No One Wants to be Defeated

Michael Jackson is dead. And I’d intended to write about the day (Tuesday 10 September 1996) I attended his concert in Budapest’s Nepstadion Intezmenyi with a horse-hung Hungarian I’d met & fucked in a bar bathroom the weekend before. More than forty-five thousand people & Rangi the only colored person in sight, fans dressed like Michael through the ages (from little afroed-mocha Michael, to the adult milky-white Michael) who cried & fainted like Pentecostal women who’ve been visited by the Holy Spirit. How I screamed my pleas for Human Nature, PYT & Man In The Mirror & counted myself fortunate to have heard two of the three. How during the Thriller encore, everyone around me began to dance &, though I’d intended to remain still, we were packed so tightly together that my feet momentarily left the ground & I thought it wise to get with the program. How when the stadium lights came up, the concert officially over, I closed my eyes & stood stock-still trying to commit every moment to memory. But that story was too cumbersome & unruly to be (properly & adequately) condensed.

The Culture Of The Past

The year that I lived in Chicago working as a 19-year-old full-time volunteer for The United Farm Workers’ Of America – until I quit to work for Rocky Mountain Bagels in their Lincoln Park location – was the only period in my life during which I’ve consistently kept a journal. Re-reading it, I often want to vomit or punch myself in the nuts. Or both. At the risk that you’ll feel the same, here are some selections from June 1994.

24 June 1994
7:13am
When we fuck, I want there to be some doubt that we’ll both make it out alive.

11:18am
No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by water-drinkers.
- Horace

4:30pm
My trouble is portable.

11:12pm
Given my track record, it's unlikely he'd follow me into the next room. But guilt is for the weak.

26 June 1994
11:14pm
I should leave people alone: stop fucking up their lives in my quest to satisfy myself. I don’t lack love, but control & am duly dangerous.

27 June 1994
12:07am
A fine line separates critical, suspicious & paranoid.

9:15am
I’m not an eater. I mean I like food, good food especially, but if I had to make a list of my ten favorite activities, eating wouldn’t be mentioned – not unless giving & receiving blow jobs were listed under one number instead of appearing one after the other. At 5’10.5” & 120lbs, hunger can’t hold a candle to my aversion to chewing. Chewing is so pedestrian.

2:00pm
We’re told never look back. Such advice is without merit, it’s human nature to look back. To look up, down & to the side. What’s crucial is that one always move forward – if only by inches – no matter where one's gaze rests. Move forward. Move forward.

9:37pm
…all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea.
--Melville Moby Dick

11:41pm
I’m prone to failures of the spirit.

30 June 1994
12:01pm

COLD COMFORT
Perhaps this heart was pre-owned –
calcified & archival, it beats less.
But no less, true.

That Which Can Be Held, Isn't Worth Holding

If I had my druthers, the real world would more closely resemble the world in my heart. And today I’d be celebrating my mother’s 55th birthday with her, rather than hitching a ride to Patterson Cemetery so that I might sit next to her fire-ant infested grave. (It's hot out.) The cemetery is family-owned; the fire ants have survived all attempts at eradication.

When I was a kid, I relished the fact that my birthday & my mother’s were but six days apart. It was for me a sign of our bond – a naturally occurring equivalent to the secret handshake. Mother was the person I loved certainly best (if not only). And I’d no doubt that she loved me in return, despite the fact that she understood me no better than did a stranger on the street. Being her son made me no less a mystery to her &, oft times, a mystery with nightmarish undertones.

Perhaps the capacity to love, without judgment, they who baffle & infuriate is given only to parents (& even then selectively). I don’t endeavor to know. But sitting here at my computer, awash in the memory of love unconditional, I can speak of its benefits, no matter how brief the exposure.

I’LL TAKE SELF-PITY FOR $2000, ALEX

I wanted to tell the representative from the alumni
fundraising committee, who called during JEOPARDY!,

that I’ve a hole in my hard palate & a big wicker basket
filled with unpaid bills; that last night, around 10:45,

while attempting to reheat a slice of leftover bleu-cheese
pizza in Stella’s microwave, I’d fainted, cutting my temple

& breaking my good glasses on her kitchen’s reclaimed
hardwood floor; that I fear I peaked too young & without

much notice; that I am, once again, considering
razor blades in a piping-hot bath. That her tinny,

high-pitched voice recalled indistinct, & not unlovely, birdsong.

The Door In Between

Upon my return to NC, where for the first time in since I was a teenager I no longer lived in a bubble of my own like-mindedness, I found that I was quick to dismiss those with whom I disagreed & to gird myself in a sense of intellectual superiority. I was often as reactionary as everyone & everything I criticized & rejected. This realization came like a stiff, swift kick to the groin.

These days, I try (failing most often) to lead with my heart, to approach everyone with a generosity of spirit. I try to recall the issues & experiences that I don’t understand, & which give me pause, when presented with someone else’s lack of understanding. And there are many liberal “issues” (in this case, a grossly inadequate term but I can think of no other at this moment) I don’t understand – like being transgender. But my lack of understanding doesn’t retard my ability to support the transgendered in their fight & quest for recognition & civil rights. For some people understanding, or what they perceive as such, is integral to their support. For better or worse, I’m of a different breed. I can take it on faith that it's my understanding that's lacking.

Growing up, I believed in nothing. My acquisition of a belief system required very little dismantling – there were no relics, no detritus from the old ways. As I grew intellectually, so I grew morally. There was little friction when the rubber hit the road. However, my case is atypical. Most people are inundated with rules & regulations – moral & religious & otherwise from jump street (my family tried & I thought them full of shit, not to be trust & best ignored, almost from the very beginning). They spend their lives embracing, rejecting or replacing the rules they’ve inherited - these rules define not only their sense of self, but also their sense of the entire world. These rules are their gravity, their laws of motion.

Embracing the cause of gay marriage costs me nothing. But for someone immersed in an evangelical culture (to take but one example), where it is accepted that gays are bound for hell & damnation, the costs are much higher. In a reality where Moses was justly denied The Promised Land, after leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, through the Red Sea & around & around in the wilderness for forty years, for smiting rather than speaking to the rock – the fact that two guys are lovingly committed to one another is immaterial. The practice is wrong on its face, no matter how decent the participants. Obviously, I disagree. Still I try to bear in mind that for an evangelical to embrace my position she must reexamine every tenet by which she lives. If her position on gays is wrong then what about salvation, redemption, Heaven? Such scrutiny takes time. And to be honest, it’s unlikely I (less than a month away from 35) could now turn against all my beliefs, even if that turning against was a turn toward justice. It’s fortuitous that I’m already on the side of the angels. No?

It isn’t my intention to fashion fig leaves or excuses for the intolerant or the divisive. Only to suggest that we can learn from the nature & roots of someone’s intolerance. We are who we’ve become due to a slow process. Un-becoming is often duly slow & more painful. A gentle voice of opposition (while almost impossible to maintain) may garner more converts. A generosity of spirit is difficult to regret.

That being said, Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Ann Coulter et al can go fuck themselves with chainsaws.

ELEGY

I considered posting a photograph of my bare ass,
under your name, on the BUTT magazine website.

The way that when drunk & high & following a stranger
from an East Village bar, back to his apartment, I would

(sometimes) say my name is Michael, like the archangel
only thinner & less the Blue Ray & the sword.

There’s a certain liberty in one-night stands,
to subway rides from the very first stop,

to the very last & back again. Remember?
The night we met, we climbed onto the roof

of that abandoned house in Montrose, smoking Camel Reds
& talking until dawn. You said the true fear of heights

isn’t the fear of falling, but the fear that you will jump.
And I said, yes.

SAMSON

I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother’s womb:
if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall
become weak, and be like any other man.
- - Judges 16:17


A cousin was born ashen & quiet, his viscera
on the outside of his body. At sixteen,

he died young & much older than had
been expected. Another was run over, on a

sidewalk in Midtown, by a diplomat’s son
who sent a check & a rose-covered

cross to her funeral. Lupus left my mother
speckled as a hyena, gnarled as ginger root.

Nothing betrays as the body betrays.
Not even, love? No, not even.