bird

Asswipe

(7/03/04)

I don't like parades.

I instinctively distrust large groups of people. Mobs. I'm wary of the French because of how good they are at mobbing. Unless of course if the situation actually calls for it. Honestly why waste your energies spearing Protestant babies on pikes or burning down housing complexes filled with Algerians when you should be saving your national reserve to handle those nasty Huns repeatedly elbowing in from the North. I hated the French Revolution. It always ends so poorly in books. Nothing ever really changes. Bank accounts perhaps but really that's all.

I'd rather people just behave. Mobs block traffic and encourage participants to have unrealistic expectations about control and destiny. It's a great way of making someone feel as though they belong and that they matter. Stop traffic for them. Cover them in buttons and point them to the polls. It's really just a good old time at the town brothel. Hello boys! Y'all are getting sold down the river. All you stinking geese.

In short I don't like seeing people feeling entitled or enjoying themselves in public. And while I'm on the subject, no one really needs to eat on the subway. It's objectionable.

I'm particularly suspicious of a parade that assumes to represent me, either ethnically or ideologically. So Sunday during the wonderful winding deviant promenade down 5th Avenue, I chose to take a gig as an unofficial 'Manny' to my friend's kids, Bern and Will. It was a great excuse to not accidentally stumble onto the parade and serendipitously run into Dah-vid.

 Since he left I have an illogical fear that Dah-vid is omnipresent. A way of holding onto hope I suppose. I'm sure that he would have been the hot and shirtless attendee of honor on  GLBT Schizophrenic Alliance float. A slap dashed and abstract affair with half the participants running in front screaming about the end of times as the others crouch beneath the crepe covered flatbed shivering and pointing at some unseen malevolent force and me on the sidelines brimming with pride. That's my boy!

He's a cunt.

A crazy cunt.

In truth Dah-vid is probably somewhere in a hospice or psych ward. There's little chance of bumping into him without some sort of PHD or Visitor's Pass. One thing I'm certain of is that he is steeped in a brew of his own miserable company. He couldn't possibly be happy without me beside him. And so to avoid running into beloved I headed under to NJ to shepherd someone else's children.

The boys, Bern and Will and I made a great day of it. Playing in the park, walking the dog and fixing dinner. Bedtime rushed up on us as I was finishing the dishes and I had them scoot into their pjs and then into bed.  With the kitchen clean and my charges safely tucked-in I sneaked out to the porch for the first cigarette of the day. I wasn't halfway through the chokin' bastard when the call came from down the hall that Will, the younger of the two, had to use the toilet. Realizing that perhaps dinner and bedtime had come too close together I was inclined to believe the three-year old's request. I snubbed out my date and ushered Will across the hall and into the bathroom.  I closed the door to afford him some privacy and began making small talk with Bern. Within a few moments Will announced that he was done. That's great, I offered as I continued conversation with Bern. Again in a longer more melodic tone Will proclaimed his completion. Oookaay, I sang back for him to come out and get back into bed.

Pause.

I'm done! Came through like a shot. A command.

I turned to Bern who had propped himself up on an elbow and through the dim light of the boy's room my eyes implored him to tell me that it wasn't so, that I wasn't about to enter this dialogue, this scene. 'What did he do', Bern asked. I echoed the question through the bathroom door.

'I poo'd', Will cooed from behind the hollow core door. I turned again towards Bern the elder, hoping that he might rescue me from the inevitable.  

'Oh, well now you have to wipe him', Bern replied blithely to my silent scream as he slid back down under the covers.

I opened the bathroom door to find Will still atop his mini seat stretching uncomfortably and smiling as he looked up at me he said, "Now you have to wipe me".

I had agreed to this day in part because these children were older and  I knew there would be no dirty diapers or pissed pants. I had recently had an unholy encounter with 14 month old twins who both ended 18 hours of constipation while in my charge.  There is, I'm sure a minute amount of fecal matter still under my fingernails from that horror. All the perfumes of Arabia baby-a. I hadn't yet recovered. This new wiping was a nearly impossible request. Will was a non diapered miniature person with all the obvious motor skills that control actions like wiping and grasping which made it completely unnecessary for me to be engaged in this act. This was too much to ask . As a man I am already saddled as a sexual suspect, and as a gay man in the company of children I am rendered lame and put out to a poisoned pasture of guilt ...My options were to let him go to bed with a crapped ass and wake up chafed or to wipe his needy little butt and risk being dragged in to court twenty years hence when Will with the help of a quack therapist starts calling up false memories.

Considering how very short-lived the men in my family are, I reasoned that I would in all probability be dead long before Will's attorney's could build a case against me, so I might as well make him comfortable in the now. He hopped off the toilet bent over and spread 'em. I wiped twice in an upward direction with only one eye open in hopes of distorting my depth perception and thereby removing myself from the actual proximity of this dangerous scene.

Once the boys were resettled I made it clear that there would be no more trips to the bathroom for the rest of the night. Within ten minutes of the terrible wiping incident their parents were home. When with eyes a bit glassy from drink and happy times, they asked me how things had gone, I told them 'swell', with the exception of the wiping; of which I would have thought that they would have warned me. Maggie was the first to register shock, her head tilted as I explained the scene in the john only minutes earlier, and then very deliberately she said 'We don't do that for him'.

Whatever happened in those brief moments in the hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom I'll never completely understand. Apparently the boys saw a hole in my character. They knew how willing I am to wipe anyone's ass. They pegged me as a chump and a perpetual victim. Kids are sharp yo. I've been stumbling through this quiet life from one disappointment to the next, crestfallen and confused I keep living out the same martyr's tale over and over again, existing on the periphery of need and giving to the exclusion of myself; those boys smelled it on me and then went for my jugular.  

I got back into the city much later than I had anticipated but not before the city cleaned its streets from the day's mobbery. As I stepped over unopened condoms and literature about financial planning for your big gay future, I couldn't help but to think of not growing old with dear ol' Dah-vey boy and how willing I had been to wipe him.

 When in perfect health he convinced himself that he was dying and asked that I be the one to flesh out the tender scene and sit bed-side holding his hand, I greedily accepted.  I would have wiped any part of Dah-vid. I would have carried him on my back, through life all the way to his grave. I would have been within him; coursed through him and avoided his disease. Verily. I proved it the night he moved to be closer to his lover when surrounded by boxes I held him up against the wall trying to fuck him through his jeans. My best friend. I am the very picture of self-control.

I am already mourning his loss so that the idea of his death gives me peace and this is proof of madness on my part. He was right to leave. Dah-vid's non-existence is the only way I can face myself, as though I had never behaved in those ways; never needed so badly to disappear into someone else's shadow. How else to explain falling in love with a crack-head? Best to just deny it and hope that nobody noticed what a monumental pussy I had become in the shadow of his needy little ass.

So  Dah-vid... go on and die as we had planned but let me be there so that I might witness your ascension and the room it creates for the resurrection of the person who I once imagined myself to be: a saint, above reproach or need.

So listen up fellow asswipes; there are innumerable asses that need wiping in this life and if you chose to slouch through it's pages wiping others, if that's how you spend your ticket, then you are obliged to do so without expectation. Without question wipe every ass that presents itself and do so and from a place of selflessness. If you are to be an asswipe, then be a god of asswipery.  Get a float in the next parade, in every parade and create a college of celibates who selflessly devote their energies to maintaining the well being of others. Stand with that cowled brotherhood  and wave serenely at the passing crowd promising them your undivided attention. Be a role model...

David Sighting #2: Blowing Smoke

I've been trundling about in a self induced coma of late, avoiding points of view or ideas. And then without warning an old friend felt the need to reach out to me. Mangling the little peace that I had carved out for myself, sweet Ian writes;

'So Jim,

... Without fail, a few times a week, my thoughts turn to you. Some mnemonic burp (the cellophane crinkle and rheumatic yellow or hospital teal of an American Spirit soft pack, a flash of your David shuffling through the evening throng in the Union Square Station, a hobbled bird, the creeping green surface of the canal) takes me back to you ...'

Ian remembers that to thwart my addiction I change levels of my brand of choice on a day to day basis. Regular to Lights to Ultra-Lights, and then back again. Aside from giving the woman who runs the deli something to talk to me about..."Yellooow? Baluuue?" It's a clever way to fight the insidious unconscious patterns that your body is taught from brand loyalty. A truly remarkable line of bullshit that I feed myself. Just change brands, change levels, keep the addiction on it's toes. Distract the demon. Exhaust him and then deliver that final blow.

It's telling that Ian of all people is seeing David in the crowded underground of it all. Ian had for a very brief time been another level for me. My ultra-light hetero distraction from the full-on tar of David. It was easy to drag on Ian. The package is pretty as hell and since there was never much hope of turning him onto dick the damage done in time and effort wasted on wishing is minimal compared to the carcinogens invoked by loving up a real cocksucker who ain't never gonna give over.

Coincidentally, I met David at the same time that I fell off the tobaccy wagon. Seven years clean and I pissed it all away sucking on a hookah at some forgetable bar in soho. David was altogether a different kind of hookah. Immediately and without aforethought we forged a brotherhood under a low hanging cloud. Our brand our patterns our reasons were so similar, so compatable that there was no telling where one began and the other ended. David had only recently rejoined the land of the living, and I, while not having been institutionalized, was manufacturing a renaissance of my own. We both had reason enough to breathe deep and blow smoke.

It all went up in a cloud one night as I remember when the years of innocent addiction to each other ended as the fraternity turned incestuous. David was blowing my dick; he was applying all of his expert skills on my otherwise neglected piece. An ecstasy threatened to come over me as I watched his beloved head moving on me and then without warning he jumped up crossed the room and fished a smoke from out of his pants pocket. There aren't many ways to express the anticipation one feels as a trainwreck of delight is bearing down on them and perhaps in that moment as he crossed back to me lighting up,I could have uttered nothing more appropriate than that which I did: 'Ohhhh brother'.

Back on the bed with my dick in his face he dragged deep and without looking at me passed the lit cigarette up my way. I let it hang from the corner of my mouth as I petted him and softly growled encouragement. Working me until no longer able to hold his breath he slowly let a silken wisp seep out. I fed him another hit and he returned his attention to me...This is how we finished that cigarette. Me glistening beside him through a choking haze.

We had a few moments like that. Those unadulterated catches when you find yourself in love, together. And now we're both wasting our time as pedestrians going to and from work.

I'm between brands today, working through a zip-loc bag of promotional Nat Shermans bequeathed to me by a friend. And as David and Dad and all the Ians keep receeding into the background I find myself without a new face, new trouble on which to focus, and wondering if I have any money enough for a fresh pack and a metrocard to bring me to the Union Square station for the rush hour.

My Sister Moses

Just last week my sister Carol hosted a wedding reception in her backyard. Our dear friends Laurie and Dave had gotten hitched at City Hall months before and this gathering was for the close friends and family who couldn't make it into the city that day.

While I was happy for Laurie and Dave and equally happy that I was going to be sent home with a week's worth of leftovers, I was not necessarily looking forward to being around other people. I have never been terribly social and as the years pass I become more and more like that ancient, white muzzled, half-blind shepherd mix that lived in the neighbor's yard next to all of us. The kind of dog who for thirty minutes slowly finds its way back in the house by following it's own shadow on the ground. It is best to maintain a distance from such a dog. They are easily surprised and quick to quarrel. It is always wise to let such a dog come to you.

When I had arrived in the early morning to help set up there was a small group of older women prepping food in the kitchen and laughing. "Oh Jim! Did you hear your Mother's message? It's absolutely priceless! The funniest thing I've heard in some time. You just have to hear this message.Carol did you save the message for your brother?" My sister I saw was far away. Whatever my mother had said on the answering machine had to have been monumentally hilarious for my sister to have retreated so completely in a kitchen so full. She was tying her son's shoes and answered back in a hollow and all too familiar tone that "No. I think it got erased." Carol wasn't laughing. I didn't press the issue.

I was happy to accept some pretty important chores that morning that included blowing up party balloons and spreading cedar chips under the deck. Something had crawled under my sister's newly finished deck and found it a peaceful spot in which to die. A faint sulfur smell was seeping from the boards and polluting one of her artfully arranged seating areas. Luckily I was accompanied through the morning by Laurie's cousin Steve the Marine, who showed up on a hog and smoking a cigar. Steve whose specialty was Supply and Demand (yes sir!) was a geek all grown up. His awkward adolescence informed his adult character. He was kind and attentive. A perfect gentleman and full of empathy. Not in spite of his awkward looks but because of them he was smoking fucking hot. Steve was strapping and he was hanging tough. As I passed the balloons to him, I tried letting them go, so that he would have to reach up to catch them, and in doing so his Metallica t-shirt would ride up on his sizeable shoulders and reveal a soft hairy trail over his taut and ample tummy. He was a biscuit and I wanted to dip this bitch in gravy. I wanted to pour bourbon down his rough and ridged spine and take those sweet smoky shots from his ass crack. I wanted to tell him that Boston was only a few hours ride away and if we hurried we might make it to City Hall in time to change history. Don't ask. Don't tell? Don't worry. At this point nothing would suit me better than a slab of husband who wouldn't, nay couldn't hold my hand on line at the movies. Mr. I'll marry that meaty ass in Mass. and cook you eggs every morning for the rest of your life. Golly Gomer! You had me at hog. He was the perfect distraction from the intrusive crowds of curious old friends who wanted to play catch-up with me. Steve was going to be my date for the wedding. He would keep me from the mean company of myself and we would spend our honeymoon beating each other senseless head long into love.

At one point Steve asked me about the cedar chips "Cedar is supposed to cover up the smell of something that died under the deck" I offered. He was impressed at my sister's 'resourcefulness'. I wanted to knock him down and have sex with him on the lawn in front of our parents.

Part of my disinterest in spending time with others has everything to do with my present financial situation. I've been working very hard and without pay for sometime now. In my efforts to focus on work and succeed I had taken the opportunity to push all meaningful relationships aside. Family and friends had seen less and less of me as the years passed. I took full advantage of being single and childless and hurled myself into my work. I took a risk and sunk all into a worthwhile venture that has not panned out. That's OK, I can stand it, but I'd rather not have to explain myself. On a few occasions my sister and mother both had expressed concern that bordered anger at my unwillingness to get out while the getting was good. The conversations with them did not play out prettily. Not having asked for help meant not having to answer to anyone. That's a time-honored rule. A bed made and laid in is not to be disputed. What's more, a man is living out a dream in front of you. It's a bad dream, it's a nightmare, it will fail miserably, but for the love of Pete just let the man have his dream already! He'll figure it all out at exactly the point he should.

So it's clear that I had not the first dime with which to buy the newly married couple a gift. My gift was to be the unofficial photographer. My bust-ass, broke, dreamless self was to be the one to record this day of days. Laurie wanted candid shots and she couldn't have picked a better person to invade the small circles of guests and while remaining unseen click away, capturing their least interested and least engaged selves. I did my best to be sure to get shots of all the partygoers. It was the perfect assignment for someone who had absolutely nothing to say. For someone who couldn't bring himself to speak. While it pained me to keep leaving my husband's side throughout the day, I could not pass up the chance to avoid having to borrow money to buy them a gift. I kept busy and avoiding meaningful conversation by pretending that a photographable moment was happening only feet away. All the darting and dashing and avoiding was tiring work. At one point I had given up the charade and just sat in a lawn chair staring out at the party through the viewfinder in blissful silence. For a good three quarters of an hour no one bothered me. It was the only way that I could have enjoyed the day.

Early in the evening as, the sun softened the scene in my sister's backyard the small party had splintered up into even smaller groups. Those with children stood in the center of the lawn to intermittently put out a yielding arm or leg to slow down their wilding, sugar high kids as they tore around the property. Those over fifty found refuge on the cedar freshened deck and off of the grass. The Marine was making time with a lady friend of mine (that’s cute Steve, let’s keep up the façade) and through the viewfinder I found my mother under the reception tent holding my nephew Jonathan in her lap and my sister sitting beside her. They were talking softly about the boy. The light was too low for a good shot, but I tried to hold as still as possible in hopes that something of the moment might show up.

My mother and sister didn't always sit so close. From the time she could speak it was clear to all in our family that Carol was blessed with a super-human intellect and cursed with a distinct self-awareness. My mother was likewise bestowed with a super-human rage whose flames were fanned by the sudden and tragic death of my father, and a firm belief that nothing ever goes well. Left alone in parenting my mother had no yin to her yang. And if there was one thing she couldn't abide by, it was a Little Miss Smartie Pants. Beside herself in grief my mother seemed to have lost the power of speech and resorted to communicating via objects. Not so much puppet theater really, more along the lines of flying shoes, wooden spoons, belts anything within reach could be used to express a thought. She whooped the hell out of us. We each had our own way of responding to mom's nonverbal dialogue. I would hide behind the house afterwards sobbing and praying that God would strike her dead. My brother, at the first hint of a discourse would put up a screaming defense. Bleating and pleading like a demon lamb being led to slaughter. His 'No Mommy! No!!!' always worked like a charm. We hated him for it. My sister's tactic was to stand still and never let anyone see her affected. After a time seeing my sister unmovable, my mother gave up. She regarded my sister as a lost cause and an irredeemable problem. By the time my sister entered puberty she and my mother had very little left to say to each other. As the eldest daughter often does, Carol was obliged to assume many of the responsibilities of a grown woman including childcare and housewifery and like any put upon child she eventually rebelled by taking the adult role playing a step further through chain smoking, dating, carousing and drinking. I'm not sure that my mother felt the need or the opportunity to have the talk about impending womanhood with my sister. But I do remember them discussing it briefly, one time.

My sister, like all girls of her generation entering the full flush of maidenhood was dealing with her own menstrual cycle as best she knew how. It was something to be avoided, hidden and tucked away in a corner, like an unwanted child or a family pet turned unpleasant. These days, feminine hygiene commercials are filled with positive energy and girl power. "Rock-ish" music underscores moving images of commiserating, giggling girls rolling their eyes and lolling about on big comfy couches. Today's message is that 'Your period is what gives you power'. Old school feminine hygiene commercials came in low and soft with Satie or Bach. They spoke to you quietly as you convalesced. They offered more comfortable, private alternatives for the next cycle. Yesterday's message was 'Your period is what leaves you prone'. But the one common message that remains no matter what the era is 'Imagine that it's not happening'. Wrap, mask, plug, spray, soak, flush, swab, disinfect and cover it up. Never intrude and never let them see you down. Naturally any thirteen-year-old girl would be less than receptive to this looming red threshold. Especially when what's most clear about the 'condition' is that it is irrefutable proof that you do in fact share common ground with your mother. So I can understand that on one particular day my sister did all she could to erase the evidence that it was happening to her and overloaded the toilet with paper. I recall my mother's shouts from the bathroom. My brother and I raced down the hall. When one of us was assaulted we all wanted to watch. None of us wanted to feel as though the beatings were exclusively ours. As we peered through the door my sister stared at the floor unwilling to acknowledge that her tragedy was being witnessed. She stood in a shallow sea of toilet paper and her own menses. My mother growling about paying for a plumber and arms flailing stormed out the bathroom we thought to fetch a plunger. My sister left alone did not stir. As we stared, it was not clear to my brother and I what we were watching but my sister knew too well and she wanted so badly to be left alone that to regard us long enough to ask us to leave would have shattered the fragile reality that she had created for herself. This wasn't happening for Carol. She had already retreated to a very private place. No doubt a dry place. In a flash my mother reappeared. Above her head she held not the plunger but my sister’s twirling baton. It was to be used to dislodge the paper and menstrual dam that was causing the flooding, but my mother saw fit to first use the baton to make a point. With all her force she brought the baton down on my sister's skull. The baton mercifully took some of the force and bent in the shape of my sister's head. I watched my sister momentarily shrink as her vertebrae collapsed in on itself. I remember that the echoing thud of my sister's formidable brains scrambling around her head made me shudder. The sight of the blow reverberating through the ends of her long hair almost brought me to my knees. It's safe to say that my brother did not have the same empathetic response. Kevin was of the school of thought in which when someone was down you were obliged to kick them, if only to remind them of how far they had fallen. Kevin chimed in with something appropriate like 'Yeah, she told you so". My mother then handed the baton to my sister and told her to fix the problem and clean up the mess and closing the door behind her left my sister to her task.

My mother should be commended for preparing Carol so thoroughly for a life so fraught with loss. She was a pharaoh wielding a baton and chasing the tribes into the wilderness. In that journey some of us would vanish and some would continuously wander but Carol would be the one that life seemed to target. In comparison very little has happened to the rest of us along the way, but the years that followed my sister leaving home were littered with hard times and unspeakable sadness. She had been locked up, abandoned, implicated, hungry, alone, childless, divorced and radiated. Yet somehow through all the blood and tears and vomit, Carol had kept a grace enough around her to offer my mother a place at her table. My mother, proud as a tower, bent herself with humility to stand in the shadow of her daughter’s good will. Capturing the moment in the reception tent, although faint, was proof enough that mercy and repentance are afforded to any of us willing to pay the price. To see them together was to know they had each earned their peace and what’s more it was to know their sincerity in being a comfort each to the other.

I spent the rest of the evening avoiding my mother and she sensed it. As I continued to scan the crowd I would catch the sight of her in the distance looking directly into the lens. She was confused and was wondering what she had done, what had happened for me to remain so apart. I was too tired from troubles to acknowledge what I was feeling. I was overwhelmed. Seeing them together, my sister grown up, my aging mother and this red headed new comer who had taken my place between them broke my heart in a hundred ways. I was swollen with love for them, and for my mother in particular. I had been resigned to spend the day separate from myself and here I was suddenly too present. I ached at the sight of my mother transparent in her remorse for a life lived in anger. Compassion on compassion came over me for her. From a distance I was assuming a part of their shared peace and it made me all too aware of how frightened I have been and ashamed of all the years that I have wasted living on the periphery of myself. I have been keeping an arms length from experience so as not to get beat. I felt left behind and alone behind the camera.

I wanted to apologize to Steve for man handling him in my mind. I wanted to make amends for having complicated our relationship by using him as a way of punching a hole through the fear that I had brought down upon me like a shroud. But alas, while I was in the bathroom earlier Steve had left without saying goodbye. Having lost Steve I had lost my distraction and I couldn’t help facing my family. So I watched them moving together in this new rhythm and I allowed it to make me glad. As I watched my sister smiling and animated thanking people for coming, my mother in all her newfound tenderness tempered through time, was left holding Jonathan. As she stroked his hair with her spotted and work worn hands I couldn’t help but to think how thin his little skull must be.

Before I headed out for the train my sister waved me over to the answering machine. She hadn't erased the message. She hit play:

"Carol, it's your mother. I've been thinking about that smell from the deck and do you remember when Sam Boyd's sister shot their mother in the head on Thanksgiving Day and then hid the body in the U-Store-It place? Well, no one found her body for five months because they couldn't smell her. The sister had wrapped the body in cedar chips to mask the odor. So I was thinking, why don't you go out and get a bag of cedar chips and throw them under there! I bet they'll work. OK. Just wanted to let you know that I was thinking of you. We'll see you later on today".

My sister looked at me, bent at the waist and finally began to laugh. "That's our mother. Can you believe it?" she asked. I couldn't believe it actually. I was disappointed in myself. After all this time and all any of us really ever needed was an empty trunk and a few bags of cedar chips.

(see the deboned and filleted version brought to you by the fine folks at www.themorningnews.org)

The Chocolate Soldier On Leave

BLUNTSCHLI. My dear young lady.... Remember: I'm a soldier. Now what are the two things that happen to a soldier so often that he comes to think nothing of them? One is hearing people tell lies [Raina recoils]: the other is getting his life saved in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people.

ARMS AND THE MAN, 1894 by George Bernard Shaw
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last year was difficult. I was heartsick and it colored every corner of my life. I carried a hollowness into every room and into each relationship. I was suffering what is commonly known as PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had been engaged in a protracted battle with my own psychology and the scarred mental landscape of the object of my affection. Supplies had run short and the distinction between ally and enemy had become blurred. I was losing ground rapidly. What they don’t tell you in camp is that Love is a fuckster and if it finds you alone it will cut out your liver and leave you clutching it to your breast as you lay whimpering in a shallow trench.

Join Up! See the World!

In an attempt to broaden my social experiences (i.e. tap more ass) and begin the healing, I posted a personal ad on Nerve. While there has been some tapping (sadly, never enough) what I've really gained from the experience is a deeper understanding of myself, and the others around me in this big old ass happy world.

People are alone for a reason. I include myself in that statement.

As a result of my personal ad Tom, the Latin Instructor and I met up for a cup of coffee and had a real pleasant chat. Tom was quite tall and exceptionally good looking with a fine lean frame, a mop of light brown hair, a square foreshortened jaw that doubled up on itself creating a little shelf on which lay the most plump of bottom lips I have ever seen on a Protestant. It was so full and fat that it necessitated a seam down its middle that confused the beholder as to which side one should attend first. Tom swayed with a slight swagger as he moved. Tom was beautiful. He was a fine-ass Grade A guy and not at all like any of the other cracked and gitched squirrelly nut pies that I had previously been out with. Whereas most men who will go out of doors with me are third tiered fellows, Tom was different. He was mainstream pretty. Five years earlier and Tom would have been a national heartthrob. He epitomized the middle slice of a loaf of white bread. Firm, clean, and conveniently stale around the edges by the time you've gotten to it. I liken dating to shopping for breakfast cereal. I've met my share of puffs, flakes and marshmallow bits, but Tom would be my first trip down the bread aisle.

As I stood paying for our cups I turned to him and said like a grown-up, "I got it." and that's when I noticed a big booger peeking at me from his nostril. He had a fine big nose. The kind of nose that draws you in. A nose to grab a hold of and drag him around the house by. His booger was thin and broad like a chip. It hung by an imperceptible nose hair and acted like the stop to a drain. After the hell that I had been through out there, one little booger flapping like a sail in the wind wasn’t going to put me out. In fact it brought him down a peg to my level. It flagged me in to safe landing with every breath. I didn’t want him to lose it. I wanted it to remain as a touchstone; something on which to focus when the going got tough.

Unfortunately there was a dull air of disinterest around him as we sat with our coffees. I knew immediately that he simply wasn't interested. Poor Tom didn't know what he was in for. I was a man home from the frontlines and I was trying to assimilate back into civilian life. This promised to not be pretty. After having lived a year dragging my heart behind me, attached to an emotional umbilicus issuing from my ass, I was on leave and anxious to enjoy the comforts of home and pretty men. His indifference made me, as I often am, immediately angry, resentful and most important determined. I did my best to drag him out of mope mode. I went into high gear. I became a charismatic along the lines of Rasputin. I opened my cock shakra and beat him shitless with it. He responded quickly by laughing at all the right places and answering the rapid-fire questions that I began to deliver in an attempt to pull his focus off of me and back onto him and the wonderful waving booger that I had grown so fond of. I was manipulating our time together masterfully. Every few minutes I would take a deliberate moment to forget what I was saying or where I was and I would look through the window and off into the sky, silently reminding myself that time and place didn't matter. That everything was ok: was going to be ok. He swallowed it all. He went with me on those little trips. His eyes rounded and moistened with each smile. He softened into a friend as he sunk further into his chair. Within an hour and as our coffees turned cold, I had his life story and his complete confidence. He shared his strained relationship with his father. His brother’s tragic death. His mother’s courage in the face of hardship and the high esteem he held for her. His troubled and deeply religious ex. He told me he was relatively new to town, having taken a job in a private prep school. He shared an apartment with the sister of an old friend. She was neither pretty nor thin, but she aside from his ex was his only friend here in New York and they spent a lot of time at home together. He was opening up like a bud. Had I really set my mind to it he would have been drinking Kool Aid out of a Dixie Cup before the day was over. He was smiling...at me! Leaning in, his long legs were dangerously close to brushing up against mine. He was feeling good about himself. He was flirting and solicitous. This formerly disinterested dude was digging my shit. I was an instant cult. And like any other great charismatic I maintained an air of distance while beneath it all I was actually desperate for a piece of him. He was the object of all my focus. I wanted a piece of his whiteness. The sinew of his arms and legs, doubtless freckled shoulders, reaching twisted tied exhausted. I imagined the whiteness in my bed and under my sheets. I wanted to slather his whiteness with butter, fold it in half and take big mean bites out of it. Suddenly the only thing I had ever wanted was a fat chunk of this tall shiny new white boy on the block. These weren’t rations. No, sir. This fare was fresh.

So naturally we made plans to meet up later in the week. We set an evening date for New Year's Day.

The hole that I mind-fucked open in my own soul that afternoon acted like a vent letting new air in. Pumping oxygen to a wan and wasted spirit. I was pinking up. I spent the days leading up to our meeting happy and looking forward to our date. The day of our date I was busy running errands and feeling pretty good about going on a first date with a guy who I had already charmed from a place of passive disinterest all the way up to mildly intrigued. Who wouldn't be feeling good? I was standing online at the Five and Dime buying light bulbs and as I slowly neared the register I found myself surrounded by candy. All sorts of candy. There were bags of Brach’s, rows of Werther's, boxes of Whitman's and mounds of chocolate bars all stacked high…and I thought 'Candy!" My Jim Jones exterior immediately melted to expose the inner workings of a sap. “Who wouldn't love to get candy on a first date? And flowers! "That's a real first date. Flowers and chocolate. Why shouldn't people show up bearing small gifts? People don't do it enough. I'm giving him flowers and chocolate, damn it!" .As a fellow gay man I knew Tom was inherently skittish and I knew that to keep from frightening him, I had to modify the gift giving. My plan was genius. I bought three exceptionally good, tiny truffles from a local bakeshop and placed them in an equally small and unassuming paper bag. I stapled the bag closed and affixed a miniscule dried flower that I found in my neighbor's garden. I rolled up the humble parcel and stuffed it in the pocket of my coat.

In the three days between our meeting something went terribly wrong. Tom shifted out of cult mode. I'm sure of this because two hours before our rendezvous I called to confirm our plans at nineteen hundred hours, only to find that he had forgotten about it altogether. Not only did he forget but he didn't feel the need to cover up by saying he was running late. Instead he said, "I completely forgot! But I'm running home now so I'm going to be a little late". I was losing my grip on him.

Tom was clearly on the offensive. He was mad about something. He had the option to say that he was running late and leave it at that, instead he felt the need to broadcast that he ‘completely forgot’. Completely. It didn’t just slip his mind it was as if the date had never taken root in his conscience, as if the brainwashing had never happened. Bastard! Needless to say I was a little crestfallen and confused about what to do with my pocket full of chocolates. After careful consideration I decided that I would risk looking the fool and offer the gift in the spirit in which it was intended…blatant manipulation. And geared up like a good Chocolate Soldier I marched off to meet him with a holster full of candy as ammunition.

I should have known how different this date would be when I noticed that Tom had shown up clean and scrubbed and sadly, booger free. On the walk to the restaurant, as I rolled the present around with my hand inside my pocket, he told me why he was running late. He had rung in the New Year with his newly minted ex and a gaggle of their friends. They were up most of the night barhopping and it was clear that he was hung over and equally clear that he had gotten laid. I smelled it on him. He and his ex got stinking drink and fucked the New Year in. What’s more, it smelled as if the sex meant something. He got laid emotionally. His obsessively catholic and closeted ex boyfriend was ballsdeep in his heart only hours before and here he was walking to dinner with a sour, vodka flushed gut beside a shell-shocked stranger. It was painful to be near us. People kept staring at us queerly; the blinking veteran and the polluted beauty queen. I couldn’t control my own sadness at having already lost him. As we were waiting for a light to change so that we might cross the street I turned to him with every intention of calling it a night. I was going to let us both off the hook. He was absent and I was even less present. The best part of me had been amputated by candlelight months before in a field hospital the night that the lights went out all over town. As I opened my mouth to speak my first sincere and unscripted words to him, my hand uncontrollably pulled itself and the chocolates from my pocket and thrust it toward him. He hesitated to take it. I gave it a little toss so that it bounced off his breast and said, "Here, it aint a proper first date until someone gets flowers and chocolate"…. In the momentary silence before he said “Thank you.”, I felt myself being extinguished right there in front him. I felt the heavy presence of death all around me. My ancestors were hovering over me weeping for my uncontrollable urge to self-destruct. We walked onwards.

Dinner was a fitful event of started and stopped conversation. He intermittently pushed his bowl away as though he was going to sick up at the cramped table. He sweated from alcohol poisoning. I sweated from despair and panic. The bustling restaurant did little to calm my nerves or his stomach. “Incoming!”, customers to the right. ‘Incoming’, food being served on the left. The rat-a-tat of chopsticks on plates from every direction. The indecipherable tongue being screeched over the pounding music that encouraged guests to eat quicker. The climbing flames shooting from under hot, oil laden pans all from the open kitchen designed to delight the hurried diners. The coconut curries, the petite and deferential ‘waitresses’. I was having flashbacks to battles fought and lost with my old love in the very same eatery, at each and every table at one time or another. The owner stopped at our table to tell me that they missed seeing me. I smiled and then grimaced. When he left I felt his handprint still on my back creeping up my spine. I left poor Tom alone for a few moments as I did a brief Tour of Shame deep within the recesses of my mind. Upon my return to the present I shook the creeping hand from the nape of my neck and quickly settled the bill.

We were back out on the street walking back the way we came. It was decided that it would be an early night. We both reached into our pockets and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. The two of us were ready to stop pretending that we were casual smokers. Surprisingly we found a brief camaraderie in our addiction. His smoking was another booger. It brought him back down to Earth with me. We lit up together. We compared brands. A sudden ease fell over us both as we dragged deep like two army buddies leaning on rifles assessing the damage that we’d done. We strolled and stopped at windows, blowing smoke, blowing off steam. I relaxed and began telling him about the neighborhood as we walked. I was in my territory after all and the nicotine was encouraging me not to feel. On the slow descent down the slope I was regaining my power over myself and over him. He began to smile again and laugh. If only I'd had two more blocks left I‘m sure I would have had him denouncing his family and worldly goods in my name. But as quickly as it all started we suddenly found ourselves approaching my house and I told him "This is where I get off." And to my profound surprise Tom leaned into me with all his pointed beauty, directly under the only streetlamp on my block and laid that fat and lovely lip on mine for a sweet good night peck. He pulled back a little, looked at me and said, "You smell good". I mumbled something stupid like "No Madam, you smell. I stink!" . To top the whole surprise off he stepped back a few feet and inconceivably uttered, "I’d like to see you again. How about Saturday?" I told him, "...wuh, chhyeah' Saturday was great and that he should give me a call. I stepped inside and he slunk off back up the slope with a pocket full of chocolates. This was going to be a New Year after all.

First thing next morning I received the following e-mail:

(Tom writes)…I need to pass on our engagement tomorrow as I am not up for it. I think our friendly coffee date is taking a decidely romantic turn (as evidenced by our time last night; I am still flattered by the "flowers" and the candy) and I can't do that right now because of a still-percolating (although not always boiling) romance with my ex. Although seemingly atypical in some ways, I guess I am one of those typical gay men who flees at the thought of the U-Haul on the second date. But, at the same time, I like to think that I am forthright and don't play any games. I try to be true to the people in my life and I would like to think that you are one of them.
I will talk to you soon.
Tom

The U-Hauls bit stung. It cored me like an apple. To this day it remains in my craw. When I catch my breath from that hit I’m going to give Tom a piece of my mind! There was only ever one other man who I would rent a truck for and he wasn’t with us the night before. There was a U-Haul in my eyes, but it wasn’t Tom’s. It was the truck that groans under the burden of my confusion about living. It was the truck that has hauled my heart, heavy with fear, from every possibility for change. It’s the truck that keeps me moving away not towards. So Tom…relax dude. Jeez..... Beep!

Tom no doubt enjoyed the chocolates with his shut in roommate. They probably discussed the date and the candy. She as a chubby mutt, most likely thought it was sweet, which was a huge warning bell for him and he most likely, drunkenly drove his own U-Haul once again to his ex’s gin soaked bed. Which just goes to prove the truth behind the old adage:

‘Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker’.

He Aint Heavy, He's A Pervert.

Our families are ourselves. My mother has her own philosophy about families and I think she put it best when she said to my sister, who after suffering three miscarriagess in her first marriage was then rendered infertile due to radiation and chemotherapy six months into her second marriage, " Well maybe it's a good thing you don't have kids, you spend eighteen years raising someone and all you wind up with is a goddamn jerk"

Always go home. At every chance. Honor your parents.

Just a few years ago my transient and often imprisoned older brother was living once again at my parents house. He was in his early thirties and it looked as though he was actually going to become a person. He had a job and now thanks to our parents an address as well. My mother and Stepfather winter in Florida. They had taken to hiding there at holiday time. My mother said it was to avoid having to " hand out Christmas gifts to ungrateful bastards." In one way I see their point, for a good long time none of we children liked or cared for either of them very much. But I suspect they avoid the holidays and the accompanying tidings of love and family closeness due to the shame they are filled with for having raised us like veal. So these two tightfisted, short, unsentimental and angry Lutheran people, mustered up enough confidence in my borderline retarded brother to ask him to be the caretaker for the split level hell in which we were partly raised and mostly tortured.

I'm not sure if it was the double responsibility of himself and the house that became overwhelming for him or if the solitary winter accommodations wore down his resistance to stupidity, or if just being from New Jersey eventually did him in, but he was arrested one night for brandishing a firearm while speeding on a motorcycle through town. (Incidentally this was the first arrest in ten years in which he did not use my name and social security number.) Somehow he was bailed out of county jail. But before he got out, my parents asked my stepsister to check on the house. My stepsister is a well meaning and genuinely likable woman, but she has also been somewhat of a nervous shortsighted hen in the past. In my parent's house she found guns ammunition, survivalist propaganda, empty liquor bottles and pornography. In every corner. One would imagine that she would have grown used to emergency situations since her own pregnant teenage daughter was abducted by her 31 year old husband and whisked off to North Carolina for a few days of imprisonment and brainwashing by him and his family. But instead henny-penny ran straight to a phone and called her father. Who through his clenched false teeth bitterly relayed the message to my mother who phoned me. They wanted him gone.

I volunteered to travel back to New Jersey by bus and to deliver my parent's eviction notice. It wasn't the guns or the ammo or the liquor that brought my parents to this conclusion, it was the fact that they had left him money to pay the utility bills and he didn't. He spent the money on porn and liquor and gas to fuel the motorcycle that he rode around town wielding firearms on. That was a breach of trust that according to their standards could never be mended. I learned at ten to not even spend the change you get when you buy a gallon of milk with their dollar. What the hell was taking him so long. There was a great big small part of me that was tired of his antics and couldn't wait to cast him out of their house. So I made my way back to NJ and to the police station where I asked for an escort to my mom's house. I had called him many times the week leading up to my visit. He never answered the phone or returned any calls. I didn't know what I would find and considered that I might even be taken out by a rifle from the family room window upon approaching the house. So I came with a policeman in tow. I let myself in and disengaged the alarm and he turned the corner looking down at me standing in his underwear in disbelief. The officer stepped up the stairs and scoped out the scene. I remember saying "Kevin you should have returned my calls". After about two minutes talking to my brother as I scouted the premises for weapons; of which I could find none: the officer decided to leave.

Alone with my brother. Something I hadn't done since childhood. It had been the better part of twenty years since we spent time together alone. I learned early on to avoid playing with my brother. And I had learned to summon a rage of my own that masked my terror of him and fueled me with adrenaline enough to fight him toe to toe whenever necessary . I had always made a wide berth around his temper. His rage was often so illogical and huge that it surpassed even my mother's. Just when you were sure that she would beat him dead for one of his tantrums, she would instead become glassy eyed and quiet. His rage I think was a mirror of her own. It sobered and shamed her. What we would learn in time about Kevin, was that he had a hearing disability from birth. So he was often being smacked around for not listening when in fact he just couldn't hear. So we begin to understand his rage…. Playing with Kevin was rarely fun. More often than not it was dangerous. One had to learn to defend oneself while playing with Kevin. But there's only so much you can do when your older brother is bearing down on your six year old skull with a baseball bat with the ugly force of a fatherless, beaten, deaf ,retarded boy. I had always been aware that Kevin was slow on the uptake and that it made him angry. My mother said it was on account of a lack of oxygen at birth. Whatever the cause I still contend that long or short term he should have been institutionalized like any other disturbed child in the neighborhood. It would have afforded us all a little peace of mind at the very least.

As the police car sped off Kevin became enraged. I began mentally mapping out an escape route and the quickest path to the cutlery draw. It had been so long since I had lived at home I couldn't remember which draw held what. I tried to reason with him, reminding him that he just wasn't acting as normal people do. To his credit he did calm down and he listened as best he could (he never would wear the hearing aid .The price of which my parents could never let any us forget ie: "Your brother's hearing aid cost us $600 and it sits in his goddam underwear draw and now you want money for books!")Eventually and due to my masterful manipulating of conversation, things calmed down further and we sat at the dining room table and talked. Me with my coat still on and him still only in underwear. He explained the survivalist literature as preparation for a great race war. He put my mind at ease by telling me that he had only three guns ,none of which were in the house: and that he was going to be ready when the revolution came: and that our father, would that he had survived his fatal self induced heart attack at 33 years of age , would have felt the same. I was confused because I don't recall my family being particularly racist. I couldn't imagine what had fueled this new found hatred. I thought perhaps my brother had bitched-out one too many times in prison and this rage was his way of processing a situation in which he felt unfairly taken advantage of. Bitch. And then I remembered something. There was an old family story that at the age of two my dead father's mother had taken me to the market where I began to loudly point out all the people of color at the check out line. "Look grammy there's a nigger! And there's another nigger!". I had been trained, much as our dog had been trained to chase the one garbage man in town who happened to be black. My father had been a nasty racist (but somehow overlooked my mother's dark skinned Italian aunts who all looked like 'high yellow' black women) and now my brother latched onto this ideology. He must have spent those isolating hours in his underwear reading porn and imagining what life would have been like if Dad hadn't died. Somehow from the asshole of our early childhood he retrieved this pearl of a memory. He had to have really searched for this one because once widowed my mother maintained no particular point of view of anyone. The only people my mother ever dismissed were those who did not make good on their debts to her. But Kevin clung to this memory of Dad when he realized he had nothing else. No money, no education, no family. It grounded him. It made him his father's son. It made him matter. I couldn't help bursting his bubble though. You see Kevin is the most obviously ethnic of my mother's children. Had we the inclination my sister and I might be able to cross the threshold of the Aryan Nation headquarters after the Great Race Armageddon , but my brother would be either shot on sight or used as free labor. My brother could never pass….This didn't sit too well and after another thirty or so minutes of arguing I finally got around to my point. The eviction. He took it well. He had expected it. I told him it wasn't fair to our mother to make her worry over any of us. That it was time to become his own person. I told him he had two months to leave. He was gone within a week. We never heard from him again.

Two months later my parents returned and I traveled home once again to visit them. My mom told me that the house was in quite a state when they returned. It seemed as though my brother left abruptly, taking only his guns. Leaving clothes and pornography. She said that she had his things out in the shed and wasn't sure what to do with them. We went out back to the shed and she showed me the large garbage bags filled with his things. In them were his clothes his soldier of fortune magazines and his pornographic collection of lactating pregnant women. Stacks of high glossy shots of mothers-to-be spraying milk from a distance on ecstatic recipients. Men on their backs masturbating with their mouths open. Hoping for a drop. I turned to my mother and nearly in tears said " He left these here for you to find?" Realizing that she couldn't possibly escape the irony or the symbolism of my brothers twisted treasure. That we three issue of her, even in our adulthood were still in need of mothering. Some of us obviously more than others. There she stood in the doorway of that shed, in the shadow of my forgiveness and in front of my brother's polluted ,accusing pile and she said, "Yeah that asshole. I was going to throw them out, but Ed thinks he can sell them to the guys on his softball team".

And my stepfather did. From the trunk of his car with the Marine Leatherneck plates down at the ball field during the Senior Citizen League play-offs.