Our Merit is in the Value of That Which We Put at Hazard

Parcel

2011-11-02T21:47:00.003-04:00

Of these things there’s little dispute: she was enraged; she threatened a woman (a friend? a confidant? a passerby?); she brandished two knives; she was shot & killed by Harlem police officers, one of whom emptied his gun; she walked with a cane; she was a lesbian; she was homeless; she was mentally ill; she was my father’s first cousin. And because her mother said I don’t want that shit in my apartment, I’ll carry her ashes back to NC in my suitcase, when I visit my family come Thanksgiving.

JUST NOW

2010-12-05T20:52:00.002-05:00

I suffer from non-site-specific restlessness & after sitting for two hours in front of my computer, unable to concentrate on anything other than gay sex sites, I decided to go for a walk. I walked west on East 5^th to Avenue C, north on C to East 12^th, and west on 12^th to Broadway & The Strand. There I bought Patti Smith's Just Kids, now out in paperback. I then waked north on Broadway to 14^th and east on 14^th to Trader Joe’s, where I sampled the chile spiced pineapples, before settling on my stand-bys: chile spiced mangoes & sesame honey cashews. Continuing east along 14^th, I missed the light at 2^nd Avenue & while I waited on the curb for the (north-bound?) traffic to stop, a man stepped close to my left side. However, he didn’t step as close to me as I’d anticipated & in stepping to my right to give him space, I overcompensated. So it seemed as if I’d jumped to my right to avoid standing next to him in particular – when I’d never really looked at him at all, I’d simply sensed someone walking up & stepped aside. Awkward. Very cold & very awkward. Waiting through a very long (north-bound?) green light. Having, on more than one occasion, watched in disbelief as people abruptly crossed the street, seemingly to avoid me, I was giving myself the business for having given this total stranger the impression that I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. And while I’m castigating myself, the man to my left, at whom I’ve, still, not really looked (but at whom I’d looked enough to know that he's white, bearded & likely younger than 30), takes two steps over until he is centimeters away from my left side & lays his head on my shoulder (close up, he smelled of alcohol &, if not homelessness, then certainly the street). And he kept it there until the light changed. At which point he stepped into the street & walked away.

I love New York.

THIS & THAT

2010-11-06T14:05:00.010-04:00

Anomie or You Don't Win The Kentucky Derby With Mules

Yesterday, SB, a photographer friend who took the single best post-pubescent photograph of me, sent me an email part of which read: Making art is hard, eh? Yes. And lately, it has (also) felt like dialing my land-line from a cell phone, in the hope that someone will answer & tell me exactly what it is I need to hear, most. When, in fact, I live alone & the house is empty. No matter how I arrange them, the words are mine; I am their product. And I am the only revelation my writing can (or will ever) reveal. I am not a valid appraiser of my merits as a writer or a man.

For the past eight years, I have really loved my beard – its wisps of grey lend a dash of unkempt & butch gravitas to my narrow, contrary frame – but, suddenly, somehow I have developed beard fatigue. No matter my beard’s length, it is the wrong length & unsatisfactory. It is only because my clean-shaven face is even more unsatisfactory that I persist with the beard. Though I hope it will begin to grown on me, again, soon.

Survivalist Porn

I am (mildly) perturbed by the popularity of the castaway-themed reality programs: Survivorman, Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, Man, Woman, Wild & Survivorman. These shows, to which I collectively refer as Survivalist Porn, differ from the long-running Survivor in that they are not competition-based & do not offer a prize. Education is their purported purpose. Stranded in the Georgian (the former Soviet satellite not the Peach State) wilderness or on Motukitiu or a Scottish peat bog with only your pluck, a paper clip, a length of rope, a tin cup, a pocket knife & a camera crew? Here is your prescription for survival – assuming, of course, that the serious calamity that has left you stranded, also, has caused you no physical injury.

(I lack whatever muscle is necessary to find these programs anything but annoying. But then, I don’t enjoy, or do, a number of things that other perfectly reasonable people do & enjoy – like touching, tomatoes & driving. And I quite enjoy oddities like beets & flossing.)

Perhaps the lingering economic downturn & our stuttering, anemic recovery lend these shows their appeal. Perhaps the view of your neighbors’ foreclosed properties, from inside a home threatened by foreclosure, is best balanced by a manicured presentation of an even greater catastrophe.

Archival

Imagine that you’re sitting in a slightly shabby examination room, explaining to your best friend’s aunt, a nurse who has a daughter exactly your age, whom you’ve known since junior high, that for several weeks you’ve ignored your left testicle’s awful ache; that you’ve felt a periodic & stabbing pain in your taint; that it pains you to piss & (even more) to ejaculate; that your frangible, hard-won sleep is interrupted by multiple trips to the head.

So went my Monday morning.

There’s a scene in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, during which the fur-wrapped doyenne gazes out of the back driver’s-side window of a limousine & confesses that life is mean. And it is (often unnecessarily so). But it’s also sly, tart & oddly pleasing.

Reprise

2010-02-19T17:54:00.007-05:00

An old, favored sweater spared a spot in the toss pile, by a few well-placed stitches.

The push past nigglingly voracious doubts, toward goals writ on more than water.

A courting (& cultivation) of perspective & voice & audience.

Yes, when no, is more than sufficient.

Our deepest desire aims at transformation.

Tone-deafness & (Reactionary) Imprecision, Do Not A Racist Make

2010-01-11T14:08:00.005-05:00

Given the current brouhaha over his comments concerning, then candidate, Obama’s light-skinned appeal & lack of ‘Negro dialect’, Senator Reid likely can’t wait for the nation’s attention to turn, again, to the contentious business of reconciling the Senate’s health care legislation with the bill passed by the House.

While Reid’s use of ‘Negro’ (a term often deployed by my grandmother in response to my more fanciful requests: Grandma, may I have $20? Negro, please.) was no doubt tone-deaf & more than a little reactionary, it wasn’t racist. Racism is a mortal offense that requires more than insensitivity & imprecision. And how duplicitous is it of Republicans, the party of ‘Barack the Magic Negro’, to call for Reid’s resignation? Furthermore, I agree with the senator’s assertions, if not their articulation. I believe, as I believe myself to be 5’10.5”, & 131.7lbs when buck naked, that if Obama were as dark-skinned as I am or married to anyone other than a black woman, he never would have been elected to the Illinois senate. Much less, the presidency. Reid shared a hoary, ugly, poorly-kept secret.

Would that all my fellow citizens maintained deep, abiding multi-racial (gender, sexuality) friendships. For while such relationships aren’t without mysteries & their attendant misunderstandings, they afford an authentic & safe space for dialogue. Instead, & all too often, we have classmates & colleagues, about whom we know next to nothing, & we err in assuming that their experiences are identical, or wholly antithetical, to our own.

Recently, the, white, ex-boyfriend of a, black, friend asked me if ‘African-American’ & ‘black’ were inter-changeable & if not, why. It was one of the best questioned I’d been asked in some time.

Christmas Miscellanies

2009-12-21T16:40:00.011-05:00

It's the Monday before Christmas & my disbelief in Santa & sugar-plumb fairies has been displaced by a waning faith in President Obama & the Democrats in Congress. An escalation of our war effort in Afghanistan all without evidence of any coherent strategy that doesn't smell of malarkey & double-speak; haphazard (& potentially worse than the devil we now know) health care legislation; toothless financial regulation legislation -we continue to genuflect before the Titans of Wall Street & Big Business. 'Round & 'round we go.

*************************

It's now the Monday after Christmas. I'm again alone in AB's apartment in Chapel Hill after spending Thursday through Sunday afternoon safe in the bosom of RM's family. Last Christmas, my only wish was to be elsewhere when the holiday rolled around again. That wish was granted. And not in the manner, or location, that I'd imagined but sometimes we are the beneficiaries of gifts which exceed our limited imaginings.

*************************

Vic Chesnutt , a singer-songwriter whose music I love & admire, died on Christmas after having taken an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier in the week. Such suicides open little fissures that were long ago filled in & smoothed over. The notion of death by my own hand seems (only) minutely less impossible. I too have lingering chronic lingering health issues - though of a nature & severity different than Chesnutt's - & am without the means to have them adequately addressed. I often feel burdensome, irresolute. If all of this proved after all to be both too little & too much for Vic Chesnutt perhaps I'm simply wasting my time.

************************

At 35.5, I've still no access to the normative meaning in (& for) my life. If such a thing even exists.

Chapel Hill

2009-12-09T01:20:00.007-05:00

With walls so thin I can hear the upstairs neighbors snore & fuck, this apartment isn't conducive to sleep or secrets: (Once) I fancied myself a contender.

Odd that I should consider weeks of isolation in an absent friend's apartment, in a city with which I'm largely unfamiliar (a city best traversed by car, despite its bus system) a curative to my quotidian loneliness. Funny the comforts one can find in the margins of someone else's failing life.

I'm exhausted (& bored) by my rampant insecurities.

I can't return to my old life. Any of them.

Gobble, Gobble

2009-11-25T22:23:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. More than sixty relatives, all dressed in matching t-shirts specially designed for the occasion, brown with an orange cornucopia & brown lettering, will gather in my youngest aunt’s white Colonial Revival house. I thought the t-shirt idea stupid but knew enough not to say so. I expressed my opposition by ordering a large child-sized shirt rather than the small adult-sized shirt my aunts were pushing.

You’d likely not guess it, but I’m a real sucker for Thanksgiving. I can be quite the glutton when the occasion dictates. And I’m not above wanting to feel like I belong – especially if the group is raucous & rollicking. And my family is. I’m even working on a Thanksgiving poem. It includes ruminations on the ending of Blood Meridian, about which I’ve been thinking a lot since receiving an email from my friend BD on the subject, so I doubt that when (or if) it’s finished it will become part of anyone’s holiday vernacular.

Marathon

2009-10-11T14:56:00.002-04:00

I volunteered on behalf of, & voted for, Barack Obama. However, I’ve spent the majority of his presidency miffed due to his so far abysmal record on Gay Rights. What of the rapid repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell & the Defense of Marriage Act? Would the anti-hate crimes legislation named for Matthew Shepard continue to flounder & sputter? How long, in this era of ‘Yes We Can,’ would justice for GLBT community continue to be delayed & denied?

Last night, purely by chance, I came across Obama’s keynote address at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner. And in the course of that speech, fifteen minutes tops, all of my anger was assuaged. Though imperfect, President Obama is the best advocate the GLBT community has ever had in the White House – & that isn’t the same as saying he sweats less than any fat girl with whom we’ve ever danced. His sincere commitment to equality hasn’t waiver as evidenced by his announcement that, after ten years, the Matthew Shepard Act had garnered enough support in the Senate to pass, & that he would soon sign it into law. Still our progress in correcting searing injustices has been incremental & more piecemeal than it seemed to him it would be, during halcyon days on the campaign trail.

But the world economy fell off a cliff. And health care reform has come to resemble trench warfare. Add Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq & worldwide terror cells to the mix & I ‘d bet my testicles (of which I’m inordinately fond) Obama gets to bed much later than his predecessor’s 9:30. Being gay doesn’t inoculate me from these concerns. And they aren’t excuses for inactivity, but the reality of life in the 21st Century.

The GLBT community has had great success in its fight for recognition, equality & acceptance, but hundreds of thousands of good people remain unconvinced. If granted the power, my entire family (save a handful) wouldn’t think twice about de-gaying me. Not out of a lack of love but due to excessive judgment & a dearth of understanding. These same people would also cut anyone who wanted to do me harm. There’s no rhyme or reason.

So, in recognizing that he has a lot on his plate & that nothing of merit can be achieved without the efforts of a large group of like minded elected officials, I’m extending the olive branch to President Obama.

ii

Still, color me gob smacked that, in a year of a record number of nominees (205), President Obama won the 2009 Noble Peace Prize. The Peace Prize, unlike T-ball trophies, isn’t an aspirational award. It ought be awarded following a sustained period of actual achievement. The nomination process closed just two weeks after Obama’s inauguration – barely enough time for him to become fully familiar with all of the toilets & exits in the White House, much less do anything to warrant this honor. Had Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination & the general election, it’s likely she would have won the 2009 Noble Peace Prize, the peculiar bestowal of which rebukes George Bush’s presidency rather than lauds Obama’s.

But as only the third African-American & third sitting president to be named a Noble Peace Laureate, I guess pulling a Marlon Brandon, who declined his 1973 Best-Actor Academy Award, wasn’t feasible.

One Need in the Night

2009-09-26T20:23:00.005-04:00

During U2’s concert at Carter-Finley Stadium, in Raleigh, on 3 October 2009, I’m scheduled to man a booth for the ONE campaign. ONE aims to end global poverty; I added my name to one of their online petitions two (?) years ago. On Thursday, I answered their call for volunteers, never anticipating I’d be one of the 100 selected. On further reflection, they likely received but 100 volunteers (if 100). And now, I’m fucked – forced to concoct an emergency to get myself out of a snare I could have ( so easily) avoided.

I’ve not given U2 much consideration since I was a senior in high school. They released Achtung Baby on 19 November 1991, I bought the cassette during Thanksgiving vacation & listened to it with the same concentration & commitment an OCD germaphobe devotes to hand washing. “Love Is Blindness,” "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World,” "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," "Until the End of the World," & especially “One” were my favorite tracks.

Weekends I’d bum rides to a town several towns over & attend parties frequented by skate punks. Parties not without narcotics & (often-warm) purloined hooch. In his pool house, for several consecutive weekends, this kid featured a local band. Young, to-varying-degrees-affluent-&-disgruntled, they performed their own loud maudlin songs plus three covers: “Jane Says,” “Driver 8,” & “One.” During the covers, (seemingly) the entire party moved as one cohesive organism. First, forward – as close to the makeshift stage without breaching it & then left & right – surrounding it.

We raised our arms. We sang along. We danced – or what passes for dancing when it is very dark & one is very young & all true transgressions lie far ahead.

Jubilee

2009-09-24T16:22:00.003-04:00

I’ve just watched Gay Sex in the 70s, a documentary of NYC gay life & culture between the Stonewall Riots of 1969 & the onset of the AIDS-era in the early 1980s. Beyond the sheer depth & breadth of sexual activity, the mentality of the time was most edifying. The shackles were loosed, the stone rolled away from cave’s mouth & in poured sunlight, freedom & hardcore man-on-man love. Even decades & a technological revolution removed from the period, wisps of joy circulated within & emanated from the men interviewed about their halcyon days of youth. They all seemed so liberated.

Watching the film, I became a little envious. Not of butt fucking a stranger on an abandoned dilapidating peer or a dank dark semi truck trailer – I’ve come plenty close to that – rather of the joy. It's residue & repercussions.

I love nothing more than writing poems, more so than ever before (including the fevered reckless period during which I wrote my first book). And, these days, I’m better at it. Still my poetry lacks some essential expression. I’ve given joy – the acknowledgement & expression of – short shrift. I’ve been less given to praise than I ought be. I don’t know how best to speak of joy without falling prey to sentimentality. The words required are less familiar & comfortable. So I avoid them altogether. I resolve to change.

I’ll always be more glass-half-empty than Pollyanna, but perhaps the glass will (sometimes) contain chocolate soy milk or Luna & Larry’s Coconut Bliss Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge. Joyful or not, I remain lactose intolerant.

A Promise of Tomorrows

2009-09-23T17:52:00.001-04:00

I wanted to write something about The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, Grey Gardens – the original documentary & the Emmy-winning adaptation starring Jessica Lange & Drew Barrymore – & (unscientifically of course) the various & varying manifestations of locked-in syndrome.

But when I sat down at my desk, all I came to me was: I was never led to believe that when I grew up, I could be anything I wanted to be. I don’t recall references to any future save the immediate future – seven to ten days (then) hence. Our present was too uncertain.

I remain (somewhat) long-range averse & am most comfortable with negative (personal) projections & speculation.

I’m trying to resuscitate my life: a job & a clean well-lighted place in New York. But my belief in the possibility of such resuscitation waivers. I fear my talents are irrelevant. That there’s no word for people like me in today’s lexicon. KW – hot, bow-legged, wise (& oddly single) – assures me that mine is the fear of inexperience. And that it will pass.

I’ve crossed my fingers.

And The Winner Is?

2009-09-21T00:34:00.007-04:00

So, I spent the past 183 minutes watching the 61st annual prime-time Emmy Awards telecast & its associated commercials. A total fool’s errand considering of the nominated shows & performances, I was familiar with perhaps four. Ten tops. While I was pleased to see Glenn Close, Toni Collette, Bryan Cranston & 30 Rock win, I watched because I’m a sucker for almost any awards show – I draw the line at the ESPYs – & I’ve had more than one erotic dream of late in which Simon Baker & Aaron Paul have featured very prominently.

What impressed me most about the long-winded-but-deftly-hosted shindig was the depth & breadth of its whiteness. And not just in terms of one-screen talent, that’s something with which I’m wholly familiar, but also behind the camera – the writers’ rooms in particular.

As a writer, I’m most concerned with the plight of (& employment opportunities for) writers. But for the collective crews of 30 Rock & The Daily Show with Jon Stewart nary a writer of any color would have basked in, what was at best, reflected glory. In fact, unless I missed someone while taking a piss around the 98-minute mark & again at the 160th, all of the nominated writers were white. And mostly male.

Are colored people un-funny? Are they not-serious? And therefore lack the necessaries needed to write scripted comedies, dramas & mini-series?

Are white folks really the very best at everything?

And what's a blue-black writer like me to do?

Watch less television?

Leave The Driving To Us

2009-08-30T20:55:00.018-04:00

Once a week, for several consecutive weeks, I’ve taken Greyhound the sixty-five some odd miles from Fayetteville to Raleigh. I’m met at the Raleigh bus depot – is there some rule that depots must be housed on Skid Row, on penalty of death? – by my friend, AB, who lived in Raleigh for almost ten years before decamping for Chapel Hill following a recent (mildly) torturous break-up.

During these trips, I often seem to be the only passenger without: someone hot on his trail; a childhood too terrible to mention, but mentioned all the same; a former & / or ongoing addiction; a (homemade?) neck tattoo; a cell phone with an annoying ring-tone; fluency in a South Asian language; a penis in constant need of adjustment; a flair for small, indelicate talk spoken loudly; a hungry-&-therefore-churlish, questionably-chaperoned child.

I look neither to the left nor to the right & occupy myself with reading.

The Stakes

2009-08-23T14:21:00.014-04:00

When it comes to suicide, those who truly wish to die, die. For them, death isn’t the last resort, but the first & only refuge.

The true recipe for Russian roulette requires a bullet in every chamber. Lacking such fortitude, the rest (of us) only play at dying.

Juvenilia

2009-08-15T16:33:00.004-04:00

Around this time last year, I resolved to re-read all the books that I’d loved as an adolescent (minus the Danielle Steele novels with which I was inexplicably smitten in the seventh grade). I completed my task this afternoon at 2:37.

I’ve loved books my entire life. The Book Fair was always my favorite day of school. Still, I was surprised how gratifying it was to return to books I’d long since "outgrown."

Of course, The Outsiders, I Am the Cheese, The Black Stallion (in its myriad iterations), The Mists of Avalon et al., when read on the backside of thirty-five, aren’t the same books I read between the ages of eight & thirteen. But they remain very good books. In much the same way that lightning, seen on the Plains, or in Manhattan, retains its magnificence.

Clean?

2009-08-05T15:32:00.002-04:00

My official test results are in & I’m HIV negative. (Nor do I have syphilis, Chlamydia or gonorrhea.) I didn’t think I was HIV positive, but feared I might be. Earlier this year, repeatedly over the course of one weekend, I broke my condoms always & forever rule with a meth-addled actuary.

Although I’d rolled on a condom (careful to pinch the tip, leaving space for ejaculate) like a reflex every other time I’d fucked someone, not using one was really easy. And it felt great.

I’ve had assignations with many men (boyfriends, husbands, fathers, priests) in many situations (one-on-one, in groups, on beaches, in bars & saunas) but can count with one finger the times I’ve felt ashamed of myself afterwards. A shame unassuaged by my recent clean bill of health.

3:10 to Yuma

2009-08-03T18:44:00.005-04:00

Thanks to Netflix, I spent yesterday watching the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma. Few pieces of American iconography command the reverence reserved for the cowboy (with the possible exception of the bald eagle). The gun-toting horseman making his way through a lawless land represents self-determination and self-reliance – notions integral to the American mythology.

Yet at its core, 3:10 to Yuma is a family film. Not a film for families, but rather about family. Dan Evans’ desire to save his ranch & spare his sons shame, makes it impossible for him to forgo the opportunity to earn $200. No matter how dangerous the work. The outlaw Ben Wade, due to his own less-than-ideal relationship with his parents, grows sympathetic to Dan's motivations – if not to his actions. Even the Civil War, of which Dan is a casualty & whose legacy permeates the film, is rumored to have pitted brother against brother.

If the lessons of the film are to be taken at face value, we accept that one can find kinship with the most unlikely people, in the most dire & violent situations. Duty often overrides discretion. Redemption is steeped in blood. All & all, America is a wonderfully brutal land.

Similar opinions are articulated throughout American literature. Consider the exhaustive hunt for Melville’s White Whale; the endemic brutality of James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales; Flannery O'Connor's magnolia-scented grotesques. (And then there's Cormac McCarthy...) For these authors, America’s violence is related to its desire to achieve two goals that sometimes come into direct conflict : freedom & the full participation in a living cosmos. The United States has developed, not merely a single great poetic work, or a theory, but an entire culture & habit intimately familiar with the intricacies of violence. Do we as a nation have a particular cultural understanding of violence?

To deny that America’s economic success and heritage are tied, at least partially, to a legacy of thralldom, conquest & bloodshed would be to deny the Dead Sea’s salinity. But what do we make of that legacy? And what is to be made from such a legacy? The Puritans, upon their arrival in 1620, sought to create a fresh start, a renaissance, a dream larger than any obstacle could oppose. Violence ensued as an unpremeditated consequence of this commitment to a regenerative dream when it turned out that the obstacles to its fulfillment were not only land, weather & wild animals, but people.

Over time, the acceptance of the probity of violence, combined with a desire for economic prosperity & the belief that non-white races were savages, provided the buttresses for the American slave trade. Westward expansion made America an inverted image of Europe in that it removed the protective social facades, accumulated over centuries, which had kept men from coming face to face with each other’s stark existential demands. On the frontier there was very little to prevent settlers from laying bare one another’s throats.

Here, the entire problem of civilization has had to be faced anew, repeatedly. Our primary tensions are between freedom and law, between nature & civilization, between the individual & society.

We citizens of the post 9/11 world are acutely aware of the pains associated with these tensions.We struggle to codify the best balance between civil liberties & the need for heightened security, personal responsibility & government assistance, to protect domestic industries in this era of globalization – to preserve freedom not only in word but in deed.

But freedom is a strange, ornery taskmaster. Unlike life on the frontier, it requires more than a fine horse and saddle –& the ability to shoot someone who out drew you.

MOSES

2009-07-18T00:29:00.004-04:00

And Moses lifted up his hand…and he smote the rock
-- Numbers 21:11

To speak with the fist is a desecration
of language, a corrupt gospel.

And I could not crossover into the land
of milk, honey & promise. I came as close

(went as far) as my god would allow.
I could almost hear the singing.

AUBADE

2009-07-18T00:26:00.002-04:00

The house is cold & quiet. It is that time of year.
Three brown-skinned men clear the neighbor’s yard
of autumn’s byproducts – dead branches, leaves –
their laughter & indistinct singing overlays
the whirr of leaf blowers & the raking rakes. Squirrels
dash, stop, stare – cautious lest they lead trouble
back to their nests. The geese on the lake tarry just
long enough to catch a collective breath. All the backyard
apples are heavy & windfall – perfect for the grey mare
& her constant companion, the black pygmy goat.
But for strong-brewed coffee, I’d be lulled back to sleep.

This is a good life. (I would gladly trade it for worse.)

No One Wants to be Defeated

2009-07-08T14:03:00.003-04:00

Michael Jackson is dead. And I’d intended to write about the day (Tuesday 10 September 1996) I attended his concert in Budapest’s Nepstadion Intezmenyi with a horse-hung Hungarian I’d met & fucked in a bar bathroom the weekend before. More than forty-five thousand people & Rangi the only colored person in sight, fans dressed like Michael through the ages (from little afroed-mocha Michael, to the adult milky-white Michael) who cried & fainted like Pentecostal women who’ve been visited by the Holy Spirit. How I screamed my pleas for Human Nature, PYT & Man In The Mirror & counted myself fortunate to have heard two of the three. How during the Thriller encore, everyone around me began to dance &, though I’d intended to remain still, we were packed so tightly together that my feet momentarily left the ground & I thought it wise to get with the program. How when the stadium lights came up, the concert officially over, I closed my eyes & stood stock-still trying to commit every moment to memory. But that story was too cumbersome & unruly to be (properly & adequately) condensed.

The Culture Of The Past

2009-06-24T22:16:00.006-04:00

The year that I lived in Chicago working as a 19-year-old full-time volunteer for The United Farm Workers’ Of America – until I quit to work for Rocky Mountain Bagels in their Lincoln Park location – was the only period in my life during which I’ve consistently kept a journal. Re-reading it, I often want to vomit or punch myself in the nuts. Or both. At the risk that you’ll feel the same, here are some selections from June 1994.

24 June 1994
7:13am
When we fuck, I want there to be some doubt that we’ll both make it out alive.

11:18am
No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by water-drinkers.
- Horace

4:30pm
My trouble is portable.

11:12pm
Given my track record, it's unlikely he'd follow me into the next room. But guilt is for the weak.

26 June 1994
11:14pm
I should leave people alone: stop fucking up their lives in my quest to satisfy myself. I don’t lack love, but control & am duly dangerous.

27 June 1994
12:07am
A fine line separates critical, suspicious & paranoid.

9:15am
I’m not an eater. I mean I like food, good food especially, but if I had to make a list of my ten favorite activities, eating wouldn’t be mentioned – not unless giving & receiving blow jobs were listed under one number instead of appearing one after the other. At 5’10.5” & 120lbs, hunger can’t hold a candle to my aversion to chewing. Chewing is so pedestrian.

2:00pm
We’re told never look back. Such advice is without merit, it’s human nature to look back. To look up, down & to the side. What’s crucial is that one always move forward – if only by inches – no matter where one's gaze rests. Move forward. Move forward.

9:37pm
…all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea.
--Melville Moby Dick

11:41pm
I’m prone to failures of the spirit.

30 June 1994
12:01pm

COLD COMFORT
Perhaps this heart was pre-owned –
calcified & archival, it beats less.
But no less, true.

That Which Can Be Held, Isn't Worth Holding

2009-06-12T13:50:00.005-04:00

If I had my druthers, the real world would more closely resemble the world in my heart. And today I’d be celebrating my mother’s 55th birthday with her, rather than hitching a ride to Patterson Cemetery so that I might sit next to her fire-ant infested grave. (It's hot out.) The cemetery is family-owned; the fire ants have survived all attempts at eradication.

When I was a kid, I relished the fact that my birthday & my mother’s were but six days apart. It was for me a sign of our bond – a naturally occurring equivalent to the secret handshake. Mother was the person I loved certainly best (if not only). And I’d no doubt that she loved me in return, despite the fact that she understood me no better than did a stranger on the street. Being her son made me no less a mystery to her &, oft times, a mystery with nightmarish undertones.

Perhaps the capacity to love, without judgment, they who baffle & infuriate is given only to parents (& even then selectively). I don’t endeavor to know. But sitting here at my computer, awash in the memory of love unconditional, I can speak of its benefits, no matter how brief the exposure.

I’LL TAKE SELF-PITY FOR $2000, ALEX

2009-05-30T19:34:00.005-04:00

I wanted to tell the representative from the alumni
fundraising committee, who called during JEOPARDY!,

that I’ve a hole in my hard palate & a big wicker basket
filled with unpaid bills; that last night, around 10:45,

while attempting to reheat a slice of leftover bleu-cheese
pizza in Stella’s microwave, I’d fainted, cutting my temple

& breaking my good glasses on her kitchen’s reclaimed
hardwood floor; that I peaked too young & without

much notice & I am, once again, considering
razor blades in a piping-hot bath & questions of childhood.

The Door In Between

2009-05-12T15:47:00.003-04:00

Upon my return to NC, where for the first time in since I was a teenager I no longer lived in a bubble of my own like-mindedness, I found that I was quick to dismiss those with whom I disagreed & to gird myself in a sense of intellectual superiority. I was often as reactionary as everyone & everything I criticized & rejected. This realization came like a stiff, swift kick to the groin.

These days, I try (failing most often) to lead with my heart, to approach everyone with a generosity of spirit. I try to recall the issues & experiences that I don’t understand, & which give me pause, when presented with someone else’s lack of understanding. And there are many liberal “issues” (in this case, a grossly inadequate term but I can think of no other at this moment) I don’t understand – like being transgender. But my lack of understanding doesn’t retard my ability to support the transgendered in their fight & quest for recognition & civil rights. For some people understanding, or what they perceive as such, is integral to their support. For better or worse, I’m of a different breed. I can take it on faith that it's my understanding that's lacking.

Growing up, I believed in nothing. My acquisition of a belief system required very little dismantling – there were no relics, no detritus from the old ways. As I grew intellectually, so I grew morally. There was little friction when the rubber hit the road. However, my case is atypical. Most people are inundated with rules & regulations – moral & religious & otherwise from jump street (my family tried & I thought them full of shit, not to be trust & best ignored, almost from the very beginning). They spend their lives embracing, rejecting or replacing the rules they’ve inherited - these rules define not only their sense of self, but also their sense of the entire world. These rules are their gravity, their laws of motion.

Embracing the cause of gay marriage costs me nothing. But for someone immersed in an evangelical culture (to take but one example), where it is accepted that gays are bound for hell & damnation, the costs are much higher. In a reality where Moses was justly denied The Promised Land, after leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, through the Red Sea & around & around in the wilderness for forty years, for smiting rather than speaking to the rock – the fact that two guys are lovingly committed to one another is immaterial. The practice is wrong on its face, no matter how decent the participants. Obviously, I disagree. Still I try to bear in mind that for an evangelical to embrace my position she must reexamine every tenet by which she lives. If her position on gays is wrong then what about salvation, redemption, Heaven? Such scrutiny takes time. And to be honest, it’s unlikely I (less than a month away from 35) could now turn against all my beliefs, even if that turning against was a turn toward justice. It’s fortuitous that I’m already on the side of the angels. No?

It isn’t my intention to fashion fig leaves or excuses for the intolerant or the divisive. Only to suggest that we can learn from the nature & roots of someone’s intolerance. We are who we’ve become due to a slow process. Un-becoming is often duly slow & more painful. A gentle voice of opposition (while almost impossible to maintain) may garner more converts. A generosity of spirit is difficult to regret.

That being said, Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Ann Coulter et al can go fuck themselves with chainsaws.

ELEGY

2009-05-11T01:28:00.003-04:00

I was tempted to post a photograph of my bare ass,
under your name, on the BUTT magazine website.

The way that when drunk & high & following a stranger
from an East Village bar, back to his apartment, I would

(sometimes) say my name is Michael, like the archangel
only thinner & less the Blue Ray & the sword.

There’s a certain liberty in one-night stands,
to subway rides from the very first stop,

to the very last & back again. Remember?
The night we met, we climbed onto the roof

of that abandoned house in Montrose, smoking Camel Reds
& talking until dawn. You said the true fear of heights

isn’t the fear of falling, but the fear that you'll jump.
And I said, yes.

SAMSON

2009-05-11T01:21:00.003-04:00

I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother’s womb:
if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall
become weak, and be like any other man.
- - Judges 16:17

A cousin was born ashen & quiet, his viscera
on the outside of his body. At sixteen,

he died young & much older than had
been expected. Another was run over, on a

sidewalk in Midtown, by a diplomat’s son
who sent a check & a rose-covered

cross to her funeral. Lupus left my mother
speckled as a hyena, gnarled as ginger root.

Nothing betrays as the body betrays.
Not even, love? No, not even.

The Women

2009-05-03T17:23:00.003-04:00

My mother was one of nine children, seven girls & two boys. In addition, my grandparents had one extra-curricular daughter each – grandmother before she was married, granddaddy following the birth of their fourth child. Much of my childhood transpired under the penumbra of a clutter of women, enmeshed in its heat & humidity.

I love my aunts. But I don’t trust them (individually or en masse) with my feelings. Little of what I do resembles what they believe ought be done. And if the project meets with their approval, my methods are suspect. They think it odd that I’d like to know at what time I was born & if my labor was of little, middling, or great difficulty. (Such questions are of no consequence to them. Being alive is all that counts.) Add to that my fondness for cock, choice of an MFA in poetry writing over an MBA or stint in law school. The shattered medical-school dream is too painful to even mention. If I have a purpose, it remains hidden from them, shrouded in mystery & great peril.

Honestly, I’m no better a steward of their spirits. I’ve no religious fervor, no faith in the supernatural. I draw no comfort from the idea of Heaven. I’ve energies insufficient for the manifestation of mundane miracles that lends credence to prayer & supplication. But I love peace (& if not peace then neutrality). When we grasp hands to say grace, I bow my head & count backwards from one hundred, hoping not to get past eighty-five before I can eat. I ask no question whose answer will be anything other than innocuous. The wonders of The Food Network have filled what otherwise would have been awkward & prolonged silences.

I used to try for more. To share with them my true self, but that only led to trouble. We couldn’t agree to disagree without someone (usually me) dealing from the bottom of the deck & saying something almost unforgivable. It pains me not that they pretend I’m straight, such an elaborate charade saps their strength, not mine. When they shut their eyes, they’re denied the view. I see just fine.

I know they’re not going to change. And I can’t trade them in, nor shoot them. I love these women very much. But I like them, not at all.

Our Deepest Desire Aims at Transformation

2009-04-26T00:05:00.003-04:00

I wasn’t born when either Kennedy was assassinated. I can’t recall what I was doing when I learned of the first OJ Simpson verdict, or Princess Diana’s death. I was on line (& on a date) at a Chicago movie theater when news of River Phoenix’s death broke. And I was in junior high when I first learned of AIDS. The now defunct Fayetteville Times ran an article about the gay cancer, Kaposi’s Sarcoma. The description of Kaposi lesions was so detailed that my mental picture of them stayed with me for days like a flu or low-grade fever.

When I enrolled at Rice, in 1992, the message in the Houston-area gay clubs was condoms, condoms, condoms, especially at Heaven, where one could get in free before midnight if he brought a canned good. Fish bowls of free condoms on the bar, in the bathrooms & at the front door, beside the register. I knew no one with AIDS.

During the fall of 1993, I began volunteering with a Chicago organization that delivered meals to people with AIDS. Every Wednesday at 5: 30 pm, my friend RB & I would meet in the Thorek Hospital cafeteria, where the meals were counted & dispersed. Each week we were given a list detailing the number & type of meals each client was to receive; the evening shift also delivered the following day’s breakfasts and lunches. Once we’d chosen & organized the meals according to delivery order, we loaded them into RB’s cobalt hatchback sports car (the exact type, I can’t recall) & were off. RB always drove & I always rang the doorbells & interacted with our clients: mothers, kids, gay, straight, dope fiends, teachers, black, white & in between.

I know it wasn’t the case, but I recall every home’s interior as dark. Stiflingly so. I may mis-remember the darkness, but not the palpable sense of despair. 1993 wasn’t a high water mark in AIDS treatment. Our clients weren’t living with, but dying from, AIDS. If I had but one word to describe all of our clients it would be thinnest. For even the doctor prescribed treatments came with wretched, debilitating side effects. And although we always serviced the same route, we almost never had the exact same list of clients from week to week. Lucky clients were repeatedly in & out of the hospital, the less-lucky died.

My journal entry written Wednesday 27 April 1994 at 8:30 pm:

Marlene is dead. Her kids, I’m assuming, in foster care. Last week they were all pressed together in that little apartment making so much noise, I could hardly stand them. The world is impossibly wrong. I wasn’t forewarned & am ill-equipped.

A Yellow Wood

2009-04-18T20:42:00.004-04:00

I’ve trouble tending my own flame. I struggle being enough for myself. (For starters, I’m poorer now than I was ten years ago). I could use an ovation or two. A serving of external validation -- with caramel sauce & clotted cream.

But my most recent dream, from which I’ve just awoken, included a fortune cookie that read: The desire for true brilliance & the desire to be thought brilliant are competing impulses. Choose.

Cavet Emptor

2009-04-11T16:43:00.006-04:00

Facebook ought include a preview option so that people who knew you from childhood might peek at your profile, before deciding to send you a friend request. A preview would prevent any (& often of late) delayed offense. For many, a peek would prove unequivocally that, though they recall your younger-self fondly, the adult version isn’t a good match for their real lives. And I would be saved having to respond to haranguing emails.

I'm from a small NC town. I’m an atheist, wretchedly liberal, foul-of-mouth & easy-of-body. My feelings toward the world are better expressed by www.someecards.com & www.asofterworld.com than any particular moral code. While I wish there were fewer, I support abortion at all times, in every case – no questions asked. And have paid for two. I think the institution of marriage can be startlingly sterile & hostile (if not outright malignant) but if my fellow gays want to get in on it – so be it. While very fond of the concept, I warm to actual children slowly, if at all. I support gun control, universal health care, comprehensive immigration reform (though nothing that includes fences or Minutemen) stem-cell research & gays in the military. I’ve visited every continent, but two & gone home with total strangers the world over. I’ve burned & rebuilt more than a few bridges.

I’m, now, closer to my true self than I’ve ever been before & had I been this guy growing up, I doubt very many old, local friends would be eager to reconnect. But I was some other guy & am saddled with all of his fond, wholly irrelevant, childhood memories.

Kismet?

2009-04-03T00:12:00.005-04:00

This afternoon my dear friend, LC, wrote & asked my opinion concerning soul mates. Specifically, if I believed we had but one particular soul mate somewhere adrift in the world awaiting a crossing of paths. I replied that I didn’t.

There are an estimated 1,335,962,133 people in China & 1,161,460,000 people in India out of a world population of 6,706,993,152. If I have but one soul mate, given these numbers, he’s likely a denizen of a rural Chinese province or an equally remote Indian outpost & is so beyond my considerable reach.

It has been said repeatedly by the wisest of wise, that we humans are more alike than we are different. Though these differences seem vast & palpable, there’s some room for substitution – a Robert for a Joe. None of us is so special (or ordinary) that there is but one key to our lock.

So says Mr. Chronically Single.

Egress

2009-03-28T01:16:00.004-04:00

I love airplanes & luggage. Departure gates & duty-free shops. Those strips of automatic walkway that help you move that much more hurriedly through airports. I’m better at leaving than remaining in one place.

I think of time as counting down – with one fewer day for every day that I’m alive. I always wanted to be & behave older than my actual age. When a teenager, I took my cousin’s school records & birth certificate to the DMV & had a state ID card with my photo & his birth date made (this was the early 1990s, the rules were much more lax) so that I could enjoy the spoils of life as a twenty-one year old. Now breathing down the neck of thirty-five, I'd like to hit pause. But not rewind, never rewind.

I’ve come to believe that there’s no such thing as a child who’s wise beyond his / her years. That that’s simply something adults say when they encounter a kid they don’t quite understand, one who’s relationship with or proximity to trauma renders adults ill at ease. Once I was often described as wise beyond my years. But I was only bluffing. Bluffing & very afraid. Of everything.

I’ve attempted suicide three times. Only the second attempt was a cry for help.

Know Thyself

2009-03-25T19:30:00.003-04:00

Before I realized that I was gay, I thought I was a late bloomer. I actually used that term to describe myself to myself – as much evidence of my gayness as a fondness for cock. I honestly believed that although I wasn’t then attracted to girls I would at some point in the future (& no doubt of a sudden) be smitten with them. I didn’t know that gay was an option. At the time, I was also the sole black friend among a gaggle of white children. And I understood, intrinsically, that I wouldn’t, under any circumstances, be kissing a white girl – not if I knew what was good for me.

In the seventh grade, I was caught in the boys’ bathroom with a copy of Playboy magazine. If memory serves, I’d gotten the magazine from PR, the son of my mother’s first cousin. Some older boy had given PR the magazine & I guess because we were cousins, he passed it to me. I didn’t understand all the fuss; two-dimensional vaginae weren’t particularly interesting. Hand to god, I was actually reading an article when Mrs. Wells burst in (on a tip?) to find me with the offending material. She threatened to call my mother, but never did.

In March 1988, perhaps an hour after my paternal grandmother’s (a woman I couldn’t stand & who couldn’t stand me – so much so that she never bothered to learn my name, calling me Lamont when my name, the name by which I’m known to relatives, is Lamar) funeral, I found a leather satchel filled-to-bursting with gay porn (& a dildo or two) in my Uncle Melvin’s closet – literally. A porno was also in the VCR. I’d retired to the bedroom because I'd a headache & needed a nap, but this newfound bounty made sleep impossible. Exactly how I came to rifle through Uncle Melvin’s private materials in his closet, I can’t now recall. But I’ve always been a rather nosey son-of-a-bitch.

Until that blessed day some twenty-one years ago, I’d never seen a penis other than my own & the sight of an erect adult cock was a wonder of wonders. Foreskin. Rimming. Butt sex. Fisting. Oh my… Though I was wildly interested in & aroused by the man sex in the videos & magazines (I even stole my uncle’s copy of the Jeff Stryker prison-themed video, Powertool) I still didn’t realize that I was gay. Or rather, I continued to be unaware that sexual attraction to men had its very own name & rulebook.

That knowledge came a couple of years later & what a welcomed realization it was.

Why I Write

2009-03-12T21:14:00.005-04:00

I’ve a hole in my hard palate. When I eat & drink, liquid & bits of foodstuff collect in & run from my nostrils. When I speak, it’s as if a clumsy rusted bucket has been placed over my head & I sound like Marlee Matlin (at least to myself). I’ve resolved to speak less. Thus far, doctors have been unable to determine the cause of my hole – though a CAT scan with contrast determined it’s not the result of a tumor. The hole is likely related to the recent loss of my four front teeth which fell out – whole & of a sudden (though not all at once): a real kick in the nuts after 4.5 years of braces & a lifetime of brushing & flossing.

I’m not unaccustomed to medical complications or setbacks. But this... The combination of mysterious origin & glaring, marked physical changes makes me feel defective – a sensation with which I’d prefer not to be acquainted.

Lately, my life feels (only) like uphill & steepness. And I’m in poor condition for such a climb.

Bygones

2009-03-05T01:12:00.005-05:00

With its rise, Facebook has ushered in an epidemic of retrograde amnesia. This particular & peculiar variant of the condition only affects social interactions that took place from birth up through high school graduation.

My Facebook friends list is peppered with cousins & littered with people from my hometown with whom I was anything but friends – including ten or so of whom I have no recollection whatsoever. (Likewise, one could infer from my list that I've a fair number of black friends from my hometown, but that would be inaccurate. Sorely.) In each case, these people reached out to me, suggesting that any actual history was mis-remembered and / or irrelevant. I accepted their requests largely out of curiosity (if we weren’t categorized as friends I couldn’t peruse their photographs & if I couldn’t peruse their photographs how would I know who’d gotten fat or married & reproduced ugly?) & a desire not to have but a handful of friends on a social networking site. (You wouldn’t know it from my behavior, but I embarrass easily & maintain a quite low shame threshold.)

I don’t communicate (regularly or irregularly) with any of these people, we simply pad one another’s friends total, but sometimes one of them posts something & I think what a fucking idiot. But with whom am I going to take issue? I accepted numb-nut’s friend request & as my grandmother said if you lie with dogs, you get fleas – she was pretty biased against dogs (especially inside dogs). (She also said don’t write a check with your mouth that your ass can’t cash but that isn’t really relevant in this situation.) Besides, I'm no angel. I'm far from an idiot, but no angel.

Thus far, I’ve only removed one person from my friends list – this short snarky dude I’d known in college who forced my hand. I’d thought I was fond of him having, as I do, a soft spot for snarkiness, but realized I'm similarly fond of Hungarian fish soup – in aroma only. Its flavor, texture & temperature make me gag.

But now that we’re no longer even Facebook friends, I wonder what he thought when my friend request, first, appeared in his inbox. You must be fucking kidding. Or, ah what the hell?

Thicker Than Water?

2009-02-22T19:42:00.004-05:00

Three days into my freshman year at Rice, I received a message from my grandmother’s youngest brother, Tommy, inviting me to his Houston-area home for dinner. Prior to receiving his message, I’d had no idea that grandma had any such brother, much less in the Houston area. When I called her perplexed that anyone would attempt to perpetrate such a fraud on me – why claim to be my long lost relative? I’d nothing to give – she said Oh, him. Ignore the message & I’ll find out who gave him your number. And since she was running late for something or other, she hung up.

Later I learned Tommy was my grandmother’s half-brother, one of three children born to her father & his second wife after the death of his first wife, my great-grandmother. My great-grandfather had had two children with his first wife, grandma & Uncle Mac Jr. By the time his last three children were born, his first two had begun to have children of their own. The odd thing was that growing-up I’d known two of grandma’s three half-siblings, Charles & Cynthia (it was she who gave Tommy my phone number). And by known, I mean sat at their dinner tables, used their toilets & played with their children. But no one ever mentioned that the youngest sibling Tommy existed – not when I applied to Rice, or was accepted, or decided to attend. Not even as I sat in the backseat of a rented van for two days as my aunts Phyllis & Rita drove me westward toward Houston.

That Christmas, I pressed grandma as to why she maintained such intense radio silence concerning her brother. She said she’d not spoken to him in almost twenty years or even really thought of him in all that time. She said she knew I wasn’t his kind of people & that our getting together would really be more trouble for me than it was worth. By this point, I'd spent one afternoon with Tommy & his family & couldn’t have agreed more.

Anniversary at Teenaged Wasteland

2009-02-17T11:45:00.004-05:00

The summer of 1993, at the end of my freshman year, I took a leave of absence from Rice University & moved to Chicago, a city I’d never visited, to work as a full time volunteer with The United Farm Workers of America. I was nineteen. During my time in Chicago, I kept a journal, sporadically. Recently, I found it in a footlocker in the garage & have been making my way through it slowly. What follows, exactly fifteen years later, is my entry from 17 February 1994 at 1:47am.

I get tripped up, trying to be magnificent. I speak when listening is most appropriate. When posed with a question, my tendency is to provide an answer, especially if I haven’t a clue. ‘I don’t know’ is only an option if the question is mathematical or technical & an answer can’t be bluffed or massaged. I like being relied upon but I fetishize inaccessibility, a recipe for wholesale disappointment. I bend & twist in every wind – even the light breeze – & am unsure of my purpose. I am alone. Always. Forever.

Man, did being a teenager really suck.

Nocturne

2009-02-07T09:36:00.005-05:00

Last night I dreamt of my mother. We were in an International airport & were going through Customs together – instead of the usual pattern of such dreams of one coming, the other going. We had a lot of luggage & much to declare. Mother had aged appropriately. Though now fully awake, I can call back her face almost exactly as it appeared to me.

While waiting on line, I told her that I’d not known she was sick unto death – no one told me – and had I known I’d have behaved differently. I’d have been better. I begged her forgiveness. She smiled her smile, which, as in life, took command of her face entire, gripped me tightly by the forearm & said there was nothing to forgive. I woke to tears.

Memory Of An Isolated Location

2009-01-30T17:09:00.003-05:00

My friend, AB, posted an article on Facebook about a body found frozen inside a block of ice, in an abandoned building in Detroit, that reminded me of something I'd all but forgotten. When I was in elementary school, during an unseasonably cold & bitter winter, my grandfather’s brother, Uncle Alec (short for Alexander), passed out in an alcoholic stupor & froze to death inside his own unheated apartment on Beta Street. Not five blocks away from my grandparents’ home.

Uncle Alec was single & a war veteran & had no children. All of his mail was sent to my grandparents’ address; he tended to flit from place to place & my grandparents' house was his only constant, other than alcohol. When he stopped by to pick up his monthly benefits check & whatever other mail that had accumulated, I recall him as smiling. Always smiling. Even when, en route to C & B fish market to buy cigarettes & peanut M & Ms (the cigarettes for granddaddy, the candy my payment for going & keeping quiet about it), I found him drunk & shuffling slowly through the streets. He’d throw up his arm in a disjointed fashion, smile broadly & call me by the nickname he’d given me & no one else used – the only nickname I’ve ever known – Champ.

25 additional & possibly less random things

2009-01-29T18:36:00.000-05:00

1. I don't believe in Heaven, but hope my mother's there all the same.
2. I don't trust juries.
3. I love roadtrips but have trouble staying awake in the car.
4. I condone some rites of passage.
5. I've never said 'I love you' to any of the men I've dated.
6. I've loved all of the men I've dated.
7. I'm not yet the person I'm meant to be.
8. When I was a kid I wanted to be a long-haul trucker (a la B.J. & the Bear) or a jockey.
9. Sometimes when watching Venus Williams play tennis, I forget to breathe. It was the same with Steffi Graf.
10. I should have gone to law school.
11. I'd like to be remembered as kind, but have my doubts.
12. I'm (often debilitatingly) self-conscious.
13. I've had sex with more men than I can count or recall.
14. The notion that I'll always be alone (romantically) is difficult, if not impossible, for me to shake.
15. My friends are better & more than I deserve.
16. A bacon bleu cheese burger may well be my favorite food.
17. I don't have a job.
18. I have sarcoidosis, a chronic auto-immune disease; Bernie Mac & my Aunt Evelyn died from it.
19. I love gin & am a fan of recreational drug use.
20. I watch Jeopardy! & The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer religiously.
21. I'm not unfamiliar with The Bible.
22.The Carol Burnett Show is my all time favorite program.
23. I prefer even numbers.
24. I'm trying to be a better listener.
25. I'm a top.

25 Random Things About Me (as seen on Facebook but slightly modified)

2009-01-24T16:13:00.004-05:00

1. I don't know which is the gas pedal & which the brake.
2. I love being gay. It suits me.
3. I don't like to sweat unless I'm having sex.
4. I'm not an optimist.
5. I make friends with really good people.
6. I don't hold grudges.
7. I've been mourning my mother for more than twenty years.
8. I can appreciate, identify & generate a good time.
9. Every time I see the word derivative I temporarily forget how to pronounce it.
10. I'm obsessed with my weight.
11. I'm a horrible speller.
12. I look good - really good - in a sarong.
13. I kiss with my eyes open.
14. I love tennis (watching not playing).
15. I take large doses of mood-regulating medication.
16. I'm not interested in a post-racial world.
17. I can't swim, but love the beach & speedos.
18. I no longer want to die, all the time.
19. I'm an incorrigible - but largely harmless - gossip.
20. I'm eager to meet a dude for whom I'd be willing to take a bullet.
21. I'm often nervous in a room full of black people (relatives included).
22. I'm my last best hope.
23. Trust that I'm sorry (really sorry) even if, thus far, I've lacked the courage to tell you directly.
24. I write good poems.
25. I love foreskin, body hair & cashews.

Black Like Me?

2009-01-21T17:58:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, while watching President Barack Obama & First Lady Michelle Obama jaunt down Pennsylvania Avenue, practically outpacing their security detail, I recognized the tiniest degree of disconnect from our 44th president – a personal rather than political disconnect. As Barack Obama smiled & waved to the crowd, I wondered what he was like, what men like him were like. You see, I don’t have a single straight black male friend. I had one, EK, during college, but we have long since lost touch. EK was biracial (a black mother & a white father who met & fell in love while volunteering with the Peace Corps in Africa); he wore kilts, lived to play ultimate Frisbee, showered much less regularly than he ought to have & for all I know, could have received a blowjob or two in a post-match locker room – hardly the paragon of traditional male blackness (whatever that is). Now, I’ve had a few straight black male classmates & have a shit load of straight black male cousins, but before & since EK, no friends. And until yesterday, I’d given this fact little or no thought.

I’m wholly & unabashedly gay – not flaming but a full-fledged fan of penis – & I think my sexuality has been something of a hindrance to my befriending straight black males. I read somewhere that 85% of black people cite religion as being very important to them. (I'm not one of those black people.) And most mainstream religions have a less than tolerant view of homosexuality, but this explanation alone isn’t enough, for I have deep abiding friendships with several god-fearing straight black women & less deep, thoroughly entertaining relationships & a whole host of others.

There’s likely to be something about me (the manner in which I move through the world) that has made such friendships difficult to come by. But what that something is, I haven’t a clue.

Profile: M4M

2009-01-06T16:45:00.008-05:00

I believe in closing doors. Especially bathroom doors – even when home alone. I can’t use public facilities for anything other than pissing (& the increasingly-rare-as-I-age hand/blow job). I’m unable to shit successfully while others are moving about to & fro (the one exception being the toilets adjacent to the café at Auschwitz but that’s a story unto itself). I never carry the phone, & only rarely a book or magazine, with me when squatting to do my business. I don’t call through the door to anyone on the outside, or answer. When visiting friends or relatives, & there’s no hope of returning to my own toilet, I deploy the overhead fan & a running faucet, least there’s noise excessive. I lower the toilet lid before flushing to prevent microscopic waste particles from dispersing into the air & settling on toothbrushes.

I don’t brush my teeth in front of others. Or fart (at all ever…). Or even use the word fart – unless I’m having a particularly Family Guy kind of day. I don’t expectorate in public having tried once, only to have phlegm drip & hang from my chin. However, I pick my nose like a bandit – but only when alone – & I (almost) always wash my hands directly afterwards. I shower every two days with a sponge bath between. I shave my head every two days or so & my armpits in the spring & summer – everything else grows natural & unkempt.

I don’t eat in bed. And I can’t sleep when the lights or television are on. Though I prefer a bit of white noise, no fancy machine is required, a simple electric fan will do. I don’t cuddle, well. Or end sentences with prepositions. Or know which is the gas pedal & which the brake. I’m not down to earth or laid-back. Or reasonable. I don’t hold grudges: I forgive & will need to be forgiven. But I don’t forget. Nor should you. And unless we’re really close, I’m not the guy to call in a pinch.

All takers please form a line to the right – shortest to tallest. Thanks.

Through A Glass Darkly

2009-01-01T22:35:00.005-05:00

I’m 5’10.5”, 127.2 lbs. And I fret about my body. Specifically my “problem area” – the cream-puff soft, sit-up-resistant bulb of belly above my crotch, which announced itself in my late twenties & has followed me into my middle thirties. The sheer folly of my feelings isn’t lost on me, especially considering that I’ve just spoken with my friend SL who’s riding high on a wave of liquid Lorcet, after having had gastric by-pass surgery on Tuesday. (SL is about two inches shorter than I am & was more than 250lbs heavier, at her heaviest.) However, my “problem area”, as a concept, is no less persistent (or troubling) for being wholly ridiculous. And, all too often, perception is reality.

I don’t wish to be younger or for there to be less grey in my beard, but more. I only (& desperately) want the flat taut abdomen of my early & middle twenties – for reasons I can’t quite articulate. I wasn’t happier then (against all appearances to the contrary) & could be so much more of a marked asshole. No one sees me naked & if I’m ever again in a room (or backseat) with a dude, about to answer the call of the wild, I don’t anticipate my “problem area” being a deal-breaker. Still I stand sideways in mirrors, sucking in & releasing my belly. I keep a tape measure in my bedroom so that I might know the width of my waist lickety split. Absurd? Shallow? No doubt.

I’m not without my vanities. (Who among us is?) And what are we without our hang-ups, our idiosyncrasies? Flesh.

The Rest of Love

2008-12-27T19:28:00.005-05:00

Several years ago, midway through a sushi lunch with my friend AH, I realized that I was in love with him. That I had been for sometime. It was discomfiting, this realization. I’m not a fuck-your-friends kind of guy, preferring not to risk my relationships or shit where I eat. And not only was AH perhaps my closest friend in New York, he had a long-term boyfriend back in his native Germany.

AH & I met in the lobby of our Columbia-University-owned apartment building. I was a graduate student in creative writing & lived on the fourth floor; he was a post-doc in chemistry & lived two floors above. AH was (is) almost four years older than I am & around three inches shorter (between 5’7” or 5’8”) with thinning dark chestnut hair, which borders on black. He’s an identical twin & a classically trained pianist.

We talked about literature & poetry & politics. We visited museums & took long walks. Often we sat side-by-side silent & breathing. I could cover this page with details about our friendship, but the thing that seemed to matter most that day, over my California rolls, was the fact that AH wasn’t in love with me. I was his confidante & his friend, but nothing more.

Someone wise & famous remarked that hell is the truth seen too late. And I’d like to proffer that hell is also inopportune truth. Truth come before one knows how best to handle it. It’s a curious thing, loving someone who never loved you (as opposed to someone who no longer loves you). Being unrequited is nothing like in the movies. I was betwixt & between. And miserable. By falling in love with AH, I’d betrayed the covenant of our friendship. It wasn’t fair that I suddenly, & so desperately, wanted so much more than he’d agreed to provide. I’d arranged business-class seats – & they were great seats, window-side & comfortable with lots of legroom & the option of reclination – upgrades weren’t an option.

So I let my love for AH go. I purged myself of it. It wasn’t quick or easy & involved my moving from Morningside Heights downtown to Waverly Place – a rather expensive transition. I began to see him less & less often, until months (& then years) had passed since we’d been together last. I lost his phone number. And I left New York.

Eventually, AH rarely crossed my mind & when he did, I didn’t lose my breath. Eventually, I was free & I set out to find my friend, to reconnect. And to my great fortune, he was easy to find – married to a woman & about to become a father, but easy to find. And when he asked what had happened to me, where I’d gone & how I’d been? I told him I’d had some trouble with my heart, but that I was fine now.

And it's been years & we’re almost as close as ever.

Eenie, Meenie, Miny, Moe

2008-12-25T15:13:00.002-05:00

For decades & decades (many more years than I’ve been alive), my family has gathered for a Christmas meal of wild rabbit. Fried rabbit, rabbit in gravy over grits, rabbit stew. The rabbits seem always to have been procured in a backyard from the friend of a friend of a friend – some guy from the wrong side of town, who sets off into the woods with a gun, a flask & a dog determined to bring home the bacon (pardon the pun).

I don’t eat rabbit or grits & have gladly missed more of these meals than I’ve attended. Sometimes, while nestled in my apartment in Houston, or Chicago, or Budapest, or Portland, or New York or wherever I was hanging my hat at the time, I’d imagine what it would be like if I were to attend a Christmas get-together with my boyfriend – the boyfriend I don’t actually have – in tow: the eye rolls, the strained silence, the overly long pre-meal blessing, the defibrillators. Now, I’d like to think I’m too mature (or least too old) to traffic in shock & awe, but I’m not sure I am. At least not yet.

My grandparents are dead & the exact origins of the rabbit-meal tradition are unknown. For my aunts & uncles this meal of oryctolagus cuniculus has a hallowed place in their memories. There were nine children – eleven if you count the daughter grandma had before she met granddaddy & the daughter granddaddy fathered with a woman across town after having four children with grandma. Grandma was a pediatric nurse who worked the hospital nightshift, granddaddy a feckless incorrigible drunk. Good times were in short shrift. Santa wasn’t likely to arrive laden with gifts but there was always rabbit, enough for each child to eat his or her fill.

So, each Christmas, they gather &, for the duration of one meal, all their needs are met.

THE VANISHING POINT

2008-12-24T02:17:00.000-05:00

Send me a lock of your hollow winter-hair
that I may recall the corner of Bedford & Grove.

The outer-borough-bound trains; our mutual heat.
The end shares its face with the beginning

& my heart is silent.
If I am to follow, I must stand stock-still.

For The Record

2008-12-21T19:20:00.010-05:00

My brain is my best feature & I think there’s something wrong with it. My right eye, index finger & leg twitch involuntarily & at random. I have headaches. I’m cloudy. My rate of comprehension is compromised: it’s not unusual for me to re-read a not-particularly-difficult passage in an article, book or poem because the first time I didn’t quite get it. I forget & fail to recognize words. I’m leaning toward a brain tumor.

My doctors aren’t worried. For every symptom, they have an explanation. Perfectly plausible ones:

Insomnia & its handmaiden sleep deprivation
Stress
A history of migraine dating back to childhood
Side effects of my battery of medicines
Excess caffeine
Severe caffeine withdrawal
Too much Discovery Health Channel

I’m a proponent of second opinions, but my lack of health insurance pretty much negates that option. And without a reference from a medical professional, there’s no way I’ll be crawling into a machine to have really expensive pictures taken of my not-what-it-used-to-be brain. Of course, there’s a chance that their years of medical training & practice weren’t wasted on my doctors, & I’m fine.

But something feels wrong. Malignant. And if at sometime in the nearly distant future I’m undone by a festering brain ailment, this record of my prognostication will survive me.

By Definition, You End Up With The Ones Who Stay

2008-12-21T01:01:00.003-05:00

I learned to read early. And read everything I could get my hands on –The Book Fair was the only day I didn’t resent having to attend school – & was particularly drawn to stories about orphans. James Henry Trotter & Pippi Longstocking were my favorites. Long before my mother died in May 1988, when she seemed perfectly healthy, before we’d even learned the word lupus, the very thought that she might die was enough to make me cry. Still I ruminated on her death because I thought that if I considered it – regularly, with precision – it wouldn’t (couldn’t) occur. To my young mind, death was always a surprise: a thief in the night. Eliminating the element of surprise eliminated the threat. Death dared not arrive announced. Right?

But, as you know, my mother did die – more slowly (& too quickly) than I could handle. And once she was dead, I didn’t resemble the protagonists of the books I’d adored. I lacked James’ adventurous spirit & Pippi’s pluckiness. I was a boy bereft. A boy who swore off Kit-Kats & kiwis, his mother’s favorite candy & fruit, respectively.

At the holidays, it's very easy to remember my childhood grief. But, as I get older, it’s even easier to recall the love. For thirteen years, I was loved – owl eyes, crooked teeth, incorrigible lies & all. And the experience of that love has allowed me to risk loving – in my own imperfect, haphazard fashion. It’s imperative, early on, to learn to love, love.

Now, I’d trade-in all of my living relatives for the return of my mother. Even if she returned as she truly was & not as I’ve remembered her, these twenty years. (Or at least I think I would & am happy not to have the option.) Everything may indeed happen for a reason, but I know first-hand, it’s not always a good reason. However, on my best days, I can almost rest easy in the belief that as long as it holds with the laws of physics, nothing is too wonderful to be true.

'Tis The Season Or Fuck You Very Much

2008-12-18T19:18:00.003-05:00

This afternoon I was sitting on the front porch wearing a ragged blue tee shirt, old Levis & flip-flops, enjoying the unseasonably warm temperature (70◦) when a plump black lab puppy toddled across the usually busy Blues Farm Road into my yard, up the porch steps & onto my right foot. Caterwauling like no tomorrow. Cute as sin, she wore a grey & white striped flea collar, but no identification. When I picked her up, she flipped onto her back, exposed her underbelly, with its lone white spot, & went to sleep.

I am a dog lover. A lick-my-face, sleep-in-my-bed, eat-peanut butter-off-my-fingers kind of dog lover. My relatives aren’t. And this ain’t my house. Knowing that the puppy (Freeway. I’d call her Freeway, if she were mine) wouldn’t be welcome to pass even the night with me, I set out in the direction from which she’d come in the hope of returning to her, no doubt worried, family. I approached house after house, rang bell after bell each time, sharing the puppy’s tale of woe – to no avail. She belonged to no one & no one was aware of a neighbor who’d recently acquired a puppy. After an hour, my arms numb, I went home &, with all the enthusiasm of a death-row inmate, called Animal Control. They were closed. Then I called BD, hoping his parents, fervent dog-rescuers, would be interested in one more – but they have five & there’s no room at the Inn. Out of options, I returned to my chair on the porch to wait (for what I wasn't sure). Around 4:30, my neighbor from two houses down, whom I’d never met, stopped by to ask if I’d seen the new black puppy she’d bought her children for Christmas, which had gone missing from her backyard earlier in the afternoon. Of course I had.

At 6:05, I opened the front door to a member of the local police force. The officer somewhat shame-facedly explained that he’d received a complaint that a strange black man was wandering through the adjacent neighborhood trying to gain entry into homes using a lost-puppy ruse. I assured him that the puppy had indeed been lost & that if I had been up to no good, I wouldn’t have left my name, address & phone number at each house I visited. He left without further incident.

Fast Car

2008-12-13T01:00:00.002-05:00

Ken Imhoff, of Wisconsin, spent 17 years, & many thousands of dollars, building an actual, fully functioning Lamborghini Countach in his basement. By hand & from scratch. Mr. Imhoff isn’t a Klingon-fluent recluse, but rather a happily married engineer, & admitted car-junkie, who was inspired by “Cannonball Run.” Although taking one’s life clues from a Burt Reynolds flick doesn’t not suggest some form of insanity, Ken seems markedly sane. Check out his website (www.kiengineering.com.) for photographs of his efforts.

I’m not a sweat-of-my-brow, elbow grease kind of guy. Not by a long shot. (Devices more complicated than Legos – including combination locks – are too complicated for me to manipulate.) Still I envy Imhoff’s endeavor. Though composed of literal nuts & bolts, it is rife with inspiration. Sleek in its confidence & its passion.

Mot Juste

2008-12-12T01:41:00.003-05:00

I’m weary of Christmas. Its bombast & the furor. If not for eggnog & carols, I’d prefer to forgo the entire shebang & bury my head in the backyard next to the pile of boiled peanuts I left for the squirrels & which the squirrels (those fuckers) ignored, until January.

This season, my oldest friend, BD, & his wife, CA, are gifting copies of my book, The Missing. They’ve asked me to autograph each, & where appropriate (BD’s parents & brother), write dedications. All I can think to write is Stay Black! But, in this context, the charm of such an inscription would be lost. Wasted. And I hope to eat many more meals cooked in BD’s parents' kitchen.

It has been almost six years since The Missing was published (& even longer since most of the poems were written). Re-reading it, to lift & modify a line from Ani Difranco, is like looking at a photograph of myself taken from far far away. Yes, I remember that moment; I recognize that particular peculiar pain; the loss is still with me – heart-adjacent. But I feel differently about it all, now. I can see things less as they seemed & more as they were. I’m not trying quite so furiously to be left, alone. (The distance between twenty-five & thirty-four & a half is incalculable.)

Still, when the wind is right, I can recall the cocaine-fueled frenzy of which The Missing is the blessed by-product. I was unmedicated & there were poems everywhere. I needed only to transcribe them.

These days, it’s as if I’m an attractive – though more than slightly overweight & sweaty – band geek trying to bed the star quarterback. Some days I’m lucky (given the right lighting & enough coaxing & the promise of secrecy boys, especially star quarterbacks, will fuck just about anyone) but most days I’m not. And I’m left sitting in front of a blank computer screen, casting sidelong glances at not my first, but my only book.

The Seat of Miracle & Prophecy

2008-12-02T20:49:00.006-05:00

My life as a reader has two distinct stages: before Marilynne Robinson & after Marilynne Robinson. Her three novels – Housekeeping, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead & the National Book Award finalist Home – have become, in very short order, my touchstones. They are hewn from a language of bewilderment & polished in the language of yearning. They are glad-handedly spiritual & still they profess that this world is heaven & reward enough.

Marilynne Robinson conveys the explicit, particular pleasures (& strangeness) of a specific location – the fictional Gilead, Iowa, whose absence from our maps seems like an accident of cartography or the Idaho of Housekeeping & her childhood – with an unparalleled mastery. Though wholly original, her sentences seem to have existed all along – patiently waiting to be discovered. And they bear the ring of truth (whatever that is). Reading them, one is challenged to reconsider oneself with a depth & breadth uncommon off of the analyst’s leather sofa. To paraphrase Robert Frost, read Marilynne Robinson and be whole again beyond confusion. (At least for a blessed little while.)

Black Friday

2008-11-28T22:19:00.006-05:00

Today marks the official beginning of the holiday-shopping season. In suburban New York, a crush of bargain-hungry shoppers trampled to death a temporary Wal-Mart employee. In Mumbai, terrorists, who attacked several locations throughout the city two days ago, have yet to be fully subdued. The death toll stands at more than 150 – including 22 foreigners & 9 gunmen – with 327 wounded. Here, I’m lounging about in a dingy blue tee shirt & flannel pajama bottoms, listening to The Be Good Tanyas & eating Thanksgiving leftovers. The outside world is both at hand & at an untraversable distance.

(Such are the wonders of digital cable & high-speed Internet connections.)

Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T23:15:00.005-05:00

Things are rarely as bad as I expect them to be. And even more rarely, bad in the manner I expect. The Thanksgiving meal with my maternal extended family (including two aunts with whom I’ve actively not spoken in months), that all November long I’ve dreaded, has come & gone & I’m sitting at my desk unscathed. Fatter & happy. There were no raised voices or back-handed compliments. No reference to those who’ve not yet come to know the Lord during the mercifully short pre-meal grace.

Sitting next to my relatives & their husbands, wives, baby mommas & baby daddies was the easiest it’s ever been. I’ve no idea what they’ve done since last we saw one another (or what many of them even do). And since I don’t really care, I didn’t ask. We focused on the present: the moist smoked turkey, the spicy oyster dressing, the flat, hard buttermilk biscuits, the mild temperature. And we revisited the distant past: the summer of ’85; Christmas of ’91. We didn’t ask more of one another than our relationship could bear.

And, for a day at least, things were near-perfect.

Dear Anonymous:

2008-11-19T19:33:00.002-05:00

No doubt you’re right. I ought make the first step & have in many, though certainly not all, cases. Not, it seems, in your case. My list of apologies-to-give is long. My progress is slow. I fret over the medium & my message. I am ashamed. I hesitate.

Would that I knew who you were, so that we might communicate directly.

On a Train Bound for Nowhere

2008-11-16T18:20:00.005-05:00

Sometime during elementary school, I fell in love with Kenny Rodgers. I requested his records for any occasion that included the bestowal of gifts or rewards: birthdays, Christmas, another academic year of all Ss. My two favorite songs were “Islands in the Stream” & “The Gambler.” Of those two, “The Gambler” continues to have resonance: You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away & know when to run.

I’m not good at calculating or assessing acceptable degrees of risk. In the past, I’ve jumped headlong into (& out of) situations without regard for the method or location of my landing. I disappeared in broad daylight. Appeared before daybreak, & in the dead of winter, with no advance warning or invitation. I was reliably devastatingly-unreliable. One result being, there are a number of folk on Facebook who’re unlikely to accept my friend request. (And rightfully so.) Now despite being medicated & sober (though not in the abstemious, twelve-step sense) I’m gun-shy & afraid -- unable to break free from a particularly unsatisfying orbit. Afraid to take a real chance on myself, lest I bet too high & lose.

I Like To Watch

2008-11-13T20:00:00.003-05:00

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I like porn. Really, like it. Especially the amateur, hirsute, plot-less, bareback, variety. What good is a fantasy if it must play by the rules? But, of late, I’m come to wonder if I enjoy actual sex. Moreover, if I’ve ever really enjoyed it. Lord knows, I’ve had my share (& as a top rather than a bottom, which often comes as a surprise to lots of people) & then some: upside down, inside out, round & round. But sometimes, fucking a dude is much less complicated than not fucking him. This is doubly true if the dude is a handsome bright-eyed stranger drinking at your favorite dive bar.

I had sex (& was kissed) for the first time at age eighteen. I was living in Chicago working as a full-time volunteer for the United Farm Workers of America; he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. We’d spent the afternoon before our evening of sex watching Household Saints in a theater downtown. CC was tall & pale & covered in bristly black hairs. We fucked on the narrow school-issue mattress in his dorm room. At my request, the lights remained on. Our romp was slightly anthropological in tone. I stopped frequently to ask questions about terms & techniques & to express my displeasure – I’d no idea I’d so not enjoy having a finger up my ass. CC & I fell in & out of bed over the course of several months, each time being better, for me at least, than the last.

I’ve a gift for easily-achieved-long-lasting erections & during the past sixteen years, I’ve pretty much fucked every dude who’s wanted me to, regardless of my attraction to him (or lack thereof) with the exception of the morbidly obese & anyone who says he’s really into black guys or any variation on that theme. A lot random, nameless fucking. I should stipulate that I feel differently about the sex I’ve had with my boyfriends. But boyfriends have been few.

My friend, AB, accurately describes himself as frigid. He’s open & aboveboard about his personal intimacy issues – caveat emptor. After talking with him last week, I began to wonder if my cloying sexual shenanigans are an expression of underlying intimacy issues. You’d be surprised just how removed one can feel from a man who’s bouncing up & down on your cock.

AUBADE

2008-11-13T15:24:00.004-05:00

Another day dawns brighter & sooner than I prefer.
The house is cold & quiet. It is that time of year.
Three brown-skinned men clear the neighbor’s yard
of dead branches & leaves – autumn’s wastepaper –
their laughter & indistinct singing overlays
the whirr of leaf blowers & the raking rakes.
This is a real life. Though books are filled
with the demise of better men than I.

GEMINI

2008-11-09T01:39:00.005-05:00

for Alexei

You are the collision of two summer storms –
furious & out-of-season.

I am of (at least) two minds,
both of which say, Go.

(but)

The night is body temperature
& love has left its impress across our backs –
the pattern, indistinct.

Postscript

2008-11-09T01:28:00.002-05:00

The 2008 presidential election occupied such a large swath of my mental & emotional landscape, for such a long time that I’m, now, left with ___. Volunteering for the Obama campaign imbued my less-than-ideal life with a degree of continuity & purpose. Last night, I dreamt that my friend CJ & I were walking through McDuffie Village, a local housing project – think Good Times minus a hint of anything good – distributing Obama for Change signs & a homemade cinnamon dessert we’d dubbed, twister whistle. But the election’s satiating afterglow is already giving way to an emptiness broader & deeper than my preterit emptinesses. What’s my role in this post-election world? How do I affect personal change?

Si Se Puede

2008-11-06T21:18:00.005-05:00

On Tuesday, 4 November 2008, for the first time since 1976, North Carolina voted democratic in the presidential election. And once the election was called, I surprised myself, & everyone around me, & wept. Though only 34, this isn’t something I thought possible in my lifetime. 63,974,022 of my fellow Americans, people to whom I often feel little or no connection, voted for Obama – 8,105 of those votes were cast in my county to 5,972 for McCain. North Carolina was one of nine states won by George Bush in 2004 that went to Obama.

I volunteered for the campaign, at a remove, by entering data, late at night, in my bedroom – Pandora.com playing in the background. But on Election Day, I dragged my narrow ass out of bed, hours earlier than usual, to work in the local campaign office. Throughout the day, I did my usual data entry & helped confused voters determine the precincts to which they were assigned. A number of these voters were new & had the look – bagging boxer-short barring jeans, baseball caps, ice – that often makes shopkeepers nervous. More than a few had names I’d never heard before & couldn’t spell without assistance. Still, there they stood in our musty makeshift offices, eager to sally forth into the wind & rain in order to cast their ballots for Obama. Around five, the main office in Raleigh called & directed all staff & available volunteers to suspend our local efforts & head to Pembroke, twenty-some-odd miles away.

We divided into four traveling groups. I rode with TB, a dear friend of LY, the Scotland County field director, & full-time volunteer & AH, TB’s & LY’s friend from college, who now lives in Asheville, & came to town to help with the final push, in a car driven by J, a seventy-two year old volunteer. J’s late-model, leather-seated Cadillac smelled like a cigarette. Let me be clear, the car didn’t smell of cigarettes, but rather it smelled like a lit burning cigarette. J was born in & raised in West Virginia. He married & moved to Indiana before being transferred to North Carolina thirty-two years ago for work. He retired this past June. And despite having no visible defects, was the worst god damned driver with whom I’ve ever ridden. More than once, drivers in the oncoming lane had to swerve onto the road’s shoulder to avoid head-on collisions. J overshot turns, reversed with impunity though his rear window was covered by an Obama for president sign & liked to make eye contact with his passengers while driving & chatting. I was pretty sure I that I wouldn’t live to witness the election results. And that feeling only increased the more time I spent in Pembroke.

We were dispersed into the wilds of Pembroke to encourage potential Democratic voters to head to the polls ahead of the 7.30 closing. Our beat was dark, rural & heavy on unleashed barking dogs. We decided that J would remain in the car while the three young men rang doorbells. Rule no. 1 in The Colored Man’s Guide to Survival – a rule to which I’ve been most faithful – is don’t roll-up to a stranger’s house, after dark, asking for nothing. Even if flanked by two well-meaning white guys. (A few words about my companions TB & AH: they’re intelligent & generous of thought & spirit. TB is bearded, a little thick in the middle with bright eyes & an open-faced friendliness. AH is both Indie-band cute & dirty with a slight lisp, a disarming New England (?) accent & dimples for days. If I were ten years younger, I’d carry an unrequited torch for both – easy.) The first few houses we approached were empty & after making u-turns & losing our way, we decided that we’d give it fifteen more minutes. At the next house, we were met by three smiling toddlers & their mother, who assured us that she’d already voted. We had time for one more house.

Our last stop was a brick ranch-style home. The door was opened by a wrinkled razor-thin gentleman in his seventies named, Adolphfus. Adolphfus was born in Pembroke but had spent the past fifty years living & working in Detroit only having recently returned to the area. When he left, he’d been classified as Indian & as such had been barred for certain restaurants and the local movie theater but upon his return, he learned that he was now considered white. A distinction he resented. Adolphfus had been watching the election coverage with his wife when we three rain-splattered volunteers rang his doorbell. He was a Democrat. He believed something amazing was afoot, but hadn’t registered to vote since returning to North Carolina. His wife, however, had. But she was planning to take her son to the doctor & there wouldn’t be time to do so & cast her ballot. She was also dubious that her vote would matter in such a traditionally red state. We assured her otherwise. We begged. We pleaded. We offered a ride to the polls. Still she hesitated until Adolphfus said that he would take his step-son to the doctor. Finally, his wife agreed to go to the polls during the waning minutes, but not before asking TB, AH & I to pose for a photograph with her husband.

Later that night, when I learned we’d won, I thought, first, of the black children – of all ages – who would forever be validated. And of Adolphfus, home again after so many years away.

Brief Encounters With Famous Men

2008-10-26T20:48:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, during a party hosted by & at The Paris Review, my friend AAH & I rifled through George Plimpton’s medicine chest in search of prescription drugs. We, stinking drunk & in desperate need of a piss, found our way, independent of one another, to the bathroom adjoining George’s master suite. Our bladders being dangerously distended, we couldn’t agree as to who would piss first & ultimately decided to piss together – not side-by-side, but facing one another, careful not to break eye-contact. While washing our hands, we realized we might well never again have the opportunity to inspect the contents of Plimpton’s medicine chest. Only after it was open, did we consider getting high. The chest’s total contents, now, escape me, but I recall what we took: a muscle relaxant, Viocodin & Xanax. And one thing we didn’t: Viagra – I didn’t want to be stumbling around three-sheets-to-the-wind with an uncontrollable, inappropriate boner. Back at the party, my friend & mentor, RH, introduced me to George, who complimented my choice of shoes & necktie. I can’t recall a single thing that transpired that night after the drugs mixed with the gin & kicked in. I woke the next afternoon, in my apartment, stretched across the living room futon, dressed but for my underwear (pink & white striped AussieBum briefs which remain lost) – a thick crust of blood ringing both my nostrils.

Sidereal

2008-10-21T18:53:00.003-04:00

Lately, & of a sudden, I’ve begun to recall my dreams. And not bits & pieces which linger up until the point of my first cup of coffee or bowel movement before flittering away. But seeming entire swaths, which become more vivid as the day progresses. In a recent dream, I’m filming a gay bareback porno in my grandmother’s house. Grandma, in her indigo v-necked dress with peaked-sleeves, is about to leave for Philadelphia, but budget constraints & fading light require that filming begin before she departs. Now my grandmother wasn’t the type of woman who’d take kindly to relatives – much less strangers – fucking on every horizontal surface in her house, even if measures were taken to catch & trap any stray fluids. Grandma believed in an ownership society: if you break it, you bought it. Her best advice could be grouped under the heading: DON’T WRITE A CHECK WITH YOUR MOUTH THAT YOUR ASS CAN’T CASH. She admonished me to be a stab you in the front kind of guy. But I’m run ragged trying to distract & deceive. A drum circle in the living room, a gospel choir in the kitchen each deployed to keep grandma away from the humping & thrusting in the back bedrooms. At one point Dan Rather, dressed in war-correspondent khaki, ascended the front porch steps & read a letter from Lyndon B. Johnson to John Steinbeck. The sunflowers growing in the front-yard garden were awash in Junebugs. Just as the film crew was breaking for lunch & the distribution of Viagra, grandma’s ride to the airport arrived & with a kiss to my cheek she was off. Filming was resumed & concluded without a hitch. However, the film remains unnamed.
What does it all mean? Have at it. I've enough trouble sussing out the significance of my waking hours & will leave the interpretation of dreams to Freud & the like-minded.

AMONG THE MISSING

2008-10-19T02:15:00.002-04:00

I will fight no more forever.
- Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce

I’ve heard that Hannibal used vinegar
to split boulders as he made his way
through the Pyrenees, France (& finally) the Alps,

en route to Roman Italy. That he deployed elephants
like modern-day tanks & won by ambush, subterfuge.

We, too, thought risk finer than bargain;
danger a foretaste of fortune.

But he who led the young men is dead
& we are wan & cold.

Legerdemain

2008-10-13T21:27:00.004-04:00

This afternoon, I read an opinion column on CNN.com by Tara Wall, deputy editorial page editor & columnist for The Washington Times & former senior advisor for the Republican National Committee. Ms. Wall postulated that Obama’s attacks on John McCain for being in lock step with the Bush doctrine rang hollow because he (Obama) also agreed with Bush on numerous issues. (CNN.com must have a very low threshold for inclusion – & being able to pass the laugh / smell test mustn’t be a criterion.) And on what issues were Obama & Bush simpatico? They include but aren’t limited to:

Abstinence
Reforming Affirmative Action
Gay Marriage
Global AIDS Initiatives
Tax Cuts
Energy
Capital Punishment
Minority Home Ownership
Welfare Reform
Religion

Ms. Wall has a knack for recognizing relationships where none exists. And she blatantly disregards not only nuisance, but also facts. Obama & Bush both support tax cuts but not the same tax cuts. And who isn’t in favor of the eradication of AIDS, a decrease in our dependence on foreign oil, or an increase in the number of minority homeowners? Likewise, being wrong on both capital punishment & gay marriage simply means that Obama & Bush, like millions of Americans, have missed the mark. Not that Obama would have bombed Baghdad. (My friend, AA, & I really like cocaine but last I checked, he’s married & doesn’t enjoy giving blowjobs.) Despite being a knee-jerk liberal, I too think teenagers should be strongly encourage to abstain from bad (as in poorly performed) furtive sex in their bedrooms & backseats, that Affirmative Action should be revised to include socioeconomic status, that welfare ought be a helpmeet rather than an eternal refuge. And if Obama weren’t religious, we might have something interesting to discuss.

Ms. Hall seems to have forgotten Obama’s Republican-applied sobriquet the most liberal senator. And does she think we the people are too feeble-minded to distinguish the difference between piss & rain drops?

Six Degrees of Separation Minus Five & A Half

2008-10-08T15:28:00.006-04:00

Yesterday evening, while attending an Obama campaign volunteers meeting, I sat next to a woman I’ve known since kindergarten & whom I’d not seen in sixteen years. I didn’t recognize her initially – rather I recognized that I knew her, but couldn’t recall her name – but she recognized me. TL was one of a group of girls who, even in kindergarten, ruled the playground. I was infatuated with these girls. They played double-dutch & won at marbles, bought strawberry ice cream sandwiches & fruit punch during lunch – my free lunch card allowed for no extras. And, for whatever reason, they were not only nice, but kind to me. TL especially. I was a bully’s wet dream: I had a funny name, was smaller than the other kids (in weight & stature), & wore hand-me-down everything, except sneakers. It didn’t help that I started school already able to read & tell time. I spent the school days watching the clock, pining for my mother & the familiar brutalities of my older cousins who weren’t crazy enough to do me any real harm – I didn’t have such confidence in my schoolmates’ sanity. But once TL extended her friendship, & its attendant protections, I inched up a couple of rungs on the food chain & my lot improved immeasurably. Though there was one nasty incident when LE tried to force me to kiss her with tongue on the playground beside the semi-submerged tractor tires behind which the older boys peed.

As karma would have it, the woman sitting next to me who wasn’t TL is the wife of a man with whom I’ve had sex. I don’t now recall if I knew he was married when I fucked him, but I’m pretty sure it would have made no difference. The wife was straightforward & chatty & much more likable than her husband.

They Who See Best In The Dark

2008-10-06T14:08:00.002-04:00

The wilderness is interior, ever-increasing.
I can not follow predetermined trails.

Recall our pact? An island & animals all our own.
We misjudged the distance between alone & lonely;

later & never. I carry that weight
in my chest – heart-adjacent.

In Memoriam

2008-10-05T15:44:00.002-04:00

Paul Newman & David Foster Wallace are dead. Newman starred in several of my favorite movies, including Hud, from which the opening line for this poem was lifted. David Foster Wallace wrote wisely & presciently about a world that I recognized: messy, fraught with complications & entangling debilitating alliances, but not without its humors & most importantly compassion. And though the composition of this poem predates both deaths, I offer it as tribute.

POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE FROM A MOVIE

No one gets out of life alive.
Or intact. No matter the effort.

ii

In ancient China, the afterlife had three distinct possibilities:
Heaven as a divine ancestor; Heaven as a Taoist immortal;
Earth as a hungry ghost.

I am my own haunt.

Dying is the cheapest trick to master
in a dead-end town.

iii

One night, during my last summer in Houston,
I took four hits of ecstasy.

Shaking & sweaty, I could speak only the truth.

Dispatches

2008-09-28T15:59:00.004-04:00

I’m susceptible to fevered flights of fancy – sometimes woefully so. During the mid-90s, while living in Chicago & working as a full-time volunteer for The United Farm Workers of America, I bleached my eyebrows white & whenever I hit the clubs, I wore bulky black protective shades over my glasses. A photograph of MC & me taken during a night of clubbing confirms that I looked like a god damned & possibly blind fool.
While in elementary school, I became smitten with horses. I wore my brown cowboy boots year round & read all the classics of equine literature: Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka, National Velvet & the entire Black Stallion series.
But as much as I read & dreamt about horses – horses running bareback across the plains or decked out for dressage – when given the opportunity to ride an actual horse, I declined. I can’t be sure, but I think that I was afraid of both the living breathing horse & of being disappointed in the horsebacking experience. As long as it remained untested, horseback riding could remain the greatest possible pleasure of my young life. I couldn't dare sacrifice the possibility to the actuality.

ii

I’ve come to realize that many of my junior high & high school friendships were, in fact, crushes. When I recall the boys who were my friends then it’s a haircut, an eye color, a whiff of cologne that comes, first, to mind. I can think of few, if any, overarching patterns of behavior or common interests. They were boy scouts, skaters, surfers & actors; I hate to break a sweat & am not active in any traditional sense of the word active. I don't master tricks, wear uniforms or join groups if I can help it. They listened to The Beatles, Nirvana, Metallica, The Who, Boogie Down Productions; I loved Tracy Chapman, Joan Armatrading, R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs & Tom Waits. Still, I need but close my eyes to reconnect to the pure pleasure I took from hanging out with those boys – a pleasure that was all the more pleasant for being wholly unselfconscious.
I didn’t recognize my sexual attraction to men until I was eighteen, at which point I was eviscerated by self-consciousness. The years prior were halcyon days of eagle-scout projects, skate ramps & “The White Album" – free of the shame of the inappropriate boner.

Target Audience

2008-09-22T01:24:00.006-04:00

On the day that my first poetry collection, The Missing, was released in 2003, I spent a good ninety minutes in St. Mark’s Bookshop staring at its spine in among all the other poetry collections. I was also duly excited by the prospect that I’d one day stroll into The Strand, a used bookstore, & find The Missing for sale there. Unfortunately, I went way down the rabbit hole – & over the river & through the woods – before that ever happened. My book could well have made it to The Strand, but I wasn’t there to witness it. Tonight, however, I’ve experienced a singular wholly unexpected thrill: finding one’s book for sale on eBay. The best books are used books. And if mine is still making its way across the country – thick in fingerprints – from bookshelf to bookshelf, then I’ve done something permanent & good. Permanent & good: people like me don’t often get to lay claim to such territory – at least not honestly.

A Spade, A Spade.

2008-09-17T20:52:00.008-04:00

Educated black people often occupy & negotiate a peculiar seemingly militarized zone between the resolutely black worlds & culture into which we were born & the dominant culture of Microsoft, J.J Abrams & 401ks.
Back in the day, I studied Latin – at Christmastime, grandmother & I would performed a rousingly tone-deaf rendition of "Adeste Fideles." My teacher, Mrs. MFW (seventy if a day, bottle-blond, petite, liver-spotted) was born in rural China to Christian missionaries. While in her early thirties, her daughter had died from cancer. Whenever she spoke of her (& she did so quite often), her eyes teared. She wore her daughter's clothes: leather pants, blouses with plunging neck lines, as a memorial & tribute – though most days it looked & felt more like performance art. Very wrinkly performance art.
Latin classes were largely painless exercises in conjugation & translation (due in large part to rampant cheating). I recall one homework sheet on which I translated a sentence as: The hard man looked at the boy on the road. The correct answer being closer to: The man looked at the boy on the hard road. (Draw your own conclusions.) One day, just after we’d handed in our daily quizzes, Mrs. W asked me to come to the front of the class. I was afraid that, after months of obliviousness, she’d grown wise to the class’s deception & that I’m about to have an after-school-special moment: cheating kills or even worse: cheating gets your black ass expelled. Instead, Mrs. W wrote three words on the chalkboard: department, government & ask. She then asked me to pronounce all three words. For a second I thought does she realize she’s written those words in English; has she finally lost it? But there was no crazy gleam in her eyes & I pronounced the words. When I was finished, Mrs. W smiled & said Perfect. That was absolutely perfect. You sounded just like a white man; if my eyes had been closed, I would have thought that you were white. I had never seen her so happy or proud of a student’s achievement, my utter mortification notwithstanding.
I thought of Mrs. W today when I read that Lynn Forester de Rothschild, American citizen & insanely wealthy wife of an heir to England’s most influential & storied banking dynasty & former Clinton supporter, was now supporting John McCain. Her reason being she found Barack Obama to be elitist. People the world over (& black people especially) know that in this context elitist is code for uppity. Being uppity signifies not knowing one’s proper place & aspiring to things to which you have no rightful claim. And in America, there’s still no greater sin for a black man.

Two Sides One Coin

2008-09-14T16:37:00.001-04:00

This morning, over a breakfast of steel-cut oatmeal, turkey bacon & instant coffee, I learned that last week, a paternal cousin, who lives outside of D.C. – a stranger really – won the Mega Millions Lottery; she’ll receive a lump-sum payment of twenty-four million dollars, after taxes. And that on the same day, a maternal cousin with whom I grew-up, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; a spinal tap will determine the extent of his neurological damage. My glass is half-full. And half empty.

Forecast

2008-09-13T22:57:00.003-04:00

The largest and most devastating tornado outbreak to affect North & South Carolina during the last century occurred on 28 March 1984. The outbreak produced 22 tornadoes that killed 57 people, including 42 in North Carolina with 15 in South Carolina & injured another 800. Roughly a third of the victims were in mobile homes.
For years, I conflated the tornadoes & the kidnap & murder of a classmate’s mother. But the latter occurred in 1985 when we were in the sixth grade. However, in my mind, uprooted trees, contorted mobile homes & downed power lines composed the landscape over which detectives & bloodhounds scrambled for clues & a scent.
MM was the only child of divorced parents. She lived with her mother & her mother’s mother in a red house – blood-red but not fresh blood more the shade of bloodstains on a white sheet – across from St. David’s Episcopal Church. MM’s mother was missing for two days before her body was recovered. Our class sent sympathy cards. A few kids attended the funeral. I didn't.
By the time MM – wan, doe-eyed & with a disposition like razor blades hidden in a shiny apple – returned to school, a suspect, KJM, had been caught & charged. His trial was broadcast by the local radio station. Part of me remembers hearing snatches of it while waiting on line in the school cafeteria, but this is surely a case of mis-remembering.
KJM was found guilty & sentenced to death. Summer arrived on schedule. And MM lived with her grandmother until the ninth grade, when she left town for boarding school. I’ve seen her once since the late 80s, in the dairy section of Harris Teeter. She was tall, kind of beautiful & in a hurry.

Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are

2008-09-04T01:16:00.005-04:00

During the late 1990s, while studying abroad in Budapest, Hungary, I was asked to participate in a police line-up. A dark-skinned man was a crime suspect & the police were hard-pressed to locate enough similarly-complected men to host a proper line-up for their eyewitnesses. Hungary is an aggressively white country, ethnic, rather than racial, differences are the norm. A skinny blue-black American college student caused quite the stir. It felt like someone watched my every move. And when it wasn’t exhausting, it was exhilarating.
I lived in Buda, on a tree-lined street just up the hill & around the curve from the four-star Gellert Hotel, in a dorm reserved for the one hundred most talented Hungarian students in the city – a dorm with marble floors, vaulted ceilings & drafty windows. I was often in the local shops amusing shopkeepers, & patrons alike, with my pidgin Hungarian. My boyfriend lived across the Danube in Pest; daily, I jumped onto or off the 7 or 11 trams, depending if I were late for class for hurrying toward a round of sweaty man-sex. Most Friday mornings, I stepped over the drunks who slept & pissed across the sidewalk in front of the bars which followed one after the other along the street between the dorm & my bank (in my recklessness, I’d flown to Budapest with fifteen thousand dollars cash, which I promptly deposited into the OTB Bank). I drank my coffee with fresh cream at the same table in the same shop every Monday, Wednesday & Thursday after class.
I’d been introduced to the district police chief upon my arrival – a heads-up on both our parts – & he came calling once he needed a favor. No sooner had his request been translated to me by my program director, VH, than I pictured myself handcuffed, shackled & en route to some Soviet-era prison bloc on the strength of a flawed identification. Shaking my head no, I asked VH to tell the short barrel-chest chief that, in America, black men, especially innocent ones, never voluntarily stood in line-ups. It was against our constitution.

What Becomes A Legend Most

2008-09-01T22:14:00.005-04:00

Perhaps it’s the result of careful skilled editing, but Gene Simmons seems like a good parent. A really good one, in fact. I’m, admittedly, no expert on fathers or fatherhood, but I’m confident I’d be impressed even if I weren’t a little punch drunk after watching a Gene Simmons Family Jewels marathon on A&E. There’s an easiness to Gene’s parenting that speaks to his inexorable love for & devotion to his son & daughter. I never would have guessed the preternaturally long-tongued bass guitarist born Chaim Witz had it in him. I hope his kids are grateful.
When I was a kid, I rarely saw my father & when I did, he was usually drunk. One night, he jimmied open my bedroom window & spirited me away from the mobile home I shared with my mother & out into the surrounding pine forest. My graying incontinent (& therefore outside) German Shepard, Butch, shuffled along behind us. After minutes of zigzagging deeper & deeper through the trees, father passed out atop a heap of pine needles & moss. I, in zip-front feet-pajamas, turned & followed my old dog home.

The Big Tent

2008-08-27T15:54:00.002-04:00

Last night, I tuned in to Senator Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention – the first 2008 convention event to which I’ve paid any attention. There’s almost nothing Senator Obama could do to lose my vote & absolutely nothing Senator McCain could do or say to win it. And since I don’t generally enjoy politicians pontificating, I’ve opted to watch the US Open on USA Network. But, having supported Senator Clinton during the primaries, I wanted to hear what she had to say & honor her compelling candidacy. And I wasn’t disappointed – far from it. She evoked Harriet Tubman & the early suffragists. (My mother was born before women could vote & this year my daughter got to vote for her mother for president brought the crowd to its feet.) She reminded those faithful to the Democratic Party, rather than to a particular cult of personality (her cult in particular), that when we cast our votes, we’re voting not simply our own self-interests but also on behalf of the least among us: wounded veterans, minimum-wage single parents, the aged, the undereducated & the uninsured.
If rifts linger in the Democratic Party, they linger despite Senator Clinton’s laudable efforts at reconciliation. Any former Clinton supporter who’s now planning to support Senator McCain against Senator Obama (when the Clinton & Obama camps were rarely at odds over policy issues – their differences being a matter of procedure) must ask herself if a candidate’s whiteness is her main criterion for support. The America Hillary Clinton hoped to lead bears no resemblance to John McCain’s country.

Eat. Drink. Be Merry.

2008-08-20T18:16:00.005-04:00

I love Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, but she exhausts me. On today’s episode, she’s hosting a few friends for weekly bridge & decides to make finger-food. Her version of finger-food includes: vegetable sushi with soy-ginger marinade, lamb sausage in puff pastry, lobster salad on endive leaves, raspberry linzer cookies & lemon drops to drink – everything home-studio made of course. Whatever happened to the days of chips, dip & beer? Garten’s card-game menu is all the proof we need that the gap between the haves & the have-nots now resembles the Grand Canyon. Now how do I get dealt in?

Matthew 17:20

2008-08-19T14:33:00.005-04:00

Fifty-seven percent of randomly survey adults believe that God’s intervention would save a gravely ill relative even if doctors declared further treatment futile. Twenty percent of medical professionals held the same belief. The survey, of 1000 U.S. adults & 774 medical professionals, was recently published in the Archives of Surgery.

My mother underwent a hardcore religious awakening when I was in the fourth grade. I went from attending church only intermittently – on holidays & as punishment for having been especially precocious earlier in the week – to suffering through four services per week: Sunday morning & evening, Tuesday & Friday nights. The church, True Tabernacle in Jesus Name (no apostrophe), forbade watching television, listening to popular (aka “worldly”) music, wearing shorts, short sleeves & the color red. (Women were required to wear skirts & pantyhose year round.) Church elders advocated full-immersion baptisms, fasting, tarrying for the Holy Ghost & faith healing. When sick, members, & their rebellious heathen offspring, were anointed with “holy oil” (Pompeian brand olive oil) & prayed over – no aspirin, pepto or visits with a general practitioner.

As foolish as this seems to me now (& seemed to me then) mother was a true believer - even after the onset of lupus, when she could no longer work, walk without assistance, hold her bowels or hold a pencil. Even at 87.5 lbs. She surely would have died in our tiny apartment had not my grandmother been present (& I away attending an academic awards ceremony) to call an ambulance when she collapsed one evening in May.

The month before her death, when I was laid low by a raging case of chicken pox, & spent my afternoons lying beside her in bed, she’d assured me that God answered every prayer. Though often, she said, his answer was, No.

Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut

2008-08-19T00:41:00.005-04:00

Monday morning, around 10 am, someone stole two cars from my neighbor’s carport – while I watched. In my defense, I’d no idea that I was witnessing a crime. The house next door is empty; its owners live in Maryland or New Jersey – some state along I-95 North – one of these days they plan to retire to North Carolina. In the meantime, a relative keeps tabs on the place: emptying the junk mail from the mailbox & hiring someone to tend the yard – usually just as the lawn approaches jungle-grass length. This care-taking relative leaves several, of what I gather are his many, cars under the carport. The number of cars varies, but I’ve never noticed more than four or fewer than two. They’re always of the luxury variety: BMW, Mercedes & once an Aston Martin convertible. (Seems a little fishy, no?)
Mondays are garbage day & while I’m rolling our malodorous green city-issued can down the gravel driveway toward the road’s shoulder, I notice a really big black truck exiting the driveway next door with a maroon BMW hitched to the back. Behind it is a smaller, though still large, green truck with a black Mercedes hitched to it. I don’t see the drivers’ faces. I’m tired (though 10 isn’t early I didn’t get to sleep until 4.30 & had had a very stressful weekend), I'm wearing my sleep-shorts & my bladder is distended – so I pay the entire production little attention. If not for their noise, I may not have noticed the trucks at all.
Fast forward to 5pm - I’m on the phone with my friend LC, who’d just landed at JFK after a less-than-stellar Russian vacation, when the doorbell rings. It’s the cars’ rightful owner & the local police. They ask if I’d noticed anything out of the ordinary & I told them what I’ve just told you. (But telling them took a hell of a lot longer.) When I was done, they didn't seem all that grateful & truth be told, I didn’t feel all that helpful. Sometimes, turning a blind eye is wholly inadvertent. And way easier than you’d think.

Minority Report

2008-08-12T03:26:00.003-04:00

Often, when watching Intervention on A&E, I find myself rooting for the wrong side. Dirty, desperate & strung-out though they may be, the addicts seem cut from an infinitely more interesting quick than their sober relatives. If they were a smidgen less high & prone to fewer blackouts or violent outbursts – they’d fit right in at my next birthday party. The same can’t be said for the sober folk. Almost every episode I'm convinced that if I were related to the people who’d contacted the show in hope of intervening, I’d also be tempted to squander all my rent money on crack, smack or meth. I might binge & purge, hiding my vomit in freezer bags at the back of my closet. Or eat not at all. Perhaps this says something about me that I ought not share with the general public? But the show has a way of making clean living & the straight & narrow seem dreadfully boring. Then again, I’ve been told by more than one qualified professional that I’ve a fear of (an aversion to) Normal. So my reaction to Intervention is likely the minority position.

Good Will Toward Men

2008-08-10T16:35:00.004-04:00

I love the Olympic Games. I’m particularly a sucker for the low-profile sport & its champion. Take David Kostelecky of the Czech Republic, the gold medal winner in men’s trap, one of the three forms of competitive clay pigeon shooting. Ranked 34th in the world, Kostelecky had never come close to winning an Olympic medal of any ilk, much less gold. In fact, he’d failed to qualify for the 2004 Games in Athens. Nevertheless, in Beijing, he set an Olympic record by hitting all twenty-five of his final round traps. And he did it all wearing shades. In a downpour. I know nothing about shotguns, targets or accuracy – though I once stood in a fallow field across the road from BD’s grandmother’s house, while he & CM took aim at skeet, missing much more often than hitting – but I cheered for Kostelecky with an enthusiasm usually reserved for Venus Williams at Wimbledon. Men’s trap isn’t a full-time salaried pursuit; Kostelecky’s no stranger to sacrifice. And when his gray portly coach embraced him weeping, my own tears dampened my graying beard.

Of course, my pleasure in the Speedo-filled men’s water polo match between Hungary & Montenegro was another animal entirely.

A Strong Man's Illusion

2008-08-06T17:51:00.003-04:00

Every night before bed, I take 2000 mg of Depakote ER & 200 mg of Seroquel – mood-regulating drugs that help keep my bipolar disorder in check – & I hate it. I was diagnosed as bipolar during college when the ever-escalating periods of mania & their companion periods of despondency, which had begun during my early teens, coalesced into my second bungled suicide attempt. I remember waking in my quiet white hospital room & finding, GW, the master of my residential college sitting bedside. To this day I’ve no idea exactly how he was notified or by whom. By law, the university couldn’t notify my family of my suicide attempt & I’ve not chosen to do so. (I’m, by nurture, given to secrecy.) My medicine regimen has been overhauled several times since it was first developed that January in Houston. At times, I’ve chosen to forgo medication all together with almost exclusively disastrous results.
One month, while in graduate school in New York, I wasted fifteen thousand precious student-loan dollars on miscellaneous bullshit. Afternoons I would return to my apartment laden with shopping bags that I’d add to the surfeit of shopping bags with which my room was already crowded. I fucked strangers in the bathroom of the Frick Collection, & Butler Library, in Central & Riverside parks & various apartments throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn & the Bronx. I snorted cocaine & drank to excess. And I slept almost not at all. I was fever-pitched – all impulse. Until, very suddenly, I wasn’t.
The days that followed were as dank & inert as their predecessors had been frenzied. Anything beyond the very basics of waste removal & hydration was beyond me. I’m grateful that I can’t now recall exactly how bad I smelled, looked or felt. Eventually, I made my way back to my psychiatrist’s office & to a mood-regulated existence, but only after days of plaintive urging from my summer roommate, EC.
I’m still tempted, during prolonged periods of normalcy (or my very best approximation of normal), to skip my medication – it’s in part mania’s allure coupled with my inability to determine what’s simply boorish egotistical behavior & what is disorder or if there’s, for me, no difference – but I don’t. I maintain, if a bit begrudgingly.

Memories of an Isolated Location

2008-08-03T15:12:00.006-04:00

During my freshman year, I spent a lot of time listening to the international cast soundtrack of Les Miserables. The cds belonged to DC, a Korean-American karate enthusiast from Arizona, whose parents had decided that he would be a doctor, no matter what – end of discussion. Weeknights, a group of us would gather, most often in DC’s room, sometimes not (though never in mine) & we would complete our reading assignments or problem sets while the soundtrack played in the backyard. DC would sing along to his favorite songs & before long, I too had favorites. (I could sing “I Dreamed A Dream” right now, easy.) How queer (that is to say odd & unconventional) it all seems now – a bunch of eighteen-year-olds sitting crossed-legged in a dorm room listening to show tunes. But I’d be a liar if I claimed not to have enjoyed every hokey minute.
Later that year, I spent spring break in Zipolite, a remote beach on the Pacific coast of Mexico, with a dangerous undertow, that happened (& I would guess continues) to be a clothing-optional drug haven popular with the international tie-dye set. My first morning, after sleeping in a surf-side reed-roofed hut that reminded me of all the downsides to Gilligan’s Island, a freckled gentleman with a purplish foreskin offered me peyote. I’d gone to Zipolite with a group of virtual strangers: cool cool kids who were friends with my friend, JS, who’d convinced me to go but whose parents had driven to Houston the night before our scheduled departure & threatened her with bodily harm if she did indeed disembark. At the center of their threats lay an all expense paid trip to Acapulco for JS & her boyfriend – you do the math. Nowadays, when I recall that spring break its narrative is one of freewheeling adventure, but to say that back then I was out of my depth & regretful & terrified is to describe bareback butt sex with a needle-sharing IV drug-using prostitute from sub-Saharan Africa as, unwise.

Attractive, Illegible Signs

2008-07-30T20:54:00.005-04:00

When I was a really little kid, I thought rain showers that occurred while the sun shone signified The Apocalypse. Though I didn’t then know the word apocalypse. During some church service or other, I’d been apprised of The End Of Days – an end that would come without warning but with great fanfare. And one day in the late 1970s, I thought it had arrived. I was in my grandmother’s backyard (I think we lived with her at the time) with Sissy, the brindled Great Dane I loved like water; we were digging toward China, when, across the street from the front of the house, a storm cloud broke open. I could taste & hear the rain before I saw it – a great wall of water inching, rather than rushing, its way through the pecan trees, over the remains of the burnt-out house in which the feral cats congregated, into the street & finally onto the front lawn. All the while, I stood in the backyard in the clear blue light of day waiting for The Rapture. Inside the pockets of my hand-me-down powder-blue corduroy OP shorts, I clinched my hands into fists: I’d not yet made it to China & had been told dogs weren’t allowed in Heaven.

Exogenous

2008-07-28T18:12:00.002-04:00

I haven’t been sleeping very much & even less well. Last night I dreamt that I could fly, but never toward anything always away from. It was a sweaty fitful sleep & I awoke exhausted & pissed. I grumbled & groused my way through the morning, dissatisfied with my breakfast, career trajectory, the length of my beard. By mid-afternoon, I was eyebrow-deep in a thankfully rare tizzy – my frustration a self-sustaining loop. No doubt, I would have continued to be mired in my bullshit had I not dropped my wallet while buying stamps at the Post Office. Along with my library cards, $120.00 & photo I.D., AM’s obituary, which I’d clipped when it ran last year, fluttered to the tile floor. I’d known AM since our days at North Laurinburg Elementary School. He was the other black boy in the gifted & talented classes. The quiet agreeable one. Our mothers were friendly in the way that some young single mothers with young sons sometimes are.
AM died of a sudden massive coronary while playing pick-up basketball with a group of kids for whom he was youth minister. He’s survived by his mother, two sisters, his wife & a very young son. And other than his abiding affection for Paula Abdul, I can’t think of a single bad thing to say about him.

Showtime

2008-07-27T20:05:00.001-04:00

I’ve just finished watching the first season of Californication, courtesy of Netflix. And I must say there’s something about a slightly bronzed, boxer-brief-clad, busted-Porsche-driving David Duchovny as Hank the floundering writer that appeals. I’ve never watched an episode of The X-Files (a fact that I should have given more weight before paying to see the franchise’s first movie) & I approached this series with little preexisting Duchovny-baggage. Still I was expecting to be under-whelmed. Like all good naturalized New Yorkers, I abhor Los Angeles & its environs (or at least claim to whenever the subject is broached). As a card-carrying member of The Homo Club (in college affectionately knows as the Sparkle Jockeys), I tend to find suspect shows without gay characters – especially those set in the world of literature & art & on cable. But midway through the season I’d gotten over my usual objections; perhaps I was appeased by the presence of a recurring, successful black character (light-skinned & married to a whorish white woman though he may be). Or maybe it was the ultra-pale, precocious (though not to the point of warranting a beating) Madeline Martin; the bright, deep, green eyes of Natasha McElhone or Evan Handler’s British-bulldog sexiness. It was most likely a little bit of each, wrapped in good writing & even better acting. Duchovny shows rather than tells: instead of pontificating about Hank’s fucked-up-ness, he does fucked-up things again & again. Just like you me & everyone we know – or at least the ones who know how to have a good time. Hank’s writer’s block recalled my own. His one-night-stands & misdirected affections, ditto. But most convincing was his longing: the writhing & wriggling – the grasping for that which, though in plain sight, is forever out of reach.

Blues Farm Road

2008-07-27T01:02:00.004-04:00

I've tried to get the gecko, which suns itself on the front porch,
to trust me, to stay awhile, while I drink my coffee
& read a poem or two aloud toward the road.

But I'm not harmless. And the gecko senses danger
no matter how benign & cautious my approach.

Ball & Socket

2008-07-24T00:30:00.002-04:00

Ladies & gentlemen please go out & get yourselves a best friend. Preferably one who dates from childhood. I’ve just returned from dinner (bacon-cheddar fries, buffalo wings, beer, gin & tequila) with mine. Trust me, they’re invaluable.

Weights & Measures

2008-07-22T15:17:00.002-04:00

It behooves you to know who’ll drive & lie; leave the windows unlatched & take a bullet, on your behalf. And not to confuse these people with those who’ll attend your weddings & always remember your birthday; fuck you hard & deep like you like & when you want, only to wilt under the heat & humidity of the long haul; the rough stuff. And it is even more important to be a lying, window-unlatching, bullet-riddled driver for one someone – at the very least.

Catch A Rabbit By His Toe

2008-07-19T20:53:00.002-04:00

Here’s to esoteric yet-thoroughly-satisfying combinations like cornflake-crusted fried chicken, Billy Bragg & Wilco putting music to previously unheard Woody Guthrie lyrics or straight men & fisting. I know of a guy, the boyfriend of a relative’s friend, who loves to be penetrated. And not by a finger or two during a blowjob every now & then but by an entire Vaselined-hand, on the regular. When time is of the essence & he wants an orgasm quick & easy he’ll forgo a blowjob or vaginal penetration in favor of being penetrated. I know what I know (& have herein shared) because his girlfriend told me. She wonders if her spending hours with her hand lodged in her boyfriend’s rectum means that said boyfriend is gay. Unfortunately, I’ve been designated the local expert in all things gay & she came to me for answers. I told her that my highly evolved gaydar was of no use because I’d never met or even seen her boyfriend. Over sweet tea, I offered that he might be bi-sexual but that didn’t seem to resonate. In the end, she borrowed my copy of the John Cameron Mitchell-directed Shortbus with the intention of watching it with him to see if he became aroused during the gay sex scenes. I guess it would have been too difficult to explain why she’d borrowed a regular old-fashioned hardcore gay porn flick. I suggested that if she found it necessary (& acceptable) to lay traps perhaps this relationship was a poor fit. (Never mind if the boyfriend popped a boner watching dudes fuck or not.) And she suggested that I knew little to nothing about true love.

Step On A Crack

2008-07-17T23:50:00.001-04:00

One day during the fourth grade, DC, the chestnut-haired, double-jointed girl who sat in the conjoined desk beside me, had a seizure & wet herself. It was after lunch. Our teacher, Mr. S, had just returned from escorting LM to the principal’s office. When it had come time for LM to read aloud from whatever fourth grade textbook was then en vogue in Scotland County, she had called the thin six-foot- three-plus teacher a tall bony giraffe. (LM was almost as tall as Mr. S & dark & skinny as black licorice. She lived in the housing projects four blocks & a cemetery away from my grandmother’s house. She enjoyed a rather bad reputation & I wanted her friendship (& playground protection) something awful.) DC was friendly; she smiled easily & often. Most days, two wagon-train-era braids framed her oval face – I nicknamed her prairie & told no one. Gripped by seizure, her body lurched forward, her face slammed flat against her desk, her bladder drained all over the floor & my left foot which, per usual, rested under her desk.

DC of course survived. My foot, sock & sneaker were all washed & dried. LM, after a brief suspension, rejoined our ranks. But it had happened trouble had come. And I wondered who among us would be the next to fall.

I saw LM this morning in Home Depot; she was buying waterproof stain for her newly refurbished backyard deck. She was as tall (though not as skinny) as ever.

The Tether

2008-07-16T14:15:00.005-04:00

What to do with my leftover love? That which remains after a break-up or which flared but never became part of a relationship proper. Every man I’ve ever loved, I love still. Not to the point of pining, not to distraction – it's quieter than that. Like a front-porch swing or fresh strawberry-rhubarb pie.

The Dark End of The Street

2008-07-14T17:25:00.003-04:00

There’s no formula for mourning. I miss my mother most not on the High Holy Days (Mother’s Day, her birthday, my birthday, Thanksgiving) but at random, otherwise innocuous, moments. Most days it’s as if she’s in a foreign land, Montenegro or Kathmandu, & I’m not, therefore we don’t see one another. But sometimes during an episode of House Hunters International, or waiting on line at Harris Teeter, or while ordering a margarita on the rocks with salt, I’m overcome with such a surfeit of grief that my eyes temporarily lose their focus. This though my actual memories of her are difficult to parse from my aunts’ stories & recollections – like unraveling a strand of her hair from a ball of yarn. Mother was the second of my grandmother’s daughters to die (my Aunt Evelyn the first); five sisters & two brothers survive her. I mourn her today having learned that a college friend’s niece & nephew (ages one & three) drowned last Tuesday.

ODE TO THE EAST VILLAGE

2008-07-12T13:30:00.009-04:00

Lately, when I can't sleep, I've been watching French
movies from the last decade of the 20th century & the first
five years of the 21st, not the classic films of the New Wave or cinema verite:
I've got existential crises & truth in spades I want dark-haired
skinny fellows who still smoke & don't mind sharing
their hairy unkempt ass cracks & veiny uncut cocks with an audience --
Louis Garrel, Melvil Poupaud, Romain Duris et al.; the kind I'm unlikely
to meet at the local Super Wal-Mart but who weren't strangers to the now defunct
Wonder Bar or the backroom of The Cock -- guys who were (almost always) hot & tender-to-the-touch.

Operator

2008-07-11T18:18:00.002-04:00

I don’t know what it is about my telephone number, but I get a lot of misdirected calls & wrong numbers. Callers seeking the Right Reverend So & So or a bail bondsman or Chinese takeout. At least once a week, I return home to find voicemail messages left by strangers for other strangers & these messages are often hackle-raising in their general nastiness. Take this afternoon’s message from Marlene to Louise from which I’ll quote: Louise this is Marlene & I’m sitting out here in your church parking lot at quarter to three just like I said I would be. And you ain’t, which really ain’t no surprise. I’m in the white Tacoma truck in the handicapped parking space, should be easy for you to find. I doubt that I’d even recognize you now that you’ve put on so much weight, a real shame since you were always such a pretty thing, but then nothing lasts forever – pretty especially. I tried to tell you that on many occasion. But you never listened to nobody. Marlene continued for another thirty or so seconds (no message seems to be too long for voicemail) but you get the gist. Whoever Louise is, I hope that her dealings with Marlene are fleeting & infrequent. And for my sake, I hope Marlene loses my number.

Breakfast at Wimbledon

2008-07-05T21:17:00.004-04:00

My how different this Saturday morning would have been for the world, had Oracene Price (né Williams) not given birth to her fourth daughter on 17 June 1980 & her fifth on 26 September 1981. Of the nine Wimbledon finals contested this decade, eight have included at least one Williams sister. In winning, Venus has won three of the last four. From the 2002 French Open through the 2003 Wimbledon the sisters met in five consecutive Grand Slam finals. Women’s tennis without Venus & Serena would be much like bullfighting minus the bull & the matador. Being heady with the scent of mythology doesn’t render the Williams story any less compelling or true. Theirs may well be the greatest sports-story of the past 100 years – if not ever. And their accomplishments, in a sport that has seen only three other black Grand Slam singles champions (Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe & Yannick Noah) in its entire storied history, have reminded me – by nature a glass half-empty sort of fellow – not to confuse the apparent with the actual. Or accept less when more is always on option.

Mercy

2008-07-04T14:04:00.003-04:00

Earlier this week, I spent two days prostrate with headache & fever – vomiting like a malaria victim. It wasn’t malaria of course – actually, I don’t know what it was – but for those two days, I was almost as sick as I’ve ever been. Light, sound & the very idea of food were enough to undo me. Any fluid other than water, including broth & fever-reducing liquid medicines, were regurgitated with a vengeance. More than once, I vomited all over & around the toilet, inside the sink as well as on the shower curtain – the vomit as buckshot phenomenon. Another time I lost my glasses in the dirty bowl & had to fish them out. Fun. And then there were the seemingly interminable minutes I spent splayed across the bathroom floor, whimpering.
As a kid, I rather enjoyed being sick (or rather pretending to be) the attention & the no-school of it all. I naturally run a higher than normal body temperature, but before this was diagnosed I would go to school & complain of a headache; the custom at the time dictated that any student complaining of a headache must have his or her temperature taken &, as mine was always above 98.2, I’d be sent home. This happened so often during the second grade that I was eventually admitted to the hospital to undergo a battery of tests. I don’t recall much of that stay except the large blue manila folder in which my teacher, Mrs. H, sent my homework & my classmates’ get-well-soon cards. I recall having to drink a milkshake like solution in preparation for my final set of abdominal x-rays; afterwards the nurse forgot to give me the follow-up diarrheatic. (I’ll never forget the pain of that long-delayed bowel movement – it felt like my rectum was being simultaneously shredded & ripped from my body.)
What I didn’t know then, what I learned only about a year ago, was that while I was laid back at Scotland Memorial Hospital enjoying cable television (there was no TV at my house) & the well wishes, the Scotland County Department of Social Services was conducting a full-fledged investigation into my home life. There was great concern that I was being abused. If my symptoms (the severe headaches & dizziness that cut my school days short) couldn’t be traced to a particular illness (as they couldn’t) they then must have a more sinister origin. All of the adults in my life (mother, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers) were interviewed at length. In the end, I wasn’t removed from my mother’s care (though this option wasn’t taken completely off the table until weeks after my discharge from the hospital). And I stopped ditching school – my naturally unnaturally-high body temperature had been uncovered – though I did try my damnedest to catch head lice.
Had Aunt D not let loose with this information it’s likely that my recollection of my second grade hospital stay would have forever included only a blue folder & severe constipation. My mother died when I was thirteen, & I imagine that this is just one of many things her premature death kept us from discussing. Why my grandmother, who died in 1998, & who seemed to take particular pleasure in regaling me with stories of just how difficult I’d always been, kept this information from me is much more of a mystery. But then sparking a Social Services investigation is much more dire than slipping undetected out the back door of Vacation Bible School & being picked up along the side of the road by a cop, or pissing in an older cousin’s Mountain Dew. Perhaps she suspected that, even as an adult, the knowledge would stick like a burr in my craw.

CATECHISM

2008-07-04T01:47:00.002-04:00

Think of it like this, the Arctic is frozen ocean
surrounded by land, Antarctica frozen land

surrounded by ocean. Similar, but not the same --
like a passion for & a devotion to.

The wafer & the Host.

Our best efforts were insufficient;
a filthy film coated our mouths & our words --
little lies whose color changed to black from white.