My gay fathers, now retired, split their time between a house in the Carson Valley of Nevada, and a condo in Palm Springs, both of which make for good escapes from San Francisco. Last year the Manly Fireplug took off for Philly, to visit his own family for Christmas, and I drove down the long, dry, stretch of Interstate 5, Finley curled in his little doggie seat beside me, the windows rolled up against the thick cloud of air pollution that had settled in the valley, until I reached Palm Springs, where I crashed in their spare room for a few nights.

There’s not a whole hell of a lot to do in the desert. Too cold in December to lay out by the pool, and none of us golf. So we played a few games of Scrabble, where I got my ass handed to me by my father, who worked as an editor for thirty years, and who uses every “Triple Word Play” square with relentlessness and skill. His humility, upon winning each and every game, does me no good, and merely feeds my resentment and my primal desire to one day Trounce. Him. Good. When not playing Scrabble we took long, slow walks around their neighborhood off Ramon Road, or watched game shows as Finn chased their little Maltese from one end of the condo to the other.

Every time I visit, when we have a moment alone together, my father asks about my health. He means of course the virus in my blood, the virus that neither he nor his partner have, the virus he only found out about a few years back, when a strange dream about my mother woke him, and led him to the computer and, after a few clicks, to my blog, and the words that I had so far kept from him. Words from which I wanted to protect him and the rest of my family. And each time he asks I tell him the truth, that so far I’m one of the lucky ones, with no viral load and no meds, and though there’s nothing to worry about I think he still worries about his son, who should, if there’s any justice in the world, outlive his father.

Always an awkward moment, that talk, every time. I’m careful with my voice, my words, the casual shrug of my shoulders. The truth is that I do have it easy, compared to others, and that there’s nothing much to worry about. Still, that question pulls me from the corner to center-stage where I stand, separate from him. Always an awkward moment, for I shouldn’t have the virus, for I had all the facts, unlike him, long before I ever had sex. In that spotlight I see the consequence of every mistake I’ve made, for this path through life that I’ve willfully taken, a path that diverged from the calm and measured one he himself has traveled, a practical and guarded path, that has kept him safe.

So each time he asks I reassure him of the truth, longing for the awkward moment to pass, for when I can step away from center stage and rejoin him and his partner, and return to my place as just a member of the family.

The days around that Christmas run together in my memory, a sort of pleasant, lazy haze of a weekend. My clearest memory is from my last morning there, when they took me out for brunch at this popular local restaurant, the kind of place that has brassy waitresses and little containers of Smuckers grape jelly in dishes at every table.

My father’s partner gave his name to the hostess, and we sat there in the lobby for a few minutes, gazing around at the small crowd waiting for tables, at the families and the couples who had wandered in after the holiday for brunch, all of our faces lit from the bright harsh light of the pasty cases nearby.

We didn’t wait all that long. The hostess checked her list of names and then called out, in a clear, strong voice that carried across the crowded lobby:

“Dick, party of three?”

If she only knew. She gathered up the menus, and I followed my fathers to our table.

My students ask me how all of this could have happened. They are all smart, they understand politics, they understand the fear of AIDS, they understand how complicated and confusing history and life can be. But they cannot understand such indifference, even when politically motivated. I told one of my students that the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. -Michael Bronski, The Truth About Reagan and AIDS

My first reaction, upon hearing of Reagan’s death on Saturday, was oh great, now we have to hear about how wonderful he was for the next month.

Of course my resentment against Reagan is personal. His administration secretly sold arms to Iran and used the money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, an army that was extremely unpopular in that country. I know everyone’s sick of hearing it, but I visited Nicaragua a couple of times in high school, which is where I had my first crush, a 17 year old boy who was later killed by the Contras. I don’t think “hero” when I hear Reagan’s name. On the contrary, he makes my stomach turn.

“I have decided that photography is a sort of private sin of mine. As a virtue I find it really hard to sustain.”

The Arbus catalogue is full of quotes that I dutifully scribble in my own notebook after waking to rain on Monday morning. The laundry is spinning upstairs and I have a scant three hours to myself before hitting the dentist’s chair for one of my weekly three-hour sessions. Of course I am bitter and resentful about losing my Mondays to the student dentist, but the only target worthy of my bitterness is myself. One of the least sexy parts of being sober is the whole cleaning-up-the-wreckage-of-my-past project. And there’s no sense in complaining about my student dentist Adrian, who looks an awful lot like the guy in the commercial who has barbeque sauce smeared all over his face. There’s no point in complaining, because although Adrian is slow and has no dental hygienists to assist him, the dental school has a program that pays for all the work done on its clients with HIV. It’s a trade-off made almost bearable by my iPod.

I’m beginning to ask my father lots of questions, about their marriage and my early childhood. I’m not interested anymore in assigning blame for all the pain of those years. I just want to understand them. I want to understand the pressures of that time. I’m beginning to see each of them within myself; my father’s quiet, his need of order, his confusion when confronted with other people’s anger. My mother’s need for affection, her addictions, her desire to please.

My mother was raised Catholic, and hated it so much that she left the Church when she married my father, who was raised a Methodist. But she felt (of course) guilty for having done so, and lied to her parents. Each time they visited from Kansas we’d take them to the local Catholic church, pretending to be members.

I was the one who broke open the whole scam, when I was about nine. I made the mistake of mentioning Sunday school to my grandparents. How was I supposed to know that Catholics don’t do Sunday school? That was a fun day in the McAllister household.

I’m grateful to my mother for many things, including leaving the Church, as it saved me the likely prospect of more guilt than I’d know what to do with. I still inherited a fair amount of residual guilt from her. She was guilty for having abandoned the Church, for being a lesbian, for trying to be someone happier than the culture would allow at that point.

It wasn’t until 11:00 pm last Sunday that I remembered that it was February 1st, and that it had been two years since my mother died. I guess that’s progress, of a sort, though I didn’t feel particularly good about forgetting the anniversary. My subconscious brought her in for a guest appearance in my dreams that night. In the dream my stepsister and I were driving someplace and we stopped off at a 7-11 for a slushee, or Red Vines. And there was my mother, working the counter of the 7-11. I saw her as we were walking up to the front door and I broke down sobbing, wracked with guilt over the fact that my mother had to work at a convenience store. It was a little melodramatic, but my dreams aren’t exactly exercises in subtlety. In my dream she was still alive, but she was sick, which only made it worse. I was probably unemployed as well, making the contrast between her martyrdom and my failings as a dutiful son that much starker. When my mother saw us walk in, she retreated from the counter and asked a co-worker to help us, because she was ashamed we had seen her. She glanced at me quickly as she walked away, her smile an apology. In all of my dreams about her, I can never talk to her. She is always across the room. We can see each other, and she’ll smile at me, but I can never hear her voice.

On Tuesday I woke at 7. The world outside my window was shrouded in white fog, thicker than I had ever seen. I could barely make out the shape of the house next door. The trees were dripping onto the back deck. Drops of condensation fell onto the glass surface of the garden table. I was tired and reluctant, as always, to go into work. I wanted the fog to justify my desire to bury back into my bed. I wanted to call in sick. I wanted the fog to be so thick that the world would shut down. But I poured myself coffee and stumbled into the shower, because like my mother I never call in sick. And that’s why, as I drove down Roosevelt Way, around the curves that twist down the side of the hill, that I saw the fog did not shroud the entire city. As I descended it cleared away, and as I continued the cloud that lay over my house receded behind me.

Seven a.m. I’m heading east. Pale morning light washes over the Oakland Hills. The sun is low in the sky. I squint and pull the visor down, twist it into the corner. I should really buy a pair of sunglasses. The Subaru has a special compartment in the roof for sunglasses; two compartments actually (one for the trick’s glasses, my friend had said the day I drove the car home from the dealer). But I like my vision unencumbered. The sun’s rays burn around the edges of the visor while I do seventy past the Plaza 580, where Now Hiring hangs below the Cattleman’s sign. What the hell is a Cattleman’s? I pass a miniature golf course, with a miniature Dutch windmill standing motionless at the foot of the 18th hole. A silver Porsche rides my ass, a bike strapped to its roof, its thin wheel trembling in the wind. I slide over to the right-hand lane. I’ve got a long drive ahead of me. Above the highway on a grass-covered hill is a white clapboard farmhouse, out front another sign, white lettering on weathered wood: “Thank You Jesus”. I crack the window, cold air streams in and I turn the volume up, someone’s covering Depeche Mode and I hit repeat.

Oh little girl
There are times when I feel
I’d rather not be
The one behind the wheel

The Porsche rushes past. I turn onto 5, and the traffic thins out. I pass exits with names like Crow’s Landing and Three Rocks. Hills rise gently on either side of the narrow interstate; they recede in the distance, each bluer than the last. A layer of mist hangs low over the fields through which the aqueducts curve, slow silver water twisting away in ribbons. A truck passes me, its cargo a small hill of sewer pipe bound together, gleaming in the sun. Another sign on the edge of the road: “Farm Water Feeds the Nation”. Jersey cows grazing; black shapes against the golden fields. Soon the landscape flattens, and what appeared to be mist hanging over the fields reveals itself as California pollution, hazy and blue, lying low and still.

It’s still early enough to believe in the romance of the solitary road trip. The map on the passenger seat shifts slightly in the breeze from the open window. I lay a book, J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself, on the corner of the map to keep it still. I let the CD play through again. I am on my way to see my father. I will see others: his partner and their two friends, maybe my brother. But it’s my father I think about. My father, who found my website last year, who read for the first time that I had HIV, who read for the first time of my long-standing, long-withering resentment against him, a resentment twenty-one years old. My father, who wrote me that day an e-mail that contained one word in its subject line: “Devastated”. My father, who at that time was expecting me in three weeks for a visit I had planned months in advance. That day we exchanged e-mails, as is our custom, preferring the measured written word against the phone calls we both dreaded. And over time, over many days, we dealt in ever-increasing openness with the subject that had divided us, and over time I began the slow process of forgiving him, a forgiveness that left me a little lonely. The resentment had been a constant companion for twenty-one years, it seemed to fade even against my own will. But fade it did, leaving in its wake not a newly formed love between father and son, but rather a new awkwardness, all of the old rules between us suddenly wiped away. And this awkwardness stirs up longing for my dead mother, who in my nostalgia never treated me unkindly, who in my nostalgia was anything but awkward with me, who in my nostalgia loses all such flaws. And the road stretches ahead, still sparsely populated, and I’ve finished my thermos of coffee and I’m alone now, racing towards the remains of my family.

When driving alone, of course, one should stop frequently; to fuel up and to stretch one’s legs, to roll one’s head on the stem of the neck till the tendons creak, to buy bottles of water and caffeinated soda from a “Travel Center” gas station that sells chips and lukewarm nacho cheese and Hustler magazines and trucker’s caps and day-old Krispy Kremes for a quarter each. But I’m either stubborn or tenacious, or simply a glutton for punishment; on the eight-hour road trip that ends up taking ten, I stop only twice. The first is at McDonald’s (“Last food for 27 Miles”) because road trips warrant fast food. But everyone else has the same idea, and I end up at the back of a line that stretches towards the far exit. This, for shitty fast food. I eat in the car, preferring solitude instead of the hordes. Then I fill up the tank across the street before pulling back onto the interstate.

The first six hours pass quickly, a blur of flat fields and traffic, Life of Pi on the CD player. As the hours pass I begin to identify with the novel’s protagonist, a boy who finds himself on a raft in the Pacific Ocean, accompanied by an enormous and unpredictable Siberian Tiger named Richard Parker. I’m without a tiger, save for maybe the tiger in my head, alone in my Subaru, far more fortunate in resources than Pi yet feeling, nonetheless, that I am on a hazardous journey, and perhaps it is through a twisted sense of empathy and brotherhood to Pi that I allow myself only one more stop, at said Travel Center, where I buy a bottle of water, a Vanilla Coke and, because I can feel something coming on, two packs of strawberry-flavored cough drops.

By now I’m outside L.A., and the traffic has slowed to a crawl. I’m grateful for the companionship of Pi, because the next hundred miles takes four hours.

I pull into Palm Springs in the early evening, an hour before I am to meet everyone for dinner. I find my motel, a pink-hued Travel Lodge on East Palm Canyon Drive, thirty-nine dollars a night. I park near the office and emerge from the car. My knees protest, bending through their deep ache, my head swimming in the sudden stillness, in the cool desert air. My legs move as if through water, and a cough tickles the back of my throat. I can’t get sick, not now. I pop another cough drop and check in.

Palm Springs has a Hilton, and countless condos, and cute little bed and breakfasts, and clothing-optional resorts full of men on vacation. But I’m into the romance of things like solitary road trips and cheap, tawdry motel rooms. The Travel Lodge doesn’t have vibrating beds, but it’s colored pink, and has paintings on the walls so unremarkable that my vision slides past them. I lay down for a few minutes and the cramped blood in my knees begins to breathe.

My father is staying in a friend’s condo with a gated drive that requires several confusing phone calls with his partner before it opens. “What you do is, you drive straight through, and keep driving all the way to the end, we are at the very end of the parking lot, and you will, let’s see, you want to park before you reach the dumpsters and, let’s see, we will stand at the window and we’ll open and close the blinds so that you can see which unit we’re in…” Dick, my dad’s partner, is saying.

I’m nodding, going “Uh huh, yes, uh huh,” and by now there is another car behind me, waiting to get in and I go “Okay, I got it, yes, I got it…” and finally the gate opens and I drive through. It’s dark by now and up ahead I see a thin figure wrapped in a towel, motioning towards an empty space as if he’s directing a plane to its gate. It’s my father. I park and then get out and hug him briefly, I can tell he’s a little self-conscious in his bathing suit.

“I was just in the hot tub,” he explains. He’s grown back his beard.

“Rough life,” I reply, and we head past the swimming pool in the middle of the condo development’s courtyard. Someone is standing at the window, opening and closing the blinds over and over even as we’re walking up to the door.

Inside, Dick gives me a hug and I shake hands with their friends Douglas and Tom, another couple they’ve known since we all lived in Minneapolis. They stand around while I take off my shoes, asking me about the trip. Everyone looks older; my father’s beard is white and Dick’s arms have lost muscle; they’re thin, like an old man’s arms. I glance around. The condo is decorated in Mid-Nineties Desert Gay; lots of white carpeting and light, plush furniture and chrome-and-glass coffee tables and statues of Navajo women wrapped up in blankets and orchids that turn out to be fake when I touch them. My Dad takes me on the two-minute tour. Someone has a fetish for celebrity autographs; there are dozens of framed headshots hanging on the walls of all three bedrooms. “This is the Governor’s suite,” my dad says with a smirk, gesturing towards an open door. There’s a signed photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger just inside the doorway. In the master bedroom all the photos are in black and white, Greta Garbo and Humphrey Bogart and faces I don’t know.

“Check out this shower,” Dick says, flipping on a light in the bathroom. A partial wall of glass bricks surrounds a green marble shower.

“Oooh,” I say appreciatively. “You guys scored. This belongs to your friends?”

“Yeah,” Dick says. “Can’t beat the rent.”

Later, my brother and his friend Matt arrive. My brother is 28 and lives in Albuquerque. He’s four inches taller and about twenty pounds lighter than me, with a mop of reddish-brown hair and a nose like Ichabod Crane. He’s the only straight one in the family. Matt is shorter, stocky, with a pale, plain face and a dry sense of humor that he reveals gradually as we all sit around in the living room. I nurse a Diet Pepsi while everyone else knocks back a few MGD’s. My Dad sips from his beer, which is wrapped in a cozy. Everyone seems to be drinking pretty hard, and I try not to stare at the Cape Cod in my little brother’s hand. The cough at the back of my throat grows more annoying, and I gulp the Diet Pepsi. The saccharine clings to my tongue. Everyone keeps asking me about my job and if I like working with the dogs, and if I felt better I’d say yes, but instead I say, “it’s just a job”. And then my brother asks about my plans for school. “So what degree would you get?” Tom asks.

“An MFA,” I say. And I sort of nod, as if answering my own question, because there is an awkwardness in the air, and I know that I’m responsible for it, because I’m tired and cranky and I don’t feel like talking. And everyone kind of nods and watches me. “I’m kind of excited about it,” I offer weakly.

Then Dick perks up. “I have to go back to the grocery store tonight before it gets too late.”

“Again?” My dad says. He turns to me. “He’s been to the grocery store twice already.”

“I forgot something. It may be my last chance before everything closes tomorrow.”

“What did you forget?”

“I forgot the orange marmalade for the cranberry sauce.”

“You put orange marmalade in the cranberry sauce?” Douglas asks.

“Yes.”

“It’s delicious”, my dad says.

“It’s his favorite,” Dick says to all of us. “I’m just trying to decide which store to go to.”

“Is Vons having a strike?” Douglas asks.

“Yes, and I won’t cross a picket line.”

“We went there today and Dick made us turn around,” my dad says.

“We went to Ralph’s, which was further away and doesn’t have as good a selection.”

“Well, why don’t I go?” Douglas says. “I wanted to get some Cordon Negro anyway, I can get your marmalade.”

“Are you sure?” Dick asks.

“Of course. You just want orange marmalade?”

“Yes, sweet orange marmalade. Smucker’s. Get the big kind.”

“Like what?”

“Twelve or sixteen ounces. Get the sweet kind.”

“Smucker’s. Okay. What if they don’t have Smucker’s?”

“As long as its sweet. Don’t get the unsweetened kind, or the artificially sweetened kind. Ralph’s should probably have Smucker’s.”

“Should I go to Ralph’s?”

“Probably, unless you want to cross the picket line at Vons….wait a minute, though, Ralph’s might be a zoo.”

“This late?”

“With Thanksgiving tomorrow, absolutely.”

“Maybe I should go to Vons then.”

“It’s up to you.”

“So where is Vons anyway?”

It goes on like this for a few more minutes. I’m sinking deeper into the couch, wishing that I could go back to the motel already. And it’s undeniable now; I’m getting sick. My bones ache dully, and the noises and the colors around me are getting brighter. The conversation about Vons and the marmalade is exhausting me and I still have to get through dinner.

And that is how I end up spending Thanksgiving Day in my motel room, alone and sick, the “Do Not Disturb” sign slung around the outside doorknob. Me and the remote control and Thera-flu; everything filtered through a feverish haze. And there is a television conspiracy; every movie seems to feature Patrick Swayze. I call my father to tell him I might miss dinner tonight. He asks if I want anything, maybe something to eat? Something to drink? I tell him no, because I feel like hiding, because I feel like suffering alone. I feel guilty, I always feel guilty, about getting sick. Perhaps it is my Midwestern work ethic, so badly bruised after seven years in California. Perhaps it is having HIV. But I feel somehow responsible for my sickness, and a familiar shame settles in along with the chills and the body aches. I feel both punished and overdramatic, like I’m making a big deal over nothing. All day I listen to other travelers bang in and out of their motel rooms, children playing in the pool outside, cars idling in the parking lot and then pulling away. The sun is shining in a cloudless sky, but I keep the curtains drawn shut. Now and then I peek miserably out the window like a shut-in, squinting against the brilliant day, the parking lot swimming in my delirium.

HIV or not, I recover quickly. I always get the flu, never a cold, and it’s always the same pattern: one day of it coming on, a full day of incapacitation, and then back to the world the next day. I’m only on day two. And though I feel like shit, I feel even worse about missing Thanksgiving dinner after having driven all the way down. I call my father at five pm.

“I’m better than this morning”, I say, which is the truth, sort of. “I could probably come to dinner, but I don’t want to get anyone sick.” I want him to tell me the right answer. I want to stay in bed. I want comfort. I want my mother.

“Well, nobody’s said anything about not wanting to get sick. I’m sure everyone would like to see you. But I can’t tell you what to do, it’s your decision.”

Damn. I sigh. “Okay, I’ll be there soon.”

I go to dinner, and everyone asks me how I am and I tell them, “Better.” My fever breaks as I eat, cold sweat shines on my brow. I tell a few weak jokes, and my father laughs quietly. He’s sitting at my side, and I feel as though he’s leaning towards me. Everyone is cracking jokes and the chandelier is too bright and their voices too high, too loud. But my father is quiet, and maybe it’s just the fever, but I feel as though it’s just the two of us, as though we’re in a foreign country where we don’t speak the language, and everyone is laughing and speaking louder, each voice clambering over the others. And it’s a feeling I like, a feeling of comfort. I don’t say anything to him, I just give him a brief smile, and then turn back to my plate. I eat a lot of turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy. I pass on the cranberry sauce. I’ve never liked cranberries.

After dinner my brother is tying his shoes on the tile near the front door, preparing for a solitary cigarette outside. Everyone else is retiring with drinks in hand to the living room. My brother and his friend are leaving early the next day, and so I take the only opportunity that will present itself. I follow him outside. “I need to talk to you,” I say. “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you for awhile now.” We’re standing out by the pool, and I gesture towards a couple of deck chairs, their white arms glowing dimly in the dusk.

“Okay”, he says, then laughs nervously. We sit.

And that is how, on Thanksgiving Day, I tell my brother that I have HIV. I tell him that I’ve known for two and a half years, that I found out a few months before our mother died. I tell him that not telling anyone in the family was the first mature act I had managed in years. I tell him that I am healthy, and that I wish I hadn’t gotten sick so that he could see for himself. I tell him my about my numbers, and what they mean, and I tell him what my doctor had said, that I could go years without meds. I tell him that he doesn’t need to worry unless I tell him to worry.

He cries a little. He wipes at his eyes with his sleeves. It’s getting darker. I watch the surface of the pool as I talk, glancing over at him from time to time. Lights from the surrounding condos play on the water. A thin stream of ants runs along the edge of the pool. We don’t stay outside very long. His friend is inside, waiting for him. We stand up and then we hug, and we say that we love each other, and then we go back inside.

Maybe everyone wants a mentor; someone who will take us under their wing, someone who will open for us closed doors, someone who will tend the thin flame of our talent and coax it to burn brighter. One of my main reasons for applying to grad school is the hope that I will find a mentor, someone who will find my writing worthy of encouragement. Someone who, let’s face it, will help me get published.

I want to blame my parents’ failures for my lack of self-confidence, for instilling in me this need for approval and guidance. But I’m thirty-two and at some point I need to grow up, so let’s pretend I’m starting today.

There’s my insecure desire for a warm, parental figure. But there is also a cold, utilitarian need for a mentor. I have chosen a career in which it is notoriously difficult to make a living, one in which contacts and networking are crucial. I want a mentor to guide me through the battleground. If I stop to think about what’s in it for the mentor (which I don’t do very often), I come up with some vague notion that he or she would be personally rewarded by the selfless act of giving.

Fueled with this combination of insecurity and mercenary manipulation, I came to the summer writer’s workshop at Sarah Lawrence College. I pretended to arrive with realistic expectations; I wanted to see the campus and get a feel for the school. I also hoped that I might learn something; that somehow a week’s workshop would contribute to my growth as a writer. I wanted the opportunity to work with one of the leading practitioners of the personal essay, Phillip Lopate.

I didn’t know much about Lopate, and I had only read a couple of his essays. But one of my classes last year through UC-Berkeley extension had as required reading an anthology that he edited, an anthology of personal essays throughout history. This book had introduced me to several writers whose work I have come to admire: Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez, Mary McCarthy, Michael de Montaigne. Lopate’s anthology, along with his own writings, had helped establish him as a leading authority on the personal essay.

Hiding beneath my realistic expectations, however, was the not-so-small hope of being “discovered.” In my grandiose daydreams, Lopate would seize upon my considerable talents and urge, no, plead with me to further my craft, explaining that I owed it to myself and society to keep writing. He would frantically call editors around New York in order to have a piece of mine published in their hallowed pages. He would introduce me to his personal agent, write breathless letters of recommendation for grad schools and would, upon my return to San Francisco, engage me in lengthy, passionate e-mail exchanges about craft, talent, and How to Make It as a Writer.

The idea that every writer wishes this for himself, that perhaps everyone else in the workshop would arrive with the same glimmering hope, did not dull my dream. I knew there could only be room for one ingénue, and behind my nice-guy façade is a ruthless competitor. If I had done more research I might have realized the near impossibility of this dream, but that realization would come later in the week.

///

I awoke Sunday morning on the plastic mattress. The sheet beneath me had pulled free of the corners and was bunched around my shoulders. I was curled into a fetal position under the thin blanket, and I lay there listening to the sounds of people walking in the hallway outside my room, dragging suitcases along the floor. I lay there a few minutes, willing myself to gear up for the day and for all the strangers arriving on campus. I’m not naturally a “people person,” so such moments require a certain amount of determination.

I grabbed my towel and shaving kit and headed for the bathroom down the hall, which appeared to serve the four rooms of my wing. I passed a middle-aged man sitting in his room at his desk, and we greeted each other. We were both, as it turned out, named Michael.

“I’m in the poetry class, how about you?” he asked.

“Nonfiction,” I said.

“Oh. Ah.” A blank look crossed his face, an expression I would encounter frequently over the coming week. Fiction and poetry are the stars of every school’s creative writing program. Nonfiction is sort of the ugly stepsister. It’s regarded suspiciously by many writers, especially in light of the recent success of memoirs such as “The Liar’s Club,” and “Angela’s Ashes,” as if these memoirs were taking money away from poets and novelists. Some book critics get all snarky when it comes to memoir, labeling creative nonfiction a passing fad.

“So do you write about politics or something?” he asked me.

“It’s more like memoir or personal essay,” I said.

“Ah, I see. Great. Well, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, then went down the hallway to the shower.

///

Later I went across campus to the music auditorium, where the opening announcements were scheduled. My natural inclination in any situation is to sit in the back. I don’t like people sitting behind me. But I made myself sit up front. My plan for the week was to get my money’s worth, which meant I would have to be a little more assertive than usual. Of course, all the other students sat several rows behind me. The instructors were gathered up front, and I had the feeling, like I often do, that I had missed the memo, the one that told you where to sit. But I stayed put and watched everyone arrive. There was a small jolt of displacement as I recognized Phillip Lopate from his book jacket photo. He was thinner and much taller than I imagined, well over six feet. His appearance was fairly nondescript; his dress shirt and slacks could have come from any major department store. I knew from his bio that he was sixty, and he looked sixty; with his gray hair, academic pallor, and quick, dark eyes. He walked with a certain hesitation, as though he wondered if he had come to the right place. Later that week I’d realize he always walked that way, and I would secretly identify with his apparent social awkwardness.

After a few announcements (“the red dot on your name tag means you paid for the meal plan, please show this at the buffet line”) we gathered around our respective instructors, and were lead by various workshop coordinators to our specific classrooms. Once settled, we gave brief introductions of ourselves. I mumbled something about how I used to write a lot of poetry, but that now I have a website and am thinking about grad school.

There were ten students in Lopate’s workshop. Only three of us were from outside the New York/New Jersey area. One woman was an English Professor at a small college in Illinois. Another girl, slightly younger than me, lived in Boston and had worked with Lopate when she was an undergraduate at Hoffstra University. We were the youngest by several years. Memoir and personal essay writing seems to attract older writers, people who have already lived a few years, and who now have time to reflect. At least half of the other students in my class had already retired.

That week the workshop reinforced a growing suspicion of mine: the memoir genre attracts people with Issues. Myself included. Everyone has a tragedy, everyone has suffered a death or an illness or a horrible injustice, and everyone wants to write a book about it. Hence memoirs of addiction, cancer, abuse, poverty, etc. Fiction writers and poets can hide their issues behind verse or character, if they prefer, but in memoir it really is all about me. And I am just another writer with Issues, and for me that is a bitter realization. Because, as you know by now, I must be special, I must be unique. But in that workshop I was just another guy who’s suffered. Yes, I am gay, I have HIV, I am sober, my mother died of ALS. But in that class there was a woman who had three diseases, including lupus; there was a woman with Multiple Personality Disorder; there was a woman with an alcoholic husband; there was a woman whose grandson had been killed by a car. The genre also seems to attract mostly women, which means that either men don’t have any issues, don’t want to write about them, or don’t think they need help in becoming better writers.

The focus of the week was the morning workshop: a daily class where Lopate and the other students gave feedback on pieces we had submitted. We’d hand out a copy to each student, and that night everyone would read each piece and give feedback the next morning. There is the potential at any workshop for the feedback to tip from constructive criticism into petty cruelty, but for the most part everyone is pretty respectful, if only for karmic purposes.

The purpose of the workshop, as I have always understood it, is not to present a highly polished piece, but one that is in the early stages, one that needs work. So I decided on a piece that I wrote several months ago, a piece that I felt had potential, but that only scratched the surface of its major themes. Not my best writing, but neither was it the worst. I had always felt a special affinity towards the piece, which is why I wanted to flesh it out and improve it.

I sometimes fall prey to the idea that growth experiences are all rooted in a kind of joy, or are the result of an openness towards life. I forget that learning is usually painful, that what we call “learning experiences” are usually horribly uncomfortable events. There is a rip in the skin of what we thought we knew, and what we learn tears through and emerges like a squealing baby, demanding that we turn all our attention his way.

Things began to hurt on the first day of class. Lopate told us that many current writing instructors are doing nonfiction writers a huge disservice by telling them to “show, don’t tell.” Lopate actually touched upon this in the wonderful introduction to his anthology, but somehow I had overlooked it upon first read:

“…the essayist happily violates the number-one rule of short story workshops, ‘Show, don’t tell’: the glory of the essayist is to tell, once and for all, everything that he or she thinks, knows, and understands…All good essayists make use at times of storytelling devices: descriptions of character and place, incident, dialogue, conflict. They needn’t narrate some actual event to produce a narrative. Even a ‘pure’ meditation, the track of one’s thoughts, has to be shaped, given a kind of plot or urgency, if it is to communicate.”

The italics are mine, because it is those words: “at times” that struck me cold. Everything my recent instructors had been telling me was “show, don’t tell.” I can still hear Margo, the woman I’ve taken two classes with in the last year, say “You must let the reader in on the experience, you must show them through all the details exactly what happened, how it felt; they must feel like they are experiencing it at the same time you are.” She was firm and unbending on this idea, and I had been working on that method for the last year, dipping into my past and constructing little narratives, little scenes full of sensory details, often in the present tense so as to heighten the sense of immediacy.

No, Lopate said. You must do more than just describe what happened. There must be the reflective voice, the voice that speaks from the present, with the writer’s full knowledge. You can’t put the blinders on the reader and lead him through the experience so that he has the same awakenings, the same dawning of realization as you did at the time. You can’t expect that he will have the patience to wait for you to wise up. You must be able to reflect on the past, and tell us that even if you didn’t know much back then, even if you didn’t know what the event meant at the time, you do know now. That is why we read the essay or the memoir, for the insight of a unique voice. We owe it to the reader.

I am not doing his words justice, and I certainly did not understand his point on the first day; what I have presented is the argument he made all week, day after day, with all of our writing. And it was hard to hear. Because each of us had been told the same thing; show don’t tell, and now it seemed that Lopate was telling us the opposite. At least, that is how it felt the first day or two. I sat there in class in a blue funk. Everything I had been taught, everything I had written in the last year and a half; it was all wrong.

What I came to understand eventually is that there should be both in the personal essay or memoir, there can be showing as long as there is also telling. I understood eventually that what I had been learning wasn’t wrong, just incomplete.

I had been working so hard on showing, in fact, that I felt like my telling voice, the voice of reflection and insight, was my weakest. I didn’t trust that at thirty-two I had much wisdom or insight to offer, certainly nothing very original to say. Because of this fear, Lopate’s words were that much more discouraging. If I wanted to keep writing in this genre, I would need to use that reflective voice; the voice of insight. I wasn’t sure I was smart enough.

So with more than a little trepidation, I handed out my piece to Lopate and the others on that first day of class; he had picked three of us to share our work first. I didn’t sleep so well that night, tossing and turning on the plastic mattress, wondering what everyone would say.

///

It did not go well, to say the least. Many words were used. Words like “cliché” and “platitudes” were used to describe my piece. At one point Lopate said “…what we are trying to write here is literature;” his point being that my piece fell far short of that goal. Even the subject matter; testing positive for HIV, was overdone.

I took it well, nodding dutifully, making notes in the margins of my clichéd essay. When class ended I gathered my notes together, slid everything into my backpack, and went out quietly into the sweltering heat of Bronxville in July. The other students streamed past me on their way to lunch, chatting together. I turned the other direction and walked slowly back to my dorm.

The criticism stung. I was more than a little discouraged. My mind conveniently discarded all of the positive comments, and magnified the negative till it was like a chorus of seventh-grade girls in my head, signing together in cruel mockery: “You’re a big loser!” I told myself I should quit writing. I should save the world from the embarrassment of my platitudes. I cursed my decision to share such a weak piece; if I had shown them something stronger, then they’d see that I could write. My vanity writhed in agony. Lopate would not be calling publishers on my behalf. I would not be discovered.

And that is how I handle criticism; I take it as far as I can, to the brink of surrender, to the point at which I will give up the thing I love best for an emptier existence. I will give up the harsh, thankless life of the artist. I will get a normal job and join the human race and not torture myself with the neuroses of the creative life. I become very childish and wounded. And that is what I did; I sulked for a day or two, avoiding the other students, sitting alone at dinner.

But then, true to my pattern, I emerged, ready to fight. What doesn’t kill me may not make me stronger, but it does piss me off. Because inspiration can be hard to find, I take what I can get; I had fuel for the fire.

Lopate wanted each of us to have the opportunity to share two pieces. That week the other students in my class passed out two separate pieces that they had previously written. But I would be different. I would take my first piece, the one that lay tattered on my desk, and I would make it better. I would show Lopate, I would show them all. Picture me in my tiny dorm room, fist raised to the heavens.

///

Lopate had given us a list of recommended nonfiction books, many of them memoirs or books comprised of linking personal essays. I circled a handful of authors on the list, and it was in their company that I spent much of the remaining week, slunk low in an upholstered chair in the library’s basement. It was not enough for me to hear Lopate’s words on writing; I had to see how authors such as Vladimir Nabakov, Lucy Greely, and Mary McCarthy told their life stories. I had to see it with my own eyes. And he was right; each of them spoke of the past, but with the full wisdom of their present selves. They described the past while reflecting on the meaning of each event.

I spent so many hours in that library, in fact, that I started packing a sweatshirt each morning. It may have been 90 degrees outside, but after an hour of air conditioning I began to shiver. I sat with my laptop and began the first torturous steps of revision. I typed a few sentences to get past the blank page, and soon I was writing. I spent so many hours there that I missed out on some of the ongoing social activities; the evening readings, the volleyball games and the barbeques. I weighed my options, and I chose the writing.

///

I had come from San Francisco, farther than any of the other students, and that week many of them asked me why. “Because I wanted an adventure,” I’d say. I will admit that at one point, when we were all having lunch together, I said, “You know what I love? Hearing you all talk.” They indulged me, the quaint Midwestern boy, with a few smiles. Several of them, including Lopate himself, were Jews who had grown up in Brooklyn. Others were from New Jersey. I loved their quick-paced conversations, and I had to learn to jump into the classroom dialogue without waiting for someone to indicate it was my turn. The urban music of their voices, so familiar from movies and television, was nonetheless still fascinating to me. Their accents heightened the sense that I was on an adventure, in a foreign place. They also heightened my sense of being a stranger, the fish out of water. Maybe I’ve seen too many Woody Allen movies, but I equate the accent with intelligence and education, and a certain amount of academic rigor lacking in other American accents. There are still some stereotypes I wholeheartedly buy into, if only out of ignorance.

I appreciated their no-bullshit approach to conversation. I didn’t want politeness or sympathy, I didn’t want to be treated with kid gloves. I wanted to succeed on my little trip to the East Coast, where the bar was set highest. I realize that I am buying into a stereotype that perpetuates the marginalization of non-East Coast writers. I’m certainly not the most original of thinkers. If pressed, I wouldn’t actually say that the East Coast is the most important place for writers. But I am a man who learns through experience; I do not want to wake up at fifty and wonder “what if.” And so I do things like attend writers’ workshops across the country, and I make small steps in the directions that tempt me; love and adventure. A new city. Underneath all of my insecurities is a thriving ambition, which in itself is probably just another insecurity; a need to be recognized as someone special, someone talented. I know that if I were to move to New York, after a year or two I would get a glimpse of the man behind the curtain, and I would come to know the fallacies of the East Coast. I would find that New York is still just another place, or as Sandra Bernhardt said: “Ah, New York, New York. If you can make it there, you will fail everywhere else.” But until then, I am intrigued.

///

My hopes for the whole mentor thing were quickly extinguished. Lopate just wasn’t the mentor type. He was not like the other workshop instructors, who hung out all day, eating lunch and dinner with their students, talking passionately over coffee, joking and laughing and being, from my perspective, very warm and accessible. Lopate left campus as soon as class was over. Even during the ten-minute break we took each day from class, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid us. We would be sitting together on the benches outside the classroom, blinking in the sun, and he’d wander away towards the other buildings, as though his only motivation was to stay away from us.

A couple of days into the workshop I told Lydia, one of the other students, about my disappointment that Lopate wasn’t as sociable as the other instructors. Lydia was about forty, with a lean, Ashtanga build. She wore her black hair slicked back into a ponytail. She was Jewish and lived in Great Neck. She spoke quickly and directly, with pale blue eyes that fastened on you. She was so different from the women I grew up with in Minneapolis; the blonde, polite, hesitant girls. She was the kind of person on whom nothing was lost, the kind of person who would suffer no fools. There wasn’t anything soft about her, and I liked her very much.

“I asked him today if he wanted to have lunch with us,” she said.

“What did he say?”

“He said he didn’t want another community. He has that already at the other schools where he teaches. He said he was basically here for the paycheck.”

What could you say to that? “Well, at least he was honest,” I said.

It was there in the library that I finally cracked open a book by Lopate, one that I had bought from the campus bookstore on my second day of class. It was a compilation of his personal essays, and there in the middle of the book was one titled “Terror of Mentors”:

The word “mentor” has always had an appeal to me, in the abstract. I like its dignified sound, its promised protection, its sense of a craft personally handed down. Only the reality terrifies me. Either because of this fear or a lack of opportunity – the right mentor never came along, as bachelors in the mentor field are wont to rationalize” I had none when I was younger, and now it is too late.

He goes on to describe how he went through years of higher education without anyone taking that personal interest in his work. How he watched as fellow students were taken under the wings of various professors, often for less honorable intentions, and how his skepticism and jealousy of the relationship kept him at arm’s length from any possible connection. He even admits that underneath all of his rational arguments against mentorship is an irrational fear of the implied erotic connection between two men, the younger man presenting himself for the older man’s marking. He goes on:

Now the tables are turned: I am no longer the young man who could not seek out a mentor, but the middle-aged one to whom some young people look for that bond. How do I reconcile my skepticism about mentorship with the fact that I make my living as a creative writing professor? Partly, I think, by denying the degree to which I actually play the role of mentor. I often ‘pretend’ not to see the embarrassing extent to which a student is in my thrall; or I try to defuse the situation with humor and impersonality while continuing to offer concrete assistance. I have had students pursue me with requests for recommendations, blurbs, advice, twenty years or more after they have studied with me: some are shamelessly using me, true, but a few actually think of me as their mentor. Yet I have refused the intimacy of that term in my own mind.

Shall I confess one reason why I don’t think of myself as their mentor? I have never had a student whom I considered my peer. I have had plenty of students who were talented, lively, perceptive, and great fun to read, but not my literary equals. Perhaps I am being unfair, and the mere fact of their taking writing courses with me disqualified them in my eyes from seeming to possess original power and independence. Perhaps I am being overly competitive with my students. In any case, how could I truly mentor someone I did not believe would ever grow as high as myself?

I closed the book. I realized that if I had done some research, if I had opened this book several weeks ago, I would not have signed up for his class. I had to laugh at the irony of me traveling across the country with the dim hope of being Lopate’s discovery. I even had to laugh at his discomfort around the homosexual implications of mentorship. I had to hand it to him. Say what you will about his ego, he was nothing if not honest.

///

As the week progressed, we critiqued pieces by each student and Lopate, in fact, spared no one. It did not matter if the piece was about something as sensitive as terminal illness; he inspected it for trite phrases or unoriginal thoughts. He held no one’s hand. When that focus had been turned to my piece, it hurt a little. But I could see that his critiques of the other pieces were fair, and when the sting wore off, I began to respect him.

Others would disagree. His criticisms toed the line of harshness and, depending on where you stood, sometimes crossed over. One woman, a top editor at Essence magazine, left the workshop after the third day when Lopate told her that her writing was well suited for a mass market publication, but that it was not literature. Another woman who wrote about the accidental death of her grandson noticeably withdrew from classroom discussion following the critique of her piece. She told me later that she wished she had signed up with the other nonfiction instructor, Noelle Oxenhandler, because she felt a woman might understand her writing better.

I knew what she was saying, and while there was a part of me that also longed for the warmth and diplomacy a woman instructor might bring to her critiques, there was another part of me that did not want to settle, that wanted to impress the skeptics of the world, of which Lopate was clearly a member. He was not particularly moved by spiritual discussions or the use of dreams or fate in our writing. “You have to anticipate that many readers will not buy into the idea of this fate you mention; some of us will only see it as coincidence. It doesn’t mean that you can’t believe it yourself, or that you can’t talk about your dreams in your essays, just that you have to anticipate their argument, you have to address such skeptics, you have to show a little worldliness.”

///

I worked my ass off that week. I stayed all day in the library, reading and writing until they closed at nine pm. Then I’d trudge back to the dorm and stay up late reading the other student’s essays so that I could give them the feedback they deserved, the kind of feedback I would ask of my own work.

I took apart my original essay and began a new one. I tried a new approach and a new structure, and I attempted to use what I had been learning in class all week, to use that reflective voice, to use my full knowledge of the present to talk about the past. I was conducting an experiment, and I wasn’t sure if it would succeed, or if I would have yet another humiliation ahead. I worked up until the second to the last day, when I made copies and passed it out to the others. In another 24 hours we would meet for the last time, and they would tell me what they thought.

///

The first student who spoke said “I liked this piece…” and I knew there’d be a “but.” It came, and I sighed a little as I realized that she didn’t get it, that she didn’t see what I was trying to do. Another student joined in, voicing similar concerns. The experiment had failed. All that work, all those hours.

Lopate normally waited until all of the students finished before giving his own feedback, but at that moment he interrupted. “I think you’re missing the point,” he said, and I realized he was addressing the two students. He went on to defend my piece, and to praise it. He got it; he saw what I was trying to do, and he loved it. He talked for a long time, and there were many kind words and compliments that would sound immodest if I listed them here, but I scribbled them into my notebook, so that I would always remember. “It’s a terrific piece,” he said, and that was that.

Later, in our individual conference, he told me that my essay had been the highlight of his week. I felt vindicated, exalted, exhausted. We talked about MFA programs in the city, and he recommended the program at New School, where he taught. “It would be an exciting program for you,” he said. I had him sign the book I had bought that week, the one with the essay on mentoring.

There was something a little awkward about Lopate; a sort of social hesitation that, combined with his skepticism and desire to keep us at arm’s length, made him unapproachable. The girl who had taken undergraduate writing classes with Lopate at Hoffstra University said that he was always like that, that he never really warmed up on a personal level. I knew that if I were to study with him at New School I would not find that warm mentor relationship, at least not with him.

But that is why I felt such elation and vindication; Lopate was not the type to encourage a young writer past his insecurities. He was tough and critical, and as a result his words were that much more meaningful. I knew he liked my essay, and I knew his approval was genuine. If I wanted warmth, well, maybe that’s what boyfriends are for. When it comes to a writing instructor, I’d rather get the truth.

I came to realize many things that week, some of which I had always known, in the way we sometimes know things but don’t realize it until later. I realized that one doesn’t need Issues to write good nonfiction; the subject matters much less than the voice. Joan Didion wrote an excellent essay about migraines. Virginia Woolf wrote one about the death of a moth. The essay I rewrote was full of big Issues, but it was liberating to know that I don’t always have to write like that, that I could write about small events or observations or irritations. Which is fortunate, because each of us only gets a limited number of Issues. Sooner or later I’d run out.

I realized that some pieces need more time and space; they need room and leisure for the ideas to fully form, and that writing for the attention span of the average Internet reader can mean too many sacrifices. One thing’s for certain; if you’ve read this far you are not the average reader, and that’s why I like you.

I knew that the essay I wrote that week required everything from me, required me to be at my best, with all of my questionable intelligence and skills, and that if I were to get anywhere as I writer I would always have to reach that level, and that I would have to get even better.

Looking back over this I can see that I have placed Lopate on a pedestal. He loved my essay, and as a result I left the conference with a tremendous sense of accomplishment and confidence. Had he not liked the same essay, I would have been absolutely discouraged. Lopate is just one person, one man with his own opinions. And those qualities of his I value are the same that would drive another writer to distraction. Lopate is that little voice that has always been in my head, the one that questions everything, the one that bristles when I write something the least bit gooey. He is the voice I had always feared, the skeptic, the elitist, the East Coast intellectual of impossible standards. In Lopate I have a found a symbol; the most demanding of readers, one for whom I will work harder. I will concede that his approval seems to matter more than my own convictions. But the few convictions I have are under constant revision: I am susceptible to the strong beliefs of others; and in my defense I call this learning.

Considering that two co-workers had come down the stairs from the director’s office in tears, I was a little anxious when the director called and asked if I could come see her. One co-worker had been laid off, another had to take a 20% pay cut AND take on another job. As I walked up the stairs I was actually a little excited. Perhaps, I thought, this is exactly what I need. Please lay me off, I thought as I climbed the stairs.

So it was a disappointment when she told me they were going to cut my job to 32 hours a week. Which means more money cut from my paycheck for health insurance, and no holiday pay. I’ll give you the day to decide if you’ll accept the offer, she told me.

Accept your offer? That’s an offer? Uh, gee, thanks.

Oh, it’s probably all for the best, another day of the week to write and look for a better job. What drives me crazy is the gradual deterioration of the job, as beloved bosses and co-workers drop like flies, as my job absorbs other jobs. I think I’d prefer one solid blow rather than these little irritating scrapes. Yes, I will count my blessings and I will accept the offer. I have HIV, I need the health benefits. I need the paltry paycheck. It’s a big, scary, unemployable world out there right now. One hand on the vine behind, the other stretching out, seeking something to grab.

“Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say”
By ERICA GOODE
New York Times
April 18th, 2003

Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.

The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain “key words” out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those words include “sex workers,” “men who sleep with men,” “anal sex” and “needle exchange,” the scientists said.

Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the health and human services department, said the department does not screen grant applications for politically delicate content. He said that when the department singles out grants it is usually to send out a news release about them. But an official at the National Institutes of Health, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said project officers at the agency, the people who deal with grant applicants and recipients, were telling researchers at meetings and in telephone conversations to avoid so-called sensitive language. But the official added, “You won’t find any paper or anything that advises people to do this.”

The official said researchers had long been advised to avoid phrases that might mark their work as controversial. But the degree of scrutiny under the Bush administration was “much worse and more intense,” the official said.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said a researcher at his institution had been advised by a project officer at N.I.H. to change the term “sex worker” to something more euphemistic in a grant proposal for a study of H.I.V. prevention among prostitutes. He said the idea that grants might be subject to political surveillance was creating a “pernicious sense of insecurity” among researchers.

Dr. Sommer said that if researchers feared that federal support for their work might be affected by politics, whether it was true or untrue, it could take a toll. “If people feel intimidated and start clouding the language they use, then your mind starts to get cloudy and the science gets cloudy,” he said, adding that the federal financing of medical research had traditionally been free from political influence.

At the National Institutes of Health, for example, grant applications are evaluated and rated by a panel of independent reviewers. The grant application is then given a score.

In another example of the scrutiny the scientists described, a researcher at the University of California said he had been advised by an N.I.H. project officer that the abstract of a grant application he was submitting “should be `cleansed’ and should not contain any contentious wording like `gay’ or `homosexual’ or `transgender.’ ”

The researcher said the project officer told him that grants that included those words were “being screened out and targeted for more intense scrutiny.”

He said he was now struggling with how to write the grant proposal, which dealt with a study of gay men and H.I.V. testing. When the subjects were gay men, he said, “It’s hard not to mention them in your abstract.”

Yeah, this administration is full of heroes. Fuck off.

what, the bitch says, well you work there, don’t you know anything about dogs that stopped up the wind pipe and ma’am I’m not a trainer nor do I profess to be one click I hung up on her. fire me, someone, please, set me adrift maybe that’s what I need, fuck cut away the safety nets the ropes that tie me to drudgery and duty push me along the razor’s edge can I be poz without insurance oh fuck probably not patience young cricket eater

thank you but I know already all that I don’t know, I don’t need any more reminders

namaste mutherfucker

can’t quite hear myself think

pick up the 30 do 21

pick up the 35 do 21

pick up the 40 do 21

pick up the 45 do fucking c’mon 19 arrrgggh get the fuck outta my way

doin’ it for my space monkey

can’t quite hear myself speak

dig a little trench boy, get it flowin again

each word a scratch in the sand

There are men on every single page of my college-era journals. Sometimes specific men, sometimes not. There is unhappiness and frustration and horniness scrawled across each page, with the underlying solution being some guy or another. Never an inside job; no, that would have required real work. It was easier to pin my happiness on Frank or Enrique or Daniel or Robert or David, who leaned over and kissed me one night outside the Saloon in Minneapolis, at the end of the summer, as we stood around the Sidewalk Sale, the nightly event where everyone spilled out of the bar at closing time, a ridiculously early one a.m. One kiss fueled an entire semester’s worth of despair and ennui, a thousand miles away in Sarasota, where I tried to study but found myself picturing erotic entanglements on the floor of the classroom, as the sociology professor droned on about deviants. Sometimes I’d piece together a dream boy, he’d have a shaved head and tattoos and a leather jacket and muscles and lots of testosterone. There weren’t too many of those in Sarasota.

I don’t pin my happiness on men anymore. But I want to remember this, I want to remember what is happening. And I am a goddamned hopeless romantic.

///

A couple of months before the Ex and I split, two years ago, I saw the movie Trick. I loved it, loved how it captured that feeling; when you first meet someone, and your heart gets dragged into it, kicking and screaming. I knew then that my relationship was disintegrating. I sat in bed as the credits rolled, and I felt adrenaline pump through me, because I was excited. That I might get to feel that way again.

///

more Joseph Campbell, on romantic love: “…the seizure that comes in recognizing your soul’s counterpart in the other person…”

///

Equal parts joy and fear: what if I’m wrong? what if it won’t work? this is crazy, feeling this way, when we haven’t even met.

Things I learn from him:

- just do the work, screw the results
- write down my progress at the gym (it works)
- fuck “what if’s”
- and stop worrying so much.

///

Nothing anyone could say would throw me off. You don’t know. And I know how that sounds.

///

I’m a kid again, with an imaginary friend. He drives with me, and I rest my hand on his knee. I spot him on the bench press. We eat at restaurants that I see again with new eyes. He walks on the beach with me and Louie. I’m late to work everyday because I don’t want to get out of bed. Or we fucked in the shower. I show him my favorite views of the city. I kiss him in elevators.

///

- How are your….
- My numbers?
- Yeah.
- They’re good. T-cells are high, viral load is nearly undetectable. My doctor says I could go years without meds.
- That’s great.
- Do you ever think about that?
- About…you?
- Yeah. Do you ever think about the fact that I might not live as long as other people?
- There are no guarantees, Michael. We could all die tomorrow.
- I know.
- I don’t hold back on matters of love.

///

In the movie Trick the two guys spend the entire night trying to find a place to have sex, but are constantly thwarted by insensitive roommates and Tori Spelling. By dawn they know enough not to have sex. They kiss at the subway stop and part ways. The go-go boy gives the pianist his phone number. As soon as he’s alone the pianist tries the number, afraid it’ll be a fake. It’s not. The go-go boy’s machine says “you got me.”

I am living in a very very long movie of thwarted testosterone. Without Tori Spelling. It drives me up a wall everyday. It’s torture. It’s so fucking sweet.

///

My only two resolutions for New Year’s were to floss and pray everyday. I’m good to go on the flossing. Sometimes I forget to pray.

Believing in him is like believing in a higher power. I can’t touch him. I can only have a little faith.

Confession

I’m telling you right now, I never pretended to be a grown-up. Just so we’re clear.

From some secret e-mails and comments I received yesterday, I get the impression that I’m not the only one having trouble with friends. The difference is that I will stop at nothing to embarrass myself publicly by airing such immature, gaudy-colored laundry on my proverbial clothesline. But if you can live vicariously through my humiliation, it’s all worth it. After all, I have this candid, ugly-truth-telling reputation to fulfill.

I’m like that spoiled little princess who can’t sleep when there’s a pea under her pile of mattresses. I tongue the tooth-ache, pick the scab. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Okay, you get it.

I told Bearbait yesterday that I’m dreading tonight. I’ve been asked again to “tell my story” at an AA meeting, a meeting with a special focus on those with HIV. It’s a rather small meeting, maybe 20 people, and my very very close friend goes there every week, as I do. Of course, he’s HIV-negative, which isn’t the issue at all. The issue for me is that I’m pissed at him but I want to appear calm, wise, and super-well-adjusted. I want to sound, at the end of my story, like I have all my shit together and that I am a sparkling pool of serenity and inner-peace. Which I’m not.

My very very close friend was so crucial to my success in early sobriety, and I usually mention this when I tell my story. But guess what? I don’t want to mention that tonight. Because I’m pissed. Because he’s playing a game and I hate games. And because even in the structure of the game he is breaking his own rules. Not that I’m playing the game. I’m not, I tell you, I’m not!

Isn’t that silly? Don’t you just want to pat me on the head and tell me “awww, that’s a cute DogPoet. Evwything is gonna be alwight. Now go take a nap.”

When I tell my story I usually talk about what’s going on in my life now. You know, the joys and the challenges. I can’t really talk about the challenges tonight, without sounding bitter and vindictive and passive-aggressive. Not that I would ever be any of those. Not me.

Actually, I think that testing positive was a milestone in more ways than one. At the time, my mother was still alive; it was another 7 months before she died. When I was actively using drugs and alcohol I often gave her tearful confessions, trying to elicit as much sympathy as possible in the hopes that revealing all of my problems would somehow explain and excuse the mess I was making of my life. When she was diagnosed with ALS I tried to get sober, mostly on my own. It would be another year before I became demoralized enough to slink into an AA meeting and ask for help.

I look back and wince at the spectacle I made of myself during that year. It was my way of seeking help, I suppose. But I was blind to the effect such confessions had on my mother, until her partner became exasperated and wrote me a very terse e-mail asking me to keep my confessions to myself, because my mother would get so upset that she couldn’t sleep at night. I still remember filling with hot shame as I read that e-mail. “Fuck,” I thought, “I am such a fucking loser.”

But I was also angry. If I couldn’t tell my mother the truth, who could I tell? Although she would live for another two years, I lost my mother in stages. I lost my confidante, and I lost my parent. She became, slowly, someone who needed my care. I lost my mother’s voice when the muscles that controlled her speech stopped working. The dementia wore away her sharp intellect. Her written sentences became shorter, and after many months, nearly incomprehensible. She’d get one word stuck in her head and she’d write it over and over. No amount of questions or gentle prodding could push her from that stuck spot. The woman who was my mother was changed beyond recognition, but she was still my mother, and she still needed us. And even at the end she was, at her core, the same generous, warm, funny soul she had always been. She gave everyone hugs, several a day. If you happened to glance her way she’d raise her arms and you’d lean over her in bed, wrap your own arms delicately around her, and accept her hug.

Man, I miss her.

At six months of sobriety I broke up with my partner of five + years, and I didn’t tell her. At nine months of sobriety I tested positive, and I didn’t tell anyone in my family. For once I could see that sometimes the truth hurts more than it helps. I finally had enough sense to see that I needed other confidants during that time.

And my very very close friend was my confidante, and I miss him very much right now. Oh, I know we’ll be okay. Enough time will pass and this will look in retrospect like the tiny bump in the road that it is.

Funny, I started out writing about him and I ended up writing about her. Who knows what it is; her birthday on December 21st, or this being the first Christmas without her. There’s nothing quite like losing your mother. In many ways the world becomes a colder place, but without her I’ve had to grow up. I’ve had to make my own family, with a rag tag bunch of queers and alcoholics. Like any family they sometimes drive me nuts. But I need them, I love them, I can’t get by without them.