Thursday, December 01, 2005
doings
So a friend of mine has undertaken the duties of ghostwriting a novel. It is based upon her employer's inspiration that The DaVinci Code is selling well. The hero is to be a thinly disguised version of himself, a middle-aged businessman with a faltering grasp of English...the heroine, my friend slowly discovered, is to be a thinly disguised version of herself. I believe the two characters were supposed to become romantically entangled. He has offered her terrible terms for her labor, no wages. It could hardly be worse but she has agreed to share a percentage of his gross profits of the self-published book. Yes. He wishes to publish it himself under the auspices of a publishing company that other employees are pressed into creating between their usual duties. He offered to fly my friend, in his company, to France for research. He often offers plot devices- the clues lead to the hero finding a treasure walled up in the very building in which the man has operated a business all along! It was there all along. It should be no surprise that the hero and the titular author happen to run the same sort of business. There are terrorists and mystics and mystical terrorists and real-life historic characters. After a year of working on the book and having her chapters criticized for straying too far afield, my friend reached a crisis point. She pleaded to be informed how far she was veering from his point. "What is your point?" she asked him. "What is the book about?" He said he would get back to her.
Is it a treasure hunt? Hardy Boys? Is it a brash statement of world politics, an indictment of irreligious icon hunters? Was it to be a new understanding of terrorism, its motivations?
He called her.
"Supply-side economics," he said.
-=================
The allowances one man may make for himself he might also afford to others, but he will always see the others' own allowances as grossly liberal. One man wants his blasphemies to be overlooked, but his church-going observed, another believes that church-going is optional, but a civil tongue the key to Heaven. Each salvation is peculiar to its maker. Even literalists tailor the Gospel to the most personally congenial interpretation. No one who is truly devout will believe that they have disqualified themselves from Heaven.
The auction is equivalent to the Last Judgement for possessions. The gavel comes down and the piece, for so long loved amongst its owners, has been determined worthwhile or worthless. As the opinion of the auction buyers might reflect upon the owner's taste, it is advised to surrender one's estate only after death. Some liquidate early. They are not only dispossessed of the things that defined them, but come to learn that the value was entirely imaginary. Sometimes it works in reverse, but then they are so amazed that the things they believed were worthless are actually quite valuable that they leave the auction similarly abashed.
The objects bear marks of their owners long after the owners are gone. Things belonging to single women are dripped on, waxy spots on the tops of things, waxy splatter on the sides along with solid rivulets of wax.
One recent estate had parts of the owners head and its contents splattered on everything, as he has shot himself. He was heavily in debt, and his possessions were mostly top-of-the-line electronics and recreational gear. We cleaned what was visible, but so much went unnoticed until it was setup in preview and on the auction block. The employees were asked not to discuss the death of the client- that is general auction protocol, but there wasn't a soul in the employ of the auction house who did not relish whispering the shocking details.
Several weeks ago, just after the greatly successful liquidation of the suicide's estate we had a full, fast auction of flamboyant kitsch resigned to us by an elderly homosexual who was still alive. I heard that he would rush the packers with individual objects of his, claiming their great value, their great significance, their hight initial cost. We had over four hundred lots- more than a third was from the living homosexual's consignment. It was 80's ersatz deco, pieces from a time when a few small retailers rebelled against the solid oak and birch constructions that were prevalent. It was the least desirable furnishings we had ever run, to my knowledge. There were some auctions that involved a condo furnished with sponge painted, stuccoed pieces evoking classical forms- as adapted to strip mall Greek restaurants. That was bad.
But thees pieces like those were inherently valueless. I cannot imagine a context where they would presume to have a value. What caused this?
The late seventies and early eighties were an anchorless time, design-wise. The modern chairs were not comfortable, the novelty furniture... bean-bag chairs were juvenile. We were grown up- Wall Street, Working Girl. When the suburban companies like Levitz, my mother's employer Housley Brothers, The Oak Barn supplanted the department stores, manufacturing became less about brands pushed by the major retailers. Terms were given forcibly- 96 months to pay. Materials were cheap or disproportionately dear, but whether it was particle board or oak, gold or marble- furniture was massive and blunt. Large and lumpy. It was as though everything were modelled on a nude Gerald Ford.
Who can blame the despairing aesthete for lining his apartment with Erte posters, for slipcovering his plaid sleeper-sofa with paisley velvet and putting blood-green ostrich feathers in a vase?
Then what happened? Pop art semmed to make the specious claim that the innocuous brands that had become cultural touchstones were in fact the vacuous tenets of our belief systems- Marilyn, Holsteins, Thunderbirds. Manufacturers took the ball. In the early seventies, the country began its "Nostalgia" craze with a manner suggesting that no civilisation had ever idealised and imitated its past. Antique newsprint patterned everything. Popular entertainers would perform vaudeville standards dressed in Belle Nineties get-ups. As the middle class shook off the previous manifestation, the colonial furniture that had been de riguer since Henry Ford furnished his house, it looked to see where the contemporary furnishing had gotten itself.
It was a mess. The success of the shlock-deco revival was enough to urge North Carolina to put some bends in things.
When blame must be assigned, and it must, who can blame Saudi entrepreneurs for selling asymmetrical marble corner end tables? For manufacturing elongated evocations of Nefertiti? Anything flashy and fifties- diner red and chrome, anything with flamboyant lines, like the parenthetical benchs, sitting on points. Anything evocative of richness, decadence- the faux marble statues and marblized surfaces. Anything irreverent and kitschy, the plastic flamingoes, the cut-out painted waitress drink stand, or English butler. It was an untested market. The prices were malleable. Very expensive, but on sale for one-fiftieth of retail.
We thought Shelley Michelle would buy some of it. Shelley is a dealer in the antique mall. She is always in her booth or padding around the mall. Some colleagues tried to warm up to her, since she is always always around, by asking her out for drinks.
I could have told them that Shelley Michelle would spit out her drink if Bush were criticised. I can't say how I guessed it but....
He was. She did. Of course, it seems that the sheer volume of his actions have decided the only way not to criticise Bush is to not speak at all. But she was not having any of it. "America, Love it or Leave it, I always say- if you don't like it you can just get out!" she is said to have said. She is a sad-eyed woman of fifty or more, hair dyed gothic black, eyebrows dyed, thick mascara and a chin-line mask of foundation. She looks sticky beige. She has a sort of pekinese flatness to her face, and might be missing a tooth in the upper front part of her mouth. She can be seen straining to open her face, make herself an ingenue, bee-sting mouth and all, though she moves like a matron in an orphanage, and quietly stares like the long-tenured, unloved manager of a lingerie department in a Sioux City Macy's. There are raw spots from where she clawed her way up from wherever she began. She wears leopard prints over, under or around diaphonous black chemises. Her hair is always pulled back with a tied black scarf. She sells extravagant costume jewelry, flamboyant vintage clothing and allied objects. Profusion. Her space looks like a jewelry box crammed fast for a getaway.
She dresses like our boss, and like our boss is a good, stalwart republican.
As I always say, the road to Hell is paved with good republicans.
Is it a treasure hunt? Hardy Boys? Is it a brash statement of world politics, an indictment of irreligious icon hunters? Was it to be a new understanding of terrorism, its motivations?
He called her.
"Supply-side economics," he said.
-=================
The allowances one man may make for himself he might also afford to others, but he will always see the others' own allowances as grossly liberal. One man wants his blasphemies to be overlooked, but his church-going observed, another believes that church-going is optional, but a civil tongue the key to Heaven. Each salvation is peculiar to its maker. Even literalists tailor the Gospel to the most personally congenial interpretation. No one who is truly devout will believe that they have disqualified themselves from Heaven.
The auction is equivalent to the Last Judgement for possessions. The gavel comes down and the piece, for so long loved amongst its owners, has been determined worthwhile or worthless. As the opinion of the auction buyers might reflect upon the owner's taste, it is advised to surrender one's estate only after death. Some liquidate early. They are not only dispossessed of the things that defined them, but come to learn that the value was entirely imaginary. Sometimes it works in reverse, but then they are so amazed that the things they believed were worthless are actually quite valuable that they leave the auction similarly abashed.
The objects bear marks of their owners long after the owners are gone. Things belonging to single women are dripped on, waxy spots on the tops of things, waxy splatter on the sides along with solid rivulets of wax.
One recent estate had parts of the owners head and its contents splattered on everything, as he has shot himself. He was heavily in debt, and his possessions were mostly top-of-the-line electronics and recreational gear. We cleaned what was visible, but so much went unnoticed until it was setup in preview and on the auction block. The employees were asked not to discuss the death of the client- that is general auction protocol, but there wasn't a soul in the employ of the auction house who did not relish whispering the shocking details.
Several weeks ago, just after the greatly successful liquidation of the suicide's estate we had a full, fast auction of flamboyant kitsch resigned to us by an elderly homosexual who was still alive. I heard that he would rush the packers with individual objects of his, claiming their great value, their great significance, their hight initial cost. We had over four hundred lots- more than a third was from the living homosexual's consignment. It was 80's ersatz deco, pieces from a time when a few small retailers rebelled against the solid oak and birch constructions that were prevalent. It was the least desirable furnishings we had ever run, to my knowledge. There were some auctions that involved a condo furnished with sponge painted, stuccoed pieces evoking classical forms- as adapted to strip mall Greek restaurants. That was bad.
But thees pieces like those were inherently valueless. I cannot imagine a context where they would presume to have a value. What caused this?
The late seventies and early eighties were an anchorless time, design-wise. The modern chairs were not comfortable, the novelty furniture... bean-bag chairs were juvenile. We were grown up- Wall Street, Working Girl. When the suburban companies like Levitz, my mother's employer Housley Brothers, The Oak Barn supplanted the department stores, manufacturing became less about brands pushed by the major retailers. Terms were given forcibly- 96 months to pay. Materials were cheap or disproportionately dear, but whether it was particle board or oak, gold or marble- furniture was massive and blunt. Large and lumpy. It was as though everything were modelled on a nude Gerald Ford.
Who can blame the despairing aesthete for lining his apartment with Erte posters, for slipcovering his plaid sleeper-sofa with paisley velvet and putting blood-green ostrich feathers in a vase?
Then what happened? Pop art semmed to make the specious claim that the innocuous brands that had become cultural touchstones were in fact the vacuous tenets of our belief systems- Marilyn, Holsteins, Thunderbirds. Manufacturers took the ball. In the early seventies, the country began its "Nostalgia" craze with a manner suggesting that no civilisation had ever idealised and imitated its past. Antique newsprint patterned everything. Popular entertainers would perform vaudeville standards dressed in Belle Nineties get-ups. As the middle class shook off the previous manifestation, the colonial furniture that had been de riguer since Henry Ford furnished his house, it looked to see where the contemporary furnishing had gotten itself.
It was a mess. The success of the shlock-deco revival was enough to urge North Carolina to put some bends in things.
When blame must be assigned, and it must, who can blame Saudi entrepreneurs for selling asymmetrical marble corner end tables? For manufacturing elongated evocations of Nefertiti? Anything flashy and fifties- diner red and chrome, anything with flamboyant lines, like the parenthetical benchs, sitting on points. Anything evocative of richness, decadence- the faux marble statues and marblized surfaces. Anything irreverent and kitschy, the plastic flamingoes, the cut-out painted waitress drink stand, or English butler. It was an untested market. The prices were malleable. Very expensive, but on sale for one-fiftieth of retail.
We thought Shelley Michelle would buy some of it. Shelley is a dealer in the antique mall. She is always in her booth or padding around the mall. Some colleagues tried to warm up to her, since she is always always around, by asking her out for drinks.
I could have told them that Shelley Michelle would spit out her drink if Bush were criticised. I can't say how I guessed it but....
He was. She did. Of course, it seems that the sheer volume of his actions have decided the only way not to criticise Bush is to not speak at all. But she was not having any of it. "America, Love it or Leave it, I always say- if you don't like it you can just get out!" she is said to have said. She is a sad-eyed woman of fifty or more, hair dyed gothic black, eyebrows dyed, thick mascara and a chin-line mask of foundation. She looks sticky beige. She has a sort of pekinese flatness to her face, and might be missing a tooth in the upper front part of her mouth. She can be seen straining to open her face, make herself an ingenue, bee-sting mouth and all, though she moves like a matron in an orphanage, and quietly stares like the long-tenured, unloved manager of a lingerie department in a Sioux City Macy's. There are raw spots from where she clawed her way up from wherever she began. She wears leopard prints over, under or around diaphonous black chemises. Her hair is always pulled back with a tied black scarf. She sells extravagant costume jewelry, flamboyant vintage clothing and allied objects. Profusion. Her space looks like a jewelry box crammed fast for a getaway.
She dresses like our boss, and like our boss is a good, stalwart republican.
As I always say, the road to Hell is paved with good republicans.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
what do folded girls do?
Next June, the 27th will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the flying saucer. It was in this neighborhood, in the vicinity of Mt. Rainier that Kenneth Arnold saw nine disklike objects while flying in his own plane. They were described over the news wire as saucers. Another area native, Dennis the Menace, is being celebrated in a new anniversary edition of early comics. The boy whose father drew the strip, Dennis Ketchum, grew up on Queen Anne Hill, where I lived for many years. He was as mischeivous as a Little Rascal, but beat a strangely solitary path. Other kid characters in the strip never seemed to share the spoils, nor participate in the plotting. Another thing that was unique about Dennis was the absence of a supplied cause for his delinquency and malevolence, his adult-proportioned menace. Dennis' popularity had to be connected to the spontaneous generation of his crimes, his criminal turn of mind, his jail-bird patois. This might alternate with a naive, hickish huck finn like candor.
Neither the behavoir of his father nor mother could explain Dennis'. He was a product of the time and exculpated the both of them. I think it has been a late popular development to not visit the sins of the son upon his father or family but to blame them upon the zeitgeist. As though the young transmit the evils of the times.
++++ ++++++B++++++ +++
I went on a coffee date with Claire and the baby. We sat at a sidewalk table, at the 45th Starbucks. We had parked the stroller at Tully's initially. They have sidewalk speakers that amplify the music they play indoors, a New Age concoction- sax, timbale, and unconsonant vocals. We moved. Two unoccupied tables in the sun only the rush of traffic at our ankles to disturb us. And the baby.
We are deep in the crossword when a bearded gay with a border collie negotiates for the table next to us. In a few minutes a black man in his late fifties comes up and begins addressing the gay, the collie, the baby, Claire, me. He tells me loudly, insistently that I am holding the baby wrong. "Stir, don't shake." He takes a cowbell and drumstick out of a bag and begins to play. He stops every young girl on the sidewalk, with either a "Hey, girl! Look at that nice skirt. I like your skirt, that's a nice skirt....mmmm-hmmm." or a variation. He talks to the gay about the hard load his race carries. The gay baits him. The cowbell guy addresses his righteous indignation to the baby. I tell him we are not a part of his conversation, though the five of us are nearly touching knees.
Claire walks the baby around and leaves me with the two of them.
"I come here on a slave ship. Yes I come on a slave ship here," the man says.
He does not mean the 45th Starbucks.
Claire and I decide to walk to a garage sale even though the posterboard sign we read on a telephone pole suggests that there will be live music. There is. A man is playing a guitar next to a folding table of kitchen items. Claire points out a table ten rows deep with mass market paperbacks. I find a Thorsten Veblen 'Theory of the Leisure Class', and a Norman Mailer 'Naked and the Dead'. I already own the Veblen, but it is a quarter a book, and the covers of both are terrific. 'Theory' has a coat of arms featuring a groomed poodle and a luxury car. Mailer has a bedraggled soldier and jagged typography, to suggest the horror and chaos of war.
I've read the Veblen before but the Mailer is new to me. The first chapter is not encouraging- shipboard poker game. The Boston cynic, the hard sergeant, and worse than one could hope for, the Southerner, who might say, "By gumption! Ah'll niver git the little ol' card Ah want!"
It is impossible to believe that this is a male speaking. It seems drawn almost entirely from the Southern-variety starlets of movie musicals and comedies. The kind in which, to differentiate, the Southern girl drawls her one unremarkable line, unfolds her legs and undulates across a room. By the way....Why why why do they perch like that? Where did it come from? Perched so far forward that their ankles are nearly beneath their anuses. Why must they simper bent? Is it sexual? What does a folded girl do? He ponduhed and ponduhed, and figgered and figgered but he got no closer to cipherin' it out than a ol' coon dog gits to tinned victuals.
Mailer's omniscient narration just sounds insane when it reproduces characters' voices in their dialects, or with their particular lack of understanding, and when it assumes an easy familiarity with our habits of perspective..."At a second glance you could see he was 28," it has gone too too far.
I think only a gay man could write of men together with any knowledge. A gay man might know, like he knows thread count, what activity makes shoulders like those.
Neither the behavoir of his father nor mother could explain Dennis'. He was a product of the time and exculpated the both of them. I think it has been a late popular development to not visit the sins of the son upon his father or family but to blame them upon the zeitgeist. As though the young transmit the evils of the times.
++++ ++++++B++++++ +++
I went on a coffee date with Claire and the baby. We sat at a sidewalk table, at the 45th Starbucks. We had parked the stroller at Tully's initially. They have sidewalk speakers that amplify the music they play indoors, a New Age concoction- sax, timbale, and unconsonant vocals. We moved. Two unoccupied tables in the sun only the rush of traffic at our ankles to disturb us. And the baby.
We are deep in the crossword when a bearded gay with a border collie negotiates for the table next to us. In a few minutes a black man in his late fifties comes up and begins addressing the gay, the collie, the baby, Claire, me. He tells me loudly, insistently that I am holding the baby wrong. "Stir, don't shake." He takes a cowbell and drumstick out of a bag and begins to play. He stops every young girl on the sidewalk, with either a "Hey, girl! Look at that nice skirt. I like your skirt, that's a nice skirt....mmmm-hmmm." or a variation. He talks to the gay about the hard load his race carries. The gay baits him. The cowbell guy addresses his righteous indignation to the baby. I tell him we are not a part of his conversation, though the five of us are nearly touching knees.
Claire walks the baby around and leaves me with the two of them.
"I come here on a slave ship. Yes I come on a slave ship here," the man says.
He does not mean the 45th Starbucks.
Claire and I decide to walk to a garage sale even though the posterboard sign we read on a telephone pole suggests that there will be live music. There is. A man is playing a guitar next to a folding table of kitchen items. Claire points out a table ten rows deep with mass market paperbacks. I find a Thorsten Veblen 'Theory of the Leisure Class', and a Norman Mailer 'Naked and the Dead'. I already own the Veblen, but it is a quarter a book, and the covers of both are terrific. 'Theory' has a coat of arms featuring a groomed poodle and a luxury car. Mailer has a bedraggled soldier and jagged typography, to suggest the horror and chaos of war.
I've read the Veblen before but the Mailer is new to me. The first chapter is not encouraging- shipboard poker game. The Boston cynic, the hard sergeant, and worse than one could hope for, the Southerner, who might say, "By gumption! Ah'll niver git the little ol' card Ah want!"
It is impossible to believe that this is a male speaking. It seems drawn almost entirely from the Southern-variety starlets of movie musicals and comedies. The kind in which, to differentiate, the Southern girl drawls her one unremarkable line, unfolds her legs and undulates across a room. By the way....Why why why do they perch like that? Where did it come from? Perched so far forward that their ankles are nearly beneath their anuses. Why must they simper bent? Is it sexual? What does a folded girl do? He ponduhed and ponduhed, and figgered and figgered but he got no closer to cipherin' it out than a ol' coon dog gits to tinned victuals.
Mailer's omniscient narration just sounds insane when it reproduces characters' voices in their dialects, or with their particular lack of understanding, and when it assumes an easy familiarity with our habits of perspective..."At a second glance you could see he was 28," it has gone too too far.
I think only a gay man could write of men together with any knowledge. A gay man might know, like he knows thread count, what activity makes shoulders like those.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Resuscitate
Will's ex-partner B. lives under Roy's house. He has cleaned it up gradually. The upstairs bedroom that was entirely given over to becoming a litter box has been cleaned. The floors are cleaned even if the damage from Mick's spilling bladder is too deep to eradicate or disguise. B. lives in fear of warrants and treachery. He talks about moving away. He is sure that Will has called the police. Will visited after Roy's death and saw B. taking cover. The police are interested in a bathtub that B sold to a dealer. It was an antique claw-foot tub that B earned as a payment on work done for someone who stays high, delusional, paranoid and hyperactive. The owner of the tub, after giving to B., called the police. THe police searched the second-hand shops. They recovered the tub and returned it. The shop owner, who had dealt with B., gave the police his info.
This sort of thing used to happen with frequency when we all had shops on Capital Hill. It seems shocking now. He might have made 50 dollars from the tub. It seems the burden of the addict to carry cast-iron down the sidewalk across the street and a mile more for a few dollars and to run from the transaction for the next seven years.
Mick had been an alcoholic. It had been the destruction of him. He had once modelled for Jantzen. When I met him he was hunched, sagging, balding, blind and only semi-ambulatory. Their floor and all their furniture was marked by spilled drinks and burns from dropped cigarettes. You could see where they passed out the most times, Will said.
When it came time to make the final decision, when Mick's family and Roy were around the bed, with the hospital staff, and they discussed the "Do Not Resuscitate" order, Roy was given the power to remove the ventilator or keep it. "Mick?" Roy asked, "If you want me to keep the respirator on, sit up and tell me."
*
*
I wrote what I called a valedictory for L.'s daughter. It was her 18th birthday. I worried that it might be inappropriate. L. seemed to like it. It went as follows:
Nothing would have suited me better at eighteen than to have left home at seventeen. It would have been a symbolic action if I had left home, by the most charitable reading. You see, by the time I had become seventeen years old, my parents had already packed a few sticks of their Early American furniture in a Mayflower van and left me with a woman of dubious morals, while they relocated to the flats of Oklahoma. Under those circumstances, it was harder to run away. I hid under the covers of the bed I had been given, but this woman in whose charge I was left had raised two head-strong children herself, and knew the difference between an empty bed and an occupied one. Indeed that might have been her forte.
I was destined to miss getting everything I needed to nurture my self-esteem by the shortest distance. I was given the editorship of the yearbook, not the newspaper. I was in second band, not first. I was the first runner-up for an exchange program. Everything seemed to have been given away to someone else before I got to it. My path to the future was littered with the shells of the nuts others had eaten. And yet I crunched forward.
Some are determined to make their mark early. Salvador Dali emptied the water supply in his sculpture classroom into the plaster supply, flooding the rooms, halls, and walkways with what became a cast that had to be chipped away. I think he was expelled. There are better examples. Of course you can't forget Mozart.
Others are poised to accompany the exact tenor and drift of their moment, and at any other time, or in any other place they would be passed by. Harry Truman is a good example of this sort of life.
Have you forgotten Mozart yet? Try.
Being young is a currency itself, and those who are richest have the least idea how to spend it wisely. Since you are an attractive young girl, you will find that everyone seems to want to lend you a hand- at least there are lots of hands apparent. At times it will seem like you are the last lifeboat off the Titanic.
A generous nature and a kind disposition must be earned, I believe. In my own experience, you have to be a total bastard for a while, before becoming a saintly figure. Look out for yourself, maybe just for a month. Give it a try. Be snotty to everyone who will not advance you. Snub those who have shown you compassion, and mock those whom you envy. Ignore the needy and shun the powerless.
You will find that you have a spine nearly straining to the breaking point against this manner. You will find that there is something inside of you- surely not the soul- nothing that mystical... something which expires, but which cannot be extinguished during your life... something your Mother and Father gave you. I won't name it. I can't. Goodness. Oh, I could.
Alright maybe do it for just a week. The needy and powerless can hold grudges a long time.
This sort of thing used to happen with frequency when we all had shops on Capital Hill. It seems shocking now. He might have made 50 dollars from the tub. It seems the burden of the addict to carry cast-iron down the sidewalk across the street and a mile more for a few dollars and to run from the transaction for the next seven years.
Mick had been an alcoholic. It had been the destruction of him. He had once modelled for Jantzen. When I met him he was hunched, sagging, balding, blind and only semi-ambulatory. Their floor and all their furniture was marked by spilled drinks and burns from dropped cigarettes. You could see where they passed out the most times, Will said.
When it came time to make the final decision, when Mick's family and Roy were around the bed, with the hospital staff, and they discussed the "Do Not Resuscitate" order, Roy was given the power to remove the ventilator or keep it. "Mick?" Roy asked, "If you want me to keep the respirator on, sit up and tell me."
*
*
I wrote what I called a valedictory for L.'s daughter. It was her 18th birthday. I worried that it might be inappropriate. L. seemed to like it. It went as follows:
Nothing would have suited me better at eighteen than to have left home at seventeen. It would have been a symbolic action if I had left home, by the most charitable reading. You see, by the time I had become seventeen years old, my parents had already packed a few sticks of their Early American furniture in a Mayflower van and left me with a woman of dubious morals, while they relocated to the flats of Oklahoma. Under those circumstances, it was harder to run away. I hid under the covers of the bed I had been given, but this woman in whose charge I was left had raised two head-strong children herself, and knew the difference between an empty bed and an occupied one. Indeed that might have been her forte.
I was destined to miss getting everything I needed to nurture my self-esteem by the shortest distance. I was given the editorship of the yearbook, not the newspaper. I was in second band, not first. I was the first runner-up for an exchange program. Everything seemed to have been given away to someone else before I got to it. My path to the future was littered with the shells of the nuts others had eaten. And yet I crunched forward.
Some are determined to make their mark early. Salvador Dali emptied the water supply in his sculpture classroom into the plaster supply, flooding the rooms, halls, and walkways with what became a cast that had to be chipped away. I think he was expelled. There are better examples. Of course you can't forget Mozart.
Others are poised to accompany the exact tenor and drift of their moment, and at any other time, or in any other place they would be passed by. Harry Truman is a good example of this sort of life.
Have you forgotten Mozart yet? Try.
Being young is a currency itself, and those who are richest have the least idea how to spend it wisely. Since you are an attractive young girl, you will find that everyone seems to want to lend you a hand- at least there are lots of hands apparent. At times it will seem like you are the last lifeboat off the Titanic.
A generous nature and a kind disposition must be earned, I believe. In my own experience, you have to be a total bastard for a while, before becoming a saintly figure. Look out for yourself, maybe just for a month. Give it a try. Be snotty to everyone who will not advance you. Snub those who have shown you compassion, and mock those whom you envy. Ignore the needy and shun the powerless.
You will find that you have a spine nearly straining to the breaking point against this manner. You will find that there is something inside of you- surely not the soul- nothing that mystical... something which expires, but which cannot be extinguished during your life... something your Mother and Father gave you. I won't name it. I can't. Goodness. Oh, I could.
Alright maybe do it for just a week. The needy and powerless can hold grudges a long time.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
In Passing
The Gallery called about the T.S. Eliot Square Dance paintings. 2 for 275? No. Am I becoming arrogant, because I had a good month? 137.50 seems too cheap, as I will never make anything in visual art that I like more. I can make others. 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' could lend itself to one or two more square dance calls. Eliot is the only poet I can stomach. His Catholicism notwithstanding. It is Eliot's glasses that the shifty, deceitful elderly lady dealer wears. That's why I initially liked her. There could be no other reason. I have loaded twenty or thirty slabs of marble into her Jeep Cherokee with nary a thanks, and still been civil, even solicitous. Damn frames tricked me.
Mick of "Just Dandy" has died. He was the fourth person of "3 of a Kind", I think. He had been with his partner, the Fagin-like Roy, for 35 years. He had kidney failure, went on medication, then dialysis, had a leg amputated. He never seemed entirely well, even ten years ago. Words were slow to leave his lip, like tipped molasses. He seemed slow on the uptake and his eyes focussed with effort, like he was just crawling out from a nap under the bed. He gave the impression that his tongue was fat, that he chewed it like a pacifier. He was, though, the most... untroubled of the group of dealers. He had a sweet disposition, and reserved his scorn for the scorned.
He would sit on the sidewalk, while Roy sanded down an end table, and his head would slowly turn to watch the boys walk across the street. He was Floyd the barber, capable of homilies on the weather, business.
I remember being scandalised that Roy sanded down furniture. It seemed dishonest to me at the time. He wsa deliberately disguising the condition. Other dealers, knowing the lay public carries this incomprehensible prejudice, would just criticize Roy for doing it on the busy corner. In their shops you would hear the muffled sound of sanding in the backroom or upstairs.
I would often walk down the street and sit next to Mick. Never exchange many words. Just sit. He was easy company. Unpretentious. Genuinely nice. He would hand money out to just about anyone that asked. And many did. Without reservations- even when business was slow, he would just give money to any impoverished street kid or addict.
Julie, who worked for them, stopped me on the sidewalk downtown to tell me. "Mick passed."
and... "I think he passed on Labor Day." and "Right before he passed he was beginning to walk again." This passage is the tip of a belief system whose mass, I trust, will remain submerged.
Mick of "Just Dandy" has died. He was the fourth person of "3 of a Kind", I think. He had been with his partner, the Fagin-like Roy, for 35 years. He had kidney failure, went on medication, then dialysis, had a leg amputated. He never seemed entirely well, even ten years ago. Words were slow to leave his lip, like tipped molasses. He seemed slow on the uptake and his eyes focussed with effort, like he was just crawling out from a nap under the bed. He gave the impression that his tongue was fat, that he chewed it like a pacifier. He was, though, the most... untroubled of the group of dealers. He had a sweet disposition, and reserved his scorn for the scorned.
He would sit on the sidewalk, while Roy sanded down an end table, and his head would slowly turn to watch the boys walk across the street. He was Floyd the barber, capable of homilies on the weather, business.
I remember being scandalised that Roy sanded down furniture. It seemed dishonest to me at the time. He wsa deliberately disguising the condition. Other dealers, knowing the lay public carries this incomprehensible prejudice, would just criticize Roy for doing it on the busy corner. In their shops you would hear the muffled sound of sanding in the backroom or upstairs.
I would often walk down the street and sit next to Mick. Never exchange many words. Just sit. He was easy company. Unpretentious. Genuinely nice. He would hand money out to just about anyone that asked. And many did. Without reservations- even when business was slow, he would just give money to any impoverished street kid or addict.
Julie, who worked for them, stopped me on the sidewalk downtown to tell me. "Mick passed."
and... "I think he passed on Labor Day." and "Right before he passed he was beginning to walk again." This passage is the tip of a belief system whose mass, I trust, will remain submerged.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Unlikely apprenticeships
"What does 'Handsome is, as handsome does' mean?" Doug asks... often. I tell him:"It means that you are only as handsome as your actions." "I thought it meant that if you are handsome you can get away with anything," he replies, just as often.
The most handsome man I know, now a successful businessman, built the capital he needed to go into business by becoming a prostitute. This was probably ten or more years ago. He will talk about it frankly, he will laugh delightedly. It seems a ridiculous phase. He was well-liked, though he did not pro-rate. Premature ejaculators would sometimes ask for pro-rated refunds on the unused time. He also did not allow repeat customers. Repeat customers also felt entitled to ask for discounts, or familiar enough to elaborate on their requirements. My friend, the male hooker, might sometimes just get his shirt off before the whole thing was over.
He said that he did what many other prostitutes did not do: make out with the guys. Most of them were older, fat. Some were younger, but fat. He would charge $100 an hour, to be paid in advance. He looks like a high-school football player, thick, muscular shoulders and arms, massive legs, a prominent chest. He has the look and the manner of a high-school jock, and a stunning, pretty profile. No tattoos. Blond body hair.
He probably gave up the business when he met Arthur at the gym. Well, possibly twelve years have passed. Art was tawny, if that's the color I mean, part American Indian, no body hair, "so muscular that he had trouble wiping his ass", I was told. He had worked in a logging camp, felling trees and in teh down-time, lifting weights with the other guys. He was on work release. He had just come from prison, a drug conviction. They were together two years. Art began using. Meth, I think. My friend never went back to prostitution, but he still thinks about it. He's 40 now. But still dreamy.
He tells of one guy, a 23 year-old, pudgy, nerdy guy, living at his folk's house in Bellevue. The guy called 4 times to make sure that the fantasy that he wanted would be acted out correctly, authentically. My f. was supposed to humiliate him, degrade him, while the guy masturbated. He told him how pathetic his dick was. He followed him around the house. "You're worthless." They were in the kitchen. He pushed the guy out the glass patio doors and locked them. The guy pleaded to be let in. He was naked. the neighbors could see him. He pressed himself up against the glass, and to my f.'s surprise shot upon the glass. The kid said it was the best experience he'd ever had.
Doug loves stories like that. So does Claire. They both live sedately, respectably, but they've had their days. Doug overdosed in the alley behind Neighbors. Claire, in just her bathrobe, crawled out a window to escape the police after she accidentally violated some hospital in/out patient rule. Of course they're the most trustworthy people I've known. They're quite similar; though they've only had occasion to see each other maybe a half-dozen times, they seem to have an affinity.
They both want the grisly parts of my rare outings. Doug wants to know "How big was it?" I never remember.
The most handsome man I know, now a successful businessman, built the capital he needed to go into business by becoming a prostitute. This was probably ten or more years ago. He will talk about it frankly, he will laugh delightedly. It seems a ridiculous phase. He was well-liked, though he did not pro-rate. Premature ejaculators would sometimes ask for pro-rated refunds on the unused time. He also did not allow repeat customers. Repeat customers also felt entitled to ask for discounts, or familiar enough to elaborate on their requirements. My friend, the male hooker, might sometimes just get his shirt off before the whole thing was over.
He said that he did what many other prostitutes did not do: make out with the guys. Most of them were older, fat. Some were younger, but fat. He would charge $100 an hour, to be paid in advance. He looks like a high-school football player, thick, muscular shoulders and arms, massive legs, a prominent chest. He has the look and the manner of a high-school jock, and a stunning, pretty profile. No tattoos. Blond body hair.
He probably gave up the business when he met Arthur at the gym. Well, possibly twelve years have passed. Art was tawny, if that's the color I mean, part American Indian, no body hair, "so muscular that he had trouble wiping his ass", I was told. He had worked in a logging camp, felling trees and in teh down-time, lifting weights with the other guys. He was on work release. He had just come from prison, a drug conviction. They were together two years. Art began using. Meth, I think. My friend never went back to prostitution, but he still thinks about it. He's 40 now. But still dreamy.
He tells of one guy, a 23 year-old, pudgy, nerdy guy, living at his folk's house in Bellevue. The guy called 4 times to make sure that the fantasy that he wanted would be acted out correctly, authentically. My f. was supposed to humiliate him, degrade him, while the guy masturbated. He told him how pathetic his dick was. He followed him around the house. "You're worthless." They were in the kitchen. He pushed the guy out the glass patio doors and locked them. The guy pleaded to be let in. He was naked. the neighbors could see him. He pressed himself up against the glass, and to my f.'s surprise shot upon the glass. The kid said it was the best experience he'd ever had.
Doug loves stories like that. So does Claire. They both live sedately, respectably, but they've had their days. Doug overdosed in the alley behind Neighbors. Claire, in just her bathrobe, crawled out a window to escape the police after she accidentally violated some hospital in/out patient rule. Of course they're the most trustworthy people I've known. They're quite similar; though they've only had occasion to see each other maybe a half-dozen times, they seem to have an affinity.
They both want the grisly parts of my rare outings. Doug wants to know "How big was it?" I never remember.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Heights and more
Doug rented a hammer-drill to get through the cinder block wall in his space. It chewed up the bits. The first was soon snapped in half. We were putting shelves up for his "smalls". I worked on my space. Things had moved. Not many. Nothing I had spent hundreds of dollars on. Those things stay. Stay and accrue disdain. Them are "lookin' at antiques". Not fer usin'. A General Fireproofing desk that I stripped to bare metal was sold. It had a black rubber top. I thought I would replace it. Making sense of it, you could see where the typewriter had been sat, and the lamp. Everything left a sort of imprint in the rubber. The metal polished up nicely. Satiny. The rubber I just wiped. And wiped again and again, fistfulls of papertowels black. The desk had languished for a couple of weeks, priced at 245, even discounted to 200. Doug made me double it which might have raised it in the estimation of those who buy these things. Between helping with his shelves, I climbed an extension ladder fifteen feet up to rehang my Lictenstein poster. The thing about heights is that I hate them- heights, low heights, high heights, all heights. My knees shook. I was pushpinning myself off the ladder. It was just a poster, the cause of my accident.. my fatal accident... just a poster.
I remember looking in Josh's face and assuring him that I wanted nothing more than to hang his 9 foot by five foot mural above my space. A mural photograph of Ali and Holmes fighting that Josh had found at a Garage Sale. It is 9 feet long and mounted on rubber. Instead it covers the entire North wall. The burl walnut Chippendale chest curtseys on its cabriole legs across from ali and Holmes.
Doug and I breathe the cinder block dust. It covers our faces and clothes. Doug is a creature of habit. He will not eat all day. He carries a liter bottle of Grapefruit flavored Soda with him and he smokes but he won't eat between his potato bread egg sandwich in teh morning and a big plate of pasta or "helped' rice at night. We leave as they shut the lights off at the mall. He wants to order pizza. When we began the ritual of ordering pizza for Doug's stay overs it seemed extravagant. We end up in the Brooklyn Cafe in our torn t-shirts and pants covered in dust. We order $35 steaks. "This is the most expensive dinner I have ever had in my life," Doug says. Doug says in wonderment.
"Wondermous", he'll say as he imitates his old employer, the ludicrously bitchy Townsend Henry. Wondermous are the steaks. Melty. I am allotted three extra spears of asparagus. She keeps her potatoes, the waitress. Keeps them for those who want them. It doesn't matter. I might have gone to my last underwear party. Wait. I've never been to an underwear party. Well, some lives are like that. All clothed.
Auction was actually welcome after a break for Labor Day. We had a healthy turnout, anything passably useable bid beyond my means of acquiring it. I ended up with a box of polyester dresses. One was from Lanvin which sounded worthwhile. It is patterned in large dots and squares and austere flora each colored as a painful rebuke to the one closest to it. There are three of these outfits. One glows like barium showing the purple paisleys swimming in a purple sea. The lot was three dollars.
One dealer, an unsmiling type, nearly universally liked for her ability to convey a sardonic wit in a normally cynical and resigned manner of shopping, told me that she had had a pattern of antique glass named after her. She had discovered it like a botanist in the dense growths of the glass industry. She examines the hobnails, the flora and feet of each production saucer or the like.
"If you discover a pattern that has no name but just a production number, (you could contact some particular authority on that glass company's wares, and) they might just name it after you."
The neglected style of glass which she found will be the "Pamela" in future retrospectives of the company's production.
One wily, elderly dealer, a chic and stylish woman who achieved a name and a sort of following in her years of shopkeeping, ever present with her white pageboy and Corbusier glasses, her Nehru jackets or striped French sailor tops, doddered into the silent bid area. The stuff is beneath her. She smiles at it indulgently. She pays for what she wants. She is perpetually a front row auction-goer-her big poodle in the aisle. Crystal, gold, she buys the extravagant, the effulgent chandeliers. But there she was in the boxes of chewed papers, and scuffed plastics. Just enjoying the scenery. Moving in her tentative, ancient way. The bidding was called over... the clientele herded away. She remained. She was humming, looking at the lots fondly. She waited. Down she went on her knees. Three minutes after the bidding had ended... the proprietor of "Apogee" knelt down by a grubby air-compressor and wrote her bid on the next available line. The man who had legitiately won the lot stood above her.
"That ain't gonna fly," he said in an indulgent way, all things considered.
"What.... is this yours?"
"Yeah. I'm glad I stayed."
"Did you stay to watch me?"
"Yeah. You can't do that...."
"Hm. I hope it doesn't work anyway."
She tottered away.
Will and I shop Tuesday and Wednesday. We spend as though we have money. I buy a six foot fiberglass elephant. He is wearing overalls, with countrified patches on them, big shoes and a baseball cap. He is holding an unfurled scroll. I have never not liked that anyone, ever, anywhere has had blond hair. I have a weakness for blonds. Blondness is next to godliness. It looks awful on the elephant. Is it supposed to make him look juvenile? He is already burdened with a short trunk. A sadly underestimated trunk, like a disappointing penis. I wonder if it can be painted grey, the blond hair. We put the elephant, which though huge is fiberglass, in the back of Will's truck. It fills it. It is the size of a Bob's Big Boy. Shoney's in Ark. We also buy the rest of the Knoll tables. There are twelve in all. We have to control the market, whether we can use them or not... they can't show up anywhere while ours are out there.
They are in my driveway now with five chairs, the gull-wing oven and a map rack. the Aerostar has danish dining chairs and a Japanesy cabinet. The dresses are spread over the furniture in my living room. The bar is disassembled on the front porch. There is a pair of wool pants and a cap from a box lot on a chair there and a an acrylic rug I used to drag a shelving unit on.
The wondermousness.....
I remember looking in Josh's face and assuring him that I wanted nothing more than to hang his 9 foot by five foot mural above my space. A mural photograph of Ali and Holmes fighting that Josh had found at a Garage Sale. It is 9 feet long and mounted on rubber. Instead it covers the entire North wall. The burl walnut Chippendale chest curtseys on its cabriole legs across from ali and Holmes.
Doug and I breathe the cinder block dust. It covers our faces and clothes. Doug is a creature of habit. He will not eat all day. He carries a liter bottle of Grapefruit flavored Soda with him and he smokes but he won't eat between his potato bread egg sandwich in teh morning and a big plate of pasta or "helped' rice at night. We leave as they shut the lights off at the mall. He wants to order pizza. When we began the ritual of ordering pizza for Doug's stay overs it seemed extravagant. We end up in the Brooklyn Cafe in our torn t-shirts and pants covered in dust. We order $35 steaks. "This is the most expensive dinner I have ever had in my life," Doug says. Doug says in wonderment.
"Wondermous", he'll say as he imitates his old employer, the ludicrously bitchy Townsend Henry. Wondermous are the steaks. Melty. I am allotted three extra spears of asparagus. She keeps her potatoes, the waitress. Keeps them for those who want them. It doesn't matter. I might have gone to my last underwear party. Wait. I've never been to an underwear party. Well, some lives are like that. All clothed.
Auction was actually welcome after a break for Labor Day. We had a healthy turnout, anything passably useable bid beyond my means of acquiring it. I ended up with a box of polyester dresses. One was from Lanvin which sounded worthwhile. It is patterned in large dots and squares and austere flora each colored as a painful rebuke to the one closest to it. There are three of these outfits. One glows like barium showing the purple paisleys swimming in a purple sea. The lot was three dollars.
One dealer, an unsmiling type, nearly universally liked for her ability to convey a sardonic wit in a normally cynical and resigned manner of shopping, told me that she had had a pattern of antique glass named after her. She had discovered it like a botanist in the dense growths of the glass industry. She examines the hobnails, the flora and feet of each production saucer or the like.
"If you discover a pattern that has no name but just a production number, (you could contact some particular authority on that glass company's wares, and) they might just name it after you."
The neglected style of glass which she found will be the "Pamela" in future retrospectives of the company's production.
One wily, elderly dealer, a chic and stylish woman who achieved a name and a sort of following in her years of shopkeeping, ever present with her white pageboy and Corbusier glasses, her Nehru jackets or striped French sailor tops, doddered into the silent bid area. The stuff is beneath her. She smiles at it indulgently. She pays for what she wants. She is perpetually a front row auction-goer-her big poodle in the aisle. Crystal, gold, she buys the extravagant, the effulgent chandeliers. But there she was in the boxes of chewed papers, and scuffed plastics. Just enjoying the scenery. Moving in her tentative, ancient way. The bidding was called over... the clientele herded away. She remained. She was humming, looking at the lots fondly. She waited. Down she went on her knees. Three minutes after the bidding had ended... the proprietor of "Apogee" knelt down by a grubby air-compressor and wrote her bid on the next available line. The man who had legitiately won the lot stood above her.
"That ain't gonna fly," he said in an indulgent way, all things considered.
"What.... is this yours?"
"Yeah. I'm glad I stayed."
"Did you stay to watch me?"
"Yeah. You can't do that...."
"Hm. I hope it doesn't work anyway."
She tottered away.
Will and I shop Tuesday and Wednesday. We spend as though we have money. I buy a six foot fiberglass elephant. He is wearing overalls, with countrified patches on them, big shoes and a baseball cap. He is holding an unfurled scroll. I have never not liked that anyone, ever, anywhere has had blond hair. I have a weakness for blonds. Blondness is next to godliness. It looks awful on the elephant. Is it supposed to make him look juvenile? He is already burdened with a short trunk. A sadly underestimated trunk, like a disappointing penis. I wonder if it can be painted grey, the blond hair. We put the elephant, which though huge is fiberglass, in the back of Will's truck. It fills it. It is the size of a Bob's Big Boy. Shoney's in Ark. We also buy the rest of the Knoll tables. There are twelve in all. We have to control the market, whether we can use them or not... they can't show up anywhere while ours are out there.
They are in my driveway now with five chairs, the gull-wing oven and a map rack. the Aerostar has danish dining chairs and a Japanesy cabinet. The dresses are spread over the furniture in my living room. The bar is disassembled on the front porch. There is a pair of wool pants and a cap from a box lot on a chair there and a an acrylic rug I used to drag a shelving unit on.
The wondermousness.....
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Vigilant, in shifts, to keep cats away
Bunny is gone. Gone. Gone.... Seeing the wee thing every night munching beneath the fender of the Aerostar in the driveway or perilously close to traffic on the sidewalk didn't create as much an affectionate bond as it did a perpetually renewed and renewable antagonism. Bunny never understood the sheer weight and velocity of the automobile. How could it? Bunny had a keen sense of the potential that exists in the human frame, however. When Zara or Chad, the neighbors, or myself approached... just inches from its whiskers, when I, for one, was just at the point of dropping the vinyl laundry basket over its head, Bunny darted quickly towards my feet. If Zara was closer or Chad it would rush at them. Many a night we spent hopping out of its way as we tried to catch it. It never seemed to be paying attention at all to us, and after several marathon chases in which our triangulated snare would chase Bunny from Zara's yard to mine, or beneath the Aerostar, or send Bunny hysterically rushing towards the busy street like Shelly Winters in Lolita, Bunny would absolutley FLOP on the cool broken patches of driveway concrete- extending all its legs, in the most insultingly relaxed posture imaginable. Of course, I was spitting phlegm to clear my airway, bracing on my knees. I left miniature carrots in paths leading up to a box Chad and Z. hoped Bunny would "hutch" in. We left leaves of lettuce, a bowl of water.
Bunny was full mostly. Zara's garden was plenty. It is inch-high now. We tried to erect a fence around the garden, to contain him, but he would sense the restriction and spend all of his time trying to get free. Even in my enormous backyard, with carrots piled hight like pirate doubloons, Bunny worked at the gate until he could squeeze out. During the chases, Bunny seemed to seek refuge in the most infuriatingly inappropriate places. Under my house for one. Under my Aerostar for another.
Speaking of..
The Aerostar which is a 1990, I think has radically altered my driving life. I am no longer tethered to slow backroads, gentle inclines and level parking. I have driven to Sedro twice with Will and his pit-bull in tow. The pitbull is not alone in finding the Aerostar's roomy rear a comfortable and adaptable conveyance. Will's impossibly handsome friend Brad had sex in the back Friday night with someone we had met out drinking. I was taking people home. The rear seats were removed.
It was not an act of debauchery unfitting for a weeknight. Something about Will's charisma and Brad's charisma combining had made them all but delirious with the joys of their manhood.. stopping every two blocks or so when we were on foot to show each other our penises. I would have rather seen everyone's keychains. I don't remember even looking, except to glance at Will's, but only to note his swelling fondness for the louche.
I love the Aerostar which has an automatic transmission and even a chime to melodically acknowledge the open, the unbuckled, the left lit. I can leave things in there for weeks and still accomodate the unforseen sideboard which has to be hauled from somewhere to somewhere.
The boys copulating in the back were lucky. It was still full of razor sharp pieces of stainless steel, intended for countertops. They should have been sliced in half.
Brad, Will'd friend, admitted that he had been imbibing cocaine and eagerly urged us to get some more. He was so sharp, so witty and in the moment, he seemed barely impaired at all by the stuff. Just more awake. We could get some, he said, from a friend of his that was at a party under a bridge. Under a bridge? Where? West Seattle? Yes. We drive to Harbor Island and under the bridge. "It's a party." We should see it.
"See it?" The West Seattle bridge is, I believe a historically long span.
What is that? We pulled up whenever Brad saw more than a few cars parked together. "What are they doing?"he'd ask. It being midnight, and four of us in an S.U.V., drunk, driving erratically under a bridge, Brad finally admits that it might be a different bridge.
"This is Seattle," Karl L. who is driving, barks. "Everything is a bridge." We head for the Magnolia bridge. It is Brad's charisma that makes us do this. It is probably Brad's charisma that gets him laid in the back of the Aerostar later. There was no penetration. No condoms. "We can take (his roommate's ) coke."
We drive there.
"But he probably hid it and he's asleep and I don't want to dig through his stuff when hes just asleep to take his cocaine."
People seem to misremember me all night, Brad included. As someone who knew someone they knew. But they are trying, which is flattering.
The night required a great deal of gin and an equal amount of grapefruit juice. I am nearly passing out when I sit in my bed. I am stretched out when I see a spider, the size of a tarantula crawl from my pillows to the foot of the bed and over the mattress. I am too tired to pull the mattress out of its alcove. To rip down the drapes, to unplug the television and VCR and move them. Spiders do not scare me. Just this one.
I grab the sheet and a pillow and sleep on the sofa. In the morning I tear the place apart. The spider comes at me, just like Bunny. I believe I have sucked it up the vacuum nozzle, but I do not hear it enter. Its body is the size of a walnut. It seems like it might not even fit. I watch the clear dust container for a few minutes. No movement. I empty it and sift through the dust. Nothing. I do this again and again. The spider is never discharged.
My vacuum, the Fantom (for copywrite purposes I guess) has a major flaw in its construction. The airway cannot be gotten at. There are parts of it which cannot be cleaned out.
Hurricane Katrina has devastated people's ability to appear unruffled, under any circumstances.
When something unusual and unexpected occurs, I am acutely aware that everyone is behaving quite normally, as though nothing had occurred. When, for instance, on Thanksgiving night, I suffered a catastrophic flat in the sunflower colored Volvo and pulled to the edge of an exit waiting for someone to stop and offer assistance, hours passed. No eye contact.
"If we do things differently, the terrorists have won." How Beckett or Pinter deserve this reality.
Terror was for a time when frenzies still could exist. Good luck finding a population that does not behave normally. Several women interviewed about the destruction of their lives complained that a particular family member had said that they were coming to get them but never did.
There was a body under sheet with a red question mark on it. This was in a photo on the front of the NYT.
I did not want to keep Bunny, but Zara had never had a pet and decided to adopt it. They even sat up at night on their front porch to scare cats away. Bunny was mostly white- the exception being two small black marks on his face. I shooed a few cats, late, late at night. They were still there, vigilant, in shifts.They had begun to find some sort of name. We could not committee it. Our ideas were too different. I remembered that "Bunny" was Edmund Wilson's lifelong nickname. I kept it to myself. In my experience Wilson was the only possessor of the epicurean waist and Nero profile who liked women. The high arched nose, the hooded gaze, the soft folds under the small protruding chin, these are the marks of the hedonist. Usually the homo hedonist.
Bunny belonged and returned to the poeple who live diagonally behind me. They keep chickens too. The spider's provenance is unknown.
Bunny was full mostly. Zara's garden was plenty. It is inch-high now. We tried to erect a fence around the garden, to contain him, but he would sense the restriction and spend all of his time trying to get free. Even in my enormous backyard, with carrots piled hight like pirate doubloons, Bunny worked at the gate until he could squeeze out. During the chases, Bunny seemed to seek refuge in the most infuriatingly inappropriate places. Under my house for one. Under my Aerostar for another.
Speaking of..
The Aerostar which is a 1990, I think has radically altered my driving life. I am no longer tethered to slow backroads, gentle inclines and level parking. I have driven to Sedro twice with Will and his pit-bull in tow. The pitbull is not alone in finding the Aerostar's roomy rear a comfortable and adaptable conveyance. Will's impossibly handsome friend Brad had sex in the back Friday night with someone we had met out drinking. I was taking people home. The rear seats were removed.
It was not an act of debauchery unfitting for a weeknight. Something about Will's charisma and Brad's charisma combining had made them all but delirious with the joys of their manhood.. stopping every two blocks or so when we were on foot to show each other our penises. I would have rather seen everyone's keychains. I don't remember even looking, except to glance at Will's, but only to note his swelling fondness for the louche.
I love the Aerostar which has an automatic transmission and even a chime to melodically acknowledge the open, the unbuckled, the left lit. I can leave things in there for weeks and still accomodate the unforseen sideboard which has to be hauled from somewhere to somewhere.
The boys copulating in the back were lucky. It was still full of razor sharp pieces of stainless steel, intended for countertops. They should have been sliced in half.
Brad, Will'd friend, admitted that he had been imbibing cocaine and eagerly urged us to get some more. He was so sharp, so witty and in the moment, he seemed barely impaired at all by the stuff. Just more awake. We could get some, he said, from a friend of his that was at a party under a bridge. Under a bridge? Where? West Seattle? Yes. We drive to Harbor Island and under the bridge. "It's a party." We should see it.
"See it?" The West Seattle bridge is, I believe a historically long span.
What is that? We pulled up whenever Brad saw more than a few cars parked together. "What are they doing?"he'd ask. It being midnight, and four of us in an S.U.V., drunk, driving erratically under a bridge, Brad finally admits that it might be a different bridge.
"This is Seattle," Karl L. who is driving, barks. "Everything is a bridge." We head for the Magnolia bridge. It is Brad's charisma that makes us do this. It is probably Brad's charisma that gets him laid in the back of the Aerostar later. There was no penetration. No condoms. "We can take (his roommate's ) coke."
We drive there.
"But he probably hid it and he's asleep and I don't want to dig through his stuff when hes just asleep to take his cocaine."
People seem to misremember me all night, Brad included. As someone who knew someone they knew. But they are trying, which is flattering.
The night required a great deal of gin and an equal amount of grapefruit juice. I am nearly passing out when I sit in my bed. I am stretched out when I see a spider, the size of a tarantula crawl from my pillows to the foot of the bed and over the mattress. I am too tired to pull the mattress out of its alcove. To rip down the drapes, to unplug the television and VCR and move them. Spiders do not scare me. Just this one.
I grab the sheet and a pillow and sleep on the sofa. In the morning I tear the place apart. The spider comes at me, just like Bunny. I believe I have sucked it up the vacuum nozzle, but I do not hear it enter. Its body is the size of a walnut. It seems like it might not even fit. I watch the clear dust container for a few minutes. No movement. I empty it and sift through the dust. Nothing. I do this again and again. The spider is never discharged.
My vacuum, the Fantom (for copywrite purposes I guess) has a major flaw in its construction. The airway cannot be gotten at. There are parts of it which cannot be cleaned out.
Hurricane Katrina has devastated people's ability to appear unruffled, under any circumstances.
When something unusual and unexpected occurs, I am acutely aware that everyone is behaving quite normally, as though nothing had occurred. When, for instance, on Thanksgiving night, I suffered a catastrophic flat in the sunflower colored Volvo and pulled to the edge of an exit waiting for someone to stop and offer assistance, hours passed. No eye contact.
"If we do things differently, the terrorists have won." How Beckett or Pinter deserve this reality.
Terror was for a time when frenzies still could exist. Good luck finding a population that does not behave normally. Several women interviewed about the destruction of their lives complained that a particular family member had said that they were coming to get them but never did.
There was a body under sheet with a red question mark on it. This was in a photo on the front of the NYT.
I did not want to keep Bunny, but Zara had never had a pet and decided to adopt it. They even sat up at night on their front porch to scare cats away. Bunny was mostly white- the exception being two small black marks on his face. I shooed a few cats, late, late at night. They were still there, vigilant, in shifts.They had begun to find some sort of name. We could not committee it. Our ideas were too different. I remembered that "Bunny" was Edmund Wilson's lifelong nickname. I kept it to myself. In my experience Wilson was the only possessor of the epicurean waist and Nero profile who liked women. The high arched nose, the hooded gaze, the soft folds under the small protruding chin, these are the marks of the hedonist. Usually the homo hedonist.
Bunny belonged and returned to the poeple who live diagonally behind me. They keep chickens too. The spider's provenance is unknown.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Ford Aerostar
What more can one say? If sex could be packaged, say... in something like a loaf shape, something slow-moving, on atrophied wheels, this would be it. If I do buy this 1990 Aerostar it will be closest the date of manufacture has ever been to my period of use. It costs three hundred dollars. It has issues. It is incontinent. It dribbles like a nervous puppy, leaving streams of power steering fluid on the ground. It IS three hundred dollars, though. The Volvo has been slowly poisoning me with exhaust fumes. It knows I know it is doing it. There is no pretense that the gas is coming from some other car.It was always a junk-dealer's vehicle. It belonged to Josh, who was a legendary dealer with a shop topped by a surplus rocket body in Fremont. He moved to the hill when I had my shop and would visit with his girlfriend, who opened her own shop a few doors down. He would forget who I was when I repaid the visit. He would be asleep behind his counter. Sometimes in transit, a box of things in his hand he would be stooped down, sound asleep. When he died, the car began to grow moss along the window sills. This model is particularly well-suited, I was told, to becoming a biosphere. Gail had a boyfriend once who parked his Volvo in a field and it began to sprout vegetation inside. It became a refuge for field mice. One travelled as far as Alaska with Gail before it hopped out.
More screaming
It happened again last night. At 2:30 in the morning, in a deep sleep, I sense a presence looming over me. I crack my eyes, my thoughts still randomly moving like the unseated ball bearings in plastic tilting novelties. The thought, the recognitions begin to fall, one in each hole. My self, my solitude, my bed, my wakefulness, my vision. There is a tall figure, caped, standing just over me. I shriek - loudly. Very loudly. I kick at the intruder. My foot's karate jab catches in the curtain that hangs next to my bed. I still do not know what has happened.
"Who is that? What is going on?" I ask in a conversational, a reasonable tone, almost expecting an answer. I reach up to turn on the light. The switch is not easily reached. I slept for ten years with the light of a Nelson bubble lamp which hung in the room outside my bed-closet. Now I sleep in pitch blackness. That may have to change. The curtains moved in the fan's breeze I suppose.... brushed against my face maybe.
The adrenalin kept me up for an hour. My throat was raw again, painfully, and still is. I dont know that it was less upsetting that no one was there. Last time, it was sort of nice to see Kyle, even if we only talked for an hour or so before he went to sleep and I went to work.
I tried to nap again, after waking at 9 but there was an unholy roar, unlike anything else. It was the practice runs for the Blue Angels, a synchronised jet-flying troupe. They must have been a few hundred feet above my roof.
They are gone soon enough. I have to decide whether to walk the two blocks to the lake this weekend. This poverty has kept me virtually housebound for weeks. Now that the paychecks are beginning to come in, I have acquired the habit of not going out. Zara, my neighbor has parked a car in her yard, charging $15. She asked if I wanted to have someone park in my driveway. I said sure but let her keep the money. I am blocked in until they leave.
The Blue Angels are so close overhead. It is an unanticipated an unexpected thrill to see teh planes paas so close and move so quickly above your head.
"Yay! Killing machines!" I chant and clap my hands. Not terribly serious. Not really.
"Who is that? What is going on?" I ask in a conversational, a reasonable tone, almost expecting an answer. I reach up to turn on the light. The switch is not easily reached. I slept for ten years with the light of a Nelson bubble lamp which hung in the room outside my bed-closet. Now I sleep in pitch blackness. That may have to change. The curtains moved in the fan's breeze I suppose.... brushed against my face maybe.
The adrenalin kept me up for an hour. My throat was raw again, painfully, and still is. I dont know that it was less upsetting that no one was there. Last time, it was sort of nice to see Kyle, even if we only talked for an hour or so before he went to sleep and I went to work.
I tried to nap again, after waking at 9 but there was an unholy roar, unlike anything else. It was the practice runs for the Blue Angels, a synchronised jet-flying troupe. They must have been a few hundred feet above my roof.
They are gone soon enough. I have to decide whether to walk the two blocks to the lake this weekend. This poverty has kept me virtually housebound for weeks. Now that the paychecks are beginning to come in, I have acquired the habit of not going out. Zara, my neighbor has parked a car in her yard, charging $15. She asked if I wanted to have someone park in my driveway. I said sure but let her keep the money. I am blocked in until they leave.
The Blue Angels are so close overhead. It is an unanticipated an unexpected thrill to see teh planes paas so close and move so quickly above your head.
"Yay! Killing machines!" I chant and clap my hands. Not terribly serious. Not really.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
By popular demand, the following changes have been instituted
I should never have mentioned the blog to anyone who might be mentioned in it. Al has wailed over being rechristened "Al", and Liz has insisted that she be called "Claire". Evelyn Waugh wishes to be known as Dear Aunt Rose and Hugh Walpole has taken that opportunity to be called Evelyn Waugh. Of course I very cleverly avoided giving my own name, but my photos certainly leave no mystery as to my identity. I am a tall, dashing youth, a strapping person with clear, frank eyes and skin unfurrowed as piglet testicles.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
I replace books I give away with others
Maybe while missing the Modern Library Rousseau, I came across a Modern Library copy of a novel by Hugh Walpole, "Fortitude". According to Wikipedia and Walpole's own introduction it was his first successful foray into print, if being published and then neglected is worse than never being published at all.
It is a coming-of-age story. The young hero in fact keeps asking if things are to be like in David Copperfield. Wikipedia also briefly sketched the details of Walpole's life- b. New Zealand, part of a "renowned homosexual coterie" that included Evelyn Waugh.
A reader testily objects that Waugh, twice married, could not have been part of a homosexual coterie. The response is that whether Waugh was homosexual or not, he was part of the coterie. I knew nothing of the coterie, nor Walpole's proclivities when I bought this edition. I liked the terse title, and as always, the full cloth binding, the discreet black central medallion with the title, and the marvelous size and heft of it.
As for coming of age novels, they do cause personal recollections to compete, which is not terribly conducive to the author's engendering a new world.
My childhood is brought back. I always, always claim it to have been unclouded. Ridiculously, fortuitously happy. Few could ever be that untroubled. I do recall as Walpole depicts, refuge in the coat closet at school or church. I remember how teachers would ferret you out with almost greater prejudice, with true anger. The smell of lunch sacks, rubber. Strange homes in the fabric.
Other things: at the parties my parents would take their children to, waiting in the room where the coats were piled for us to leave. Even in our own home, waiting near the bed where the coats were- occasionally even under them. I pile everything I can on me in winter to get the right weight on my ankles when I sleep. I never felt this need before I stayed with Al in his freezing house by the Cascade foothills. Or until he stayed in my bed. He had the weight distributed so evenly over the expanse of his bed, two sheets, each is whipped over the bed and allowed to billow and settle, then be tugged to an accurate center. Two comforters, or a blanket and a comforter. The heat would be turned off. Everything electrical turned off and watched to see if it was still inflammable. As cold as it would be, still the weight of all that on top of me would be smothering, restricting. I would pull myself free of a part of it and he would tuck it back around me to keep the bedcovers balanced. Eventually I found I desired it myself and tried to recreate it in my own chaotic bed.
In my bed there was and is always a squalid tangle of thrift store NFL sheets. "Now isn't that better," he would ask, flattening each out. "You're just like Rat-Girl, burrowing a nest in the middle of the bed." His rat, Rat-Girl, has been dead ten or twelve years now. Either he left her on the window sill for the seagulls to carry away, as the seagulls persecuted the square beneath his window, where the less addled bums scattered scraps from the sandwiches that were handed out--- or I proposed it as befitting a creature more wild than domesticated- a sort of Viking funeral. He might have flushed her or put her in a dumpster. Still the former story stays with me for some reason. Who knows why some things remain behind, ecen if they never happened...The unlabelled image of a seagull in a horned Viking helmet is pointlessly and inexplicably filed somewhere in my memory.
What a strange existence that causes one thing to be almost death to you which would save you later and before, and to have it again and again and to forget it again and again. When a little warmth or a cool breeze makes such a difference. How have our minds evolved to accomodate such viccissitudes?
Rousseau makes it apparent that the evolution of an individual can be depicted as a product which eclipses its ingredients. He suggests that writing abbout one portion of his life allows it to then be forgotten, expunged forever. Simultaneously, he implies that each stage uniquely leads to the eventual result, his sad fate. The next episode almost exclusively and uniquely leads to that same fate, and the next. Someone somewhere accused Rousseau of being all revelation and conversion. there is a passage from something online which says it better:
"If it is true that Rousseau desires to present himself to the world as a tragic hero, the victim of sinister plot, it is also true that this ultimate downfall would at least provide closure and a sense of meaning to his life. But without this definitive ending, the final significance of the various events he has described must remain indefinite. Tragedies, like all teleological structures, reveal their meanings only backwards. Without reaching that decisive point, everything remains tentative, almost meaning something in so far as it alludes to this future event, but still open to radical and revelatory change through what transpires in the final act. Rousseau's story, and perhaps the life that it reflects, is trapped in this highly-charged but indeterminate state until its plot can be resolved. "
I mentioned the pile of coats in part because nothing would seem as deadly to me now. How hot it is here, and Seattle is probably one of the most temperate cities in the country. Because of this there is no air-conditioning except in grocery stores, theaters.
My friend Liz does not even own a fan. She is afraid that her nine-month old will put his fingers in to where the blades are. He probably would. She can sleep with her windows open. I live in a house so poorly designed that screens cannot cover the windows unless they could be pulled off every time the windows are opened or closed. But I have fans. It is madness to suffer from the heat or cold.
It is a coming-of-age story. The young hero in fact keeps asking if things are to be like in David Copperfield. Wikipedia also briefly sketched the details of Walpole's life- b. New Zealand, part of a "renowned homosexual coterie" that included Evelyn Waugh.
A reader testily objects that Waugh, twice married, could not have been part of a homosexual coterie. The response is that whether Waugh was homosexual or not, he was part of the coterie. I knew nothing of the coterie, nor Walpole's proclivities when I bought this edition. I liked the terse title, and as always, the full cloth binding, the discreet black central medallion with the title, and the marvelous size and heft of it.
As for coming of age novels, they do cause personal recollections to compete, which is not terribly conducive to the author's engendering a new world.
My childhood is brought back. I always, always claim it to have been unclouded. Ridiculously, fortuitously happy. Few could ever be that untroubled. I do recall as Walpole depicts, refuge in the coat closet at school or church. I remember how teachers would ferret you out with almost greater prejudice, with true anger. The smell of lunch sacks, rubber. Strange homes in the fabric.
Other things: at the parties my parents would take their children to, waiting in the room where the coats were piled for us to leave. Even in our own home, waiting near the bed where the coats were- occasionally even under them. I pile everything I can on me in winter to get the right weight on my ankles when I sleep. I never felt this need before I stayed with Al in his freezing house by the Cascade foothills. Or until he stayed in my bed. He had the weight distributed so evenly over the expanse of his bed, two sheets, each is whipped over the bed and allowed to billow and settle, then be tugged to an accurate center. Two comforters, or a blanket and a comforter. The heat would be turned off. Everything electrical turned off and watched to see if it was still inflammable. As cold as it would be, still the weight of all that on top of me would be smothering, restricting. I would pull myself free of a part of it and he would tuck it back around me to keep the bedcovers balanced. Eventually I found I desired it myself and tried to recreate it in my own chaotic bed.
In my bed there was and is always a squalid tangle of thrift store NFL sheets. "Now isn't that better," he would ask, flattening each out. "You're just like Rat-Girl, burrowing a nest in the middle of the bed." His rat, Rat-Girl, has been dead ten or twelve years now. Either he left her on the window sill for the seagulls to carry away, as the seagulls persecuted the square beneath his window, where the less addled bums scattered scraps from the sandwiches that were handed out--- or I proposed it as befitting a creature more wild than domesticated- a sort of Viking funeral. He might have flushed her or put her in a dumpster. Still the former story stays with me for some reason. Who knows why some things remain behind, ecen if they never happened...The unlabelled image of a seagull in a horned Viking helmet is pointlessly and inexplicably filed somewhere in my memory.
What a strange existence that causes one thing to be almost death to you which would save you later and before, and to have it again and again and to forget it again and again. When a little warmth or a cool breeze makes such a difference. How have our minds evolved to accomodate such viccissitudes?
Rousseau makes it apparent that the evolution of an individual can be depicted as a product which eclipses its ingredients. He suggests that writing abbout one portion of his life allows it to then be forgotten, expunged forever. Simultaneously, he implies that each stage uniquely leads to the eventual result, his sad fate. The next episode almost exclusively and uniquely leads to that same fate, and the next. Someone somewhere accused Rousseau of being all revelation and conversion. there is a passage from something online which says it better:
"If it is true that Rousseau desires to present himself to the world as a tragic hero, the victim of sinister plot, it is also true that this ultimate downfall would at least provide closure and a sense of meaning to his life. But without this definitive ending, the final significance of the various events he has described must remain indefinite. Tragedies, like all teleological structures, reveal their meanings only backwards. Without reaching that decisive point, everything remains tentative, almost meaning something in so far as it alludes to this future event, but still open to radical and revelatory change through what transpires in the final act. Rousseau's story, and perhaps the life that it reflects, is trapped in this highly-charged but indeterminate state until its plot can be resolved. "
I mentioned the pile of coats in part because nothing would seem as deadly to me now. How hot it is here, and Seattle is probably one of the most temperate cities in the country. Because of this there is no air-conditioning except in grocery stores, theaters.
My friend Liz does not even own a fan. She is afraid that her nine-month old will put his fingers in to where the blades are. He probably would. She can sleep with her windows open. I live in a house so poorly designed that screens cannot cover the windows unless they could be pulled off every time the windows are opened or closed. But I have fans. It is madness to suffer from the heat or cold.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
what he took on the plane with him
For his plane-ride back to Hollywood, I gave Kyle my Modern Library copy of Rousseau's Confessions. There are no volumes of greater portability and discretion. Apparently they are collectible. I find that books seldom recoup their investment. They are devalued more abruptly than cars driven off the lot. Thirty-five dollar hardcovers will bring four or five dollars. When the seller protests, believing that the retailer merely wants an increased margin, the retailer will refuse them altogether- "Noone wants hardcovers." There were many times when selling books was all that saved me from hunger. Eight dollars for a box of books could buy me a week of dry-goods, plus bread milk and coffee. Books cannot be bought for investment. There is no market beyond that the established antiquarian booksellers have manifested. Quietly scratching 1st ed. 295.00 in pencil and patiently stroking their moustaches. Somehow it works for them. Ebay seldom produces an audience for my books.
I undersold a Faulkner 1st of "Go Down, Moses! (and other stories)" a volume to which was attached the specific opprobrium of Faulkner (for the other stories part). 100.00. But it went to Oxford, Mississippi where it probably belonged. (Belonged? To which it was a stranger. Though a product of a New York Publisher and Printer its contents fully described the South, like a telling bloodline in a child born expatriated from his fathers' home).
Kyle read the Sky-Mall. Who doesn't. Who can concentrate on a plane? I hope he will hold Rousseau in his palm as so many 18th century pedarasts attempted to do, and feel moved to open it.
Kyle is, of course, naked culpability. Every man he has anything to do with announces that he has been ill-used, and details it. We are both designed as scapegoats for the world. My own misdeeds, like a weighted hat, bow me. Rousseau liberates. Whose sins are so penetrating that they can not be washed clean in this stream of words? My own sins are nearly expiated in his confessions.
Rousseau lies. He is ungrateful to those who help him, who free him from his just punishment. He weeps, pleads and confesses to anyone by whom he is cornered in guilt. He abandons friends who fall in epilepsy. He exposes himself in public squares to women, but cannot get erect. Most notably, he is a thief, and will steal from anyone without regard to his attachments. He will accuse the innocent of the theft and see them ruined. He passes himself off as master of that he barely knows. He publicly performs these unheld skills believing that he might possess them after all. He is insulting when he means to be clever- slow-witted in company. He is untalented at every trade. He is a sexual masochist, and desires to be dominated by the petulance of women who are born of a higher class. He undergoes a factitious religious conversion. He contributes testimony only half-believed to a beatification process.
Yet, despite all this, nothing frightens and disgusts him more than the attempts of men to carress him.
I adore Rousseau, nevertheless. He is my savior. I would like to adapt the Confessions to make some sort of stage work. THey must be royalty free, and salacious enough to keep teh attention of an audience. It would need to be highly stylised. Well, later, maybe....maybe later.
I undersold a Faulkner 1st of "Go Down, Moses! (and other stories)" a volume to which was attached the specific opprobrium of Faulkner (for the other stories part). 100.00. But it went to Oxford, Mississippi where it probably belonged. (Belonged? To which it was a stranger. Though a product of a New York Publisher and Printer its contents fully described the South, like a telling bloodline in a child born expatriated from his fathers' home).
Kyle read the Sky-Mall. Who doesn't. Who can concentrate on a plane? I hope he will hold Rousseau in his palm as so many 18th century pedarasts attempted to do, and feel moved to open it.
Kyle is, of course, naked culpability. Every man he has anything to do with announces that he has been ill-used, and details it. We are both designed as scapegoats for the world. My own misdeeds, like a weighted hat, bow me. Rousseau liberates. Whose sins are so penetrating that they can not be washed clean in this stream of words? My own sins are nearly expiated in his confessions.
Rousseau lies. He is ungrateful to those who help him, who free him from his just punishment. He weeps, pleads and confesses to anyone by whom he is cornered in guilt. He abandons friends who fall in epilepsy. He exposes himself in public squares to women, but cannot get erect. Most notably, he is a thief, and will steal from anyone without regard to his attachments. He will accuse the innocent of the theft and see them ruined. He passes himself off as master of that he barely knows. He publicly performs these unheld skills believing that he might possess them after all. He is insulting when he means to be clever- slow-witted in company. He is untalented at every trade. He is a sexual masochist, and desires to be dominated by the petulance of women who are born of a higher class. He undergoes a factitious religious conversion. He contributes testimony only half-believed to a beatification process.
Yet, despite all this, nothing frightens and disgusts him more than the attempts of men to carress him.
I adore Rousseau, nevertheless. He is my savior. I would like to adapt the Confessions to make some sort of stage work. THey must be royalty free, and salacious enough to keep teh attention of an audience. It would need to be highly stylised. Well, later, maybe....maybe later.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
What made me scream
I live alone. I've always lived alone. Kyle's two or three months in the Lola Apartments studio were the only exception.
I have a new job which wakes me up at 5:30 every other morning. So I sleep soundly. My fan on. My windows I still keep locked at night. And I am sleeping. Deeply deeply. A hand grabs my shoulder
I dont know what made me realise that it wasn't what should happen- nor even what could happen. It was not right, but I don't know if I sensed it, analysed it... I just reacted. Screamed and screamed. There was a man standing over my bed. If it hadn't been Kyle, if it had actually been someone else who had broken into my house and had intended me harm, there was lots of time to harm me in before I was capable of action. Lots. Kyle was visiting his folks. His sleep is still erratic enough that he is awake at 3, 4, 5 in the morning. He gets restless at the folk's house. He surfs the web. Chats. He has someone pick him up and drop him off at my house. And he tries the doors. He tries knocking. He finds a door unlocked. He finds me.
I love Kyle. I can't hold it against him, frightening me like this. He is so vulnerable, so emotionally fragile.
And so deranged in circadian rhythms. We watch t.v. He sleeps while I go to work. I come home at 2:30. He is still asleep in my bed. I walk to a Co-op to get him healthy food. He calls another friend to pick him up and take him back to his parents. People will do anything for him. He can't really admit this. It always ends the same, the same hesitant, earnest pleas. Whoever it is...they are surprised they say, surprised by love. Again and again it happens to him.
He is cursed by being young, handsome, muscular, brilliant, funny, vulnerable.
He comes over once more before he flies back. He gets a call from one of these guys. Someone he hasn't heard from in a month. Someone who is trying to get noticed. Forge a bond. "I wanted to call and tell you that I saw a psychic."
Kyle paces back and forth listening. The phone finally dies. He sits next to me.
"The psychic said that I have Syphillis and Gonhorrea."
"Wait. You didn't go to a psychic."
Kyle shakes his head, No. His friend said that all you have to do is tell the woman a name and she will see the person's condition. His friend wanted to impress Kyle. Let him know that Kyle was always in his thoughts.
Kyle pulls his large frame into a fetal position on the sofa.
"I know it's ridiculous," he says. "I'm worried."
"Have you had any symptoms at all?" I ask.
No. He can't move.
We have to go to a pharmacy and get him anti-anxiety meds.
What about all the other Kyle K______s? I ask. It could be any one of them.
When he leaves I know that he has given me his contagious half-awake- half-asleep state. I am exhausted but I can't sleep. I cook navy beans. I watch them without the will to move. They begin to lift in the pot, in the water. They lift and revolve in the pot slowly. One, then the next, randomly they rise and turn like thirty-year olds in Logan's Run.
There is no renewal.
I have a new job which wakes me up at 5:30 every other morning. So I sleep soundly. My fan on. My windows I still keep locked at night. And I am sleeping. Deeply deeply. A hand grabs my shoulder
I dont know what made me realise that it wasn't what should happen- nor even what could happen. It was not right, but I don't know if I sensed it, analysed it... I just reacted. Screamed and screamed. There was a man standing over my bed. If it hadn't been Kyle, if it had actually been someone else who had broken into my house and had intended me harm, there was lots of time to harm me in before I was capable of action. Lots. Kyle was visiting his folks. His sleep is still erratic enough that he is awake at 3, 4, 5 in the morning. He gets restless at the folk's house. He surfs the web. Chats. He has someone pick him up and drop him off at my house. And he tries the doors. He tries knocking. He finds a door unlocked. He finds me.
I love Kyle. I can't hold it against him, frightening me like this. He is so vulnerable, so emotionally fragile.
And so deranged in circadian rhythms. We watch t.v. He sleeps while I go to work. I come home at 2:30. He is still asleep in my bed. I walk to a Co-op to get him healthy food. He calls another friend to pick him up and take him back to his parents. People will do anything for him. He can't really admit this. It always ends the same, the same hesitant, earnest pleas. Whoever it is...they are surprised they say, surprised by love. Again and again it happens to him.
He is cursed by being young, handsome, muscular, brilliant, funny, vulnerable.
He comes over once more before he flies back. He gets a call from one of these guys. Someone he hasn't heard from in a month. Someone who is trying to get noticed. Forge a bond. "I wanted to call and tell you that I saw a psychic."
Kyle paces back and forth listening. The phone finally dies. He sits next to me.
"The psychic said that I have Syphillis and Gonhorrea."
"Wait. You didn't go to a psychic."
Kyle shakes his head, No. His friend said that all you have to do is tell the woman a name and she will see the person's condition. His friend wanted to impress Kyle. Let him know that Kyle was always in his thoughts.
Kyle pulls his large frame into a fetal position on the sofa.
"I know it's ridiculous," he says. "I'm worried."
"Have you had any symptoms at all?" I ask.
No. He can't move.
We have to go to a pharmacy and get him anti-anxiety meds.
What about all the other Kyle K______s? I ask. It could be any one of them.
When he leaves I know that he has given me his contagious half-awake- half-asleep state. I am exhausted but I can't sleep. I cook navy beans. I watch them without the will to move. They begin to lift in the pot, in the water. They lift and revolve in the pot slowly. One, then the next, randomly they rise and turn like thirty-year olds in Logan's Run.
There is no renewal.
Screaming
I am still hoarse from screaming. I have never before heard the type and timbre of scream, the scream of horror that came from me. I don't know if I even recognized my voice when I heard it- so purely, unpremeditatedly mine, that sound. I should recognize it. Maybe I should practice it. I'm not sure it doesn't need refining, a little-more John Cusack, a little less Joan.
The other person who heard it, that scream, said ,when we reassured each other as people do before they face imminent death, that it was not girly at all.
"Really? It didn't sound like a woman?"
"No. Not at all."
Kyle has diagnosed himself with body-dismorphic disorder. It is impossible to dispute that he does not think he looks like what he looks like. We curled up in the corner of my bedroom. It was 4 or 5 in the morning. He reassured me that, in my last moments, I was not effeminate. I reassured him that he did not look like what he thought he looked like.
How I screamed: Two two-second blasts. The same note.
What happened between them: I took a breath. Which suggests Menendez reloading the shotgun- which suggests the suspension of passion, the measured actions of a rational mind. It wasn't. Nothing was in my head except terror.
Why I screamed: I have moved into a new house. Seward Park, where Olmstead and brothers plotted the most astonishing beauty a hundred years ago. On the lower edge of Lake Washington in the southeast part of Seattle. I've been here a few months but it has been years since I have been in a house. For almost twenty years I have lived in apartments. I was in the Lola Apartments at the southern hem of Queen Anne for ten years. The Lola, turn-of-the-century, brick and stone, fourty units. I lived in the least accessible one, third floor, north end. It was fine when I was a personal trainer. THere was no elevator. The stairs were worse when I was a bartender. 3:30 in the mornings, I would pick my way up. Nothing could have been less convenient when I became a furniture dealer. I would lift pieces up, step by step sometimes, or drag them like a full fishing net. I would get them to my studio apartment and climb over them until they were refinished and ready to move back down. It was a studio with a sleeping closet. Kyle even slept there for a few months. He paid rent but was seldom anywhere but the bed or the kitchen. He feeds himself like a furnace stoker. Roughly cut fresh vegetables. Whole chicken breasts- 3 or 4. He is 180 to 185 pounds. He is 34. He was a competitive gymnast and has an indomitable physique, partly German genetics. He is 6 feet and an inch, blond with blue eyes. From the bridge of his nose to the top of his head he is astonishingly beautiful. Handsome, assertive well-shaped forehead, squarish, sculptural, with sensitive, thoroughly lashed blue eyes. He certainly likes to hear opinions on his appearance, but accolades "above the bridge of your nose" does not appease him.
He moved to San Francisco to enter therapy with a specialist who treats Body Dismorphic Disorder. Later he moved to Los Angeles to work alongside films. He is preternaturally smart punctuated at times by infantile behavior (by which I do not mean petulance or willfullness, but helplessness and lethargy) and deranged by self-obesessiveness.
I hadn't seen Kyle since he left for San Francisco. In that time I had moved into my new rental house. I hoped he would feel comfortable there when he came to visit. Its not much of a place. Asbestos siding. Four by fours support the front and it seems raised, post and plinth style. You can stoop in the front yard and see the back yard. The walls are often not more than partitions, masonite, wallpapered and painted again and again. There are no gutters but what still cling to the eaves are parts of gutters rusted through, filled with moss and weeds. The ceilings are erratic, tilting, sagging.
To get here, or away from here, Rainier Avenue is almost unavoidable. It is almost synonymous with degradation, like Sea-Tac, the area living off the scraps of commerce people who can't find the airport. Like most urban depressed areas, Rainier had been conceived with high expectations. It was laid as a compass point to the mountain, and from the sign-board beggars shed from Goodwill to well beyond Columbia City the mountain is there, just in front of you. White and blue. Impossibly promising. Framed by the hardwoods that have grown healthy. It could almost work, with blinders.
I will see the stoop-sleeping sad and angry folk. The man who pulls himself along on a hospital bed, day and night. The defeated who remain fat. The exuberant pompadour James Brown contemporary who peacock struts across traffic without regard to the murderous speed. The Ethiopean block, the Eritrean restaurant, the food bank, the Facts sold on the corner by Malcolm X-alikes. The industrial, the failed, the expedient. Budget Batteries, Jiffy-Lube, Wendy's. The fish and chips signs still on a building now bannered as Philly Cheese steak next to Triple Cheap hauling and towing. Why inventory it? Did Dickens leave anything out?
One last- a white plastic lighted sign over a door that never looks to be able to open. In copperplate script: Elegance- Home Care Products With Class.
I was nervous enough moving from Queen Anne, a well-established bastion of civility to Seward Park. Blocks alternate in South Seattle from Dynasty to Tobacco Road. I was surprised when I met the neighbors. All young, attractive, liberal for the most part. There is a sizeable lesbian enclave and the gays who have absented themselves from the dance floors live settled in pairs all over. Young families. Few apartments. Gentrification. I have the last squalid house on the block.
I leave the door open, the windows open. My furniture and tools unlocked. I have applauded myself for my bravery and adaptibility, but to be honest, it is probably a safer neighborhood.
Queen Anne had weepers. Every weekend, some weeknights. Wandering between the apartment houses loudly sobbing. The sound echoed, but was not diminished in the still nights. Weep, sob, lament. The tragedies of apartment houses. One woman thried to throw herself from the building behind mine. Same- third floor. She hung, half out her window. Her dangerous boyfriend pounded on the door behind her. Later I met someone who knew him. He died in a peculiar way, what I can't recall. The man, a chef I think who strangled Dominick Dunne's daughter to death lives in teh block behind that. Even in the halls of the Lola. A man shot himself in his apartment on the floor beneath me and the bellet went into the hall.
Josephine Oglesby who lived for decades in my apartment died there in the bathtub with a can of cooked shrimp and fork beside her. THe tragedies are packed tight and stacked high where there are so many apartments. Seward Park seems almost suburban.
But I screamed. Screamed for my life, for anger and fear. I should, and will explain, after the gym.
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