worry about this?
Is my vocation simply a side effect?
I wrote my fears to my sister. Maybe it isn’t real writing at all, I wrote. Maybe it’s just a symptom.
My sister wrote back, You make art because you are an artist you nitwit.
I was strenuously grateful for this. I copied her words on a note card and taped them to the inside of my door.
Unfortunately her opinion cannot be entirely trusted. She’s on the list. Of people who are biased. And thus cannot be entirely trusted.
What a pity that that list includes everyone who loves me.
Recently I discovered that all my stories have a plot. (I, too, was shocked.) They are absolutely plot-driven. There is almost nothing but plot.
The plot is: a man is on a quest. He is looking for divine providence. He wants to know if it exists. He thinks probably not. Almost certainly not. Nonetheless, this doesn’t discourage him. Or anyway does not stop him. He asks, am I delusional or is the divine participating? Or is the divine attempting to participate and I am only getting in the way?
I am obsessed with plot!
Thus I am extremely interested whenever anyone appears to set up their life in a way that appears to demand a response from God. Most commonly when they say: Next month’s rent will come from somewhere!
In the last year I’ve known two people that have done this. One was an evangelical Christian missionary. Donations were down because of the economy and the weak dollar. He didn’t know if he’d be able to pay the rent and continue his ministry.
The other was a budding New Age luminary who wanted to teach Tarot. Both gentlemen had rent bills in Tokyo of nearly three thousand bucks. Both felt that, if God supported their work, then goddammit he could come up with his share of the rent.
I awaited the outcome with interest. Who would prevail, I wondered, Jesus or Tarot?
A year later, the missionary is moving out and the Tarot master is still at home.
Unfortunately the seeming clarity of this outcome is totally fake. After all, Jesus did come up with eleven months’ rent. Maybe it was just time to move on? Why Jesus would want anyone to live for long in Tokyo is a fathomless mystery to me.
Also I seriously suspect that the Tarot master is actually loaded and just says “I don’t know where the money’s coming from” so he and his affirmations can score a victory, so he can pretend to be like us.
Obviously further investigation is required. And that means reading t-shirts in crowds and billboards on buses and counting pregnant women as they walk past. Constantly examining events and asking oneself, “Is this random, or am I being directly addressed?”
Close attention must be given to sudden pronouncements from total strangers. In particular, I am slavishly obedient when odd strangers tell me what to read. Why else would I read Celine? Or Million Dollar Mermaid? How would I ever have been able to survive without A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or Esther Williams?
Are the things that happen to us meaningful or not? -- is widely considered a reasonable question.
But then: how can anything be meaningful unless everything is meaningful?
See how quickly one arrives at total nuttiness? It’s right next door. It might not even be a different door. There might not be a door at all.
Here we are.
As soon as you even ask, “What matters?” --
Then, God help you.
Or not.
Disability payments are more regular than grants, presumably. And no lectures are required. Still, there’s the matter of glamour. Presumably it is easier to maintain one’s self-esteem as “artist” than “sick fuck”.
I should admit it does not much matter to me personally, as long as I am permitted to go on writing sentences on blank white three by five cards.
Here, then, is the story. It’s finished now. Please feel free to forward it to whatever authorities you deem appropriate.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Islands in the Stream
They agreed that Barbara should wait at the restaurant. The heat – it was too much for her. The heat and the noise and the dust, and having to squeeze past crowds, past paper lanterns and beer t-shirts, past silk scarves and skewers of meat just to inch along the street – it was not for her. There was just today in Bangkok. Tomorrow they would go to the beach and her husband and daughter had promised her that she could have all the quiet she liked. Quiet was good for her. Or maybe it wasn’t good, but she liked it.
Barbara enjoyed fast food restaurants. The key was to eat as little as possible, so as to minimize the harm. She folded her hands on the little table in front of her and looked out through the glass wall to the street, to the crowd pushing past, smiling but not stopping for the big blonde girl who’d gotten her dangling earring caught on an awning.
Barbara felt safe. As if there was a guarantee that, in this air-conditioned box of nonsense, nothing meaningful could occur. She was protected. You clogged your heart of course – but that was only trouble for later.
Her husband said she had a lot of strange ideas. She said she believed in paying attention. Her daughter said she paid so much attention she completely missed the point.
Look at this giant chicken, with his cowboy hat and his outstretched arms. A chicken beaming among the red yellow orange balloons above the red yellow orange chairs. On the walls huge faces of white children were emblazoned among deep-fat fried giant chicken parts. Each white face was laughing, but very carefully, so as to show only the top set of teeth.
There were reasons for this, Barbara was certain. Probably bottom teeth had been found by some marketing research group to signify uncertainty or mortality or lust – and thus had no place in this, the haven of fried chicken and joy.
She enjoyed this restaurant very much. She could feel entirely safe here, almost. If only she hadn’t seen that horrible chicken documentary. Because, even if the human race were perfect in every other way, just for what we did to chickens we would never be forgiven.
Barbara often dreamed of Armageddon. She wondered if this was normal. Barbara was interested in being normal. Which turned out to be difficult because it wasn’t like there’s a list posted anywhere: Guidelines to Normal. You were told what your ideal weight and blood pressure – Barbara was too high in both – but as for the rest you had to figure it out. That is why Barbara wished she could give surveys.
She wanted to ask: How often do you dream of the end of the world? She dreamed of the end all the time. Just the night before she’d been up on the Twin Towers getting ready to climb down an external fire escape with no provisions other than a rotten head of lettuce.
“You think too much!” her husband said, several times each day. Her daughter said so, too. They said it as if they expected her to simply and obediently stop thinking, right there and then, the way a dog drops a bone.
Her husband was almost certainly, at this moment, getting a blowjob in a massage parlor. She supposed she ought to mind. The truth was that sex would make him feel guilty, guilt would make him kind, and kindness would drastically improve their vacation. That blowjob was service to the whole family, really.
Barbara hoped he was with one of the glamorous lady boys they’d seen bobbing down the street among high heels, ringlets, adam’s apple and acrylic nails. Her husband had stared at one, and then he shook his head, as if to say, “Can you believe that?” But Barbara wasn’t fooled for a minute. If I get breakfast in bed, she thought, I’ll know it was a boy.
Her daughter said that Barbara had absolutely no sense of humor. But she did. There was just so little she could say out loud.
She looked around the restaurant. It was two-thirds full, but almost silent except for the piped in music and a timer going bing in the kitchen. Everyone was looking at their phone. Even the baby in his stroller had his own play phone. When he was ready to talk, he’d call somebody up.
According to Barbara’s estimation, it had been about eighteen months since the world had fallen to second place. Now, for those who could, the screen came first and more people looked at it than at the world around them.
What a perfect word: screen. As in a play or lady’s dressing room. A screen, as in a shield. Some place to hide. And Barbara didn’t blame them, not at all. The world became more frightening each day, as our toys turned against us, as our idiocy bounced off the clouds and rained down upon us. Barbara would have hidden, too, if she could, but screens didn’t work for her. Perhaps she was too afraid.
“How’s Thailand doing?” she’d asked the elderly but energetic taxi driver on the way from the airport, after he’d explained that the way he kept up his stamina was by drinking the breast milk of his much younger wife.
Her daughter had rolled her eyes. Her husband was already asleep. “King die soon,” said the taxi driver. “Then civil war start. Same day king die. Not next day. Thailand no one country. Two, three countries.” He said this quickly and matter-of-factly, as if slicing up a fruit.
Barbara had been startled. She assumed she was visiting a stable country. Everything seemed all right. But the lady at the hotel said the same thing, when Barbara asked about it. Thailand was – only a temporary situation. The king was in 24 hour intensive care.
She tried to talk about it with her daughter, who’d said, “That man believed in the power of breast milk!”
“I breastfed you,” Barbara said. And was told, again, that she was incapable of understanding the simplest sentence.
Barbara was sitting very still. No one could say that was wrong. Her back was not touching the back of the seat. Her bottom was sore. The crowd continued to jostle past outside the glass wall. The chicken presided over her with outstretched arms.
The key, Barbara believed, was to remain at all times the same size. She shouldn’t become any bigger. She was already too big, as she learned every moment here, just trying to walk down the street. It was even more important that she not become smaller. She ought to remain at all times Barbara, age 54, five foot six, big in the hips. She should not become the size of a child or a cat or a kitten or a mouse or a roach. Above all, she should not be Alice-in-Wonderland all over the place, now the size of a matchbox, now the size of a house.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with Barbara, her doctor said. She was too sensitive and thought too much. A little vacation might be just the thing. When she came back – perhaps she could find herself a hobby? Of course she had her painting – her little pictures with their unusual colors and that was very nice and he was glad she could enjoy that – but maybe she could find a hobby that included other people. For example, she could join an art class and receive some instruction and paint, you know, actual things.
What she needed, her doctor explained, was a new role – her daughter was grown, her husband busy with work. A new role, a flexible one, of course. She’d still be there when her family needed her!
Someone’s phone was beeping. Was it the girl in the red hat? The boy with the headphones? Just beeping away. It was impossible to tell who because everyone, of course, was playing with his or her phone. Was that necessary? Of course not. Someone had their headphones in. It was completely inconsiderate. That’s how it was nowadays. People couldn’t hear themselves.
Barbara took a small card from her pocket. It read: I am a cultured and wise and yet, a humble person. Her doctor had given Barbara some affirmations and told her she must recite them each day. She should use them instead of her own thoughts. Affirmations like: I feel great about myself! Fear is only a feeling. All is well in my world!
Barbara had a problem with sounds. When she felt a little – ill at ease – she became very sensitive. Voices, footsteps, chewing, sniffling, bells. All kinds of sounds. Sounds that, when she complained about them, her daughter said, “Mom! People don’t even hear those things anymore!”
Not only did Barbara think too much, she felt too much as well. Thus the appointments with Dr. Dillman. To help her make progress toward thoughtlessness and senselessness. She also needed to love herself more, since the time others could spend loving her was very limited. Perhaps self-love would come naturally, when she was thinking less? Right now she was only talking to Dr. Dillman. Drugs were also “an option to explore”.
From overhead, help appeared. The music had changed to the theme from Dirty Dancing. Barbara would have liked to dance. But she was careful to sit still and not mouth the words – she didn’t want to look like a mad woman!
How she wished she could give surveys! She would love a job like that. But only if she could choose the questions herself. Otherwise she’d be stuck asking about race and age – two things widely rumored to not even exist. Whereas, Barbara wanted to ask about Armageddon and, lest that seem overwhelming, she also wanted to know if other people missed Patrick Swayze.
She missed Patrick Swayze so much. And not the same way she missed milk delivery and safe streets. Not even the way she missed, say, Katherine Hepburn. She missed him in a tender down-to-earth way, but not immoderately, as if he’d been the Hollywood equivalent of the check-out lady with the bandanna at Safeway, the one who smiled at you in a way that made the day 35 pounds lighter.
She was older than every person in this restaurant. Including the manager who was by no means young. She would be all right with aging except that the years were so incomplete. Nothing was ever properly finished. So much was not even started. Like notebooks with just a few pages scribbled in, and then so much torn out. If life was in any way reasonable, one would be allowed occasionally “time outs” to make changes to, say, the Spring of 1991.
Barbara had fallen behind, in other words, and, if ever there was any doubt, she had her husband and her daughter to tell her so.
She looked sadly around the restaurant. Thai people would eat at places like this from now on. They’d get fat like Americans and their hair would lose its luster. But what could she do? God help her if she tried to interfere with the global distribution of deep fat fried chicken. They’d lock her up for good.
What could she do? She could do nothing. Therefore, she shouldn’t think about it. That was the formula. So many things not to think about! Almost everything that mattered.
Barbara heard a sound like fireworks. And for Barbara fireworks were never all right, as if she were being reminded of another life, full of bombs. National holidays were awful for her – she also distrusted flags. “You’re like some kind of refugee,” her daughter told her once, and it was true, but – from where?
Barbara put her hands on both sides of the table. She frowned at herself. She was thinking the thoughts she was not supposed to be thinking. The table had gotten so big.
First there was only one siren. And it was a long way off. But then there was another and the first siren was closer.
What could she do? She could do nothing! Therefore, she shouldn’t think. Tomorrow they’d go to the beach. She could have as much quiet as she liked. All she had to do in the meantime was sit at this restaurant and not think and -- ? Love herself. She couldn’t do anything for the chickens or the atmosphere or the Thai people getting fat but she could love herself and think less.
I am special and wonderful! I am my own best friend and cheerleader.
There was another siren, or it was the same one, only closer now. The timer went off in the kitchen. Someone’s phone rang.
Barbara shouldn’t listen. Barbara shouldn’t think. If only she could learn to think, not hear, not feel, not speak – how much better it would be, how much healthier! So much easier for everyone!
Another phone rang. More sirens. Someone stepped outside to take a call and looked concerned. Was that the sound of police cars or ambulances?
I have many qualities, traits and talents that make me unique. I give myself permission to shine!
More sirens. Ambulances or police cars. Maybe fire trucks. Why did the music have to be so loud? Why couldn’t people stop talking on their phones? More fireworks. Or maybe they weren’t fireworks at all.
What if the war had started? Maybe the king was dead.
How about a survey? How fun it would be to give surveys if she could ask all the questions herself! She had a question wanted to ask everyone in this restaurant and also everyone all over the world: how often do you find yourself singing “Islands in the Stream”?
How do you do it exactly? Do you sing Dolly? Do you sing Kenny? Do you try somehow to belt out both parts at once?
Barbara found herself singing “Islands in the Stream” all the time. She couldn’t help herself.
That is what we are!
How can we be wrong?
Sail away with me!!
Having met by chance in the street, Barbara’s husband and daughter returned together to the restaurant together to find Barbara sobbing hysterically, her head on the small orange table.
Both of them felt absolutely terrible. It was just as they suspected. Even small, simple things were too much for Barbara.
Barbara’s daughter put her arms around her mother. Barbara’s husband didn’t know what to do. He was feeling so terribly guilty. He’d even bought a small gift for his wife: a styrofoam container of mango sticky rice.
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