Dogpoet

Today I marry my friend.

I promise to tell you “I love you” every day.

I will encourage you in your work and dreams.

I will celebrate with you our joys and stand beside you during our hardships.

I will remember your favorite things and surround you with them.

I will cherish the strengths and imperfections that make you Joe.

I will fight for you, care for you, and protect you.

I will never give up on you.

I will give you the room to be your own man.

I will cultivate honesty, compassion, generosity, and a sense of humor.

Together we will build a home where friends and family are loved and celebrated.

We will be companions in this life.

One of the things I know I’ll always find at my future mother-in-law’s house outside Philly is pictured at left. Also, scrapple for breakfast. Don’t ask what it is, just eat it. It’s good.

The Manly Fireplug‘s sister recounted for us how she asked her 7-year-old daughter if she’d like to be the flower girl at a wedding. The girl, who loves Cinderella and pink and the Little Mermaid, jumped up and down and said “YES!” Then, “Wait, who’s getting married?”

“Uncle Joey.”

“UNCLE JOEY’S GETTING MARRIED!!” Her eyes got wide and she jumped some more. “To who?”

“To Mike.”

The girl stopped jumping. “Mike?!?”

“Yes, Mike.”

The girl looked doubtful. “How does that work?”

“Well,” her mother said, “Sometimes boys like girls, like me and your daddy. And sometimes boys like other boys. And sometimes girls like other girls. The only thing that matters is that you love someone. That’s all that matters.”

The girl was quiet as she considered this. “Does Mike like dogs? Because Uncle Joey likes dogs.”

“Yes, honey, I think Mike likes dogs.”

“He better.”

The posts were pissing me off.

“She was a nut. Too bad she didn’t try harder to live.”

“Coming soon, the Michael Jackson/Amy Winehouse reunion album.”

“Boxed Winehouse.”

I realize that making fun of messy celebrities on Facebook is the new American pastime, and I run the risk of appearing way too earnest here (I pretty much always run that risk here) but there was no part of me that found anything about her death funny.

I’ve been sober nearly eleven years, with the help of other drunks and drug addicts. Stay sober long enough, and well-meaning friends who don’t have the addictive personality, or the disease, or whatever it may be that kept you from applying moderation to your life, will praise you for your strength and willpower. (We call these well-meaning friends “normies.”)

But here’s the thing that every sober drunk and drug addict knows. Strength and willpower had little to do with it. None of us can say with any certainty why we were able to “get it,” and hold on to it, when so many couldn’t. The statistics were against us, rehab or no rehab.

Listen to enough of our stories, and you’ll hear a common thread. There was nothing special about the last time we got drunk or high. It was rarely the worst day or night of our lives. Rarely did it involve the worst consequences we’d faced. Sometimes no matter how much we drank we couldn’t get drunk that night.

Maybe the right friend said the right thing at the right second, or the perfect stranger opened a new door. Maybe that afternoon we just got tired of the emptiness where our souls used to be. Every story involves luck, or coincidence, or, if you prefer, a bit of grace. It took more than five or six tries until it happened to me.

I was late to the Winehouse bandwagon. I often stubbornly resist the zeitgeist, and her “Rehab” song turned me off. But during one visit to Hawaii, the Manly Fireplug added Back to Black to our iPod. We listened to it nonstop that week. There was something about our hotel, a rather seedy, down-at-the-heels tropical outpost called the Queen Kapiolani, that fit Amy’s lyrics.

Back in San Francisco I developed a back-up singer hand gesture routine to my favorite song, “Tears Dry On Their Own,” which I’d perform in the car while the Fireplug was driving. That song contained my favorite of her lyrics:

I cannot play myself again

Should just be my own best friend

Not fuck myself

In the head

With stupid men

Here’s the thing about Amy. She knew who she was. A drunk, an addict, a cheater. She slept around behind her boyfriends’ backs. She had bad taste in men. She didn’t whitewash her sins or blame it all on the other guy, which so many pop songs seem to do.

She made me feel less alone with my own sordid past. With the part of me that is still, to this day, less than virtuous.

I don’t know Amy’s story. I know she did, despite her song, attend rehab, more than once. I don’t know what it was like for her to wake up in the morning, to want to write her next record but find it impossible. I only know the smallest slices of her life, fed to me through headlines and grainy photos.

I don’t know how badly she wanted to get sober. All I know is that her time ran out before grace found her.

Those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while know that I now spend a good chunk of my time with a guy I call the Manly Fireplug.  I don’t call him that to protect his identity – he’s just fine with notoriety, thank you very much – the nickname just cracks me up.

His name is Joe Gallagher, he owns Joe’s Barbershop here in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and we’ve known each other a few years now. Back when he first picked up a pair of clippers, he rented a chair in my barber’s shop. I used to sit in Pasha’s chair and just stare at Joe. A few months after Joe rented the chair, Pasha up and died of a heart attack in his mid-40′s, and so I naturally used the occasion to switch barbers. (I never said I wasn’t capable of cold calculation.)

Joe had a partner at the time, so I contented myself with feeling his hands touch my head every couple of weeks. He wasn’t stingy with advice. After hearing the 22nd installment of my doomed long-distance love affair with another blogger, he spun me around in the chair, looked me in the eye, and barked, “You just need to get fucked. Really hard.”

He had a point.

I went off to grad school in NYC and Joe opened his own shop. When I moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2006, Joe was single. We started working out together and one thing led to another. He swears I spent a lot of time bending over in front of him at the gym, putting weights away. I never said I was a fool, either.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Joe proposes to me as I lay sedated in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung. I think the experience clarified for us that we wanted to spend whatever time we had left in this world together. The sedation just made it easier to say yes. Not long afterwards, California passed Prop 8, taking a legal wedding off the table.

Like most couples we hit a rough patch, but came back together with renewed purpose and respect. “People don’t change,” the cynics say, but I have first-hand experience to the contrary. With every passing day he became more solidly the partner I’d always wanted. I had to work to do the same for him.

We’d talk about heading off to one of the other states that had legalized same-sex marriage. Joe turned 50 . “I’m not getting any younger,” he warned me. But I kept dragging my feet, wanting to wait until it was legal in California again, wanting to celebrate such a day in the place we call home, with our friends.  But there were no guarantees that Prop 8 would be overturned, and eventually I realized that we could both get what we wanted. We could get married somewhere else for real, and still come back to celebrate with friends.

Which is a very long way of saying that I’m getting married. In like five weeks.

I now understand why people take a year to plan these things. “What are your colors?” a florist asked Joe a couple of weeks ago.

“Um, colors?” he said.

Yeah, we’re not that kind of gay.

The Bay Area Reporter ran an article on some of us heading to NYC to get hitched. You can read it here. My only caveat is that I now better understand why some people feel slightly misrepresented when interviewed by the media. The whole Cher thing was sort of a joke. Also, the idea of a “traditional” wedding matters less to me than the idea of sharing the day with friends. But if that makes it traditional, then I guess I want a traditional wedding.

Two days later CBS radio interviewed us as well. It’s a nice, short piece, and you can hear it here.

Then ReyRey of ReyRey’s Photography offered to shoot some engagement pics, including the one above.

Joe and I had talked about keeping the whole thing low-key. It’s not like we can afford to throw a party for 500 people. But there is no low-key with Joe Gallagher. Frankly by now even I’m starting to find myself overexposed. But it seemed wrong not to mention it here, where I’ve chronicled ten years of my life, and where some of you have been kind enough to follow along.

Goddamn, I’m going to have a husband.

As I kid I had an aversion to athletic fields. Something about their open, sun-baked sterility depressed me; I was a nervous kid prone to hiding in woods and libraries. Athletic fields were for normal boys, the kind with no trace of self-consciousness, a quality I deeply envied and never fully understood. And though I was lucky enough to escape the lowest rungs of the school pecking order, and never the very last chosen for recess sports, my self-doubting hamstrung my innate athleticism, which, going by my parents’ hilarious lack of hand-eye coordination, wouldn’t have been that impressive.

I’ve grown up to be a private man who plasters his private life all over the internet. Few of us are consistent at all times. But as any honest writer would admit, the life I spill here is just a version of the “real” one.  Every sentence considered and measured, every paragraph revised until most, if not all, its errors have been rubbed away. A manufactured self is the one I’m most comfortable displaying.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last year on athletic fields, working my way through a couple of seasons of softball, a season of casual Fall Ball, and an out-of-state tournament or two. I took this photo standing beside the batting cages in Palm Springs, waiting my turn while the Manly Fireplug swung away. But in sports there’s no revision or erasing. You make mistakes in front of other people on those open, sun-drenched fields. And you either let those dropped balls kill you, or you figure out a way to shrug them off, hoping with practice and persistence that the next time will be different.

I don’t know about you, but that ball doesn’t look to me like it’s going anywhere. Here I am, three months after hitting my first “homerun” (that word is in quotation marks because that day in Vegas the blue called me out at home plate, after the catcher turned to tag me and we collided and I broke my wrist).

Though I’m batting against the league’s top-ranked, undefeated team, it doesn’t even look like I’m playing softball. It looks like I’m golfing. Like I’m going to knock that ball a few feet, send it skittering across the shallow infield, maybe to land right back where it started, in the pitcher’s lowered glove. It looks like my three teammates on the three loaded bases will just have to wait for the next batter to get them moving. It looks like I’ll groan again in frustration, trudge back to the dugout, where I can resume sulking in the company of my outsized expectations, sure that I will never again regain my softball mojo.

It doesn’t look at all like the ball will sail over the pitcher’s head, over the second baseman’s head, and over the outfielder’s head too, landing somewhere deep in right-centerfield, giving me plenty of time – this time – to run my little ass off around all the bases, chasing my teammates all the way home, where I will touch that plate and let out a primal scream that will vent every frustration of the last three months, before I remember that I’m from the Midwest and that I should just fade politely into the background.

I mean, that’s just what it looks like.

Greetings from Palm Springs, where The Manly Fireplug and I have spent the last few days celebrating my 40th birthday. Two nights ago we stopped by my gay dads’ condo for a little party that featured three gay male couples in their fifties and sixties in tropical shirts who winter here and who have, after a few decades together, grown to resemble each other. This happens no matter what your chosen demographic (as in, really, how many more gay dudes with muscles, buzz cuts, and tattoos could the Fireplug and I possibly know), but it’s usually easier to spot in a different demographic.

When I was a bit younger I used to be cynical about rainbows, but now I just appreciate the fact that someone got me a cake.

My 40th came and went without a lot of anxiety on my part. This partly comes from watching a few others panic at their 40th with less than perfect grace (and not wanting to do the same), but really I think it has more to do with the fact that I’ve been 40 since I was nine years old.

In other news I’ve been working pretty hard at two jobs, one of which sometimes involves washing attorneys’ dishes, and the other of which involves the title “manager.” Somewhere in between I work on my book.

My wrist has been healing up nicely, and though I have yet to be *officially* cleared by the surgeon, I jumped into my first softball game last weekend, and while I have yet to regain the confidence I was edging towards when I broke the damn thing, I didn’t completely disgrace myself. So there’s that.

Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy began Anna Karenina, a book I  should cop to never having read, with the words, “Happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

My own family’s particular unhappiness was, on its surface at least, so unusual that it defied belief, and I tended over the years to keep it to myself. Long story short, when I was ten years old my parents separated, and within a year they both came out of the closet. I’d suffered my first unrequited crush, on a grown man, the year before, and my one brother would eventually turn out to be the only straight one among us, a sort of photo-negative reversal of the usual situation gay kids find themselves in, growing up feeling freakish and alien in a family of heterosexuals.

Given just these bare set of facts, the reaction over the years from friends and strangers has always been illuminating. Certain  gay guys would get a starry-eyed look as they imagined this alternate-universe childhood, as if I’d been raised by some fabulously surreal pairing – Cher and Elton John, maybe. Ellen and Liberace. More than one guy asked if I ever cruised the bars with my Dad.

The gap between these fantasies and the reality kept me reticent. I mean really, look at those plaid pants.

But maybe I should revise my statement. My own family’s particular unhappiness wasn’t about homosexuality. It was about how two adults tried, with varying degrees of grace, to exit a family created more from convention, from social pressures, than from love or lust. To exit a family that didn’t fit, with two sons still in tow.

There was a lot of unhappiness, more than I cared to dwell on, and throughout my teens and 20′s I did what a lot of gay boys do, I too exited my family, the best I could, just like my brother had tried, unable even as a young writer to think of my family as particularly fertile material, and it wasn’t until my mom died, when I was thirty years old, that I turned around and looked back.  And began working on this book.

But if my family has remained, if not completely unique, then at least fairly unusual on its surface, the consequences of our particular kind of unhappiness are common to every family. The pull between social obligation and authenticity. The need for attention. The pain of abandonment. Favored sons, scape goats, and black sheep. The baffling power of parents to reduce grown men to little children again within ten minutes at Thanksgiving dinner.

Unhappy families are so common now as to appear the norm. Friends with happy childhoods speak of their families with a tone of quiet apology, as if they’d been graced with unfair luck.

It took a while, but after my parents’ exit they each created a new family, with same-sex partners and stepkids, each with its own particular laws of physics – each with days both happy and not.

Tolstoy’s opening sentence is quoted often, no doubt because it feels, to many people, true. Maybe your family was happy like other happy families, or unhappy in its own way. Maybe your family, those lovely, frustrating, adoring, infuriating people, fell outside the lines of convention.  How did they form you?

Before the internal editor and the censor and the sentimentalist kick in, what do you think of, when you think of your family?

The nice Asian girl at the bagel shop points at my splint. “Still hurt?” she asks. I nod. She says, “I think you have lost weight, no?” Cue my creeping look of horror. Does she mean good weight or bad weight? Gay weight or straight weight? Is she talking about my face or my shrinking biceps? I want to reach across the counter and shake her for the answer but the CULTURAL DIVIDE BETWEEN US CANNOT BE OVERCOME!

I’m writing this now – a vain, deeply impatient man half-crazed by a deficit of endorphins.

Last Friday I drove down to South San Francisco on a very early Friday morning for an appointment with a hand therapist, scheduled by my surgeon, only to be told by the embarrassed hand therapist that she could do nothing for me until after the surgeon pulled the three pins out of my wrist. Minutes later I was ushered out of the lobby into a back hallway, after I’d begun yelling at a flustered cast technician who’d just given me diametrically opposing information about the procedure for replacing the dingy splint, catching and pulling now against the heads of the three pins sticking out of my wrist, that her co-worker had given me two weeks back.

Later I found myself sitting in an exam room, deeply ashamed and confused by my behavior.

I tried to talk myself back into a state of humility with the fact that the combined doctor and ER visits, pharmacy runs, and surgery had cost me less than $1000.

I’ve wrestled with my impatience, driving the Manly Fireplug to softball practice where I watch from the stands.  I nodded, as if I agreed, when a friend told me that there is always next season, thinking to myself that having watched my mother die at the age of 55, I no longer think that there will always be a next time.

I then tried to remind myself that we were talking about D league gay softball and, like, chill out, dude.

For perspective I told myself that I do not live, say, in Japan. I’ve never seen a tsunami or an exploding nuclear power plant. These thoughts distracted me about as long as you’d guess.

I wrote a story for a local magazine, cobbled together from this blog, about my first season playing softball. Just before I sent it to the editor, I cut out the part about breaking my wrist in the Vegas tournament, because I didn’t want people to pick up on my self-pity.

I decided to be a little less vain here.

My team had their first games of the season, a double header, bright and early this past Sunday. I drove the Fireplug to the field and stood on the sidelines, shivering a bit in the cold morning air, recognizing the nervous looks on some of my newer teammates’ faces.

I’d gone the whole last season, my first season ever, avoiding base coaching, always a bit unsure of the rules. But this year, without anything else to do, I stepped in, figuring like everything else in softball the best way to learn was to just throw myself into it and make a few mistakes.

I stood there just outside the foul line, watching where each of my teammates hit the ball and gauging how far they should run, signaling to them to stop, or to look, or to just plain run. And after each single I’d slap their shoulder and tell them good job, and when the next guy hit I’d tell them to run. “Go,” I’d say. “Go, go go.”

Wednesday, it turns out, is the craziest day of the week at Kaiser Permanente’s South San Francisco surgical department. Or so I was told, by a rather nervous, green-seeming nurse who finally called me from the exceedingly packed and increasingly cranky waiting room, where the Manly Fireplug and I had been sitting for over two hours. Thirty minutes prior, I had clicked off Angry Birds in a huff, stormed up to the receptionist, and pointedly asked when she thought I might be getting my wrist cut open. She shrugged and said, “Many people today.”

“Fine,” I said. “But can I ask you a favor?”

She regarded me warily. “What is it?”

I pointed at the waiting room television. “I haven’t eaten anything in over fourteen hours, according to the surgeon’s directions, so could you please for the love of God TURN OFF THE FOOD NETWORK?!?”

Behind me the waiting room erupted in a chorus of “AMEN!”s and the receptionist scurried to the TV in order to stave off the insurrection.

I didn’t bother saying to the nurse who finally called my name the obvious, i.e. maybe they should schedule fewer surgeries on Wednesdays, for fear of losing my place in line. Instead I stripped down to the hospital gown, kissed the Fireplug good-bye, and slipped into la-la land as the anaesthesiologist injected into my IV line what she called “the good stuff.”

Three hours later I woke in the recovery room, where another very nice nurse monitored my vital signs and asked me two separate times if I wanted any apple or grape juice. Parched and groggy, I nodded and croaked “grape.” She brought me apple. Later the Fireplug returned from the pharmacy with a bottle of different good stuff and some grape juice, and took me home. That is one of the reasons why I love him.

For the surgery they had “blocked” my entire left arm, which when released from its sling flopped around with a mind of its own like something out of a horror movie. I propped it up on a pillow and was joined on the couch by the Fireplug and our three dogs for a couple episodes of our new favorite show, “Friday Night Lights,” even though lately the show makes me mourn for the recent loss of softball, now that the season’s beginning.

Of course we’d been given separate and conflicting instructions for pain management by doctor, anaesthesiologist, nurses, and take-home instructions. But as a slight tingle returned to my left arm, I downed two Percocet and figured I’d be fine.

Flash-forward an hour, when I grabbed the phone from the Fireplug, who was speaking in a tense voice to a Kaiser advice nurse, and yelled into the receiver, “THIS IS A TEN, OKAY? ON YOUR CUTE LITTLE PAIN SCALE OF ONE TO TEN THIS IS A FUCKING TEN!” I then handed the phone back to the distraught Fireplug, and went back to pacing around the house, grunting, as the dogs stared at me with wide eyes.

I am going to risk immodesty here by saying that I began to imagine how Jesus Christ must have felt, crucified, his wrists hammered onto that cross.

Flash-forward forty-five minutes, to the San Francisco Kaiser’s ER, where they very slowly unwrapped my bloody splint to check on the condition of the surgical site, and where a total surprise awaited me and the Fireplug. You see, when the surgeon told us, post-operation, that he had opted for three pins to hold my wrist together, we both imagined that these three pins were internal. But in the ER we discovered three pins sticking OUT OF MY WRIST, beside a long jagged stitched-up scar.

“Oh,” I said.

Long story short, the surgery itself was deemed successful, and a very nice Russian nurse named Vladimir or Nikolai or something injected me with Dilaudid every twenty minutes until my senses returned to something closer to normal. I really grew to love Vladimir or Nikolai, you know, as a person, and later I grew especially fond of a charmingly funny nurse named Riley who wheeled me into a private room around three a.m. Considering the last time I ended up in Kaiser’s ER, the night my lung just up and spontaneously collapsed for no good reason, I now have a soft spot in my heart for all of Kaiser’s male ER nurses.

Several hours later the surgeon said he had told both of us to give me as much Percocet as I needed that first night, (“I mean, I did re-break your wrist, you know”) but I suppose we’d had a lot of conflicting info thrown at us in a few short hours. I took a couple of days off from work and watched a lot of bad television, which I fortunately don’t remember, just like I barely remember taking the photo above, but then pictures don’t lie. For those of you who enjoy ugly photos, here’s a link to a photo of my wrist, post-sugery, unwrapped. The rest of you I’ll spare.

Back to work tomorrow, mildly dazed and perfectly agreeable.