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.

Less

what he took on the plane with him

For his plane-ride back to Hollywood, I gave Kyle my Modern Library copy of Rousseau's Confessions. There are no volumes of greater portability and discretion. Apparently they are collectible. I find that books seldom recoup their investment. They are devalued more abruptly than cars driven off the lot. Thirty-five dollar hardcovers will bring four or five dollars. When the seller protests, believing that the retailer merely wants an increased margin, the retailer will refuse them altogether- "Noone wants hardcovers." There were many times when selling books was all that saved me from hunger. Eight dollars for a box of books could buy me a week of dry-goods, plus bread milk and coffee. Books cannot be bought for investment. There is no market beyond that the established antiquarian booksellers have manifested. Quietly scratching 1st ed. 295.00 in pencil and patiently stroking their moustaches. Somehow it works for them. Ebay seldom produces an audience for my books.
I undersold a Faulkner 1st of "Go Down, Moses! (and other stories)" a volume to which was attached the specific opprobrium of Faulkner (for the other stories part). 100.00. But it went to Oxford, Mississippi where it probably belonged. (Belonged? To which it was a stranger. Though a product of a New York Publisher and Printer its contents fully described the South, like a telling bloodline in a child born expatriated from his fathers' home).
Kyle read the Sky-Mall. Who doesn't. Who can concentrate on a plane? I hope he will hold Rousseau in his palm as so many 18th century pedarasts attempted to do, and feel moved to open it.
Kyle is, of course, naked culpability. Every man he has anything to do with announces that he has been ill-used, and details it. We are both designed as scapegoats for the world. My own misdeeds, like a weighted hat, bow me. Rousseau liberates. Whose sins are so penetrating that they can not be washed clean in this stream of words? My own sins are nearly expiated in his confessions.
Rousseau lies. He is ungrateful to those who help him, who free him from his just punishment. He weeps, pleads and confesses to anyone by whom he is cornered in guilt. He abandons friends who fall in epilepsy. He exposes himself in public squares to women, but cannot get erect. Most notably, he is a thief, and will steal from anyone without regard to his attachments. He will accuse the innocent of the theft and see them ruined. He passes himself off as master of that he barely knows. He publicly performs these unheld skills believing that he might possess them after all. He is insulting when he means to be clever- slow-witted in company. He is untalented at every trade. He is a sexual masochist, and desires to be dominated by the petulance of women who are born of a higher class. He undergoes a factitious religious conversion. He contributes testimony only half-believed to a beatification process.
Yet, despite all this, nothing frightens and disgusts him more than the attempts of men to carress him.
I adore Rousseau, nevertheless. He is my savior. I would like to adapt the Confessions to make some sort of stage work. THey must be royalty free, and salacious enough to keep teh attention of an audience. It would need to be highly stylised. Well, later, maybe....maybe later.

What made me scream

I live alone. I've always lived alone. Kyle's two or three months in the Lola Apartments studio were the only exception.
I have a new job which wakes me up at 5:30 every other morning. So I sleep soundly. My fan on. My windows I still keep locked at night. And I am sleeping. Deeply deeply. A hand grabs my shoulder
I dont know what made me realise that it wasn't what should happen- nor even what could happen. It was not right, but I don't know if I sensed it, analysed it... I just reacted. Screamed and screamed. There was a man standing over my bed. If it hadn't been Kyle, if it had actually been someone else who had broken into my house and had intended me harm, there was lots of time to harm me in before I was capable of action. Lots. Kyle was visiting his folks. His sleep is still erratic enough that he is awake at 3, 4, 5 in the morning. He gets restless at the folk's house. He surfs the web. Chats. He has someone pick him up and drop him off at my house. And he tries the doors. He tries knocking. He finds a door unlocked. He finds me.
I love Kyle. I can't hold it against him, frightening me like this. He is so vulnerable, so emotionally fragile.
And so deranged in circadian rhythms. We watch t.v. He sleeps while I go to work. I come home at 2:30. He is still asleep in my bed. I walk to a Co-op to get him healthy food. He calls another friend to pick him up and take him back to his parents. People will do anything for him. He can't really admit this. It always ends the same, the same hesitant, earnest pleas. Whoever it is...they are surprised they say, surprised by love. Again and again it happens to him.
He is cursed by being young, handsome, muscular, brilliant, funny, vulnerable.
He comes over once more before he flies back. He gets a call from one of these guys. Someone he hasn't heard from in a month. Someone who is trying to get noticed. Forge a bond. "I wanted to call and tell you that I saw a psychic."
Kyle paces back and forth listening. The phone finally dies. He sits next to me.
"The psychic said that I have Syphillis and Gonhorrea."
"Wait. You didn't go to a psychic."
Kyle shakes his head, No. His friend said that all you have to do is tell the woman a name and she will see the person's condition. His friend wanted to impress Kyle. Let him know that Kyle was always in his thoughts.
Kyle pulls his large frame into a fetal position on the sofa.
"I know it's ridiculous," he says. "I'm worried."
"Have you had any symptoms at all?" I ask.
No. He can't move.
We have to go to a pharmacy and get him anti-anxiety meds.
What about all the other Kyle K______s? I ask. It could be any one of them.
When he leaves I know that he has given me his contagious half-awake- half-asleep state. I am exhausted but I can't sleep. I cook navy beans. I watch them without the will to move. They begin to lift in the pot, in the water. They lift and revolve in the pot slowly. One, then the next, randomly they rise and turn like thirty-year olds in Logan's Run.
There is no renewal.

Screaming

I am still hoarse from screaming. I have never before heard the type and timbre of scream, the scream of horror that came from me. I don't know if I even recognized my voice when I heard it- so purely, unpremeditatedly mine, that sound. I should recognize it. Maybe I should practice it. I'm not sure it doesn't need refining, a little-more John Cusack, a little less Joan.
The other person who heard it, that scream, said ,when we reassured each other as people do before they face imminent death, that it was not girly at all.
"Really? It didn't sound like a woman?"
"No. Not at all."
Kyle has diagnosed himself with body-dismorphic disorder. It is impossible to dispute that he does not think he looks like what he looks like. We curled up in the corner of my bedroom. It was 4 or 5 in the morning. He reassured me that, in my last moments, I was not effeminate. I reassured him that he did not look like what he thought he looked like.
How I screamed: Two two-second blasts. The same note.
What happened between them: I took a breath. Which suggests Menendez reloading the shotgun- which suggests the suspension of passion, the measured actions of a rational mind. It wasn't. Nothing was in my head except terror.
Why I screamed: I have moved into a new house. Seward Park, where Olmstead and brothers plotted the most astonishing beauty a hundred years ago. On the lower edge of Lake Washington in the southeast part of Seattle. I've been here a few months but it has been years since I have been in a house. For almost twenty years I have lived in apartments. I was in the Lola Apartments at the southern hem of Queen Anne for ten years. The Lola, turn-of-the-century, brick and stone, fourty units. I lived in the least accessible one, third floor, north end. It was fine when I was a personal trainer. THere was no elevator. The stairs were worse when I was a bartender. 3:30 in the mornings, I would pick my way up. Nothing could have been less convenient when I became a furniture dealer. I would lift pieces up, step by step sometimes, or drag them like a full fishing net. I would get them to my studio apartment and climb over them until they were refinished and ready to move back down. It was a studio with a sleeping closet. Kyle even slept there for a few months. He paid rent but was seldom anywhere but the bed or the kitchen. He feeds himself like a furnace stoker. Roughly cut fresh vegetables. Whole chicken breasts- 3 or 4. He is 180 to 185 pounds. He is 34. He was a competitive gymnast and has an indomitable physique, partly German genetics. He is 6 feet and an inch, blond with blue eyes. From the bridge of his nose to the top of his head he is astonishingly beautiful. Handsome, assertive well-shaped forehead, squarish, sculptural, with sensitive, thoroughly lashed blue eyes. He certainly likes to hear opinions on his appearance, but accolades "above the bridge of your nose" does not appease him.
He moved to San Francisco to enter therapy with a specialist who treats Body Dismorphic Disorder. Later he moved to Los Angeles to work alongside films. He is preternaturally smart punctuated at times by infantile behavior (by which I do not mean petulance or willfullness, but helplessness and lethargy) and deranged by self-obesessiveness.
I hadn't seen Kyle since he left for San Francisco. In that time I had moved into my new rental house. I hoped he would feel comfortable there when he came to visit. Its not much of a place. Asbestos siding. Four by fours support the front and it seems raised, post and plinth style. You can stoop in the front yard and see the back yard. The walls are often not more than partitions, masonite, wallpapered and painted again and again. There are no gutters but what still cling to the eaves are parts of gutters rusted through, filled with moss and weeds. The ceilings are erratic, tilting, sagging.
To get here, or away from here, Rainier Avenue is almost unavoidable. It is almost synonymous with degradation, like Sea-Tac, the area living off the scraps of commerce people who can't find the airport. Like most urban depressed areas, Rainier had been conceived with high expectations. It was laid as a compass point to the mountain, and from the sign-board beggars shed from Goodwill to well beyond Columbia City the mountain is there, just in front of you. White and blue. Impossibly promising. Framed by the hardwoods that have grown healthy. It could almost work, with blinders.
I will see the stoop-sleeping sad and angry folk. The man who pulls himself along on a hospital bed, day and night. The defeated who remain fat. The exuberant pompadour James Brown contemporary who peacock struts across traffic without regard to the murderous speed. The Ethiopean block, the Eritrean restaurant, the food bank, the Facts sold on the corner by Malcolm X-alikes. The industrial, the failed, the expedient. Budget Batteries, Jiffy-Lube, Wendy's. The fish and chips signs still on a building now bannered as Philly Cheese steak next to Triple Cheap hauling and towing. Why inventory it? Did Dickens leave anything out?
One last- a white plastic lighted sign over a door that never looks to be able to open. In copperplate script: Elegance- Home Care Products With Class.
I was nervous enough moving from Queen Anne, a well-established bastion of civility to Seward Park. Blocks alternate in South Seattle from Dynasty to Tobacco Road. I was surprised when I met the neighbors. All young, attractive, liberal for the most part. There is a sizeable lesbian enclave and the gays who have absented themselves from the dance floors live settled in pairs all over. Young families. Few apartments. Gentrification. I have the last squalid house on the block.
I leave the door open, the windows open. My furniture and tools unlocked. I have applauded myself for my bravery and adaptibility, but to be honest, it is probably a safer neighborhood.
Queen Anne had weepers. Every weekend, some weeknights. Wandering between the apartment houses loudly sobbing. The sound echoed, but was not diminished in the still nights. Weep, sob, lament. The tragedies of apartment houses. One woman thried to throw herself from the building behind mine. Same- third floor. She hung, half out her window. Her dangerous boyfriend pounded on the door behind her. Later I met someone who knew him. He died in a peculiar way, what I can't recall. The man, a chef I think who strangled Dominick Dunne's daughter to death lives in teh block behind that. Even in the halls of the Lola. A man shot himself in his apartment on the floor beneath me and the bellet went into the hall.
Josephine Oglesby who lived for decades in my apartment died there in the bathtub with a can of cooked shrimp and fork beside her. THe tragedies are packed tight and stacked high where there are so many apartments. Seward Park seems almost suburban.
But I screamed. Screamed for my life, for anger and fear. I should, and will explain, after the gym.