Archive for February, 2003
Hi. My name is Michael and I’m an Aries and I like driving at night with the windows down. And fried chicken.
My middle name is Lowell, my grandfather’s name. I used to hate it when I was a kid. I wanted a normal name like Tom or Scott. But now I like it.
I have a dog named Louie and I work in an animal shelter. I like dogs but I often don’t like dog people. Louie likes my job more than I do. I think people like my dog more than they like me, too. But I’m okay with that.
I think a lot about flow and what fits and if something doesn’t fit it drives me crazy and I annoy all my friends and loved ones talking about it till it fits or goes away.
Sometimes at night the sky over San Francisco is so bright that it keeps me awake. But I won’t shut the blinds.
I always get the worst songs stuck in my head. This morning in the shower I was singing “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.”
In spite of this I’ve had friends threaten to take away my gay membership card because I wear flannel shirts and own a few Bruce Springsteen CD’s. What do they know about being a gay?
I resent my writing instructor because she fawns over all the women, especially the blind one.
But maybe that’s good for me.
If I love you I will soak up all your favorites; books, music, movies, artists, philosophers.
If I love you I will rearrange my days.
If I love you I will save all your letters and scraps of paper.
If I love you I will put your pictures on my desktop.
If I love you I will try and write it down.
My name is Michael and I like roller coasters, scary movies, and pudding.
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.
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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.
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more Joseph Campbell, on romantic love: “…the seizure that comes in recognizing your soul’s counterpart in the other person…”
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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.
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Nothing anyone could say would throw me off. You don’t know. And I know how that sounds.
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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.
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- 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.
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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.
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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.
“People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.”
How does Bush get his way with the environment?
“Bush, by contrast, has learned to stand oblique to the current of public opinion on the environment, allowing criticism to slide off his back. His lieutenants in Interior, Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have quietly focused on the regulatory route, using administrative guidance and legal loopholes to achieve what Gingrich could not obtain in the full glare of the legislative process.
“”They are rejecting the full-frontal-assault approach that gets a lot of media attention in favor of death by a thousand strokes of the pen…”
It’s a literary approach, one could say.
Okay, so somebody just sent me a huge bunch of balloons, with a card that says “Happy Birthday, Love Louie.” Now, I’m pretty sure my dog didn’t call the balloon place and furthermore, he probably knows that my birthday is actually April 5th.
Today at the gym they played Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” twice within 15 minutes. Not that my gym is gay or anything.
Look who’s in Artforum.
I hit “repeat” on the outskirts of Sacramento. Again, the bass, drawing me in, taking me back. It was a song of nostaligia for me; a song about a time and place that I would never again see. But today, a year after mom died, it feels like something else. It feels both nostalgic and hopeful; the sun and the blue sky and the Sierras glowing white in the distance. A song that plays on a day when I am alive and driving with the windows down, a song that plays on a day I feel love for a man who lives far away. A man who knows the Whistle Song. “It’s such a happy song,” he tells me when I call. And he’s right. I am good at sadness, it’s safe and comfortable. But now there’s more, and I get to have it all.
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“My kind of people,” Aaron says. We’ve wound our way into the video bar at Faces (why are there so many gay bars called Faces?). We’re standing on the edge of the packed floor. There are all races and genders and orientations dancing together; there is a homely 45-year old man dancing with a young, sexed-out blonde bombshell who raises her arms over her head, who twists her hips around and tosses her hair as the man grabs her waist and hops, off-beat, behind her. There is a woman who looks like the winner of the Banji Girl contest in Paris is Burning; she wears a striped hat made out of the same material as her sweater. She sidles up behind every curvy girl dancing alone and molds her hips to the girl’s butt, until each girl moves away. There are two Asian girls with bee-stung lips colored dark, who hang on each other but whose lesbianism is a show for the men who stand nearby, the ones with gold chains glittering on their necks. There are girls in rugby shirts and mullets dancing in the corner, there is a bartender wearing a tuxedo shirt and a bowtie who knows the words to every song. A boy who walks in late, looking like a younger Rick James, his long pressed hair falling past his shoulders. He removes his sunglasses and catwalks into the bar like he owns the place. There are a couple of gay boys here and there, vastly outnumbered. The videos are all familiar; TRL-style. Songs you can’t help but know, no matter how much you avoid MTV and the radio. The bar is bright and crowded and full of clueless dancers who back their butts into you, separating you from your friends and pushing you off the floor while they undulate to J-Lo. And I dance in spite of it all. Am I really dancing to J-Lo? I think. I can’t believe it. As though there is a secret fag committee standing on the sidelines, watching and judging. I look around for the committee when Britney Spears comes on, but everybody is dancing. Nobody is watching me. So I dance, too. I’m a slave for you, baby.
But then Justin Timberlake comes on and I’m all like, no fucking way am I dancing to Justin Timberlake. I draw the line at Justin Timberlake. I stop moving but the not moving is more conspicuous than the moving. Everyone else is moving and they don’t care what I think about Justin Timberlake. Or that maybe deep down inside I wanna dance to Justin Timberlake. So I move, I dance to Justin Timberlake.
I don’t escape anything, I do not lose myself. I am brought straight into the heart of it. I move as everyone here moves. Everyone into their groove, everyone into their friends. Nobody cruising me; I am definitely not sexy to Sacramento. It’s not Webster Hall and the VJ is not going to play “The Whistle Song.” It’s someplace else entirely. Missy Elliot sings Work It and we work it. I watch the entire dance floor go wild and sing all the lyrics together to Kylie Minogue. But when Christina Aguilera gets all dirrrrrrrty I take a break. I must draw the line somewhere.
That spring her swallowing muscles are so weak that she begins to choke on her own saliva. By then she’s had a stomach tube implanted: everyday she pours five cans of Jevity formula into the tube, for nourishment. The doctors decide to perform a tracheostomy, which will close off her wind tunnel, preventing the choking. The hole in her throat will let her breathe. She will also need to have her larynx removed, and will no longer be able to speak. This is from my journal, the night of the operation.
May 3, 2000
I don’t much want to write, at home late on a Wednesday night, the air warm like summer already. Home from a run around the lake in the dark, to blow off steam. Mom had her larynx removed and a tracheostomy. I was at the hospital until 9 pm when we saw her after surgery. I don’t use the word “shock” lightly here. I hope the image scarred into my brain fades, I don’t want it to stay long. There is no easy way to say it. A long ragged scar all the way across her throat as though it had been slit. Angry stitches. A tube blowing steam on the wound. Another tube draining the incision. And worst of all, in the hollow of her throat, a hole. A hole with red ragged edges. A hole in my mother’s throat. A hole the size of a baby’s fist, right there. Mom. My little mom lying there drugged, her face the color of death, eyes rolling open, eyelids wet, waving her hand at me, her throat ravaged like animal prey, her voice now gone forever, no sound ever again to cross her lips, no grunts or laughs or improvised hello’s, I love you’s, good bye’s. I thought maybe I wasn’t mad anymore but my jaw was clenched the entire drive home. Nothing. Run. Run in the night in a circle, come back where you are.
Later: 12:45 a.m, still awake. She’s alone now, in that hospital. Sleeping, I hope.
