Less

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.

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.

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.