watching what I shouldn't

Watching the mirthless Mad, Mad, Mad,  etc. World, the bloated, turned eclair filled with the redoubtable cast. It is frantically unfunny. The only interesting part is the bizarre but brilliant speech given by the delightful Terry-Thomas on the American gynocracy:

"As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated- they're like slaves. They die like flies from coronary thrombosis while their women sit under hairdryers eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother's Day! and this infantile pre-occcupation with bosoms. In all my time in this god-forsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, in advertising and all fields of entertainment. I'll wager you anything that if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight."

Faulkner calls them "mammalian ludicrosities".Of course, my feelings about breasts are complex. There is something vestigial about them. Structurally they have the sophisticated lines of flying buttresses. They seem an after thought, or an inconveniently added necessity maybe- like fanny packs.

After Mad, Mad...'s bizarre end where the comedians are thrown lethal distances off an out of control fire truck ladder, some onto live power lines- I witnessed the equally apocalyptic end of "Kiss Me Deadly"-whose last shot is of a nuclear device that slowly blazes over the girl who opens the box in which it is detonating. It is weird at best- though it oddly prefigures the ark of the covenant scene from Raiders.

Tuesday: Adam's Rib. Judy Holliday was given an Oscar for Born Yesterday when she deserved one for Adam's Rib. The role was the same- her acting method so radically new that it is still startling to watch. Take it away from her for Born Yesterday and give it to Bette Davis for All About Eve. Rip the award from Susan Hayward's cold dead hands and give it to Roz R. Oscar revisionist chess. Truly some of the worst performances captured on film were accorded the damn thing- Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. Cliff Robertson in Charly. Unwatchable. Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly, Harold Russell, Jenifer Hudson- all rotten. Teresa Wright ruined so many great films, there should be some way to digitally replace her. Almost every horrible actor of note has been given one- with the exception (so far) of Candice Bergen (nominated), Cybill Shepherd (Golden Globe) and Screech.

Winnowing

I am paring down the number of books I own. I am trying to read as much of each as I can before their purge. Some have proven instantly unlikable.  I am at peace with getting rid of the Wapshots, but I have given the Forsytes a week to ingratiate themselves with me. Goodbye, unread Kobo Abe. Adios Amos Oz. Bye-bye Scott Bradfield. Go, Timothy Mo. You've worn out your welcome, Fay Weldon. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Joe Keenan, Nino Ricci, Greg MacGuire, John Fowles: after the first dozen to the first hundred pages- they are all on notice. The first editions I have are not really worth listing for sale: Toni Morrison & John Irving have all signed limited run editions that predate my trade 1sts and wholly devalue them.

I am burning stacks of old New York Reviews after tearing out articles that I might find informative later, but again I must only keep what is practical and light the rest in the fireplace because the furnace is not working. I must admit that I will never read long pieces on Marianne Moore or Rabindarath Tagore, Pynchon, or Roth, because I will never ever read Moore, nor Tagore, nor Pynchon, nor Roth. 

I can't settle now on anything absorbing to read for pleasure- I have begun Rites of Spring on Stravinsky, Modernism and War, Martin Amis' House of Meetings, (which opens unpromisingly with an often used subversion of the medium by commenting on the failings of that medium. "If this were fiction, it could never convey... sort of thing. Such a cliche, but who has the strength to avoid it? Amis, one would think-but we get something like: 'after all, what are words on a page? A collection of black marks...') I've begun an enjoyable book on the Victorian medium Daniel Home, & the 3rd volume of the Graham Greene bio by Sherry, whose 1st 2 volumes I believe I own- though they may be buried in trunks in the garage, somewhere I assume near Greene's books themselves, handsome, discreet little cloth-bound hardcovers in uniform editions from Viking. All I can find inside is A Burnt-Out Case.

Please, Dean, no!

Every morning, once I have set the soy milk steaming in the kitchen, I will open Pandora, an online streaming music site, on my Mac. I can wander out, as I did today, and paint a cabinet and an hour later come back to hear a song and artist that reflects the genre, the style or the generation of the artist I had selected as a "seed" station. The seed is analyzed, and it qualities plotted. Pandora chooses the songlist based on similarities. I find it, then, somewhat peculiar that every song, artist or style I have selected inevitably leads to the same fucking song: Dean Martin singing "On the Street Where You Live". This is a song originally from the musical "My Fair Lady". It was covered widely, but seldom to odder effect. For Martin it was given a slow, swinging Big Band arrangement. It seldom matters who I have selected to listen to- after an hour, it has lead to Dean Martin singing "On the Street Where You Live". Blondie to Grace Jones to Sylvester to "I have often walked, down this street before". Prokofiev to Stravinski to Rimsky-Korsakov to "I have often walked, down this street before".  Dinah Washington to Carmen MacRae to Nancy Wilson to "I have often walked....? Copland? Daft Punk? "I have often walked...." Dean Martin has become my online stalker.

It could be worse. I have nothing against Dino, as he was called. He was not the classic songbook type of artist, more of a movie-star personality than a vocalist. For some unrecoverable reason, I loved Matt Helm movies, though Dean seemed the least physically apt hand-to-hand combatant on film. It was, luckily, the era of the glancing karate chop to the neck. Though Martin lacked physical authority, he epitomized a sort of easy-going, boozy, hip, masculinity. Like Sinatra, he turned a lack of athleticism into a sort of non-threatening but unsurpassed virility. They never seemed to take a woman by force. They sort of melted underneath her. They were straight bottoms.

To my unending mortification, the only time anyone ever caught me in the act of um... self-gratification, I was a teen in my darkened bedroom at home watching "Bells Are Ringing" with Dean and Judy Holiday on a black and white portable. Of course at that age, I could have jacked off to a Porky Pig cartoon. 

I remember from a bio of Martin, but only hazily, Dean's inability to stomach the bathos of Jerry Lewis- the false pathos, the disproportionate straining of sentiment to portray great sadness, which he then contrived to bracket by desperate farce- the mannerisms of a clown, without context or reference. Dean Martin's decision to walk away from Martin and Lewis is one of the great artistic abnegations of the 20th c.- like Rothko slitting his wrists, or dating Yoko, or David Foster Wallace hanging himself, although that's a little less Martin and a little more Lewis. 

Alice B. Toklas never embraced- nor to be frank, admitted being Jewish. She fancifully imagined herself baptized by any leaking Catholic, and fervently believed in an afterlife. Always the more practical of the two, Toklas expected that Gertrude Stein, who had not been baptized, would need to be bailed out of Limbo.  This is something that could only be done by paying the Church for intercession, prayers for her soul, candles lit to burn up Gertrude's minor (subliterary) sins. If Gertrude's will had been clearer, Janet Malcolm believes that Toklas would have liquidated all of the famous Modernist paintings that Toklas was given a living from and they would now be in the Vatican Museum.  In Malcolm's Two Lives, we get the lovely story of May Bookbinder (a young woman for whom  Gertrude had conceived a great passion) whose love letters Alice discovered. It is generally accepted now that Toklas had demanded Gertrude remove every instance of the word 'may" in a piece she was writing, replacing it with "can". Though slavish, and particularly jealous, Toklas never admitted that she and Stein were lesbians. What might have constituted sex between the two of them might possibly not be generally recognized. It's impossible to know even when you are told, as Gore Vidal does, who does what to whom. Malcolm suggests that a passage of Stein's writing clearly signals her sexual attraction to women, Alice particularly, which, though I've read it over and over- something about old clocks and bright handkerchiefs, and food and dirty things- and all it does is confirm my belief that I know nothing about the sexual organs of females.
Malcolm, though able to be succinct and meandering simultaneously, has such a clean, refreshing style, that it makes me doubly reluctant to return to Cynthia Ozick's 'Fame and Folly'. Cynthia's sentences are occasionally overwrought, alliterative and provoking. There is a repugnant piece on her own precocity, as reflected in the envy of her classmate, the subluminary Alfred Chester. It is called Alfred Chester's Wig and she compares their brilliant wordsmithing and she compares his hairlessness to her own broad nose and we see her adolescent desires which must have appalled Chester whose homosexuality she sees as spurious.
It has made me realize that though I preferred dead writers, I had conferred a sort of honorary posthumousness on living female authors who were, well... like Welty and Pym and Ozick. I could read them pleasurably without worrying that they were worrying about their own desirability. I would hate to admit that ugliness confers some degree of integrity. I suppose it makes any renown seem to be hard-earned. Of course initially any peculiarity generates curiosity. Odd names stick in your mind. But you can also ask: would a tall Lautrec have the same reputation? What if Emily Dickinson had been the kind of gal that said "Have you heard this one?" and slapped your back when she guffawed. What if Sartre could see what was in front of him? I don't know if this is worthy of exploration. I think it is generally agreed that isolation might breed the talent to promote one's gifts. Let's say that it was Ozick's good fortune to look like Irvin S. Cobb with a mop on his head. Maybe this made her need to prove some sort of exceptional intelligence. So she spars with Chester, and flaunts her Eliot.  She constantly reminds us, she is nothing if not ardent about her enthusiasms. Her diligence in championing Eliot despite his anti-semitism is only partially to accrue some admiration from decoding Eliot's obscure lists of academic references. 
My experiences with Ozick have never come to equal my first happy chance reading of Levitation, which was in a Pushcart collection, I think. One of the things I found in the UALR library. I didn't understand it but I liked it enormously and began collecting her. Now, for the first time I wonder if I should Ebay all the many volumes of hers which stick together in back rows in cabinets. Ozick. Cheever, and Updike and Colette and Maugham and Brookner- books I once valued so highly and that I will never again be able to commit a moment to; I cannot entirely give them up, but then I don't run into them all that often.
In the humidity of Arkansas books didn't last long...but I still have most of the books I have always had. Their decay will likely be slower than the deliquescence of my ability to read them. 

The election

I concealed an aspirin in a piece of turkey and, though Buddy made his suspicions evident, he took it. The result, I suppose of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, he overwagged his tail and has a sort of hangover. Any excitement or activity causes him to lurch reactively then skid to a quick halt- any movement of his tail is agony. Bud and I ran and jumped and played and then soberly sat and watched Obama's speech, and ran and jumped and played some more. I began the night watching the election returns in the "Elite" a louche bar which has gained a sort of ironic following. It was full of people, shoulder to shoulder, nipple to scapula. I cheered Kay Hagen defeating Liddy Dole whose campaign commercials called Hagen "godless" more times than should fit in 30 seconds. No other results were in before I made a stop at Rob and Steve's where, during commercials I was able to see bits of our mutual friend Bill's newly released pornographic debut. Bill looked very handsome but sounded disconcertingly effeminate. He was being questioned by a policeman outside of his trailer while a younger guy knelt between them, I didn't catch why. The three of them moved with all the pulsing sensuality of a line at the bank. It had a strange pace, but I barely saw him unzipped. Just the static introductory scene, staged in profile only, as flat as an Egyptian mural, but most gay porn is staged like that- like an early round in Password.
But Obama was inspirational, yes, and it was nice to see Bill again.
70% of the African-American vote in California was for banning gay marriage. Dicks.

We carve Jack-O-Lanterns

The finished, lighted pumpkin is mine. Dave's looked..... um.....Canadian.

I am letting my hair grow and I cannot shut up about it

I am King of the Chesterfields, if finding 3 makes you king of something

The first Chesterfield in my life was my own beloved tan suede Chesterfield on which I now sit. I seldom sit unless I sit on it. It is straining at its overuse, pulling itself apart at the seams. Buddy's refuge and playground- where I hold and nest with the stray guy I might have over. It is somewhere between 7 feet and infinity and barely fits. The front door rubs against it. The fireplace blisters against it.  

The Chesterfield has shown up in every medium, symbolizing everything from downtown chic (in a Madoona (typo, but let's leave it) video) to entrenched upper class taste (in every Parliamentarian's office in British film). 

They tend to occur in ox-blood red leather. Indeed, my second was the highly worn ox-blood red leather Chesterfield with box cushions seen in the vicinity of this paragraph. The faded and spotty cushions had to be painted many times with leather paint from McPherson's on 12th. Beneath the velcro'ed cushions is a lining patterned with the logo for "The Leather Store". There was nothing that could be reasonably done to disguise this. The damned thing was also missing a button, a problem which has often been about as easy to ignore as a missing jigsaw puzzle piece.  Smooth leather buttons are virtually nonexistent, and finding an upholsterer to recover a single button would damage my self-abasing nature. Luckily, I was able to snip a smooth leather dime-sized button from a bothersome, hobbled Plycraft chair that I was ridding through the auction. I painted it to match with acrylic paint. 

It looked convincing. I tried for nearly 45 minutes but it was impossible to reach the button with one hand while the other hand pushed the button in from the other side. The Chesterfield sat upended in the neighbor's yard. I stared at it with frustration. Finally, I stopped a group of passersby and asked one to push the button in from the front while I tied it to the frame. 

My most recent Chesterfield sofa is the deep red with the tufted seat spotted here grazing in the same neighbor's front yard. It is from the Sodo Salvation Army. I had stopped shopping at that particular Salvation Army because of the highly delusional prices on uniquely crappy items. Astonishingly, this was $169.00. Unsurprisingly, I only had $158.00.

My cashier repeatedly ran my debit card until we found the price that cleared.

The only other thing of note that I have found, other than Chesterfields, is this blog, whose name I had forgotten. The first thing I did after I tracked the damed elusive thing down was to change its name, from (?) Drastic Folly (Lawsy!).

The auction to benefit my fingers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

unrelated photo

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.....

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.

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.

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.

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.