what we see out the winder

buddy at the winder

my vacuum bag is barking at a matador

I have often wondered how to describe the smell of a puppy when it first wakes up. In Arkansas, I remember, during the early romantic stages of a new relationship, drinking coffee in boxers and a robe on David's front porch, with friends or neighbors stopping for a friendly word, I caught a whiff of it."It smells like puppies waking!" I enthused to dumbstruck silence.
"Well...... I just farted," David said.
I listed it as my favorite smell for Claire, when she sent me (amongst others) a form of fifty or so questions, the purpose of which was to better know her friends. She might not have believed me. For "What or where would you describe as your second home?" I said Narnia. But I love the smell. Buddy emits it, with others. I cant tell where it comes from. His mouth? His head? His butt?
If there is one talent that the homosexual possesses ina greater degree than his opposite, it is the ability to describe things. Kyle assked me last night,"Does your dog smell like a vacuum cleaner bag?"
I nearly shat. That is precisely what the smell is. Well, almost.The vacuum cleaner bag suffused with hot air and deeply colored with the friction against the rubber belt that spins the brushes. No wonder I am galvanised by vacuuming, and could pair off vacuuming and puppy sniffing until I was in Nirvana.
Kyle was also very acute on the subject of Barbra Streisand, whose early television specials PBS is rerunning. There is something compelling about them. The most bizarre songlists presented over a nearly sociopathically narcissistic tableau of Barbra as infant, an Ur-Edith-Ann. Old pianola numbers et al. Mae West was incensed ( I read) that B.S had stolen her entire persona, something which West herself had scraped together from Gibson Girl engravings and odd bits of Jersey Burlesque, one supposes. They were, each in their way, utter freaks. J Garland did the same thing. Sung Stephen Foster like she was Piaf begging for her lover to fuck her consumptive body to death. Yes, in Minstrelsy. What in the fuck?
Clive James says it best when he says that these divas have an almost total inability to judge how they are going over.
Kyle has been calling quite a bit or I have been calling him, mornings AND evenings, and I have to say that I look forward to it more than I should. A healthy person should not rely so heavily on the companionship of a long-distance friend. I am almost addicted to his peculiar blend of hilarious and accurate analysis, celebrity gossip, flirtation and fond abuse. He, of course is famously addicted to rummaging in the minds of others. One's tacit understanding of oneself is like catnip to him. Of course when he does visit Seattle I suppose we will just sit awkwardly in the same room and wait for a crisis of hunger or boredom to motivate us. Still, all the hours we have spent communicating, it is a bit unfair to continually castigate him for the few thin moments we have had together. I have to say, all in all, I haven't craved anyone's whole self- flaws included, as much as his, since of course the moving away of Eric M. and the figurative death of the lamented ex, the Barista Don. Kyle could dissolve into weeping and babbling and biblical prophephies before me and I would think it was the cutest thing since Cheney shot Dick Whittington. Of course, he is the only one of three or four friends that read this (each of whom I equally admire) so I have to say that it is difficult to be entirely frank about him. It is easier to be more critical than complimentary. But isn't it always? and shouldn't Reese Witherspoon be traded to terrorists for something more valuable, um...... like.....a bandanna. I do a better June Carter.
I am reading Hollinghurst again, after resting up for ten years, almost enough time. The novel, The Line of Beauty is like the less interesting exchanges in... say Alison Lurie, arranged according to a rough template lifted from Angus Wilson. Set in 1983, when the English discovered blacks and tried to assess them with a lack of hauteur, hauteur sadly being the only quality that distinguishes the English from Koi, it follows a young homosexual man who is obsessed with tonguing the sphincter of a working class East Indian 'mo,whilst staying in the house of a conservative parliamentarian. It is most awful. Most.
It is the sort of thing described as hilarious satire because it mentions Margaret Thatcher. There are lines of beauty in the damn thing but not the ones intended, I don't think. The first section, called The Love Chord tries to synchronise a remembered musical note with the joy of black buttocks. There is, however, a wonderful comparison of an awkward social moment in the air to the tingling before an allergic reaction, and some telling social observation. The hero of the awful thing decides that his manner to his hosts is one of "tremendous agreement". There are a few more of those and the rest is silence. I will give it 200 pages. A.N. Wilson didn't come easy either.
Buddy is now barking incessantly at my matador bust. He has barked at every bust in my house, no matter the size. He has also barked at coats and toast.

Buddy and his vet

Illness and Portland and worse

What I have had, since New Year's or thereabouts is pertussis. Whooping Cough. It has lasted for many, many weeks and faithfully passed through each of the stages as described in the various websites to which I was just recently referred. The worst was the whooping, which sound celebratory. It is not a whoop. It is a whistle, and a backwards one at that, air being pulled, first with great force and then with lessening force through a small hole and then a much smaller one, until ...as the websites recount... one passes out, one becomes brain damaged, retarded and dies.... one dies retarded.
It would happen during the night and I would sit up, unable to breathe, pulling harder and harder, beginning to panic, as my chest began not allowing full expansion, and the mucus that blocked my windpipe not seeming to waver, just plugging it. I would clamber out of bed and crash into the bathroom and bend over. The violence of my heaving would make me vomit, which sometimes would help a little more air get through, (but not often) and I would crash through the house and sometimes, starved for air, crawl out onto the front porch, in just my briefs, towards the street and help or retardation and death.
Buddy would be up and panicing himself. The last time this happened I noticed that Buddy was swollen up like a pufferfish. He was having an allergic reaction. The two of us lay there staring at the other's pathetic faces. Mine blue... his puffy.
Another horrible stage was something like pleurisy, during which I was paralyzed by pain from all the coughing. By paralyzed, I mean I could not move. I would collapse onto the floor after two coughs, and just lay there, feeling like I had been shot. The first few times I was there for twenty or thirty minutes. tears running sideways off my face, Buddy jumping over me like a hurdle.
Lastly I had diarrhea, unceasing, relentless and unplacatable. Ten days of it, and on the road trip to Portland, in every unfamiliar shop and restaurant, ordering food I couldn't eat and browsing in shops we didnt like, for the facilities.
Portland was alternately hellish and terrific. Arn and I had some tense moments. He acted the injured party, saying that I had explicitly given him permission to have sex with men who would take it in ways I would not have it. He said that although he didnt need permission as we were not acting as exclusive and monogamous partners, he nevertheless understood that I understood he would be bouncing off others' buttocks.
When one of them came from Portland and stayed in Arn's apartment for five days straight and Arn brought him to the auction house where I was working and the two of them appeared very comfortable with each other, very proximate, even affectionate I had some problems with it. When additionally, the guy was physically unattractive: short, bearded, nebbishy, with peculiar arty wire framed glasses, it somehow made it worse. Like Bob Balaban in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That is what my sexual partner was having sex with.
After a long drunken discussion, we somehow passed over it and had a great day on Saturday and Sunday, shopping punctuated by fantastic sex. The vintage market in Portland is thriving. Mostly junk, but it makes up in volume what it lacks in character. We filled the van within a few minutes. The good items were priced at about the Seattle level: the Danish, the classic modern. Two thirds what we would charge.
Portland seems more aggressively fun-loving than Seattle. It is walkable, freindly. It is sloppy and ebullient. It is pretty and unkempt. It woo-hoo-s, like a college town at three in the morning, but it lacks a significant homeless or street kid population. No panhandlers. Not one. It is hippyish, and homely. It could be very lovable. Inexplicably, there were few attractive gays in the bars. Even in the midst of their raucous Mardi Gras. Few. Very few. One killingly hot stripper at Silverado's. Shaved head, thick and lean. One fey gym rat, also with a shaved head. This was it. The gays seemed more of a desparate, nerdish, homely underclass. To give Arn some credit, his Bob Balaban might have been the best looking guy he could find in the city.

Buddy's Book list: Henry Miller, Durrell, E.B. White

I've finished "The Custom of the Country", Edith Wharton's ode to female awfulness- in short a gripping tale of deceit based on amoral and remorseless greed. Undine Spragg keeps an eye on her rivals, though they hardly appear in the novel excpet as spurs to Undine's avarice. It ends as one of them, her country gal-pal Indiana Frusk becomes an Ambassadress, something the divorced Spragg can never achieve. "Mrs Spragg... yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity." & "Her incessant movements were not the result of shyness: she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity." Edith Wharton Rules! I was outpaced by Masterpiece The-A-ter, and their Bleak House lapped mine, so I have laid it aside. City Room, Arthur Gelb's reminiscences of The New York Times, and Kay Boyle's turgid "Being Geniuses Together" have both been waiting patiently, half-read while I enjoyed Edith and Dickens. Both were picked up again at inopportune passages. Gelb has just emerged from red-baiting, and his drama critic years and all that is ahead seems to be labor disputes and the blackout. Boyle thought she had tuberculosis, and poor as dirt, accepted the hospitality of a couple, the male half of whom she gets pregnant by. He dies quickly, presumably to keep his production of ersatz Olde English verse to a minimum. She quotes too much of it, though too much is a debatable measure when giving us lines like: "Lyke a marygolde O the wynde has notte anye nose to mayke". Her autobiography is alternated with chapters of McAlmon's. The latter is eloquent, propulsive and fascinating. Here on Hemingway (who McAlmon published): "It's difficult to say who started the attitude in writing which one finds in "My Old Man".... It isn't so much a style or an approach as an emotional attitude: that of an older person who insists upon trying to think and write like a child." McAlmon was an assiduous drinking partner of Joyce's and somehow ended up piecing together the last fifty pages of Ulysses from the incoherent notes he was handed. (the first typist had destoyed the text as being obscene) He dragged Joyce home many nights and had him carried upstairs to the belligerant beetle-browed Nora. He also knew Wyndham Lewis well, Pound, and of course Hemingway. Interlarded with his tales are Boyle's maudlin, starry writings. The previous owner of this volume has a strange jabbing notational style. Sometimes she jabs her inkpen at the book when she is stirred by it, though often it appears to be just nervousness. Lee Hibbib was her name, and her marginalia is.. in total: Oh, Wow, Baby, Interesting, Class, Key, Am! and Ha! She prefers Boyle to McAlmon, with whom I have to say she shares certain qualities. Buddy has mauled the corner of the next book waiting, a biography of E.B. and Katherine White. It is only his second book. His first was the correspondence between Larry Durrell and Henry Miller. If I could only get him to take my current book and eat the Kay Boyle out of it.

At the auction

My dog, Mangelina Jolie

Will and I were taking the dregs of modernism, the unusable Herman Miller chair bases, the powdered box cushions, the warped and popped Rosewood veneers, the split fiberglass forms, curls of cracked bent plywood, busted Italian lamps to the dump in Fremont. They call it a "transfer station" I believe. All the refuse is thrown into the pit and this is pushed by a bulldozer into a deeper pit containing large dumptrucks which transfer it to another spot. The last time I was here, I was throwing hundreds of schoolhouse pull-down maps into the pit, like they were javelins. I had sold dozens, maybe a couple of hundred. It seemed that they supported the store. These were the leftovers. Places no one wanted. The dump is, of course infernal. The thirty-foot-deep pit glows red from the taillights of the trucks backed up to it.
Driving back, Will suggests we stop at the Humane Society. Just for a lark. We pull into its lot. There is no empty parking space. It is packed, on a weekday. People are bringing in dogs, or rescued cats. Most seem to be shopping for dogs, though I suspect one retiring lady is lingering near the wall of cats for a reason. The staff is harrassed but friendly. We see three adult pit bulls, all very sweet, a border collie who beckons calmly, and many and various excited yelpers. I say that we should come back when I am ready for a dog. So many of these are already spoken for, and so many people are there looking. It is heartening, but rather discomfiting to hear the emotions flow at each cage from each shopper. I discern a dim back room. In the first cage, almost too small to notice, there is a white puppy sitting next to a turd. He is almost all white, but there is a black patch over his eye. He is all unfocusable energy when I stop to talk to him.
His adoption, I see from the form, is pending. From my experience at garage sales I know that this means with enough effort, this puppy could be available again.
The receptionist calls the pending adopter. No--- His landlord says that insurance won't cover a tenant with a pit bull, and the puppy is supposedly a pit bull mix. When he was dropped off, the rescuers said they knew his mother was a pit bull. I look at the perfectly dogshaped infant. He is more of a Thurber dog than any other known breed. His snout seems more slender than a pit's, as do his shoulders, and his eyes are deep brown and very emotive. He does not have the stolid blunt Eastern European look of pits I have seen. He has a boxy head. Maybe he has some dalmatian. He is sort of like Peggy, the dalmatian I adopted in Little Rock, my faithful companion for roundabout four years, who rode in a truck from Arkansas to Seattle with me, and who died eleven years ago of old age complicated by euthanasia.
Unprepared to own a dog, nevertheless I find that I am determined. Some deep paternal instinct has been triggered. No force on earth could make me leave without him. I am handed the forms which might qualify me. It goes through. I get him and paying (140 dollars) the cashier asks what hisname will be. She named him Jason. Will asks "What's your favorite movie?". Then who is my favorite movie star and so on. Does Will think it suitable to name the dog Brad Pitt-Bull? How could one name a new being after a newsworthy person? I mean if I did love Brad Pitt immoderately enough to saddle the puppy with the name what would become of future developments? How could one trust that the actor wouldn't embarrass all the puppies named after him by something as peculiar as his recent embrace of everything his current bedmate endorses? What if I had been an Aniston partisan and had a dog that unfavorably reminded me that Mangelina Jolie was not the role model I had envisioned? When we come home and after short deliberation I name him Buddy.

buddy

I am a fat vampire!

I must have a good reason, you might be saying, for yesterday (written earlier) allowing myself to be poked up the ass with a sharp stick. Paying to be poked up the ass with a sharp stick. Indeed I do. Indeed I do. Halloween night, I was at a party, early. Everything I do with Will has to be done early. It is from years of being first in line at estate sales I guess. On Wednesdays we are the earliest to rise. We are sitting in his truck in the parking lot where the containers are unloaded before the place is unlocked. We watch each of the other dealers arrive. There are two elderly men in a Volkswagen van, in the back is carried an elderly Eskimo woman. She never leaves the van. Many come with their dogs in their trucks or vans. They all like Will, and his pit bull Sadie. They wave companionably. We do not get an advantage being first because we draw numbers from a hat with all of these dealers and we must buy in turn from the container. Why we are early I never will know.
We are always the first to get in the dance club, when only one or two solitary loons are just touching the surface of the dance floor in their ungainly flight. And we were the first at the party Halloween night. It wasn't clearly explained to me before we arrived but the party was principally for the gay volleyball team, which Will has lately joined.There was supposed to be a boy there that Will was interested in. I asked Will if I would know which one it would be. "Do you know what fetal alcohol syndrome looks like?" he asked. I don't.
Thevolleyball team could be interesting, I say to myself, picturing the lean, long-limbed athletic collegiate boy, a little horse-faced, but capable of cracking walnuts against his biceps. We ring the doorbell The host answers. He is a young man, six-foot, chubby, and flamboyantly made up as a vampire. His soft shirtless torso is open to the elements as his cape and some shorts (over hose I believe) are the greater part of his costume. He keeps in the false fangs when guests arrive. He requires them to absorbe the ensemble. Then he takes the plastic teeth out and complains about their size. He speaks with the inflections of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. Petulant, unsatisfiable valley girl. Whenever he passes one of the many full length mirrors in his apartment he says: 'Oh my God! I don't look good. I'm a fat vampire. Oh my God! I'm fat! I shouldn't have been a vampire. I'm too fat. I just look like a fat vampire." He wanted to be reassured. I don't remember anyone contradicting him. The guests began arriving, the fetal alcohol syndrome boy first, fairly handsome, as a half-shark devoured swimmer. Then came a small effeminate Asian boy dressed as a acat. Then came another small effeminate Asian boy dressed as a cat. Then a bat which was indistinguishable from a cat. Then a sort of bat-cat winged demon. Then a cat. All in black, with furry berrette ears, or fangs, shirtless or in diaphanous blouses, all Asian, all young, muscleless, and effeminate.
There was a sort of gregarious, affable older couple there. One past fifty with attenuated arms and a barrel like chest, sunken cheeks, ruddy... dresssed as a Crusader, in chain mail and his lean muscular boyf., 30ish , painted red with horns, more the volleyball type I had anticipated, but yoked to the geezer. They had met on the Internet. One had moved across the country to be with the other. There was another couple, in wrestling singlets, unfortunately. The rest of the party was unattached... to a mate, an identity, or an ethos.
Bill and I were not in costume. "Um....I like your shirt. I mean it's cool.... I like it," one cat or bat said, "but it's not a costume."
We moved, in cars, to a party on Beacon Hill, hosted by 3 gay roommates.
It was densely packed with hundreds of gay men, all flamboyantly costumed, most eschewing drag. THere were some attractive guys. I talked to another uncostumed kid, the sullen half of what looked like an unsuccessful date. Will pursued several small Asian men.
We left for the Cuff. I waited in line for a drink from the sole bartender that recalls me fondly, Charles. In front of me, two ahead, was the most amazing behind, bottom, what can I call it? Ass. Butt? What does it justice? Glutes? Glutes. That seems grown-up. Glutes in low riding stretch pants. I couldn't see much of the rest of the guy, but I made Will come look at them. We stared, speechless. Eventually the guy turned around. He was wearing Lawrence of Arabia motorcycle goggles.
He was handsome.Muscular. I thought he must be talent flown in from L.A. A stripper maybe. He looked too sophisticated for backwater Seattle. Too groomed. And was so... proportionate.
Later I dragged Will to where I spotted the guy standing so we could gape some more.
"You're handsome."
Will didn't respond. What the hell. Oh. The guy was talking to me. We danced.
Arn was my age plus some, but not much. I kept thinking that it was about to be over. He'd thank me and that would be it. But its been 3 months now. He is a veterinarian. He chews with his mouth closed. He is unaffectedly masculine. He reads assiduously. He is politically liberal. What more could I ask? Negative? Yep. We were tested simultaneously. We can be condomless. He was particular about having everything tested for. Thus the stick. Thus the stick up the ass. Thus I am asked to balance my weight on my face, put my hands behind me and hold my cheeks apart and not flinch.
I am a born flincher.