The day starts so much better when one does not rush to work. Even on days I am running late (i.e., most days) I remind myself to walk and not run. Sometimes I’ll even take the time to grab a walking breakfast, a sandwich or a bagel and a coffee.
It’s not the being late that rattles me, it’s the rushing. Better to accept the lateness and start things out calmly.
Of course that doesn’t mean things won’t turn horribly sour once you get to work.
When a gay man reaches a certain age — say thirty-something — he may begin to wonder what category he falls into. It’s all about categories in this gay world. What you look like: twink, chicken, bear, cub, otter, wolf. What you do: gym bunny, muscle daddy, leather daddy. Who you do: top, bottom, chubby chaser, chicken hawk, rice queen.
We revel in these labels. We build identities and bars and communities and Web sites and publishing companies around them.
Some of us revel in not fitting into one of these categories.
Until we do.
I have never felt like I fit a label. Never was a twink. Not headed toward anything in particular, so I thought. Maybe I could be a cub if I could grow a beard worth a damn. But today I was startled to learn that there are at least two people I work with who think I am a bear. Or at least bearish.
It was further revealed that one of them (I don’t know who; I didn’t ask) said so as a compliment, i.e., my apparent bearishness is an attractive quality. And this did lessen the shock. I’ll take anything label if it means someone thinks I’m cute.
A quick flip through any bear magazine should disabuse anyone of these notions of bearhood. I am as pink and hairless as a newborn kangaroo. But, taken with another word someone else at work applied to me — cuddly — I have little choice but to conclude that I just need to lose weight. No euphemism for “fat” — even if it means someone thinks I’m cute — can leave me feeling very good about myself.
The cleaning woman who comes through our office every day found a damp pair of boxer shorts in my wastebasket yesterday. I put them there. They were mine.
Underpants can end up in all kinds of strange places. I once saw a pair of baby blue shorts dangling from a black wrought-iron fence at my bus stop one morning. Who can imagine the hurry their owner must have been in to have abandoned them so.
My excuse is really very simple. Despite being in a tightly sealed container, which was inside of a sealed Ziploc freezer bag, the beets in my lunch leaked all over the inside of my gym bag. Luckily, my boxers took the brunt of the staining. My brand-new white gym shoes got a dab here and there, but nothing too bad.
I didn’t mind tossing out the shorts. They were dark blue but way beyond saving. They were old. And I was not about to wash my shorts in the sink at the office!
I shudder to think what fictions those wet, stained shorts must have ignited in the cleaning lady’s imagination when she fished them out of my garbage — with me sitting right there. (No wonder she didn’t say hello yesterday!)
Mom and dad and I were on a roller coaster. It was a sunny and cool summer or spring day. I was my present age, or a little younger (I always feel younger around my parents). They were somewhere in their 50s and still married. And I was dreaming.
I was able to see the coaster from a third-person perspective as well as my own. It was like watching it on TV or in a video game. This allowed me to see the train moving so fast that sometimes there was no track under the wheels. We would be suspended on solid but invisible tracks for a second, like the cars remembered where they were supposed to go, before sections of track would suddenly blink into existence. My in-dream explanation was that the processor in the computer was too slow to keep up with the train. We were spinning and dipping and looping so much that I began to worry my dad would get sick. Plus, I felt bad about sitting with my mom instead of him.
After the coaster stopped, my dad approached the ride operator looking a bit rattled, babbling, shaking all over, with a wild look in his eyes. I assumed he was doing it for comic effect, and that the operator must see people behaving like this all day long. To prevent my dad from embarrassing himself, I took his arm to lead him away — a gesture, I was aware, both arrogant and presumptuous.
When I approached him, I saw that he truly was shaken. Never mind him getting sick to his stomach, it occurred to me for the first time that he might be having a heart attack. In my dream, he’d had one years before. Not so in real life, though we suspect it’s what finally killed him. We’ll never know for sure.
The next thing I remember is being in a parking lot at night. Maybe at an amusement park, maybe not. Mom was no longer around, and Dad was apparently feeling a little better, sitting in the passenger seat of The Car (any car). He looked over my shoulder and said, mightily impressed, “Huh! Look, there’s Shelley Duvall.”
The woman walking by had what looked like a short amber-colored perm, and she wore a knee-length beige skirt and jacket with brown piping and a white blouse ruffled at the collar. It didn’t look like Shelley Duvall to me. But I followed her as she walked to her car. When she opened the door and turned to enter, I saw that it was in fact Shelley Long.
Dad loves her! I thought. (In the dream he loved her, anyway, and I recalled memories of us watching Cheers together, memories that I now realize may or may not be real.) I thought I might make up for putting him through that roller coaster, cheer him up, by getting him an autograph.
As I approached Shelley Long, I glimpsed a guy crouched at the driver’s side rear corner just long enough to wonder what he was doing there, when — flash. “Got it!” he shouted.
Whether he was a paparazzo or a private investigator, Shelley Long seemed unperturbed, but I did not want to be associated with him. So I cleared my throat and began, “Excuse me, Miss… uhm… Long? Hi. Uhm, I have nothing to do with this guy, just so you know. But I was wondering if you could do something for me.”
The photographer had the gas cap door open, and he was tucking some money inside. “There,” he said.
She looked impatient. Well… and?
“I was hoping I could get your autograph, ma’am,” I said.
But I didn’t have a pen on me. Or paper. “Do you have any?” I asked, embarrassed at my lack of preparation. Clearly she did not. “Never mind. There’s one in my coat. Which is in my car. Just around the corner. I can go run and get it.”
“No,” she said, sighing loudly. “I may not be here when you get back.”
My mind raced. I must have that autograph! “Well, how’s about this?” I stammered. “I go run and get my pen, and if you’re here, great. And if you’re not, at least it’s my own stupid fault.”
She shrugged: agreement enough for me — or at least not a disagreement.
Then she crawled into her car and curled herself up so her entire body fit into the steering well. It did not look comfortable, as her head was now tilted nearly completely upside down, and her legs were tucked up somewhere behind her body. But she seemed unbothered by the posture. It was as if she were hiding from someone. And she was now in no position to sign anything.
I gave up on the pen. To leave her alone seemed dangerous somehow. Shelley Long was having an emotional crisis of some sort.
Stepped past the photographer, who was just sort of crouching there, I asked her what was wrong, but she said she couldn’t tell me. “Of course you can tell me,” I said. I fancied it a somewhat heroic gesture on my part. “You need to talk to someone.”
If she was worried that I was some kind of gossip reporter, she gave no such indication. I don’t remember what we discussed, but once she opened up a crack, it all came spilling out. I worried that the guy with the camera would be taking down every word, but he seemed to have stopped moving — like his wind-up clockwork had stopped running.
And that’s all I remember.
Usually my dreams are about ordinary, banal events like making coffee or being at work. Sometimes they’re overcomplicated versions of normal things, like trying to find my way through a stranger’s house on my hands and knees in a reality somewhere between M.C. Escher and Lewis Carol.
Sometimes they’re miniature fantasy scenarios, like talking on a video telephone to Madonna — until she begins to make dubious claims about losing the connection (“You’re fading, Eric. You’re fading.” Roughly translated: “You’re boring me. I’m hanging up.”)
Sometimes they defy normal physical laws, like the time I drove a car down an ordinary staircase into my uncle’s basement.
I find myself every once in a while dreaming about my childhood best friend, who told me to stop coming over to his house after his parents found out I was gay. Clearly an experience like that will leave a mark; I understand why that would be on my mind. But sometimes I remember a real doozy the morning after — like the one where a stained-glass rocking horse emerged from The Ocean (any ocean) to attack The City (any city), throwing immense objects out of its way, such as a radio tower and large pieces of the bridge I happened to be standing on at the time. I have no explanation for dreams like this.
Among those dreams that defy explanation, my favorites are the ones that last long enough to take completely unexpected turns. Like giving Shelley Long a shoulder to cry on. I tend to appreciate them as inexplainable little “art movies” rather than something with a psychological explanation.
I may never understand the apparent potency of an autograph from Shelley Long, but it’s not hard to see the value of a few stolen moments with my dad.
Um… great. This is the one who gets killed in the movie.
With one more day left at what I am now beginning to think of as my “old job,” I find myself with a certain song from Les Miserables stuck in my head.
Of course my getting a new job doesn’t have nearly the same weight as France’s 1832 student revolution. Neither does the Broadway show that prominently features it, despite its stubborn refusal to fade from public consciousness. Nevertheless, that soundtrack is still gaily playing in an auditorium in my head somewhere, stuck in an endless loop, echoing mercilessly.
I have been song poisoned.
In a way, I’m glad, because it managed to push out of my head another song that held me hostage yesterday: “Grace Kelly,” by Mika. Since (perhaps unwisely) purchasing Life in Cartoon Motion, I’ve been hooked. Despite a rash of stupid lyrics in half of the songs, I have to acknowledge that most of the album is clever, ironic, funny, moving and of course ludicrously catchy.
However, the three-thousandth time I heard Mika screeching “I could be brown/I could be blue/I could be violet sky/I could be hurtful/I could be purple/I could be anything you like,” I kinda wanted to hit my head against something hard and blunt. Repeatedly.
OK, despite my kvetching, I have to admit to still kinda liking most of Les Mis. (At least I didn’t say Cats.) My only hope is that the next song to invade my brain doesn’t leave me worse off than this one.
As spring takes its sweet time getting here, I am reminded that, in this period of seasonal transition, i.e. April (the best April Fool’s joke I’ve seen in a while is yesterday’s temperature), one is well served to guard against germs and other nasties roaming the range. They seem to really sock it to you this time of year as the changing conditions play havoc with immune systems everywhere. I myself just got over my annual cold relatively unscathed. Now, right on schedule, it’s time for some minor throat trauma.
It’s around this time last year that I was fighting off an as yet undefinitively identified infection that was threatening to eat away the roof of my mouth. I can still feel the scars where the festering craters of decay had formed. I can still see the puzzled faces of the doctors with their pen lights aimed into my mouth (What is that?). I can still hear the otorhinolaryngologist wagging his finger, implying that my fondness for sex with men was probably at the root of my problem. (I still can’t figure that one out.) I can feel the needle pushed deep into my ass cheek for the first of a series of three just-in-case injections. (Praise Jesus, I didn’t need installments 2 or 3.)
The best part was the weight I lost avoiding, at first, solid food, and then all food, full stop.
Now we wait for the summer sun to come and burn off the fog of infection. Until then, people are getting pretty gross.
Yesterday while staring out my office window toward the street, I saw a woman sneeze on her kid. She was facing my building, pushing a little girl in an open stroller across the street. She reared back like a pitcher winding up for a fastball and let loose what looked to be an enormously satisfying sneeze. A thick mist issued from her face directly downward, raining droplets of biological refuse, visible from three stories up, onto her precious little charge.
She sniffed back some gack and carried on without pause.
Good luck, kid, I thought.
A day later, another woman on the subway let go of the chrome pole she was grasping so she could sneeze at her hand, only half covering her face, and then put it back exactly where it was on that pole. Another woman on the pole, wisely wearing gloves, registered her shock with a flurry of incredulous blinking and stepped aside to join a companion a few feet away.
Though we often feel like helpless puppets in the manipulative world around us, I think we can often take some small comfort in the ability to make changes in ourselves, however minor, just to prove that we have some control over something.
I don’t remember when it was or what prompted it, but I do remember that there was a precise moment when I decided to write my nines like upside-down sixes in one counter-clockwise motion from the top down, my eights as two circles rather than starting them like an S and crossing back to the original point, and my twos as they appear in print, with a sharp point where the arc meets the baseline rather than that loop many people use.
A friend of mine in high school wrote her nines like a lowercase G. I always appreciated her attempt to restore the curve to the descending half of the numeral, but … well, it looked like a “g.” I fancied that my version represented a slight improvement.
Similarly, I didn’t care for the sharp point in the northeast corner of the shorthand eight. And, when written quickly, it looked like it had a couple loose threads that could get caught on a passing descendor and unravel the whole thing. The shorthand two looked sloppy and lazy to me, too. So, I sharpened my twos and rounded my eights.
Notably, perhaps, I did not opt to draw dashes through my sevens. That would have just been European and pretentious.
I began practicing my new twos and eights and nines immediately, secretly hoping someone would notice and comment on them. I thought they looked masculine and deliberate. Solid. Strong. Not loopy and soft. I found a new zeal for balancing my checkbook. I copied page numbers during college research assignments with glee.
For a time, I tried to extend this to punctuation. I tried to make apostrophes and quotation marks like little “sixes” and “nines” — out of a sense of correctness and a temporary aversion to hash marks and ditto marks — but that didn’t hold for long. Who has time to fill in the little holes?
How does this demonstrate control? I guess it’s just something little, a miniature reinvention. If only I could apply the same energy to, say, how much I drink every week — or how often I go to the gym.
I’ve heard people older than me say things about aging like: “I feel like I’m the same person I was when I was younger. It’s like I’m 25 inside. But I look in the mirror, and I see this old face.”
Is this incongruity the same for all of us?
Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself: I’m living with my husband in a state I didn’t grow up in, and I have for the last 8 years; I’ve graduated from college; I’m making decent money at a decent job; I can make my own decisions and determine my own road. I have to make my own decisions. What choice is there?
I suppose some people groom themselves to accept their own adulthood. And whenever it happens, they take the reins and ride off into the future. But me — I think I’m still at the bus stop sometimes, waiting for adulthood to pick me up.
Who in their right mind would allow me to just sort of take care of myself? You mean, they let me vote? They let me live on my own like this? If I wanted to buy a car or a house or open a retirement account, I can just … do it? Who do I think I am?
I recently volunteered to speak at a career night event put on for some high school kids. I was part of a group of young professionals (professionals?) who talked about their jobs and answered questions from the attendees about skills, training, degrees, career choices. It seemed funny to me that I should be presented to these kids as a role model.
Are they kidding? My life, an example? I felt like all I could do was tell them what not to do. But I guess I’ve done OK, haven’t I? Of course I can give some advice.
One of the first times I realized I was a grown-up — that I had truly left the nest — was in the health and beauty aids section of Target. I was buying dental floss.
Until I was 22 years old, my mom scheduled twice-yearly checkups with the dentist. Even when I was in college. I’d come home, and there’d be a dentist appointment tossed in with the obligatory visits to friends and family. And every time, the dentist gave me a toothbrush and a packet of dental floss. And because I hardly ever flossed, it was plenty to get me through the next six months before my next appointment.
Dental floss always stacked up at my house. My mom had baskets and baskets of it under the sink in the bathroom. Plain, waxed, mint waxed, cinnamon waxed, blue, green, white. I think I even used a packet of unwaxed plain once as kite string. We never wanted for dental floss at my house — ever.
Then I crossed state lines. Visits to Dr. Forrest ended. It took me a year before I got on the ball and made my own dentist appointment. And I had to buy my own dental floss. The multitude of options at Target is overwhelming.
Sometimes I still feel like the insecure teenager I was: unsure about his future but somehow not worried about it. But now I’m really just a much less insecure 30-year-old — but slightly more worried about the future. I have much less of it now. And I have the power to screw it up.
I wonder if I will ever feel my age, or will I also look in the mirror 30 years from today and wonder who the heck is looking back at me?
I always leave the voting booth with a deep sense of satisfaction. I nearly whistled as I walked home. Voting is the most basic of our panoply of rights, and I’m always proud of, and grateful for, my excursions to my polling place. Even for a primary. It’s so easy to do, yet turnout — especially on primary days — is notoriously low among our complacent populace. People are dumb. What can I say?
Today felt especially good in contrast with yesterday’s day-long mourning. (September 11, 2001, was a voting day, remember?)
America has alternated between sticking its head in the sand and up its ass since then. Sand. Ass. Sand. Ass.
Let’s hope the votes count.
... but enough about me 