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.