My Confessions

Maybe There's A God Above

2009-12-24T20:01:00.002-05:00

I wanted to go out to the market this morning. Chimelle usually does all of that for us, the shopping and whatnot, but I wanted to go to the market myself. I'd've gone with her if she was home, but she was seeing her friend at the baths; she can't be underfoot all the time, I want her to have a life. There was just no chocolate in the entire house, and I was restless, so I put on my coat with the big hood and went out.
I left from the little servant's door in the back of the temple, and I kept my hood pulled all around my face as I walked up the alley to the street. I was sure nobody had seen me. I just wanted to buy some chocolate and listen to the guitar players that congregate in the Mullioned Court, nothing so big. I walked slowly, enjoying the cold winter air and the way the white snow softened all of the hard stone surfaces of the city, the way it glossed over the dirt from a million chimneys and the painted boastings of ten thousand juvenile taggers. It was snowing as I walked; I put my hood back, feeling the snowflakes on my heated cheeks, and that was probably my mistake.
"Oh sir," the woman said to me, and I paused for her. She stood in the little recess between two row houses, an hemi-octagonal space of walls and windows and holiday decorations. She was thin, and dark of skin, hair and eye. She looked at my feet as she spoke, and that only softly, so that I had to strain to catch her words. "Please," she said to me, "Sir," she said. "Let me but touch the hem of your garment."
She looked up at me then, and I knew my mistake. She knew me. She could have spoken my name. There are so many people who want my help, so many who could but with a little bit of effort raise themselves higher than they ask me to elevate them. They are a constant weight upon me, thronging my temples, tugging at my sleeves, always asking. 'Please,' they say. 'I am unworthy, but if you would only...' Their pleas are heartbreaking, and constant, and more numerous than all the waves on all the shores of all the human worlds at once. How am I to answer them all in the flesh? When I stand outside the Multiverse, looking down on the human worlds from a place where there is no time, I could help them all... But I will not. I know (in that place, which is not a place) that there is no end to their pleas, that in the end I would live their lives for them if they could only impel me to do so.
But incarnate, I am weak.
"What is it that you want from me?" I asked, bracing myself. It's always more horrible than you imagine.
She swallowed several times, and I saw that she was reaching some internal compromise with herself, that she was reasoning with herself in order to sound more reasonable to me. "My Lord," she said, and swallowed again. "My Lord, please." And she caught the collar of her dress in one of her bone thin hands. With one motion she tore the bodice half away, revealing her breasts in their corset. "Lie with me, my Lord. They say you dwell in the body of a human man - come, let me give you the gift of the flesh, so that you cannot deny me." She wiped feverishly at her face, at her forehead. "Please, my Lord. I will do anything that you desire of a woman. I will-"
"Why do you desire my help?" I said, not wanting to hear what despicable acts she would willingly commit herself. "What is it that you want!"
She looked at me, searching my face, her lips working as she sorted through her words, her forehead furrowed with a heavy crop of pain and yearning. "My daughter," she finally said. "She-" but the words stuck in her throat, and the tears welled in her eyes, so that she could not go on. "She...! Oh," she gasped.
I closed my eyes, and laid my hand on her head. Immediately I saw her daughter lying in her narrow child's bed, almost dead of an ailment any competent physician could have diagnosed and healed. I could feel the child's shallow pulse, and her mother's agony over it; I could smell the infection that tainted her immature blood on her breath, and count the ceaseless nights her mother had spent bathing her forehead with a cool cloth, praying for the fever to break. But it would not; the organisms multiplying in her cells and bloodstream had won their battles, and she would die, probably this night.
I sighed heavily, and took my hand from her mother.
"Go home, woman," I told her roughly. I could see others watching, realizing who it was that this woman of the streets had accosted. "Go to your daughter. She will need you now."
I saw hope dawning on her face, and hated her for it. She could not see the future, or how much better it might have been for that little girl to have died before reaching the age of majority, or the sins she would commit as a woman against all of humanity. Even if she could have seen as I did, she most likely would have done the same. Such is a mother's love.
"Cover yourself," I said, indicating her half-bared breasts. "Go home to her." I looked around. Others were converging on us, the sick, the poor, the halt and the lame. Always they are with us.
No sense in pretending now, I told myself, and holding up my palms to the sky I rose into the air. They fell to their knees and worshiped me, and in my guilt over running from them I healed all of them that had ailments amenable to remediation. Why not? For what other reason am I God?
But I went back to the temple and sulked in my rooms until Chimelle came and asked if I wanted anything from the market, whereupon I irritatedly gave her my list and sent her on her way with short words.
I regret it, but then, regret is the legacy of humanity. To be human is to know guilt, and after all I could just be God, everlasting, immanent and immaterial without resorting to this whole messy incarnation business. I chose what I chose... And so be it.

Title lyric from "Hallelujah" by John Cale.

This Is Your Promised Land

2009-12-15T00:08:00.003-05:00

All my life I lived with my grandmother in her trailer, and we traveled with the carnival.
My grandmother was tiny and wizened, her shrunken face all giant liquid black eyes and expressive little china-doll's mouth with a tiny little button nose bumped up between them. She had a braid of snow-white hair so long she could sit on it, and a whole collection of wonderful pins with jewels and colored stones and little statues on the ends that she stuck through the braid while she was in the tent. She told fortunes, of course. Her stage name was Cassandra Envenimer, and old John who was her barker said it all French and mysterious.
She was very good at telling fortunes.
She used cards, sure, but she also used a leather sack full of flat stones, each with a funny pointy letter scratched in it - roons, she called them. She had another sort of leather canister with weird twisted sticks in it too, and every once in awhile she'd cast those and study them too. She told me that all of the world was a pattern, and that you could see the big pattern that changed only slowly in the little patterns that change all the time. She said it was like seeing the sky in a mud puddle - if you knew how to read them, the ripples told you what was going on around it, and the shapes of the clouds told you things too. I didn't understand much of that. She also told me that my father was no good, a confidence man, and that he would undoubtedly take anybody handy along with him when his terrible fortune called in its due. That I understood quite clearly.
Still, the carnival didn't satisfy me very much. The children changed from day to day, so I could never make a friendship that lasted. My grandmother was always trying to teach me to read the cards, but I had no talent for it. What I could do quite easily was to make a candle go out, or light if it was already out; to shut a door without touching it; to make a feather dance under my fingertip as if caught in a breeze. Grandmother said I must never let anyone see me doing that sort of trick. For that, she said, the marks would not pay; instead, they would come with torches and burn you to death. I understood that quite clearly too, and did my best to appear as approximately normal as my limited contact with the marks would allow.

Title lyric from "Tyranny" by the Stabilizers.

When I Was Not So Strong, You Know

2009-12-13T18:26:00.003-05:00

I tried the trick that my father had shown me a few weeks later.
I needed money, and my mother wouldn't give me any. All the kids from the regular high school were going to the dance, so of course I wanted to go too.
I went down to the drugstore where I girl I knew slightly from the neighborhood worked a cash register. She was in there leaning on the counter, buffing her nails and cracking her gum just like every girl that age I've ever known. I figured she'd be easier to push than a stranger. I went up with a couple candy bars and a two liter of pop and bravely handed her my dollar bill with trembling hands. I'd spent hours looking at pictures of real hundred dollar bills, I'd spent even more hours practicing, visualizing the dollar as a hundred. Still, when I looked in her eyes, I understood finally that all of that had been for nothing.
I understood that it really was a push, just as easy as reaching out and giving her a shove with my hands. Just as easy, and just as mean.
"Hey big spender," she said, still looking uncertainly at me. "Don't you got anything smaller?"
I remembered to pat my pockets just like my father had done. "Nope. Sorry."
I watched her count out the change: ninety six dollars and thirty one cents.
"Have a nice day," she said, and looked at me. Looked at me again. So I pushed her once more.
Don't remember.
I went to the dance that night, and with over ninety bucks I can tell you I had a pretty good time. It was probably two or three days later that I saw that girl sitting on her porch with red eyes when she ought to have been at work, and of course I knew. I knew that she'd been fired, that it had been because of me, and most of all that she couldn't even have told on me to save herself... Because she didn't even remember.
So I could do it too. Just as well as my old man. Maybe better. The part where, unless I was so careful, I'd hurt somebody every time I used it... I had to learn that part all by myself. He left it out when he took me to the movies.
That was when I started to realize, though, that there were other things I could do, too. Things I could do better than push people into making mistakes or believing things that weren't true.
Some of those things would have even more painful consequences than seeing the pain I wrought that very first time.
Probably because it didn't stop me.

Title lyric from "Magic Man" by Heart.

Never Seen Eyes So Blue

2009-12-10T18:43:00.002-05:00

This is how my father made his living:

He took me to one of those almost-restaurant/nearly-ice cream parlor deals down by the highway. “Order whatever you want,” he told me affably. Given the liberty, I ordered a huge banana split. I remember that he had a big milkshake of some offbeat flavor, like coffee or butterscotch. Something very grownup, I remember that. The bill probably came to four or five dollars, most of it for my huge split; I saw him passing a dollar bill over and was instantly, utterly mortified, before the girl at the counter – Hi, I’m Diane! Her nametag said – had even realized, before he’d begun the apology that I could already half-hear in my head.

I saw her frown at the dollar, just as I expected. Then she said, “Don’t you have anything smaller?”

My father patted his pockets with an apologetic smile. “All I’ve got, I’m afraid,” he said. So she just nodded and counted out his change, ninety three dollars and seventeen cents; I’d been wrong, the bill had been over six dollars. Six dollars and eighty seven cents, apparently.

As we walked back to the car, I waited to be out of earshot and then said in a low, accusing tone, “I saw what you did.”

“Did you now?” my father said blandly, and unlocked the car for me. I got in, barely keeping my huge plastic platter of ice cream steady.

“Yes, I did. You gave her a dollar and she gave you change for a hundred dollar bill.” I waited for him to argue with me; I knew what I’d seen, the single “1” had been too plain to me. I wasn’t wrong.

But he didn’t argue. He just started the car. “If you say so, kiddo.” He took a minute to suck up an absolutely brain-freezing amount of his milkshake before sliding us out into traffic. Humming vaguely, he drove us down the street to the gas station.

He’d driven past three gas stations on the way to the ice cream store. Why? Because he hadn’t had any money. Now he did – the money he’d somehow tricked the girl at the ice cream place into giving him.

“Why are you stopping for gas here?” I asked as innocently as possible. “It was cheaper at the three places on the WAY to the ice cream shop, you know.”

“Was it?” He was plainly only half listening. “I’ll have to pay better attention next time.” He got out and pumped his gas. He’d left his wallet on the car seat; he was always doing that, probably because he had to make sure all the bills faced in the same direction before he put them away. I waited for him to come back for it so he could pay for the gas – I was surprised that he’d gotten any, since all the places I’d ever had to wait in made you pay for the gas up front.

Instead, he came out with another handful of money, patting his pockets. “Ah, THERE’S my wallet,” he said gratefully, and sorted the handful he’d gotten from the gas station into the bill fold.

“Looks like you only took them for fifty,” I said, again as innocent as a lamb.

“On top of the full tank of gas,” he replied archly, and for a minute I knew I had his full attention. “Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it, kiddo. You never know when you’ll be in a pinch and the most convenient way out isn’t always the most noble one.” He nodded decisively and drove us out of the gas station. “So, you wanna go see a movie?”

He got us into the movie for free, too.

Title lyric from "Magic Man" by Heart.

heart - magic man
by aquarius3

You Don't Know Me At All

2009-09-21T17:55:00.004-04:00

See, there's this guy. Close your eyes and try to see him if you can.
It won't be easy: he's nondescript, physically average in almost every way. He's about six feet tall, but the way he holds his shoulders when he stands, very square, and the straight-backed way he walks makes him appear taller. People think that he's taller, anyway. You'd have to look at him closely to realize that he's not, and nobody does that very much. Maybe it's his coloring; his neutral-colored hair which fails to be definitively blond or brown, or the not-ethnic but not-alabaster tone of his skin. It could be his voice, not deep or high tenor but decidedly unmusical, almost hoarse. When he speaks his words have that embarrassing quality of one's own recorded voice. Perhaps it has more to do with his manner, which is quietly assured without being confident or aggressive. Whatever it is, he is utterly forgettable. Try to remember him and he fades like a dream upon waking. Most people don't even look at him even as they're interacting with him. They've already pasted a mental image of someone they already know over him based on some slight resemblance. Ask them to describe him later and they'll find themselves describing the person he reminds them of instead. This is our hero.
In that awkward time of year when summer should be over but refuses to go and let autumn take the stage, this man is walking down the street in a large midwest city. His scuffed and beaten sneakers, once very expensive, occasionally drag and grate against the concrete of the sidewalk. He is not graceful, but he does not stumble or fall. If he were to pass by someone known to him they might greet him, thereby giving us his name, but nobody knows him here. He is not out for exercise but rather has his own mission, which presently leads him (and us) to a large brick building, once a factory, that now marks the edge of a pocket of extreme urban decay in a sea of otherwise unremarkable suburbs. This area was once full of industrious activity, back when steel was king of this city. Now it is the home of those who make their living and economy outside the legally drawn limits. This is where his mission takes him, and so we must follow.
Across the street from the brick building stands an even larger abandoned factory. In its recessed doorway lounge several young men who are clearly up to no good, and might not even recognize a good motive were it presented to them. They stir and stiffen as the man approaches, and when he has drawn close enough, the tallest and thinnest of the three speaks.
"Hey mister," he says with mock civility, "You got a cigarette you could spare me?"
The nondescript man's cheeks hollow briefly; this, you see, is how he smiles. "Smoking is bad for you," he says, and suddenly all three youths are standing at alert.
"You a cop?" One of the other boys asks, but the tall one tells him to shut up.
"I'm not, in fact, a policeman," the plain man tells them. "I'm just a guy. I'm looking for someone you might have seen recently."
"Yeah?" The lead boy has gathered his meager courage enough to sound aggressive. "What's that to us?"
The man reaches slowly into his pocket and extracts a picture. It's a Christmas scene, the decorated tree clear in the background. In the foreground stands the plain man with his arm around another, younger man. "I need to find him very badly," the plain man says, indicating the younger man in the picture. "If you can help me, I can help you." His hand dips again into his pocket and comes up with a baggie knotted at the corner to contain a white substance. "What do you say?"
The three boys gather around and study the picture. "Holy cow!" One whispers, and the plain man and his two compatriots regard him with interest. "That's the guy who's staying with Arnie," the exclaimer mutters. "I seen him there this morning."
"Arnie's the one who lives over the Coach and Four bar on Triskett street?" the plain man asks pleasantly, but in such a way that they know he's already sure he's right.
The leader once again tells his subordinate to shut up. "Arnie ain't gonna like that, y'know," he tells the exclaimer. "You telling people his business and all."
"Why not let me worry about that?" the plain man suggests, and tosses the baggie up in the air. The lead boy snatches it so quickly that it seems to have vanished by magic. "Thanks for your help, gentlemen," he says, and turns back in the direction he came from.
Watching him go, the youngest of the boys, silent up til now, says: "Think we oughta try to roll him?"
"Nope," the leader says decisively. "That dude's packing, I'll bet you money. Besides," he tosses the baggie up in the air himself and catches it again, "we got better things to do."
A moment later, the deserted doorway is once again vacant and undisturbed.

Title lyric from "You Don't Know Me" by Ben Folds Five (featuring Regina Spektor)

Ben Folds - You Don't Know Me (featuring Regina Spektor) (Offici - The most amazing videos are a click away

I Got Too Much Life, Flowing Through My Veins, Going To Waste

2009-09-19T15:20:00.003-04:00

Sometimes it's really hard to write.
Not that it's hard to parse reality into words; I can't seem to stop doing that most of the time, even when I try. My mind just ticks on and on, always trying to more accurately and deftly capture my experience in those funny verbal/text signals we call language.
No, my trouble lies somewhere else.
In every story, there's this point. You start out in the same way every time: there's this place, there's this person or people, this is the situation those people or that place exist inside. Here they are, now care about them. That's all well and good. It's the point where we shift from the general to the particular that the trouble slips in. This is who they are, this is where they are... and now, this is what happens. As a writer, you have to believe in what happens to your characters. Your situation has to evolve in way that is natural and symmetrical to you - but the catch is, it has to seem real and natural enough to someone reading that they believe it too. It's that point, where the description of who and where ends and what happens next begins, that the devil enters through the details.
I really love to write. It actually feels good to slip into another reality, even one confined entirely within your head. I have become a better writer just by constantly trying to better grasp and convey what I see and hear; but now, I want to overcome that biggest hurdle of all. I want to write what others will not only want to read, but to return to again and again. I want to write the words that will make people angry, make people laugh, make them sad... Maybe even weep for joy. I know it's a lot to want. So many people try and fail; a lot of people - not so brave, but maybe wise - would say that it's better never to try at all.
But I'm going to try anyway. What have I got to lose? My time is short enough, I want to do all I can with it.
So here goes....

Title lyric from "Feel" by Robbie Williams.

A New Version Of The Old Scene

2009-07-30T23:45:00.005-04:00

I have less than nothing to say.
It's hot for the first time all summer. Everyone around me groans about how cold and rainy it's been and mutters darkly about global warming. I LOVE it. I am happiest hiding in the dark like a slug under a flat rock, so this entire cool rainy summer has been marvelous to me. The minute it went over eighty degrees I started to suffer. I mentioned this to my daughter, who remarked right back that I'm the one talking about running off to a warmer climate when in fact I love the cold and the winter. That made me feel funny, half sad and half bitter. I do love the north, I do love the Pennsylvania hills, and I miss being there. I want to go back. I can't. Plus it's hot here right now and everything's slightly gritty and everyone on the street is wearing jeans and t-shirts while they look cool and collected and I'm a sweaty irritable mess in shorts and a wifebeater. Maybe it's hot flashes; who knows, maybe mentalpause is sneaking up on me at last.
I was sitting with my guy just watching some random show we downloaded - Nurse Jackie, I think, or Breaking Bad, we're huge fans of both - when I looked over at him and was struck by how beautiful his profile is, how very well drawn his features are... And I felt this huge surge of love for him that frightened me. Usually we are pretty copacetic; we both go along at our own pace, we turn to each other for the things that we need and the rest of the time pursue the trains of thought in our own heads. It reminded me how lucky I am to have him, and so as a sort of offering to the fates or spirits or gods (none of which I really believe in, mind you) I intervened in the love life of two people I barely know because they were being stupid and I could do it without cost or obligation. They were grateful, just as I was grateful to be with such an all-around wonderful guy, and so I paid back karma in its own coin. I feel pretty good about that.
The other day I got an email from a young doctor I knew from back in the days when I was an administrator in a medical school. She was peripherally involved in my care when I was in treatment for the cancer and she was curious (and concerned) about how I've been doing lately. I told her that I'm fine, and that I do have all of the longterm symptoms they described but still feel really pretty great in spite of them. She offered to see me, free of charge, if I wanted to come to the city where she practices. I've given it some thought and decided against it; I don't need a long trip for just a diagnostic, however free. Even if it was bad news, what could I do about it right now? Nothing. So I will not worry. I feel good, and I'm sticking with that.
Or I would, if it wasn't so blasted hot. Canada sounds pretty good to me right now. Tornwordo, will you smuggle me across the border?

Title lyric from "Ragdoll" by Aerosmith.

You Know You're Gonna Lose, You Never Win

2009-07-26T12:50:00.004-04:00

So,we're at an amusement park. It's half rides, half water park; everyone's in their shorts and t-shirts and wifebeaters if they're not rocking the full-out speedos-and-hawaiian shirt combo. It's hot as Satan's asscrack, too, and almost that sweaty. Instead of mostly having a good time, all of the adults are either scratchy and irritable or half-drunk bordering on belligerent. Sound like a good time yet?
We're standing in line to get into the water rides when a woman I know slightly - to call her an acquaintance would be overstating it - comes up to us. She calls me by name -"Bigg, right?" and asks if we can help her. The partner and I cast each other that oh-crap-here-we-go look before I politely say "Maybe, what did you need?" Turns out her son, a spoiled little snot I could run over with a bus and feel only the vaguest twinge of remorse for later, is in the water half of the park and won't come out. She didn't buy a pass to the water park for herself because she 'looks like such a cow in a bathing suit and would probably have just gotten wet anyway' and now wants us to go in and get him. Now, we're talking about a kid I've seen all of twice; the only impression the kid really made on me was that he was a walking argument for eugenics... and possibly more responsible birth control decisions, but whatever. I mention that I might not recognize him, and she manages to look as hurt as possible before pointing and saying, "That's him, right THERE!"
We follow her dramatically pointing finger. She's pointing at a crowd of roughly one million children. All of them look like possible suspects.
"Just go, before he gets away!" she wails, and the next thing I know the partner is dragging me through the gate and into the water park. Never one to ditch a damsel in distress, I valiantly go in pursuit of the errant tyke with the trusty partner in tow. I hear his mother shout the kid's name behind us: "CHRISTOPHER!" So I start calling his name too, if at a slightly more civilized volume.
Finally one little darling looks up and says, "What?"
"Your mother wants you," I tell him, and seize his wrist. Ignoring his protests I drag him out of the water park. He's pretty much kicking and screaming. I am grimly determined. I dump him in front of his mother and say, "There you go."
Do I get a thank you? Of course not. She says, "That's not my kid."
As my partner and I are frozen in disbelief, a woman comes to the fence on the water park side behind us and shrieks "CHRISTOPHER! What are you dooooing!?" exactly as if the kid was voluntarily participating in a heroin deal. Naturally, we all turn and goggle at her in horror. How did this happen? "Give me my son back!" she shouts dramatically.
"Not until you give me MY baby back!" the slight acquaintance shouts dramatically back. She throws her arms around the bogus Christopher.
The other mother gives us all a disgusted look, marches over to the crowd of kids, looks it over like she's picking the ripest melon and grabs a kid pretty much at random. She marches him over to the gate, and guess what? OF COURSE IT'S THE RIGHT KID.
"Christopher!" slight acquaintance coos as he runs into her arms.
"Christopher!" the other mother coos as her ugly little ankle biter is returned from captivity.
Then, just to make the whole surreal experience complete, the TWO of them start cursing US. Exactly like it's our fault, right?
Some days you're the statue, and some days you're the pigeon. This was definitely a statue weekend.

Title lyric from "Your Momma Don't Dance & Your Daddy Don't Rock 'n' Roll" by Loggins and Messina, as performed by Poison.

If You Do Not Want To See Me Again, I Would Understand

2009-07-22T01:32:00.004-04:00

Gay men are funny when they get together in groups. Straight people only pick up on the obvious stuff, the constant sexual tension, the abrupt attitudes, the sudden attractions. I get that; when I'm in a crowd of straight people it's there too, but upside down, backwards, inverse. I've spent some time studying the semiotics of straight mating displays - I even managed it successfully more than a few times, even if you only count the times that actually led to procreation. Believe me, gay people are just as left out and uncomfortable on straight mating grounds - it's just that since among gay men everybody is a potential partner, even if only for that second you reject him with an internal ew, gross. That doesn't change everything so radically, but it does make for a whole lot less chitchat and a whole bunch more long meaningful stares.
Of course, I have it easy. I have a much younger and ridiculously hot partner. (You've seen pictures by now, Lem. Back me up here.) I'm not afraid to flaunt that in the face of guys my age who would otherwise have been my logical suitors. Naturally this makes them a little scornful of our relationship, but it took me awhile to even see what I was really doing. Thing is, they'd be with him if they could - hell, when my own daughter told me she'd date him in a heartbeat if he was straight I knew just about everybody sees some of what I do in him - but they also miss that I don't suffer by comparison. On the contrary, I look much better as a potential mate with him already on my arm (and vice versa) than I would otherwise. Of course I feel good about myself because I've managed to attract a handsome partner... And while I don't believe I've allowed that let me make quite the ass of myself that I've seen some guys manage, I guess I have sinned in that regard.
So my Pride resolution for 2009 is to appreciate him more and worry about other people's reaction to us less. After all, we met a couple of our approximate ages a few nights ago during one of the local festivities, and they were quite happy to use the phrase 'daddy fetish' in public. We laughed rather rudely, I'm afraid - and then abruptly stopped when we saw their faces and realized they were serious. My beloved and I have never related to one another that way, in bed or otherwise, any jokes we like to make to the contrary notwithstanding.
On a less self absorbed note, I also recently came in contact with David's younger brother via the wonders of the Internet. He's my age. We shared a ton of our childhood's more religious moments. We were even vaguely friendly in high school, at least until I got a boyfriend and became the local weed dealer. To my great (and eventually pleasant) surprise, he's gay and out. We had a really nice chat. We laughed, we reminisced... And then we started talking about what we've been up to recently. He's single and seems rather like a player - sort of the way I always imagined David would be if he were less religious, except more saccharine and less perverse than I expected somehow. I allowed as how I was happily partnered, already have an anniversary under my belt... And then my beloved bounced up and slung his arm around me, and the brother's sly speculative smile sort of curdled. He watched us and made his pleasantries when I introduced them, but then asked one question before he excused himself and slipped away: "Um, HOW old are you?"
It was actually his reaction that inspired me to write this rambling ode to my evolving understanding of my own relationship and how it changes my relation to every other human being. That's what the great loves in our lives do, right? Those loves, they're worth what they cost us and any benefit they bring us is all bonus gravy. Or else they're not really a great love, I guess.
Anyway, my tappytapping of the keys is keeping him awake now, so I'll wrap this one up. To both of my remaining regular readers here, take care of yourselves and the ones you love.

Title lyric from "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind.

I Keep Thinking That It's Not Goodbye

2009-07-14T22:18:00.003-04:00

My birthday is the day after tomorrow.
I won't cry you any rivers, I won't try to tell you how much I hate having birthdays and how sad it makes me to be another year older. I don't so much care for being over forty, true, but there ARE worse things in the world. I also wish that I could stay young forever - who doesn't? However, I know that nobody does or ever has stayed young for even a minute longer than the time allotted and so have chosen to deal with it in the most dignified manner of which I am capable - about the same dignified manner than toddlers have when protesting that they're not tired and don't want to go to bed.
It won't be so bad though. I feel wiser than I was. I'm ready for new things; I feel equipped by the things I've gone through to meet new challenges, maybe even to enjoy it. I'm not regretting the last few years even though they've been rough ones. Why would I? The alternative would be to have no more years in front of me, and that day comes soon enough for all of us. I'm in no rush.
So if on Thursday I should happen to cross your mind, please send me a good wish. I'll be sending them back to you, I promise.

Title lyric from "Graduation" by Vitamin C.

I Have No Choice But To Hear You

2009-07-08T23:10:00.002-04:00

I watched a girl ride down the street on her bike today. It was cooler today than it has been, but she was still sweating for all she was worth as she worked her way up the slope between the reservoir and the cemetery. The sun was bright, but thin somehow; it glared off every surface, but it failed to warm the stiff breeze coming off the lake. I admired that girl's commitment... Or what I imagined to be her commitment: she could have been riding to work, riding to school, even riding home from a doctor's appointment at the hospital next to my apartment. What do I know?
I know that the days are getting shorter again, and that winter will come. I don't want to see another winter, ever. I want to escape to the land of always-summer, or at least to somewhere that it never snows. I don't want to wear a coat out in the snow. I don't want to drive in it. I don't want to shiver and blow on my frozen fingers when I carry something home from the store. I like walking most places I go. I don't want to stop that. That's what I know.
I know that I'm a lucky man, no matter what the obstacles I'm currently facing. I have someone wonderful in my life. He does things for me... I can't begin to explain. I have some really great friends who love me. I talk to my big kids online and on the phone all the time. I am not rejected or outcast; when people meet me, they tend to like me. I am personable because I am happy. I wasn't always that way, I was fat and awkward and painfully self-conscious. But because I finally had the guts to stand up and step out and take what I wanted because I knew that the time I had left in which to do so was running short. If I have any regrets, it's not that I did it, but that I waited so long. But even that isn't so much of a regret because I have my children. I didn't waste those years like a forgotten leisure suit at the back of the closet. I had a family, I had a life. And now that life's changed... A lot. I know that, too.
But I also know that the clock is ticking away and that midnight approaches. I must make things beautiful and right for my beloved now, and so I wish you all a fond goodnight.

Title lyric from "Head Over Feet" by Alanis Morissette.

Sweet Freedom Whispered In My Ear

2009-07-02T04:52:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I really get disappointed in people.
I know it's not polite to say so, but I do.
Lately I've been in contact with a lot of people from my past - mostly through Facebook. It's funny how something that's 99% a waste of constructive time can have such a big impact on your daily life, isn't it? Funny and sad. Sad because I have known these people in real life, I sat in a high school classroom with them for six years or I partied with them in my hometown or I worked at the same company with them and sat with them at lunch. Yet the majority of those people never took the time to get to know me half as well as they do now simply by reading a few things I wrote (mostly in jest!) on a website that is half encoded pixels and half consensual hallucination. The fact that they are supportive and friendly now, when I am just a picture and a few lines of text to them, means so much less to me than a kind word or just a smile might have back then.
I'm glad that the world's moving on, don't get me wrong. I think it's an absolutely wonderful thing that young people today won't have to go through some of the things that a lot of my generation did - and boy, does it make me feel old to say that. It's just that I wonder: if it's so obviously my right to love whoever I'm moved to love, then why wasn't it obvious ten years ago... Or twenty? Does everybody have to recognize something to make it right? If tomorrow everybody goes back to hating the fags again does it mean that our right to love was never obvious and support for it was just a fad?
I'm sorry that this post isn't more positive. I keep thinking of all the really wonderful people I've known and how they've suffered and some of them have died just to lead us here. Then I look around at everything that's supposedly changed for us and I'm just not so sure. The door to acceptance that's supposedly swung open for us can swing the other way too. There's still plenty of oppression, hate and ignorance out there to go around. I heard it in the casual comments of people who watched the gay rights float go by in a local parade; I hear it every day when people say "that's gay," or see people who think their T-shirt saying 'I called your boyfriend gay and he hit me with his purse' is the height of hilarity. That's why I get a little bitter when I hear people saying that we should wait, that the president and Congress have Bush's mess on their plate and shouldn't have to be bothered with a little thing like legal protections and political promises. I feel as though we'll get nothing at all and the door will swing the other way if we don't do something here and now.
If you're reading this and you live in Pennsylvania take a moment to read this and then act on your conscience. It's not just something important to people like me, it's something real that you and I can do to make sure that what precious few gains we've made stay ours.
That's all.

Title lyric from "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John.

Teenage Ambition You Remember Well

2009-06-25T04:12:00.003-04:00

Tell me what monogamy is, and why it can sink so deep into your head if it's not biological.
See, here's my thing. During my teen years, I had a boyfriend. His name was Rod. You can read all about him during the confessional period of my blog, starting around here. When we were alone we were every sick, sappy teen romance cliche you can possibly imagine: we held hands, we talked about growing up and getting married, I even wrote his name in my notebooks... and then my first name with his last name. It was really that bad. And we were two guys. Plus we had sex a lot. Anybody who's seen the teen boy libido in full swing can just imagine that times two and will probably wonder how we managed to avoid spontaneous combustion. He was my first love. Because what I felt for him was new and thrilling and unlike anything I'd ever felt before, I held that relationship up to all the others as a sort of yardstick of what was good and bad in them.
Thing is, I cheated on him. I don't know why I did it. I didn't know then and I don't know now. It was my first time being with someone. Maybe I thought I could feel that way with that I was with, and float in a sea of giddy infatuation. Who knows? He cheated on me in the most reciprocal manner possible, and our relationship was never the same. He cheated on me again, and then left me for the other guy. We were together off and on for around two and a half years - and in teen years, that's forever. I was devastated.
Through my marriages, I never cheated. Despite the opportunities... Hell, despite the utter and complete good it would have done me I never did. In my heart, I was unwilling to be the bad guy that way. It was just one of the ways I tried to gain the emotional upper hand: by claiming the moral high ground. I didn't cheat, I wasn't verbally or physically abusive, I remembered every occasion and genuinely tried to fake an enthusiasm for her parents. When my marriage to D ended, I rebounded immediately into a relationship I never could have dreamed of, yet utterly symmetrical to my marriage: a man who grew up in the same crazy church I did, who was on polite speaking terms with my parents and had been the subject of many teen fantasies.
There I was, all liberated, and what did I do? I tried to do everything I thought I should do instead of what I really felt. We wore outfits - real chaps, even! - we wrestled in singlets, we tied each other up, we spanked and talked dirty and used food and tried slings, swings and very soft whips. All well and good. Then we had a threesome... at my instigation, no less, and I turned into a SEETHING JEALOUS FIEND. I had more vengeful plots than a Batman villain. I started the events that led to the end of that whole relationship - although his sudden calling from God to return to straight life was a bit of a clog in the pipes, let me tell you.
So I played the hookup game. And you know what? It led me straight to a young man I'm so fucking crazy about to this day, you should pardon my french, that one of my favorite pastimes is kissing his furry little insteps. I worship him in the temple of the flesh, as the saying or psalm or pop tune goes, and he's shown me exactly the kind of unbelievable rush that I first felt with Rod - only it's an everyday thing now. The way I love him is like a book I love and keep misplacing, because it keeps turning up when I look in the fridge or hang up a towel or fold a basket of laundry. I love him. I'd do anything for him. He makes everything that came before worthwhile.
That's what scares me about our relationship: I'm not sure I'm prepared for an "after" part, even though the age difference between us sorta suggests that there might be one. Sure, some May/December romances drift blissfully on. Most don't. That's how that goes for humans like us. Talking about it seems taboo, too. Like talking about death; ignoring it makes our lives mechanical and without meaning, but letting it loom over us destroys the time we have. I just love him. I just want to enjoy and savor the time I have, the way I savor the time I have on this planet. I know both of them are necessarily limited. There's no way I'm going to make the same mistakes of the past all over again. I couldn't imagine having a better time with someone else than I do with him. He gets me. I get him.
I know, I know. A lot of our friends have it both ways. They've been together for years and they play games with others too. They say things like "monogamy is for straight people." They seem to be having fun. They're exuberant. They make me think sometimes that it could work, that they could actually be right. Problem is that I can't make the leap from 'maybe' to 'let's try this' anymore. Mark Twain said,“The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.” I guess I'm therefore far more of a cat person than I ever guessed. Who knew. I won't go so far as to say that I'm set in my ways because I'm still open to trying new things. I just have a much better grasp of what I'm capable of doing and handling well... and polyamory just ain't one of them. My bad.
But now, after all that longwinded blather and exposition, I've got to go and clean for that young man I was telling you about. Maybe fix him some breakfast too. My best to all of you, as always.

Title lyric from "Heat Of The Moment" by Asia.

It's Hot Here At Night

2009-06-23T20:28:00.003-04:00

I am tired. I am procrastinating. I am blaming the weather.
In my own defense, it has finally turned hot here after being rainy and cool for weeks. I already miss the rain. I detest sunlight, even though for the first time in my life I appear able to tan instead of burning. I'd rather stay in when it's blazing hot out - but it's even hotter and muggier in here. The one thing it can't do is make me miss winter.
My beloved's mystery illness is quite a bit better. I have stopped waking him in the night to take his ibuprofen, and now that his throat is so much less sore he can eat again. Today he had most of a pizza to himself and I was so very glad. I hate it when he's sick because it upsets me to see him so miserable.
I was really not a very happy camper all day on Father's day. All I really wanted was to see my three youngest children, which of course was not an option. I was glad to hear from the older ones, even though the middlest girls had to sneak away from their mother to call me. I am equally glad that my older kids all like my guy despite his being so close to them in age. My son and my guy actually seem to get along famously, since they have similar taste in video games and movies. They talk quite contentedly on the phone about things that have nothing to do with me. That makes me happy; even happier am I when my my daughter tells me that my guy is "a catch," and asks me for my opinion on the boys she sees. How unfortunate that her current love interest is at least in my opinion a giant mistake. Thank Jebus I'm too tactful to say so.
Now I am going to go for a long walk in the huge graveyard nearby. It's evening, the breeze has cooled the air, and the cemetery is a beautiful and restful place to walk. Some people evidently find this a touch morbid, but I find it both convenient and conducive to long, deep thoughts that can unspool themselves uninterrupted.
I hope that these long hot summer days are enjoyable for you all. My best to each and every one of you, as always.

Title lyric from "Hot In The City" by Billy Idol.

Ain't Got No Cash, Ain't Got No Style

2009-06-18T11:20:00.003-04:00

Today is my older brother Doug's birthday.
Like me, he's attracted to guys. He's never been much for girls; he had a girlfriend after high school, and that went nowhere. She was quite the dish as I remember - and crazy as a loon. The two of us have that in common, Doug and I: if we're gonna pick a girl, we always pick 'em crazy. Don't they say you always end up marrying Mom in the end?
Since Doug and I live so far from each other, I am limiting my celebration to Facebooking him and embarrassing him on a certain adult social networking site we both frequent. Ah, the Internet. Sharing life's little embarrassments with the entire universe is SUCH fun.
My beloved is sick. He's got a sore throat, but a trip to the doctor's proved it to be neither mono nor strep. I have a wicked sore throat myself, but he has been so knocked out by whatever this is that I've pretty much denied feeling ill and tried my best to take care of him. I figure that next to cancer this is a walk in the park, and so far I seem to be right. Hopefully it will pass soon.
We are trying to pull our finances together in order to make another move. This time I am hoping to have jobs located and ready for our arrival in our new destination. The economy is making that vaguely difficult, however, and in spite of the enthusiastic wads of cash the government's been slinging in every direction that doesn't seem likely to change either. I am just doing my best to remain optimistic still, and that's going about as well as it can. For the record, I still love our new President, but I AM starting to wonder if he loves me and my people back or if all of those sweet things he said were just to get us into the voting booth with him. Wouldn't be the first time some guy talked his way past my defenses with sweet nothings... But like most teenage girls the morning after, I am telling myself that he's just busy or has commitment issues and that it can't be that he's just not that into us. I guess we'll see.
How's your day going?

Title lyric from "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin.

By The Way, I Tried To Say I'd Be There

2009-06-15T10:40:00.004-04:00

There are a lot of things you can do with a blog. You can report the news you think is important and add why it's meaningful to you, critique fashion and food and arts, share recipes or build kingdoms of never-were. I've done some of all of those things, but today I'm just going to give you what I have. I am here and now, just like you. All I really have is this moment, because the future is just conjecture and the past could be an illusion. So here's where I'm at right now.
Things are hard money-wise. In order to make them better, we have to make changes in our lives that will cost money. We need to move again, we need better incomes and we both want to be part of a more creative community and less involved in a certain superficial social scene that has been slammed by its participants so many times that to do so here myself would be repeating redundant. Like two people on either side of a very deep, long canyon, we can both see where we want to be but are less certain exactly how we'll get there. It is of little comfort to know that the rest of the country is in the exact same mess - that just means that there isn't some wealthier, more accommodating environment out there just waiting for us.
There's been a lot of stuff in the media that I follow lately about the Obama administration. The people I listen to say that he's failing us on marriage equality and DOMA. I personally am having a hard time being scathingly critical of him for that - after all, I'm not in a rush to marry or die on foreign soil any time soon. I don't hear anybody screaming about ENDA, and that's where I think all our efforts should really be focused. I can be fired from any job in the nation because I'm in love with another man. You ask me and I'll say that's the real discrimination and injustice.
Everywhere I go I see pregnant teenage girls. I was a teenage parent myself - I was nineteen when my oldest daughter was born, and had been a stepfather for over a year by then - and I was fully confident after experiencing it myself that sometime soon having a baby at fifteen would be exposed for the really uncool dipshit move that it is. So far, that message doesn't seem to be reaching its core audience. I told my own pregnant teen that I personally think she's a moron. After seeing what her mother and I went through, how could she possibly want to repeat that? I didn't plan this, Dad, is what she told me. But once it happened, I couldn't just kill it. You wouldn't have REALLY wanted that, would you? For the record, I would have supported that no matter how much it broke my heart because she deserves to experience being a free and unencumbered adult before she has to give up her entire life in service to someone else who will never truly appreciate her sacrifice. When I said so, she blithely hugged me and said, Aw, Dad. I appreciate you. That's why you're gonna babysit SO DAMN MUCH. Just shoot me now, will you?
If there's anything that saves me, it's the love I have in my life. I mentioned this little insight to my oldest daughter recently, as she's in a new relationship with a young man she finds completely mesmerizing. She is in that insecure early stage when she can't imagine what attracts such a wonderful young man to her. When I said that everyone feels that at some point about the person they really love, she just laughed. I don't know why you guys got together at first, she said patting my knee, but the way you guys are starting to look and sound exactly alike is downright scary. The other day I talked to him on the phone for, like, five minutes before I realized it wasn't you. I find the exact opposite in my own experience: the thing that make us perfect for each other is that I have what he lacks, and vice versa. Someone who compliments and completes you that perfectly doesn't come along every day.
Finally, I'd like to give a couple blog shout outs to some young bloggers who have renewed my faith (and interest!) in the blogosphere. Notes On Bar Napkins and Put The Lotion In The Basket are probably the best two new blogs I've read in the last few years and I highly recommend them. With that, I leave you, as always with my best.

Title lyric from "By The Way" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Just Say That We Agree And Then Never Change

2009-06-10T14:24:00.003-04:00

When I was somewhat younger, I went rafting on a river in southwestern Pennsylvania (I don't remember which one exactly: Youghiogheny? Can that possibly be right?) It wasn't a big river, but it was deeper than most of the creeks and streams in the more mountainous northwestern part of the state where I'm from, and it had a bit of a current to it in some places. I guess they sell it as "white water," but I went on actual white water when I lived in Arizona and it scared the shiznit outta me. By comparison, that childhood trip was mostly a walk in the park. We were four people to a little inflatable raft like a bigger ship's dinghy, everybody paddling, and it was a lot of fun. During one broader, shallow stretch we even sat up on the sides and rested for a minute. That's when our raft hit a submerged rock and pitched me off. The water was probably only about ten to fourteen feet deep there, but it seemed like an ocean then. The thing I remember most is watching my raft-mates' startled faces suddenly shrink and disappear behind a wavering curtain of light, and of looking down and seeing only rocks and weeds a few feet below my sneakers.
That's the image that keeps coming back to me lately. My life used to be like that. I was the head of a family, part of a team effort. We all rowed more or less together. Then all at once I got pitched right out of the boat, and now I'm down here in these depths I never thought might be here. I desperately need to reconnect to the surface world, to the good parts of what I left behind, or my life will go on with the same sort of drifting, drowning sensation. Or maybe that's what this is, I am drowning and I'll never again see the light of day again the way I did before.
Don't get me wrong, okay? It's so easy to misinterpret what people actually mean when they write, isn't it? It's just that ever since I started to get better from the chemo, I have a sense that I'm living on borrowed time. That if I want life to actually start again, that if I want to be able to wear the 'survivor' badge instead of the 'I'm just waiting for the next set of symptoms to begin' hangdog look, I have to reconnect with who and what I was before.
It means getting a job, or some sort of income that I can call my own, and a place where I can put down new roots even if the old ones are dug up. It means finding a stable, sheltered place to stand out of the constant onrush of the world. I'm so tired of uncertainty already. Don't quote me on this, but I think I'm getting too old for it. I'm not depressed or upset, just... displaced. I suppose in a sense it's a positive thing, that it means that I really might be putting the cancer into a new perspective as a dark and dangerous period of my life that's over now instead of just on hiatus. On the other hand, it also means that I can't really relax or be anything but en garde until I can make the changes I want.
Plus I guess I'll finally have to figure out once and for all if I can build my world solidly around another person's presence in a really trusting way instead of reserving that niggling little judgment in the back of my head that nothing this good can really last. Who knows? Miracles have happened, right?

Title lyric from "Cable Car" by The Fray.

The Fray - Over My Head Cable Car
by misslupin

All The World's Indeed A Stage

2009-06-09T10:36:00.004-04:00

So I've been thinking about what my guy said to me about trying to make my name with my blog. I've actually been thinking about it a lot, to tell you the truth. But how can I get anywhere with it when nobody even reads it anymore?
All the bloggers I know who have made it big are all about the issues, too. I am not so much about the issues. What's going on in my life is WAY more important than political concerns. Granted, some people I knew back in the day - like Joe - have actually managed to pull down some respect and influnce with it too, and I'm sure that's gratifying. Still not important to me.
I just wanna tell my story. I wanna sing my song. I personally think that the crap that happens to me is fascinating, even if nobody else does. After all, it's happening to me, and who could be more important than that? (Spo, if you're reading this, I just heard you think the word 'narcissistic.')
So I'm thinking that maybe I'll just content myself with changing things around a little on here, shaking them up a bit, and going on with my efforts in other realms. I still really want to see an actual, physical book with my name on the spine and a smugly grinning photo of me on the dust jacket. Maybe it will never happen. Maybe it will happen tomorrow. After all, in a world where an ultradouche like Rush Limbaugh can be famous I guess everybody can still get their fifteen minutes of fame. I just want mine, y'know? Lord, doesn't everybody?

Title lyric from "Limelight" by Rush.

Everyone Knows That's How You Get Famous

2009-06-07T17:39:00.004-04:00

I have begun to feel as though my life is moving in a new direction. All good, except... I have no idea what that direction may be.
I have always wanted to be a writer. When I said that out loud the other day, my beloved said to me, "You ARE a writer."
"Yes," I qualified, "in the sense that I write stuff, that's true. Allow me clarify: I've always wanted to be a published author."
He said nothing, but made a little face as he sipped his energy drink. Not the usual face, either; we've given up RockStar energy drinks because the owner of the company is a douchebag, and the new brand we're trying honestly sucks. It's like liquid cat litter, and doesn't even give me the same euphoric (and false!) sense of accomplishment. The face he made was his 'I'm thinking something I'm not gonna say' face.
"What?" I demanded. Maybe even a trifle testily. Testily - is that a word?
He set the can down carefully and said with obviously intended tact, "Um, maybe that's just not in the cards."
Of course he's right, but who wants to hear that? "So what are you saying?"
He shrugged. "Maybe," he said, "wanting to be a "published author--" he hooked air quotes around it "--is kinda like Picasso wanting to be a cave painter, or Frank Gehry wanting to design children's playhouses."
"I don't get your metaphor," I said, and this time I was definitely being testy with him. He doesn't like it when I'm testy.
"I mean," says my beloved, "here we are, on the dawn of a new age of communication. All sorts of new media are opening up around you, and here you are still thinking that what amounts to a dead media platform - a fossilized dead media platform - is the venue that was meant for you. Maybe, just maybe, the way you write and how you put things together is better suited for the Internet age. Who knows? Your blog thingy there might be the ticket to the fame you're craving, just like that asshat Perez Hilton. Stranger things have happened, y'know." He took another long swig of cat litter juice, belched and added, "by the way, this stuff sucks ass. See if you can find another brand, will you?"
I don't know if he's right about the blogging thing, but he's definitely onto something with the energy drinks. Stupid Russell Weiner just couldn't be more aptly named, in my opinion.
Still, his moment of insight has given me much food for thought, to say the least. I do love to blog, I do love the Internet, and I am just narcissistic enough to think that people might read what I write. Some of the people I've come to know through this blog have made a name for themselves that way - my old pal Jessica, for one. Maybe truer words were never spoke, and I should follow his advice...
Maybe. We'll see.

Title lyric from "The Fear" by Lily Allen.

What I Need Is A Good Defense

2009-06-05T22:59:00.003-04:00

As a new strategy in our battle with the demon nicotine, I have purchased a bag of tobacco and a box of cigarette tubes. These two handy items cost me exactly $7.89 total, and are the equivalent of a carton of cigarettes - a $45 to $55 value at least. The first few times I tried to use them to make a cigarette were just awful, and this has had two consequences: we've already started smoking much less and the ones I do make are becoming much better rather quickly. If necessity is the mother of invention, then I suppose that incentive is the mother of quality. I predict that at this rate we'll be down to only smoking when we drink in no time. Guess what we're gonna quit next?
I went out drinking with some friends recently. It was a 'business happy hour,' one of those excuses to drink and behave badly in public under the guise of networking. I was personally attending because I've been volunteering with the local arts organization, and quite a few of the other gentlemen attendees were the same familiar crowd from the bar and the Pride committee. I privately found it hilarious how many successful, moneyed straight women were having the time of their lives, behaving in ways that they never would if there had been more than a few straight men in attendance. The best part, however, was when one of the girls whipped out her phone and passed it around. I almost choked; it was a picture of a man's erect penis.
"That's my guy," she told me proudly, tapping the screen with one very manicured nail to make sure I didn't miss it. "Ain't he something?"
Bingo, the other phones came right out too. Every single woman and man at our table had a picture of their partner's genitals. I tried so hard not to bust right out laughing (okay, I'd had two mojitos and they were getting to me a little) that I almost choked.
Then my best friend turned to me and said, "Okay, Bigg. Show him off."
I tried looking all innocent, but she made a little magician's assistant flourish and presto, there was my phone in her hand. Why - oh WHY? - do I show her these things?
"Are you gonna show 'em or am I?" she threatened, so of course I let her. I will allow you to imagine their gasps and astonished, jealous smiles - but rest assured, THERE WERE BOTH. I actually had more than one alleged gentleman shove his way to the seats behind me so he could get a good look over my shoulder. Simian behavior at its extra best on all our parts, folks.
The take away lesson I got from this was a two parter: A) take those pictures with my instead of my phone from now on and B) that really is what your partner/spouse/conquest does with those pictures when you let them photograph your downstairs business. As a result, I am rethinking some of the less than clothed things we've posted online elsewhere (and no, I ain't gonna link to 'em, either!) but at the same time gaining a new appreciation for people who take their clothes off for a living. If we really believe that the body and sex are beautiful and sacred then we ought never be ashamed... So why do we treat people who let us see even in the most decorous adult contexts so shamefully? Just human nature, I guess.
Have a wonderful weekend, everybody.

Title lyric from "Criminal" by Fiona Apple.

Fiona Apple - Criminal
by hushhush112

Honey, Just About The Time You're Thinking It's All Right

2009-06-02T10:19:00.005-04:00

I got busted smoking. Big time.
I was sitting there in bed with a cigarette, laptop tuned to Facebook and Don't Miss The Snatch just plain thundering out of the speakers when he walked in from a run. It had started raining (I hadn't noticed) and, being without pockets in his unbelievably sexy little running shorts he'd gone out without his key. He'd had to pound on the downstairs door in the rain for several minutes before one of the neighbors let him in, and to say that he was already feeling a bit cross might be understating things by just a tad. And there I was, the figurative smoking gun in my hand.
BUSTED. Don'tcha hate it when that happens?
He glared at me, and I stared back with my mouth open. Guilty? You could have taken a picture of me and pasted it next to the word in the dictionary.
Yeah. Whoopsy.
After about a thirty second standoff that felt roughly like eternity plus one, he went over to the dresser, pulled our underwear drawer all the way out, reached in behind it and took out a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds and lit one. Still glaring at me.
He took a big puff and exhaled it very slowly through his nose. "I just want you to know," he said pointing the cigarette at me, "that this -" he flourished it, making an involuntary smoke ring "-is ALL. YOUR. FAULT."
And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
I'll be back again after my lengthy time out in the corner, where I will presumably think about what I've done wrong.
Yay! We're smoking again.

Title lyric from "Shakedown" by Bob Seger (from the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack, how tacky!)

Go ahead, watch the WHOLE VIDEO. I dare you.

BOB SEGER - Shakedown (Beverly Hills Cop II)

It's Not Just My Pride

2009-05-30T09:30:00.003-04:00

I did a bad thing.
I bought a pack of cigarettes and hid them. I didn't try to justify it to myself, or dream up an alibi; I just bought them and hid them in the basement ceiling where I knew NOBODY would look but me, and that was that. I go down there to do laundry all the time, so I didn't even have to cover my tracks. I just started folding my laundry on the table on the outdoor patio at the back of the building where I can sit and smoke without being seen... or smelled, for that matter.
HB doesn't smoke menthols. I do. He's been so damn good about quitting that I should probably commit seppuku and just get it over with. I'm even past the point where I can use raving nicotine withdrawal as an excuse, since they say that the cravings only last three days. It isn't as if I had been lying awake nights just dreaming of a cig, either. I'd pretty much gotten used to the idea that I was gonna hafta finally quit... And then one day in traffic I saw someone in the car next to me smoking my brand - I was driving a friend's minivan so I could see the pack lying on the passenger seat next to her - and within ten minutes I pulled into a convenience store, went in and bought a pack.
As I was folding the towels this morning, I thought about it. I don't feel particularly guilty - if only because I don't really suffer from guilt, I'm more of a carrier - but it does make me wonder about who and what I am. I mean, aside from the whole smoking-when-I-shouldn't-be thing, this is blatant cheating. I've never been much of a cheater; a little bit at board games when I was a kid, a short but dedicated streak of exam cheating in college, and now this.
I don't understand exactly why I'm doing it, either. I mean, I took the trouble to check the wind direction so the smoke would blow away from my laundry while I folded it, I used extra fabric softener and then gave it all a misting of Febreze to kill any lingering smell on the clothes and then washed my face and hands and brushed my teeth IN THE LAUNDRY SINK when I was done. I've never been one to go to that kind of lengths. It's too hard, I'm too lazy. It's so much easier to just tell the truth: "Hey, I know you're some sort of iron-willed superhero, but I'm gonna have a cig, try not to hate me okay?"
It sort of worries me that my first impulse was to be dishonest. I still watch porn from time to time - granted, usually with him, but not always - and it makes me wonder if I'll see someone in a porn that turns me on and then cheat with someone who looks like them. Even now that seems sorta ridiculous - apples and oranges, y'know - but if you'd told me three weeks ago I'd be sneaking a smoke under the pretense of washing the protein stains out of our sheets on a daily basis I'd've laughed my head off. Nevertheless, here I am, already thinking about how good it would feel to light one and take that sweet, sweet first puff... Damn I gotta quit that!
So, in conclusion, I am bad. I am disappointed in myself. I am altogether weaker and more duplicitous than I ever dreamed. I am a bad partner... Hell, I'm a cheater!
...and I am also apparently going to go and have another cigarette before I start biting my nails again and suddenly find myself gnawing on my elbow because I've already swallowed my forearm one nibble at a time.
Wish me luck - although I don't know whether that means you'll be rooting for me to get caught or not. Up to you, I guess.

Title lyric from "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse (as peformed on the new Fox series "Glee")

Just A Couple Of My Cravings

2009-05-24T18:46:00.004-04:00

We are trying to quit smoking (again).
It's not easy this time. When I was a teenager, I smoked. Usually about half a pack a day, often a little less. Then when my first wife was pregnant with my oldest daughter she took me up on the subject.
"How am I supposed to quit smoking," she inquired, a cigarette blazing away in one hand above her burgeoning belly, "if you don't?"
"See this?" I asked, and took the cigarette out of my mouth. I stubbed it out and threw it away.
"Mmm-hmm," she observed rather sarcastically. "Right. Sure."
"See this?" I asked again, and took out my cigarette pack. I picked up a pair of scissors that were lying conveniently nearby and cut the (soft) pack in half. "There," I said, hands on hips. "I'm done." I was, too. That was my last cigarette. She never did quit.
Fast forward nineteen years. My oldest son, J, started smoking.
At first, I was an absolute dick about it. I screamed, I cried, I threw myself on the ground and wept. I literally created a scene whenever I saw him with one. After about two weeks of this behavior, he switched to menthols out of revenge.
"Look at me, Dad," he'd say, taking one out and lighting it. He'd inhale a big old whack off it and say, "Mmm, I'm in flavor country."
I lasted maybe another two weeks. Then, one day when I was feeling particularly stressed and he started this routine, I growled "Gimme one of those," and smoked one. It was horrible; it made me lightheaded, plus giving my lungs that on-fire sensation every smoker craves. My son only gave me a knowing smirk, the big bastard, and continued to smoke. A few days later, I asked him for another one. A day after that, another one. At some point shortly thereafter (and I'm talking like fifteen minutes when I say shortly) I went out and bought my own pack. I've been smoking again ever since.
So now, as I mentioned, I'm trying to quit again. Partly because I occasionally cough up trace amounts of blood (attractive!) and partly because the sin tax on filthy delicious coffin nails is getting ridiculous. Marijuana is literally cheaper... and I'm never quitting that, so don't start with me. I've tried everything, too. Cold turkey, wearing a rubber band on my wrist to snap myself with every time I experience a craving (useless!), and even switching brands to a very cheap, very unsatisfying NON-menthol brand, which has actually been the most effective so far - I've actually cut down to about two or three a day, and every time I do smoke it's with the same sort of disgust I once reserved for accidentally sharting my pants. The other night I actually dreamed about smoking a cigarette - not just any cigarette, but my favorite brand: Marlboro 72's in the blue box. Talk about a wish-fulfillment dream... Hell, it was almost a wet dream, come to think of it.
The worst part is the sanctimonious crap I get from people about quitting. It's about time, they tell me constantly, and you of all people should know better. The very worst crap comes from other smokers, though, who tell me that quitting is good for me because of my health. I have on one or two of these occasions muttered something like, if you were so goddamned worried about YOUR health you'd shut the fuck up right about now. Clearly, smoking was at least good for my temper.
Sadly, though, my beloved is quitting too, and he has MUCH more willpower than I do - which probably explains why we're still together and I remain unstrangled. Since he is doing it entirely for me, I can but throw up my hands and give myself up for loved. I will therefore close with this injunction for those of you who know me IRL: should you ever see me with a cigarette in my hand, calling me a cheater is justified, but telling my beloved is signing your own death sentence.
You have been notified, and can blame no-one but yourself.

Title lyric from "Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk" by Rufus Wainwright.

No Change, I Can't Change

2009-05-23T19:29:00.004-04:00

Once upon a time, I was a dad. I had kids, lots of them, and a wife and a house and a job. All that regular stuff. It was good for a long time, too. We all really loved each other and got along. We made a very happy household. I liked being a dad. I tried really hard to be the best dad that I could. Some of the things I had to do to be a good dad were easy. Others were hard in ways I never could have imagined before I had kids. Still, I took the bad with the good and it was a life. That time lasted almost fifteen years.
But then it went bad. I wasn't happy. My wife wasn't happy. We were really unhappy with each other, and that made the kids unhappy. I moved out. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. I miss being a dad every single day, and if there's a God then he's the only one who can count the tears I've shed over the kids I can't see now. But I didn't know it would be this way when I left between their mother and I. More than anything, I wish that we could get past the bitterness and blame to what's really important to both of us. Right now, we can't.
I'm lucky. There is still love in my life. If I hadn't struck out on my own, I might never have met my partner, and that really would have made my life less in almost every way. I love him very much, and I'm always sorry when the problems I haven't resolved from the past hurt him too. Life is very hard that way; but if there were no hard parts or sad parts or angry parts, there would be no glad parts, no joyous parts, and no contrast between pleasure and pain. I guess that's why we get a dose of both.
So now I want to make tomorrow better. I want to avoid the mistakes of the past, even though I know some mistakes can never be foreseen beforehand because they are made in the best of faith. I want to enjoy another long and happy time with the people I love around me. I want to do all the things I like best, to write and to read and to learn from the world. I want to drink it all in like wine.
I only wish there was no bottom to this wine barrel, and no bitter dregs.

Title lyric from "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve.

I Need To Know

2009-05-10T09:57:00.003-04:00

I think sometimes that it's sort of darkly funny that the two big gay issues of the moment are gay marriage and DADT. I joked to a friend recently, "Oh, sure, just what we needed: the right to divorce each other to financial death and the right to die violently on foreign soil. Three cheers indeed." I really was just joking, too. If getting married is what you and your partner want to do then you should indeed have that right. Just like it's completely your right if you want to serve in the military - although that compulsion has (thankfully!) eluded me thus far. I don't get the burning desire to have either one of them, to be honest, although I have much more empathy for the marriage side than the military.
What I want so much more than either of those two legally recognized rights is a couple social concessions from straight people as a group. When I walk down the street with the man I love and his hand brushes mine, I'd like to be able to hold it without anyone batting an eyelash. When we're at the beach and we sit side by side, one pair of dudes among five or six pairs of straight couples, we get that we're different, but not why that's such a huge ordeal. So what? Why does it make it okay for evidently otherwise civilized people to share their thoughts with us on why we're disgusting and immoral and 'fags.' Honestly, I don't care if people think that. Everybody gets to think what they want. There are people that I find pretty disgusting, and you might be surprised at some of the targets I pick.
Oh, I know that my wish isn't gonna come true any time soon. Maybe the marriage and military things will move us closer to that. I can't see the future, and sometimes things turn out that way. But I doubt it. I think it's a lot more likely that during the hard times of the future (and there will be hard times, because there always are) the door that has swung open for us will swing shut. Laws can be repealed, rights can be taken away as easily as they are granted. When people are afraid - like they were afraid after 9/11 - they have a way of showing their secret faces. When you're afraid for too long it can turn to hate, and hate can be misplaced. That's how witch hunts start.
But maybe if you took a minute to read this, and you're the sort of person who might be inclined to share their views on the subject, go ahead and tell me. I'm ready: tell me why it's right, tell me why it's wrong, tell me how it all makes sense. I can't tell anymore.

Title lyric from the song of the same name by Tom Petty.

They Say To Make It You Need Talent And Ambition

2009-05-04T12:44:00.003-04:00

I can't decide which part of the whole Carrie Prejean/Miss America debacle I find more tawdry and sad: that the pageant evidently paid for her breast implants, that I found her reply really not at all offensive but her behavior afterward gold-digging and brainless, or that it's made me feel an extremely grudging (and passing!) respect for Perez Hilton. Probably that last angle is the worst one, since I've always sort of thought that Perez is sort of a douchebag in a loud, obnoxious, doing-nobody-including-himself-any-favors sort of way, and even though he's acted pretty much like a douchebag through the whole thing himself he at least stuck to his guns, and for that I'm willing to give him his props, as the kids say. Of course, the fact that she simply and politely stated her opinion but then had to go and do exactly what she said she wasn't - namely, campaigning against same-sex marriage - because it seemed like there might be a buck or two in it just makes me tired and sad, but it's exactly what I expected. As to the breast implants, whatever happened to 'natural beauty?' But whatever, let's face it, beauty pageants are all about shallowness and exploitation with a scholarship reward like a crackerjack prize at the bottom, so I guess it's my fault for paying attention to a pop-culture debacle in the first place and I have no-one to blame for my disgust over the whole thing but myself.
After all, I could have done something worthwhile and uplifting with the ten minutes I burned watching all the coverage on blogs and YouTube instead, right?

Here's Julie Brown performing my take on the whole mess.
Julie Brown- "Cause I'm a Blond"

Title lyric from "'Cause I'm A Blonde" by Julie Brown.

So I Drew A New Face And I Laughed

2009-05-02T09:56:00.002-04:00

So I realized today that I feel good. Really good, maybe for the first time in a long time. I have learned one of the big truths of life: happiness really can heal a lot of ills, and unhappiness can kill you. Sure, happiness (like life) doesn't last forever. But it sure is terrific while it's there, isn't it?
The sad part is that happiness is great to experience, but boring to read (and write!) about. Good food, quiet times and crazy-hot sex turn into a laundry list of "I did this and it was super." Boring.
So I hope you're having a good time, and that it's super boring to hear about. I know I am.

Title lyric from "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz.

What? What?

2009-04-23T11:50:00.004-04:00

Lately, I've been joking around with some online friends about Gay Jesus and what he wants for our lives. Not in a sacrilegious sort of way - I want to be clear, I am making fun of NOBODY with this, but just in a 'Jesus loves us too' sort of way. It started with the Family Guy episode about Peter being injected with the gay gene; his family sends him to a re-education camp, where they tell him that 'Jesus hates many people, but none more than YOU.' I said at the time, "Maybe straight Jesus feels that way, but gay Jesus just loves everybody..." and thus this meme/joke was born. After referencing Gay Jesus when reminding my fellow homos that we should be nice to each other several times, one of my friends said, "Who is this Gay Jesus of whom you speak? Tell me more." That's how the Ten Suggestions Of Gay Jesus was begun.
So, in the hopes that you might find these funny and thought provoking BUT IN NO WAY irreligious, bigoted or blasphemous, here are the Ten Suggestions of Gay Jesus.

The Ten Suggestions of Gay Jesus*

1. Gay Jesus wants you to be happy. If you were having a blue night and Jesus bumped into you at the club/bar/after party, he would totally dance at least one whole song with you so you'd feel better.(Probably not more than one, because a lot of people need His love these days.) On the other hand, if you're having a good night or looking especially good and you see someone else who's having a bad night, you should totally dance at least one dance with them so they feel better. (Again, you're only obligated to one. Gay Jesus knows your time is valuable too.)
2. Gay Jesus wants you to be healthy - so bring back free condoms sponsored by the government. Oh, and eat better and exercise and call your mother. This is not meant to imply that Gay Jesus is a rehab clinic. Addiction is one of those unfortunate consequences of being human that need to be fixed quietly and with as much dignity as possible, sort of the way they fix unfortunate moles with plastic surgery. So be good to yourselves and each other.
3. Gay Jesus does not want you to be a pain in the ass. So, next time you feel like you've got something to say or act out, pause for just a second and ask yourself how you might react if you saw a total stranger do or say or be arrested for what YOU'RE about to do. It helps, it really does.
4. Gay Jesus affirms that everybody wants to love somebody. He is in favor of relationships of whatever duration, and agrees that people who still like each other after a decade or so are pretty amazing, no matter what their genders, ages, or fashion issues. At the same time, he disapproves of stalking, meanness and any relationship that begins with "ex-." Gay Jesus says, 'When it's over, it's OVER. Move on.'
5. Gay Jesus wants everybody to be productive. He also wants us to express ourselves on every level possible. He even agrees that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So, next time your Aunt Muriel is showing you her macrame owl, just remember whose side Gay Jesus is on and SHUT YOUR SMART MOUTH.
6. Gay Jesus loves you no matter how incredibly swishy a queen you are, no matter how diesel a dyke you are, and even no matter if you can number the people you've slept with in platoons. He says so on his Manhunt profile, so you know it's true. GAY JESUS LOVES YOU. Just please, read his hookup requirements before you private message him, m'kay?
7.Gay Jesus is not a big prude. He is a fan of and contestant in the big biological sweepstakes known as sex. Every adult human being is happier when they have sex of some kind in their lives, no matter how sad and unimaginative their conception of sex may be. If it makes them happy, you shouldn't knock it... At least where people can hear.

8. Gay Jesus realizes that humor is necessary to the human condition, and that sometimes humor can get a little mean and still be funny. In harmony with suggestion #3, Gay Jesus hopes that if you MUST say something horrible because it's funny and it deserves to be said that you will bring it to him in prayer. He will totally give you credit when he repeats it - just as conscientiously and anonymously, OF COURSE. On the other hand, if you recognize something about yourself in a joke that is nevertheless actually funny, MAYBE THAT'S SOMETHING YOU NEED TO WORK ON. Think about it.

9. Gay Jesus says that we should all like people who are different from us. If your friends are all pretty much the same as you, then YOU'RE BORING, and that makes Gay Jesus a titch annoyed. Find someone much more interesting than yourself and learn from them. It's not too late. Remember, Gay Jesus really does just love everybody, and he's not just saying that.
10. Finally, Gay Jesus is a fan of fashion-affirming lifestyle choices. If you aren't stylish and can't help it, Gay Jesus will love you anyway, but he might decline your coffee invitations because your living room wallpaper hurts his eyes. If anything about your taste in clothing, home decor or sexual fetish makes you feel self-conscious, remember that there ARE professionals eager to help you with your problem who are just a phone call away.

*These are just suggestions because Gay Jesus only gives commandments when he's got his leather on... and then you just better say YES SIR.

Title lyric from "What? What? (In The Butt?)" by Samwell.

I Don't Know

2009-04-16T17:03:00.003-04:00

I started to write today, but then I couldn't.
The blank white space where the little black words are supposed to go was staying blank. When I stared at it, the white space stared right back at me.
It's not that I don't have things to say. I want so bad to write it exactly as it flows through my head, but there are so many limitations I must observe that I have to skip from one permissible stone to another instead of swimming in the stream. I know how writing is supposed to feel, and it's just like that: I'm a little dark fish in the story river. Sometimes I get caught in little backwaters, unable to find the main current again. Sometimes, I make it all the way to the sea.
This is how it is. Right now the sun is slanting down the window at the foot of the bed, and it casts green shadows on my feet. The comforter looks like metallic corduroy and feels like oiled silk. My lover is composing a song on his keyboard, and I can feel the sounds he's orchestrating flowing the way the words should come to me. Quicksilver cool to swim in, every next word obvious from the last.
It won't come, though. I can't force it to be the way I want. I can't constrain it into the traditional forms, I can't think about the readers out there scratching their heads. The only narrative moment is the now, and it can only show me its contents through its fish-eye lens, distorting like the peephole in a cheap apartment door. Why try to contrive a mask for myself when I can never actually capture the truth of the moment anyway? My misperceptions are their own camouflage.
So I'll go back to the beginning and I'll start again. The story will change with every iteration, yet the core truth abides. We all are doomed to do what it is that we do, and this is the doom for me.
So listen, if you want to hear: Once upon a time...

Title lyric from the song of the same name by Lisa Hannigan.

It Seems My Life Is Going To Change

2009-04-12T12:10:00.004-04:00

I am going to be a grandfather.

Title lyric from "With Arms Wide Open" by Creed.

My New Blog

I Quit, I Give Up

2009-03-17T12:07:00.001-04:00

Go here.

The Sun Will Set For You

2009-03-02T09:54:00.002-05:00

I've done a few trial posts, and now I'm ready to start blogging in my new digs. Couldn't leave Blogger behind - it's just too comfortable! Check out my profile and find my in my new place on the web...

Title lyric from "Shadow Of The Day" by Linkin Park.

I'm Just Never Prepared For The End Of The Ride

2009-02-18T08:07:00.003-05:00

I can't do it anymore. I'm sorry.
I've sat my butt down here every day and tried to blog. It won't come. My other writing is has suddenly taken off like a forest fire; it ignites my days and incinerates my dreams, and the words it leaves behind like ashes on the page have never contained more of that fire. Not so here, though.
My life has changed. It's hard to believe, just that finally taking that one step in my life could make such a difference. Every circumstance was pointing toward it, every turn of events pushed me closer to it, but it wasn't until I threw off all of the chains I'd locked myself up in that I really knew I could be happy.
I am happy. Every day now, I am surprised by a little more grace and contentment. Why? I have nobody's mistakes but my own to regret, nobody's fuckups to try to fix, no drama to watch and tell myself that I'm lucky. It's just me and the guy I love, and that's more than enough. How was I so stupid not to realize it before?
Thing is, this giant sea change in my life and heart have made this blog feel... obsolete. Like a wool sweater that's a few sizes too small. Dishonest, even. I think it's time has passed.
But before you get too upset (or yawn and say 'duh!'), I'm far from done with the internet. Now I'm just planning my next virtual space. Maybe it will be here, maybe it will be someplace else... But before long you'll find my calling card here, leading you to someplace new.
I hope you'll join me. It won't be the same, because nothing ever is. But maybe it can be better.

Title lyric from "End Of The World" by Matt Alber.

In My Body There Is Buried Some Strange Memory Of How To Fly

2009-02-05T11:47:00.003-05:00

"...when an organism is faced with a novel environment, new behaviors may be observed..." - American Journal of Human Genetics

"...a reason to show/a side of me you didn't know..." - Hoobastank, The Reason

Here I am, the laptop (finally) repaired and my internet signal strong, but no lengthy and insightful post prepared. More on that later.
For now....

Since we've been spending so much time together, I've learned so many new things about HB that I sometimes think I was only casually acquainted with him before. Some of it, of course, is new; with only the two of us, we have both expanded and grown in each other's eyes, and we're becoming different people together. One of these changes is that he's growing new habits out of the compost of our daily routine. Here are five of them that I find amusing, endearing or both.

1. He's started undressing the minute he's in the door from work. It's become his custom to wear as little as possible when we're together, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I've started doing the same. It's like we're in bed every minute that we're together.
2. HB has suddenly developed an interest in politics, mostly from the most recent presidential election. He has some very strong feelings about Barack Obama, and I could really see him working for Obama's re-election campaign a few years down the road.
3. He's learned how to tell jokes. I am a big one for jokes, especially lame question and answer jokes that make you groan and hold your head. When we first got together, HB could never properly tell a joke... But a few nights ago he came home and told me one that he'd heard from work, and it was hilarious.
4. We've gone to the local gay bar, and instead of being uptight and uncomfortable the entire time the way he'd been before, he let loose and had a ball. He drank, he danced, he even sang karaoke. When I commented on his good time, he said, Why not? Nobody knows us here.
5. He texts me at least twice a day to tell me that he's thinking about me. Nothing sugary or overly sentimental, just that one line: I'm thinking about you. Funny thing is, I'm always thinking about him when these little notes arrive. Fate, huh?

Now that I can, I promise to post more regularly. The laptop repair was expensive but worth it, and now I have all of the internet back at my fingers instead of being able to steal a few minutes on FaceBook from a friend across the hall. Look out, digital information society.
I'm back.

Title lyric from "Monarch" by Matt Alber, one of the best musicians currently recording.

Don't You Wanna Fall, Don't You Wanna Fly

2009-01-30T08:04:00.003-05:00

The coffee's ready when I wake up: the microwave supplied to us is old and cheap, but it has a programmable timer, and now I always wake up to a hot cup of coffee. Granted, it's reheated, but the first coffee of the day is more about caffeine and less about quality, at least in my opinion.
There's a card lying on the table, one that I must have looked at ten thousand times. It's from my little kids; J and Amber smuggle mail and gifts to them for me, and bring me back these hand-made cards adorned in crayon in pencil. They always say, 'Daddy, we love you.' There are several more adorning the door of the tiny fridge. Anyone seeing them would think that I'm a dedicated weekend dad, while instead I stand a very good chance of not seeing them again until they're all teenagers. I look at this card on the table while I pour my coffee, and as always I feel my heart grow hot and heavy in my chest. I want to storm back there and take them from her, I want to pick them up from school and cover their little faces with kisses, I want to tell them that I never wanted to be apart from them and beg them to forgive me. Anger and desire change nothing, as always: they are hundreds of miles away, and I am here without them.
So I make myself go through the motions, and while the ache never fades, the current moment of my life begins to move to the forefront again. If it were not for being separated from them, I would be completely and insanely happy - and how often are we ever completely happy, at least once puberty has set in? Holding HB in my arms, meeting new people and seeing new things, writing and listening to music and living every moment only for itself...
I thought that this would be a new beginning for me, that I would reinvent myself as a new person, the way I have before, but instead I find at this point in my life that I am achieving synthesis: all of the old parts of me that were valuable have found a new configuration among the simple pleasures and unhurried happiness, and I am better than I was. Last night, with Le Tango De Roxanne pouring out of the speakers, HB grabbed me and danced me the five free steps back and forth across our little room. At the appropriate moment, I dipped him. He yelped in surprise, and when I drew him back up he put his arms tight around me and kissed me.
"You are so much better," he breathed in my ear, and with his arms crushing me, I couldn't even reply. "I remember when you weren't strong enough to hold yourself up with just your arms, and now..." He gripped my head with his hands on either side of my face and kissed me again, hard. "You're getting better." I certainly do feel better, healthier, stronger... And this is HB's dream for me. To be healthy and whole at his side. May we both get our fondest wish.
But today I have volunteered to stuff envelopes for a local Arts Council project, if only to keep myself busy and away from thoughts and memories that do not help and can only keep me hurting. I am less leery about going out in public now, since I have received word from the Big Woods that no charges are being handed down in the mess that Robbie started by trying to get revenge on the crew that robbed us. This is good news for everyone else, but does not free me; there is still the local warrant for me to be dealt with, and my money envelope is far from fat enough for that yet. Before I leave our place, though, I'll go to it and touch the crisp white paper hiding the folded bills inside and repeat my promise, a promise to myself and my children:
One day I will go back and once again have what is mine. I swear it.

Title lyric from "End Of The World" by Matt Alber, quite possibly one of the best songs ever written.

So I'm Sailing For Tomorrow, My Dreams Are A Dyin'

2009-01-26T08:44:00.003-05:00

It's silly, I know. It's also probably wrong to have started doing it without saying anything, but I've begun tucking the odd dollar or two that I make away in an envelope in my bag. Nothing much; I've been tutoring a new friend's son in chemistry and math, and the money I put away is only a tiny fraction of the pittance that earns me. Still, it's more what the money's intended for than the actual amount. Every time I put a bill into the envelope, I think, someday I'll go back. Deep in my heart I know I probably never will, that my old life is over as irrevocably as the Bush administration, but I still do it. The human heart is a funny thing.
As if I needed reminding. HB and I are swaddled in this newfound warmth and security, as if we'd only just met instead of being an old married couple well accustomed to each other's snoring and morning crankiness. At HB's new job they tease him quite regularly over his elaborate lunches and touches of indulgence; he has landed a desk job this time, and already his cubicle is adorned with pictures of us together, of him on horseback, of the house in the Big Woods. He went into this job determined to be 'out' to everyone, and to his surprise they mostly accepted his declaration without much comment. They do give him a well-aimed jab every now and then - the other day, one woman observed that her daughter would love HB, and another woman said, I think your husband is more his speed. I held my breath when HB told me this, sure that it would have upset him, but he shrugged as he repeated his own reply: you're safe - I've seen pictures of your husband, and mine's much better looking. His skin is getting thicker as he gets older, I suppose.
As for me, I am just taking my time to breathe in the wonderful change between us. We have the time to lie in bed for hours, kissing and gazing into each other's eyes. With only each other's heads to explore, we're finding the lost continents and hidden treasures that only lovers really ever find in one another. I only want for this to go on, and for us to go deeper into each other's minds and hearts. If I'd known it would be like this, I think I'd've run away with him long ago.
But I still miss the Big Woods. When he's not around, I think of my kids and my house and my history. Sometimes it makes me silently cry tears that literally burn my eyes, they're so bitter. The past is so hard to let go...

Title lyric from "Southern Cross" by Crosby, Stills & Nash.

This Love I've Got For You Could Take Me Round The World

2009-01-24T01:50:00.003-05:00

Here we are again. Chapter thirty seven: intrepid little Nell makes good and lives happily ever after. Except not.
I have to admit, I am beginning to sort of enjoy the itinerant life. We move a lot, never very far but always steadily westward. I have our belongings distilled down into a couple duffel bags, and you'd be surprised how many creature comforts I can produce from them. We go where the invisible winds of employment and opportunity take us, and so far we are content.
I thought about it the other night, as we lay on a bed together in an unfamiliar room high up in a big old subdivided house. I was stroking the curve of HB's spine while he sat up and smoked the day's last cigarette, and thinking how very much life has changed for me in the last year or so. I have resisted change so much for so long... And now it's broken over my life like a tidal wave. What will I piece together out of the wreckage and flotsam when the water recedes? Stay tuned and see, I guess.
I must say too that the carnival schedule of our wanderings is agreeing with us physically, too. HB is not the only one who looks better. Someone I know and like very much recently insisted that a picture I'd sent him had been taken in the early nineties, not last week. At first I thought he was being kind... but then HB pointed out that he'd seen pictures of me from when I was younger when I looked a lot the way I do now: thin but not emaciated anymore, hair short by choice, laugh brackets around my smile. I do laugh and smile the way I used to then, so maybe it's making a difference in my face.
I just know that when I had nothing else to fall back on, when every other person I had ever known was indifferent or embroiled in their own mess, HB has unfailingly been there for me. He's more than I ever guessed a man could be, much less one his age. I thought I'd be good for him, but it's turned out so very much the other way around.
Before I go, I want to say that my gmail account is still active. Doris honey, I know I owe you two or three emails. Tony, Tom - you guys too. Have patience, please. Soon. I will get back to posting every day soon. I promise.

Title lyric from "Show Me Love" by Robyn.

I Need Peace, Got To Feel At Ease

2009-01-19T19:04:00.001-05:00

I didn't even ask what spooked him. He just came home from work and said, "Time to move on."
Of course, he was a little surprised at how prepared I was. In less than two hours I was dropping our duffels at his feet, and I fed him and we showered during that time too. I felt a minor pang at the last look around the little room... But it was HB being there with me that was magic, not the place. We were set to roll.
We traveled south this time, although not so far as to leave the midwest. America's Dairyland is pretty country, or would be if not for the snow. HB had a place all arranged for us, and after a two and half hour drive I was glad to see it. The first thing he said (with his wicked little grin) was that the new place has free wireless, compliments of the coffee shop next door. He has been fretting about Ravn, and one of the first things he did was to go online and email him. He's been chafing to talk to Ravn online again, and I'm really hoping that the two of them will connect again soon.
After he got offline, he turned around in his chair and watched me. I was running around the small space, finding places to put things - his vast collection of socks, our winter gear, the one framed photo of the two of us that I still have - and generally tearing my hair out. Perhaps I shouldn't have had all that coffee during the ride.
"What are you doing?" he said in a tone of considerable amusement.
I stopped and gave him an indignant look... and then laughed. "I'm nesting, I guess," I told him. "Just like a pregnant woman in her last trimester."
He patted my stomach and told me that I was hiding it well, then kissed me and went out to find someplace that sells cigarettes. After he left, I went to my little box of private things and drew out a card I'd found when I was packing us up to leave the last place.
I made it a long time ago, sometime around here. It's a drawing, and I remember when I was making it I made a wish: a wish for the perfect guy for me. I drew what I wanted him to look like, and then I wrote on the back all of the things that I wanted him to be. When I found it, I didn't remember right away what it meant, but as we were watching Practical Magic the other night, it hit me. I dug the card out and looked at it again, and it was crystal clear to me. I wished for HB, and he came. Like magic, just like in the movie when Sandra Bullock wishes for the man of her dreams and he comes to her. HB literally is the man of my dreams, the one I wished for on one of the worst nights of my life.
I think I'm finally starting to realize just how very lucky - truly, magically lucky - I am to have him in my life. I don't ever want to lose him.
So now I'm going to sign off, and finish my nesting, and tonight we'll settle down in a new place and start a new, temporary adventure.
My best to you all.

Title lyric from "Never Ever" by All Saints.

Again My Turn To Win Some Or Learn Some

2009-01-15T12:44:00.004-05:00

It's so cold that I can't go out.
I tried to, accepting an invitation to go icefishing, and knew almost immediately that I'd be sick if I stayed out in it. I could literally feel my blood chilling in my veins. So, confined like a songbird in a cage, I clean and do laundry and write in my journal... and brood, of course.
Maybe HB is right, though. This short time of enforced rest has done me good; without the boys to constantly worry about, without the drama of the Big Woods and my own stupid mistakes, when and where it's just us two alone... I have managed to put on a little weight, mostly from having a bite of the meals I cook for him. I have never seen him work so hard, or eat so much, or sleep so sound. His face is thinner and harder, and his arms and shoulders are filling out nicely. He insists that this is exactly what we need right now, and never really gives me a straight answer when I ask if what we need is different from what he wants. This is a transition point, he says. We're going to move on from here.
I certainly hope that's so. I think I am ready to feel useful again to at least some small degree. If I'm not gonna die tomorrow, I suppose I should at least try to live today, right? So in the mornings HB still coaches me through exercise, and I shop at the little independent market with real produce and meat and cook healthy, and I vigorously try not to make sour faces when I'm practicing my positive thinking. What else am I gonna do?
It's funny, I found this novel at a library in a town we passed through, just a book in the free bin that attracted me for some reason. It was written by a woman in the late forties in a sort of free-flowing diary style, not unlike my blog. I find myself identifying with her experience: married her sweetheart right before he went off to war, and now that he's come back they've moved to an island off the Seattle coast. She described her attempts to be a resourceful housewife and mate to a rather taciturn man... A man not unlike my own charming prince of flowing hair and few words. I guess when you get right down to it, we all go through the same cycles sooner or later, having the same human lessons to learn.
But now I have to post this before my stolen Internet signal wanes. I have supper to make, and the zipper on my winter coat to repair - or try to, anyway - and then Prince Charming will be home. My best - and his best - our best to you all.

Title lyric from "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz.

Don't Have The Means To Rise Above And Beat It

2009-01-12T07:23:00.003-05:00

Dark. It's always dark during the short days and long twilights of winter. This, however, is a waning darkness; I can see HB's silhouette in the doorway, and the night sky through the window behind his head is dissolving into a wash of gray-orange that will become dawn in an hour or so. The sky might almost be pretty if it weren't winter out there.
"You think we should get moving today?" he asks me. When he draws on his cigarette, the orange tip blazes bright enough to briefly illuminate his face. Still I get no take on his expression, just an eye here, a nostril there.
"We're fine. The living's cheap and you've got a job. Let's stay awhile." I am trying to be cautious and sensible. Too bad I have no idea how it's done, and no instinct for it to rely on either.
"How long is awhile?" When he cracks the door open to pitch out his butt, the bitter cold comes sheeting in from outside. If I could ever make it back home again to the Big Woods, I would no longer complain about the cold, just the snow. When they think it's cold there I'd tell them stories about this place. "Days? Weeks? You really wanna settle down here?"
I didn't have to fake a shiver. "This damn podunk hole at the tippy-top of nowhere? No way. I figured just until we could make enough money to get far away from here."
"To where the sun shines." It must be getting lighter in here, because I could vaguely see him smile now. "Arizona heat. California sunshine. Hiking in Oregon. Backpacking in the Olympias." He's half teasing me. Those are things I used to ramble about. "Won't take that long to get there, y'know."
"That's what I'm counting on." I make one of those abrupt conversational changes for which I'm known and admired. "I made your lunch, take it with you."
"Egg salad again?" He groans. "I'd rather not."
"It's not egg salad, it's some of that ham we had at Muriel's." Along the way, we have had to rely upon the various kindnesses of strangers. I have yet to meet anyone, even in these horrible times of no money and lost jobs, who is not willing to offer us something, even if it is only directions to someone with more to give. "I made you gravy sandwiches on toast, just like you like."
"Awesome." He comes over to kiss me, and instead of a peck on the cheek I grab a handful of all that glorious hair and pull him in for a real one. Our toothpastes taste quite compatible, despite his nasty Marlboro. At least I'm considerately waiting until after he leaves to light up one of my own hoarded menthols. Regarding me from so close that our eyelashes brush, he whispers, "I love you."
When he left to go to his parents, I honestly didn't think he'd be back. I thought he'd cut and run, and who could blame him? I think I would have, at least if I was cutting and running out on anybody but him. Evidently he feels the same way, because he came back. I watch him pulling his hair back in a hairband, the way it coils into snaky little curls like wisps of dark smoke at the nape of his neck. My boy with an advanced degree off to work a winter construction job because he's on the run with his crazy stupid bone-thin lover. With some people it's drugs or alcohol, with others it's cards or roulette or slots, I even hear some people are fucked up by shopping or internet porn. With him, it's me.
A horn honks outside. "I love you," I call after him again after he shuts the door, and I can see him raise his hand to me before he gets into the pickup.
I've met the men he's working with; I've met some of their wives, even some of their kids. None of them seem the least bit interested in the details of our relationship. Nobody has asked if we are father and son, uncle and nephew, parole officer and wanted criminal... and certainly not if we're lovers. We are guarded and aloof around them, and they are patient and giving. They're a strange bunch, these people who call themselves 'youpies.' They make these great big pasties filled with meat and vegetables that you evidently have to taste to believe. They're nice people to be around, all in all... And I'll leave everyone of them to their ice and snow and forests and lake without a backward glance. I'm ready for some sunshine.
But with the thermometer outside hovering below twenty on the fahrenheit side, I doubt I'll get much of it. So I'll do my bit of housework, get ready for him to come home again... And I'll hope. And I'll wait, even though my time's getting short for waiting.
Something good has got to happen. It's just got to.

Title lyric from "Waiting On The World To Change" by John Mayer.

When You Fall, Everyone Sins

2009-01-03T11:50:00.004-05:00

We were in a little place between Chicago and Rockford, and that's where HB and I had planned to spend Christmas. I have an old friend there, and she's got a quiet, comfortable house all to herself. How I wish we'd stayed there.
I got this call from somebody I know. Nobody in particular, certainly nobody important, but he wanted to make me a business proposition of sorts. I knew some people he wanted to deal with, and in return for my introduction to them he offered a finder's fee. I heard him out, politely declined - it would involve a trip in the wrong direction, and even though I wouldn't be going all the way back into Pennsylvania, it was still way too close to Pittsburgh. Besides, why bother? So I hung up the phone feeling like I'd been a good boy.
Then Robbie called me. Had I heard? He had some interesting news about the very same people that the first guy had been asking about. Robbie knows those people - I introduced him to them - and he felt that we could share in their sudden prosperity. I equivocated. I told Robbie I wasn't sure that was a good idea, not at all. I told him to let me think about it. I wasn't actually considering it at that point... but I didn't dismiss it out of hand this time, either. I remember going to bed musing that an extra several hundred dollars in hand might make it easy to hop a bus or a train the rest of the way to California, instead of going to Arizona and then Grand Junction the way we'd planned, relying on friends for accomodations and food. Maybe, I thought. Just maybe.
Next morning I was having coffee with my hostess when the phone rang again. Cheap, disposable prepaid number, nothing that could be tracked. This time it was the Slav, and he was much more motivated in his attempt to persuade me. HB scowled at me over his coffee and Marlboro breakfast, mouthing 'who's that?' at me several times. I waved him off while I listened. Together, the Slav and Robbie were making a pretty powerful argument - but what really sealed the deal for me was that the Slav offered to take over my house in the Big Woods until I could come back to it. In retrospect, perhaps that's a weakness I should wear somewhere besides my sleeve, hm?
Naturally, HB was dead set against the whole idea. It was our hostess who was enthused; she was quite the adventurous lady back in her day, and the nature of the business didn't deter her at all. She offered to drive - half a day - back to West Virginia if she could benefit. I called the Slav and talked it over while HB paced angrily in the living room. Then I called the people in question for the first time, an unfortunate family clan that once lived in the Big Woods and still sticks to the deserted rural areas. They responded enthusiastically. Details were discussed and agreed upon. I actually hung up feeling fairly proud of myself. This will work, I told myself. Wrongly, as it turned out.
HB went against his better judgment in coming along, and he still hasn't let me forget it for a second. I still don't know exactly what went wrong; my best guess is that either the people we were going to see told the wrong person that they were expecting cash-laden company, or somehow Robbie or the Slav let it slip while they waited to meet us in Wheeling. We did stop to eat there in a place that was more bar than restaurant, and I guess it's possible that Robbie or the Slav or maybe even our dauntless hostess said the wrong thing to exactly the wrong person. Whatever it was, I didn't see it coming.
So the thing I always warned the kids about, the thing I was so paranoid about and went loaded for bear against happened to us. I didn't have three strapping (and strapped) young lads watching the exits, I didn't have a gun on me, I wasn't prepared at all. We got robbed. I thought we put up a pretty good fight, but that really just made it worse. With almost no money left - just what HB, who wasn't there when it happened, had in his pocket - and not a lot of available options, we said goodbye to dauntless hostess and went back to Pennsylvania, back to a convenient hidey hole not far from home.
As it happens, there is a local warrant out for my arrest - the child support thing again. No secret stays hidden in a small town, and being two months behind, my delightful ex had only to call and say that I'd taken off for California. Evidently this is all the evidence they need to subpoena me to a hearing - a summons I never got, and has now left me in that unprepossessing limbo, 'contempt of court.' Not exactly the FBI's top ten most wanted list, but a guaranteed ticket straight to jail anywhere I show my face in Pennsylvania, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Without money or any certaintly on my next step, I don't know what to do about the charge - but I know I'm not going to meekly present myself and be hauled off to jail again. No way, no how.
In my utter and abject apology to HB (and plea for him not to leave me in disgust) I have promised that he can run the show for awhile. He's in charge, I'll listen and do what he says whether I like it or not. He isn't done being angry with me, but he does agree that there's nothing to be gained by going to jail. So, relatively safe but confined and always watchful, I am lying up and plotting my next move.
Right now, though, my mind's sort of blank. I sure hope HB's got something good up his sleeve.

Title lyric from "Move Along" by the All American Rejects.

Feel Like I Could Run Away, Run Away

2008-12-30T10:48:00.004-05:00

We got jumped in a little town not all that far from Wheeling, West Virginia. They took everything from us, the bastards, all my stake money.

We'd decided to sort of leapfrog our way west, staying with people we knew and trying to make some money along the way. Almighty dollar, and all that. In this economy, everybody's looking to make a buck. We did all right at first, but we'd backtracked over a hundred miles just to follow something that in hindsight should have clearly been too good to be true. Such is life.

Robbie got marked up the worst, but we all got roughed up some.

I am too used to having Randy with me, and this time he wasn't. You win some and you lose some, and this time we lost out big. Such are the stakes of the game, I guess. When we made it back to the house where we were staying, HB was beside himself. He was so furious with me - and rightly so, no denying it - that we both came very close to an edge I don't ever want to contemplate again.

So after we licked our wounds and counted our losses, we were closer to home than anywhere else and had exactly seventy dollars left to our collective names. Hiding out in the Big Woods wasn't and isn't an option; everyone knows your business, word just travels too fast. Ditto for the city limits of Erie, although there are enough people there for us to be lost in the holiday crowds if not anonymous. We opted instead for someplace we knew nearby, and laid ourselves up in a little place far from paved roads and civilization. Being on the run isn't a good time, but I got to spend Christmas in HB's arms. We were warm and relatively safe and in bed together, and for the moment that's doing pretty good.

But we are on the run now. I'm considering my meager number of options, trying to figure out which of the few possible ways out I - we - should take. If I have a resolution, it's this: from here on out, it's just HB and me. There may be others with us, but I'm in it for him and he's in it for me. When you're drowning, sometimes you can only save yourself, but I got lucky enough to find someone strong enough to help hold me up. Any more and they'll just pull us down.

So that's where I'm at. Thank you all for your kind wishes and prayers. I can tell that someone's rooting for me, because we've just had too many lucky breaks and near-misses to be coincidence. Thank you all again, and I hope to be back in regular contact with you soon.

I miss my blog, and my time spent here with you.

Title lyric from "Shattered Dreams" by Johnny Hates Jazz.

It Looks Like I'm Losing This Fight

2008-12-16T22:12:00.003-05:00

I finally made the kids take me back to my house in the Big Woods, mostly with the reasoning that there were things I would want to take with me if we were leaving for any length of time. It was almost as bad as I'd feared. In the ice storm I'd missed, the little roof sheltering my west window had come completely down, and by now resting against the top of the window frame at an almost completely reversed angle, it was actually funneling water against the window pane and so on into my dining room, where it pooled and froze on the floor. The ice also brought down my gutters on one side of the addition, and so I'll probably start having water leaks there any time now.
HB was helping me clean up the frozen water when I just sort of lost it. I like to think I'm pretty tough, but this was like getting suckerpunched in the face just when you least expect it. Plus from the way the huge old pine tree behind the house is starting to lean, I could see it taking no more than one or two more storms like that to make it fall on the house and bash in the roof...
And just like that, I started to cry.
I haven't done that in a long time. I don't like to cry. HB came and put his arms around me; I could tell he was alarmed, but when I tried to stop I only felt worse. He held me and rocked us back and forth while he whispered against my neck. He asked me what was wrong.
In the way of those emotional moments when you can't really speak what's on your mind, I could only murmur that it was everything, it was the house, it was being sick, it was having to leave, to run away.
"Hey, hey, it's not like that," he soothed me, "if you really want to stay, then we can stay. It will be--"
"No it won't," J said behind us. I felt HB turn to look at him, but I just kept my head on HB's shoulder, my face hidden in his hair. I wanted to make believe that he really could make everything better, like the fairy tale prince I sometimes pretend him to be. "It won't be okay. You guys have got to go, because my Mom is never gonna give up. You can pay and pay and she'll never be satisfied. I know it's hard, Dad, but you gotta go." And then he put down his broom and went up the stairs to pack up my bedroom.
Now I am writing this in bed in Erie, at a friend's house, the laptop toasting the tops of my thighs. J and HB are downstairs with our host, talking about me in lowered voices. I wish they would just accept that I can't accept it, and let me get on with it anyhow. I'll go, I'll follow HB anywhere, to hell and back. He's done it for me. But I can't just let go of everything I've ever known and pretend it doesn't bother me.
It does. It really does.

Title lyric from "Missing You" by John Waite.

Some Boys Try And Some Boys Lie But I Don't Let Them Play

2008-12-14T18:52:00.003-05:00

Today was a bit disappointing.
We went to a gay brunch, the first thing like it we'd done in... quite awhile, anyway, if ever quite like this. I had been assured by the friend hosting the brunch that it would be very laid back and social. To some degree, it was... although I now know I'd rather be mistaken for HB's father than for his pimp. Several of the attendees (I'd hesitate to call them gentlemen) offered me inducements to bestow HB's favors upon them, exactly as if I owned him and was in the habit of renting him out by the hour. The first two offers were delivered in that 'let's pretend I'm joking even though I'm mostly not' tone that made it easy to reject them with a clever comeback, but one older fellow who really should have known better would not take 'you're being rude' for an answer.
Afterwards (we didn't stay all that long, imagine that) HB was driving me back to J's apartment and asked me what was bothering me. I told him, but instead of being offended as I'd expected, he laughed.
"I thought that's what he wanted," he said. "You know..." He hesitated.
"No, I don't know." I was feeling rather put out over the whole experience. "I suppose you'd better tell me."
He gave me one of his quizzical looks - the kind of face he makes when he's trying to gauge my feelings. "Before you and I got together, I used to do that sometimes."
"What, hook up? I know that." I was silently hoping he wasn't headed in the direction I suspected.
"Yeah... but for money." He kept his attention on the street. It rained in Erie, all day, and the streets were polished sheets of ice. Add to that the conviction of Erie drivers that they are the sole vehicle operators on the planet and the streets can be very hazardous. "We do need money..."
"So bad you should whore yourself out for it?" I regretted it the instant I said it, but HB is good at knowing when it's my mood or my discomfort level talking.
"I wasn't really looking at it that way, but I guess you could say that. Didn't he offer you money just to watch us?" He cast me a sidewise frown and kept driving.
"So?"
"So, next time we could make some money that way and not have to screw at J's place," HB explained, ever the practical soul. "I didn't mean that I wanted anybody to touch me."
"You sure?" I dropped the snappy tone right away and put my hand on his knee. "You sure you don't want someone else? Because if you do, then you could--"
"I want to be with you, and only you, dummy," he said affectionately. "But look at some of the other stuff you've done for money. At least this way would be just as fast and probably less risky."
"But not exactly dignified or classy," I pointed out. "Besides, I'd feel like..."
He waited. "Go on," he finally prompted.
"I'd feel like I was using you. Like you were just an asset I had, not the most precious thing in my life. I wouldn't like that." I tried to be as clear as possible, but sometimes it's hard. How do you say these things? "I just... value you too much to let someone else make me feel dirty about us."
He nodded thoughtfully. "That's fair. It was just an idea, anyway." He grimaced. "I wouldn't want to do it in the same room with most of those guys, anyway. They were mostly old and gross."
"I'm old and gross," I said, and he laughed at me.
"You're neither," he told me, and kissed my cheek. "Besides, I just wanted you to know that I'll do anything for you. I'd rather work a job and bring home an honest paycheck to you any day, but I'd steal and lie and whore for you if that's what it took." The way he shrugged made me think that he was actually reassuring himself of the lengths to which he was willing to go more than he was reassuring me. "Forget about it. I love you."
"Silly." I biffed him on the shoulder, and then leaned over to kiss his neck. Is there anything better than the rasp of stubble against your lips when you kiss someone? "I love you, and neither one of us are gonna hafta be whores. We'll find a way to make some money and go to California if that's what you want."
"I do," he said, all grave and serious again. Then he shot me another sidewise look and a half smile. "I really do. I can't wait. I want to walk through San Francisco while I hold your hand, I want to lie on the beach with you, I want to tell people that we're married and not get that look from them. I want it all."
I forbore to mention how cold the beaches are this time of year in northern California and just reached over to take his hand. "Then I want that for you," I told him. "I want you to have it all."
I do want it all for him. I never want him to have to slither through the muddy underworld that I've sacrificed a part of my life to, I never want him to feel like the things he's done have lowered him in his own eyes or anyone else's. I only want good things for him. Happy things. I know he loves me - I guess now it's time once again to show him that I love him too, with the best quality of love that I'm able to give.
I also want to put this wretched day behind me. The whole experience left me feeling sullied somehow. I can only hope your day was better than mine, everyone.

Title lyric from "Material Girl" by Madonna.

Just Another Way To Survive

2008-12-13T12:05:00.003-05:00

I am just not feeling well at all today. Headache, sick stomach, dizzy, the whole nine yards. Even my secret drug combination - opiate-style painkiller washed down with alka-seltzer - isn't doing the trick. Naturally, everyone around me is being extra cheerful just to piss me off. I hate holidays.
Yesterday was a study in western Pennsylvania weather: first it thawed, then it froze, then it snowed. Being in the city, we didn't see nearly the kind of snowfall that came down at my house in the Big Woods, but it was still plenty. Of course, also being the next-to-last Friday night before Christmas, everyone and their brother decided to throw a party. The kids insisted that I go, and I knew that HB really wanted to go too, so I gave in and tagged along. Other than making me feel quite strongly that I was chaperoning a high school dance complete with spiked punch, it was mostly bearable. I smoked too many cigarettes, had one single social drink that I immediately regretted and still do, and inadvertently (along with HB) inspired one of J's little friends to come out of the closet. Before I tell you about that, though, I just know you'll really want to hear how my afternoon went yesterday.
J had to work from two o'clock until ten, and he wanted me to clean his apartment. It's a small place, not really a one bedroom or an efficiency but somewhere in between - what I think the Brits call a bed-sit - and it's pretty easy to clean, especially with HB lending me a hand. So we were there, and we were alone, and pretty certain that we would have the place to ourselves all evening... I'm sure you can guess how this part goes. He's a young man with needs, and I was in the hospital for awhile there. So we get good and naked and entangled, and sure enough, we hear a key in the lock and then the door opens. The front door, which is approximately three feet from the end of the bed. Fortunately for me, HB whipped the blanket over us in a ninja-class move that I could never have made, so J didn't have to commit the sin of Ham, praise Jebus. The minute the blanket was over us he started cackling like a fiend, and after J immediately slammed back out I could hear him laughing out in the hallway too. I'm so glad when I can amuse someone and at the same time raise their self esteem by looking bad in comparison. Just one of many public services offered by yours truly, folks. HB is the real hero of the story because he acted swiftly and responsibly without for one second stopping... the other stuff he was doing. He made J wait out in the hall until he was done, too.
So we go to this party with J, Amber, Andrea, Aaron, Brad, Randy, Robbie and Tom. I made Robbie promise he wouldn't drink, and he was relatively good about it - he probably had a beer or two, but he was much closer to sober than soused when we left and that's what counts. Amber and Andrea drank like fish, and they managed to get Aaron fairly well buzzed before I caught them and made them stop. Once the kids had dispersed, made their rounds, and then sort of rebounded into a group again, we were all settled on a big sectional couch with a number of J and Amber's classmates (they go to the same college). My stomach was bothering me, so I asked HB to get me a ginger ale or something, and he kissed me on the cheek when he left. This is nothing unusual: all the boys kiss me on a regular basis, and it's about as titillating as the dutiful smooches you gave your grandma as a child.
Still, that's what prompted one of J's little friends - a third year engineering major who'd been following HB around the entire party - spoke up and asked how many of the kids were actually mine. He seemed to take it for granted that HB was my son, and was properly mystified when Amber was loudly, drunkenly amused by his mistake.
"That's not his son," she giggled, and slopped her vodka-and-orange-pop drink on his pantsleg. "That's his lover."
I took a deep, calming breath and reminded her that HB prefers the term 'partner.' Personally, all such apellations make me wince. I prefer vaguer phrases like 'he's mine,' or 'we're together' or even 'guyfriends,' but go with the flow.
The engineering major - I've forgotten his name, but it was something awkward that shortened to Ted or Ned - was was flat out entranced.
"Really?" he exclaimed. Then, a trifle cooler: "But aren't you... a little older than him?"
I allowed that I was, in fact, a little older than HB. Just a little. Not much.
"That's okay," Ted or Ned reassured me graciously. "I think older guys are hot, too." The look on his date's face - his pretty young female date's face - is probably better imagined than described. If you can picture hurt, anger and (I swear) prurient interest all in the same expression, you've nailed it. "You're gay?" she demanded.
"Well... Um... More like bisexual," he stuttered. Awkward, very awkward.
"And when were you going to tell me that?" She pointed in the direction HB had gone, I'm guessing toward the kitchen. "I could tell he was, but you could have told me you are by now."
I soothingly pointed out that it's not exactly the sort of thing that comes up over coffee on a first date, but she persisted with the question.
"Uh... Never?" he finally answered. Wrongly, of course.
Fortunately, Andrea redirected the conversation by asking the date why, if she thought HB was gay, had she told Amber and Andrea at least a half dozen times in the first twenty minutes of the party that she thought HB was 'cute, adorable, hot and/or had a hot ass?' One of the things I like about Andrea is her self-possession and casual social cruelty; she's like a cat that way, viewing all the world as a succession of victims with which to be toyed. So now both Ned or Ted and his date were embarrassed and uncomfortable.
That's when HB came back with my can of ginger ale. He handed it to me, looked around at everyone and said, "You guys talking about me again?"
Andrea laughed and said, "Turns out she's hot for you--" she pointed at the date "--and he's--" she pointed at Ned or Ted "--hot for your partner." Everyone else laughed too, except Ned or Ted and date who both practically dissolved into furious blushes so hot they could've boiled water.
"Too bad they're so hot for each other they had to fuck on my bed this afternoon," J muttered, and I did a little blushing of my own.
And that was how I spent my Friday night. Today HB is frantically trying to prepare us for departure, and I am deliberately dragging my feet. I've worked hard at embracing this as an adventure, but as I've already told him, my heart's just not in it. 'That's okay,' he told me, 'as long as your feet are in it, your heart will catch up eventually.' My little philosopher, don't you know. Eventually, though, I'll have to help out of sheer self-preservation, so I guess now is as good a time as any.
Have a great Saturday, everyone.

Title lyric from "Dani California" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

If I Could Change The World

2008-12-11T19:10:00.000-05:00

Now comes the hard part.
HB wants us to leave right away. Leave the Big Woods, leave Pennsylvania and flee any part of the continental US that has regular winter snowfall. Naturally, I protested; I'm afraid I'm still just as mopey and sentimental about home as ever, and I thought our plans were made to stay in Erie, comfortably nearby. HB is adamant: evidently one of the doctors told him that I might do better in a warmer climate, and he's taken it to heart. I told him my opinion, that it's just one of those comforting things doctors suggest when they don't have anything really useful to offer, but he won't hear that.
I worry about money, naturally. I worry about finding ourselves thousands of miles away from familiar ground, knowing only a few people and having nobody to rely on if we should find ourselves in any kind of trouble. I worry about letting him take on the entire responsibility for me that way. Here, at least my family and friends can help, they can offer us support and encouragement and the occasional odd cash donation. Who would we turn to in Arizona or California or Washington? Is it really fair to let him make this decision when I have so many deep misgivings about it? I don't know.
He is out with Amber and Andrea right now, doing age-appropriate things while I am supposed to be napping. Aaron came into the city this morning, despite the fact that he should be in school, and he tearfully begged both HB and me to take him with us if we leave. HB didn't say much, and I tried to calm Aaron down, and now he's out with Robbie and Randy. Hopefully all three are behaving themselves, although I wouldn't bet any amount of money on it. J is still trying to soothe the pain of his breakup with Jill by finding comfort in the arms of others, and as I write this he is out showing one of these other young ladies a good time. All of them are so young and full of life that they make me tired. I think if it were solely up to me, I'd go back to my freezing cold house in the Big Woods; I'd build up a big fire in the woodstove and curl up on my couch, and I wouldn't move from there until somebody shook me awake and told me it was spring. I know how very little that thought helps, just like I know I should be coming up with some sort of plan. I should be trying very hard to divine what the smart thing is to do, especially since it doesn't seem to be occurring to me naturally.
I don't know, maybe I'm still just run down from the good natured incarceration of the hospital. I've had to tell everyone that I'm fine about a thousand times, I've had to smile and tell myself that they love me when HB and the kids treat me like an invalid - that word which, when pronounced a little differently, means 'unworthy or untrue' - and I've had to face up to the fact yet again that I'm a long way from the top of my game. Boo hoo, pity party for me. I just don't want to have to worry and scheme and struggle again, not right now. It's almost Christmas, and I think that this year that holiday could mean so much more and be so much happier than it was last year. Not exactly the best time of year to travel and start over.
Oh, well. As an author I loved in childhood said, 'the world goes as it will, and not as you or I would have it.' I am going to have to get on my feet again, and swiftly. HB deserves my cooperation and support, not more work and drama. So I am going to take my nap like a good little boy and hope that when I wake up, they'll all be back here again to tell me about their evening and share the part that's left of it with me. I hope you all have a good evening as well, and that you'll wish me luck as you always do. It really seems to help, you know.

Title lyric from the song of the same name by Eric Clapton.

The World Shines For Me Today

2008-12-10T19:25:00.001-05:00

I wasn't sure I'd get to be writing this post any time soon, but here I am again, back on the net. I was pretty sure that the combination of no medical insurance and being personally obnoxious would work, and it did, if not exactly like magic. Having three other roomies since I got out of the ICU introduced me to the sobering fact that being a pain in the ass is not exactly a novel approach to serious illness. Who knew?
As luck would have it, I got assigned a male nurse on nights who was (at least to me) pretty obviously gay and obviously pretty in a gay sort of way to boot, and getting to chat with him was nice. HB hated him with a passion, but the only comment he made on the guy was the moment he laid eyes on him: 'he's a redhead,' in much the same tones that a distraught mother might say 'that's the dingo that ate my baby.' I thought it was funny and incredibly sweet that HB had even a vague delusion that this guy would be interested in me, as I am quite a bit older than he was and wasn't exactly looking my best in a hospital johnny and under-eye bags by sampsonite. It was just nice to see one of us there, you know?
Speaking of HB, I really need to take this opportunity to say that he's an absolute god. No kidding, no question, he's got to be either the single best person I've ever known or possibly has a unique mental illness (or maybe a little of both) because he was there every single minute. He talked to the doctors, he sat on my bed and watched cable while he rubbed my back, he even bought a bucket of tapioca pudding - and I mean a big bucket - and grinned while I pigged it down and then apologized frantically while I puked it back up. I honestly am starting to think that he's the only part of heaven that I'll ever get (or need) to see. Sorry if that all sounds sappy, but I think he deserves all the sap I can pour on.
The first evening I got out of ICU and was adjusting - poorly - to the idea of not one or even two but three new roommates, HB was sitting with me and holding my hand when the nice old lady in the bed next to me asked us a question.
"What are you two, fags or somethin'?" the old doll politely inquired.
"We sure are!" HB said immediately. "How'd you guess?"
"After you kissed him I was hoping he wasn't your father," she said, or something to that effect. I was still sorta woozy at the time. "What'd he do, molest you?"
HB showed his teeth in a way that I guess you could call a grin and gritted out, "No, I stalked him over the internet."
"What's he in for? AIDS?" she chirped. What a gem. We really don't take care of some of our seniors in the manner they deserve, don't you think?
"He attacked six great big guys that were rude to us," HB answered. "Huge guys. Unbelievable fight." By this time, the two guys and one woman in the beds opposite ours were chuckling loud enough to be heard.
Granny ignored them. "They beat him up?"
"Nope," HB said. "He killed five of them and the cops beat him up on the way to the station. The other guy lived, but he's still in the ICU. Maybe he'll be your next roommate, wouldn't that be fun?"
"All you kids are mouthy little bastards," she muttered and turned away from us. "Don't know why anybody would want to molest you anyway."
Right about then I reached over and raked the curtain between our beds shut and thought I was gonna choke to death from trying to laugh. HB grinned and pounded me on the back and damn near drowned me with a bendy straw. Believe it or not, that was the most fun I had the whole entire time.
Now, though, I'm a free man for at least the moment, and I'm in Erie with my son and daughter while I get mentally ready to face the Big Woods again. Randy has been watching Robbie like a hawk, and while Robbie's been an angel by all accounts he's clearly tired of surveillance. HB won't admit it, but he needs a break from me, he needs to go to the movies with Amber and to the library and maybe even to the local theater, where they're doing Nunsense for Christmas. The lake hasn't frozen over yet, and it's possible to walk up and down the freezing cold beaches on the Peninsula, something he loves to do. I want to spend some time with J and Amber, and maybe try somehow to see the rest of my kids too. I'll be emailing and posting and catching up with all of you, at least for a little while.
For now, though, good night. I'm still groggy and stiff and irritable, and it will take me a while to snap back into shape, too.

Title lyric from "I'm Alive" by the Electric Light Orchestra (from Xanadu).

I Hope You Don't Mind That I Put Down In Words

2008-11-26T17:35:00.003-05:00

I had a big day today.
It started with HB rolling me out of bed at 7 AM. I protested that I had to try to get Robbie out on bail today, and he told me he knew that, but we were going somewhere first. That somewhere turned out to be the doctor's office, where Dr. Zed gave me a cursory examination and then left me cooling my heels in the exam room for a good half an hour. When the door opened, it wasn't the doctor, but HB; he took me to the front desk, dealt with some paperwork, and then shepherded me to the car.
"Home now?" I said hopefully.
"Nope." And that was all he said.
He drove me to the drugstore, and then made me wait in the car for another interminable half an hour. He finally came out with a big white pharmacy bag.
When he got back in the car, he gave me a measuring look and asked how I felt.
"Tired." I might have even been a little snappy about it. He just nodded and brought out a bottled water (the flavored kind, naturally) and then dug in his pharmacy bag and began producing bottles of pills.
"Antibiotic," he said to the first one, a great big pink pill. "Down the hatch." Then another horsepill, this one yellow-tan. "Megavitamin." I swallowed it down. He held up yet another bottle, but didn't open it. "If you start to hurt, you tell me right away, and I'll give you one of these."
"What is it?" I didn't snap at him that time, for sure.
"Better stuff than you'd get from Robbie, and cheaper. And legal, might I add." He gave me a half-grimace with this last line. "And if you ever even think of getting anything from Robbie again, I'll break your neck. Got me?"
"Got you," I agreed very meekly, and he drove me home.
An hour or so later we were on the road to Erie, where I met up with Robbie's father. I haven't seen him in years, but he still looks great to me. Back in the day, he and I were... very close, and let's leave it at that. He and I met with the bail bondsman, who no doubt thought it very odd that Robbie's father and the guy everyone identifies as Robbie's foster or step father were not only there together but obviously good friends. When we insisted on co-signing the bond, he rolled his eyes but went right along with it.
We picked Robbie up at the jail, and now he's back with us. HB has been nothing but gracious about the whole thing, and for Robbie's part, he first hugged his dad, then hugged me, and then shook HB's hand and apologized, quite handsomely I thought. HB nodded and accepted, and I think that's about the best way that could have gone.
Soon we'll be back on our way to the Big Woods for the giving of thanks and conspicuous gustatory consumption. I feel like a huge weight has lifted from my shoulders - and the back of my aching neck - even though I know the most challenging part is probably still to come.
While Robbie was in the shower, indulging in the joys of privacy, HB came over and put his arms around me, and when I held him against me I thought that I really, actually that I would never let him go. I don't think I've ever been so aware of how very lucky I am to have him, and how very much I don't deserve to have someone so wonderful in my life.
But he is in my life, and I'm not going to let him get away any time soon if I can help it. Of course, given how take-charge he's gotten lately, I may not have a choice: I heard him just a few minutes ago on the phone telling Aaron to double check and make sure that all the guns are in the gun safe.
"What gun safe?" I asked over his shoulder, and he covered the receiver long enough to tell me that he'd borrowed my late brother's from my sister-in-law, a Baptist so rabid she thinks gay marriage is going to crumble western civilization single-handedly.
"Make sure you get all the dope in there too," HB told Aaron. "Lock it up and put the key where I told you."
"Where's that?" I interrupted.
"Never you mind, mister," he told me sternly. "Enjoy having Robbie home."
I will, too, but not as much as I'll enjoy having a holiday at home with so many people I love, HB most of all. I can only hope that your turkey day is as good as mine - although I doubt there's that much happy to go around in the world.

Title lyric from "Your Song" by Elton John.

Now There's No Point In Placing The Blame

2008-11-25T16:42:00.000-05:00

After two days of worry, no sleep and little food, I am sick.
I didn't even realize it. I knew that my head hurt, my neck hurt, that I sweated when the house was cold and froze next to the fire. I knew that everything seemed to have taken a wrong turn, and that where I was happy or at least content a few days ago I now felt light-headed, despondent, unable to think or plan or see my way clearly ahead. I knew that the kids looked at me funny when I almost burnt the pork chops for dinner last night, that Randy caught me at the door with the saw in my hand and made me let him cut wood for the fire, that after I complained that I was thirsty and nothing tasted right Amber came with a huge jug of juice and poured glass after glass of it into me. Still, I didn't realize.
Then early this afternoon HB came into the family room and built up the fire with the stove open, piling on the hickory logs Randy cut until the air smelled faintly of smoke like incense and the bright orange light splashed into every corner like molten gold. He put his arm around me, and then pulled back, showing me his hand. It glistened with moisture, sweat from the back of my neck.
"My God," he said, but I didn't listen.
Instead, I spoke. I felt like I had to say what was on my mind, what kept circling inside my head.
"Listen," I asked him, "I'll have the money for Robbie's bail together tomorrow. He's going to have to come back here, and I'm going to have to watch him. He can't be in Erie, there's just too much temptation there. I'll have to watch him. I'll have to watch him constantly, and fight with him, and he still won't listen."
"Bigg-"
But I wouldn't let him talk. "You don't need that. You weren't born into this life, you didn't choose it, and you shouldn't have to pay for his mistakes or mine. You shouldn't have to pay the penalty for crimes you didn't commit. You should take this as your chance to get away. Your golden opportunity. If you leave me it will break me in two, but if you go now I'll never say a hard word against you. This is your chance. You have to take it."
"What are you talking about?" He was puzzled. "I was born as gay as you were."
"No, not that. The street." Street, you understand, is the most common euphemism for the life that Robbie and Duff and the Slav and Randy and I all lead, the fraternal (and sororal) community of those whom class and circumstance and addictive inclination trap at the bottom of the social ladder but refuse to meekly observe the constraints of law and poverty. The ones who make their own rules, provide their own sustenance by whatever means necessary, and despise the ones who embrace civility and society and the enforcement of law. "I wasn't born for this life, but I knew it was for me right away. Robbie was born into it and he'll never escape. Our lives are about hustle and dope and jail, but yours isn't. You can still get away. Don't you understand? This is your chance to escape."
"Oh, stop it," HB said crossly, and leaned forward to wipe more cold sweat from my face. It was dripping out of my beard. "Stop talking like that. You need to go to bed."
"No," I protested, "I can't-" But I lost my words to coughing. "I gotta... I need to..."
"Here," and he held a glass of something cool up to my lips. I drank, and it soothed my throat, but then it went down wrong somehow and I coughed again, a lot of it running down my chin and soaking my already wet shirt.
I dimly heard HB yelling for Randy over my spluttering. A minute later they were half-lifting me, and then they got me up the stairs into bed.
"I'm not going to sleep," I told HB, petulant like a little kid, and then I made a liar of myself and dropped right off.
I woke up about fifteen minutes ago, and the whole house was silent. I got up and groped my way through the early winter twilight, not turning on any lights, just trying to find someone. I called for Aaron, for HB, for Randy, but nobody answered. I don't know where they all went, but nobody's home. There was only an insistent chirping: a cell phone, I'm not even sure whose, lying on the dining room table.
I picked it up. "Hello?"
"Bigg," Robbie's voice was distorted, but I recognized it nevertheless. "Hey, they let me use a regular phone because the jail payphones won't connect to a cell. Do you have the bail money together?"
"I'm working on it," I told him. "I hope to have you out by the end of the week."
He groaned. "Oh, man, I really want to be out Thursday. It's Thanksgiving."
"I'll do my best," I promised. "How are you holding up?"
"I'm misbehaving and making it hard on myself," he replied cheerfully. "The screws are dickheads, just like you said." I heard someone near him clear his throat loudly, and guessed that one of the guards - the screws - was standing right there and already regretting his decision to let Robbie use the phone. "I gotta get outta here, Bigg. I'm getting really sick."
"I know, I know," I replied, and I do know. Oh, how very well I do know. "I gotta work with your mom and dad and grandmother and everything, though, and that's not easy."
"Fuck," Robbie growled. "If that dumb little bitch just woulda got her headlight fixed--" Hurry it up, the man's voice urged from somewhere near Robbie. "Listen, just tell 'em that I'll have them all payed back within a week. You know I can make the money back."
"You can't," I said. "They'll be watching you. You're going to have to stay with me and keep your head down. You-" but I had to cough again.
"I know what to do," Robbie said impatiently. "Just get me outta here, will ya?"
Then there was a clunk and a metallic scraping as the phone changed hands. "This is officer W-," the voice told me. "Are you Robert's father?"
"Not biologically," I managed to gasp, "but I'm responsible."
"Then you should tell him to follow the rules," the voice reprimanded. "He's gonna get himself extra time if he doesn't settle down."
"Can I talk to him again?" I was very polite.
"Not now," the voice replied, and there was another clunk and then the dead buzz of an empty line.
"Damn," I said to the little phone, to the empty house. "Damn it. Damn him. Why?" Of course, there was no answer, and after a minute I snapped the phone shut. I went through the cold rooms - the fire was long out - and while I found the laptop open and buzzing on J's bed, there was nobody in the house. So I picked up the laptop and carried it back to my warm bed cubby, the only place in the house not only still warm but sweltering from the electric heater. I climbed into the bed, and I wrote here everything that I could remember from the last few hours, and now I'm going to go back to sleep. Maybe they'll all be back when I wake up. Maybe HB took me at my word, however fevered and incoherent, and when he left the others went with him. I don't know.
All I know is that my house is icy cold and cavernously empty without them, and that I ache and sweat and shiver still. The day after tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and even though I know I should get up and take the store-bought turkey out of the freezer to thaw and set the wild turkey marinating in olive oil and sage, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to stay in my bed.
I guess I'm just not thinking straight, because right now I'm finding precious little to be thankful for, even though that sane little voice relegated to the back of my head chants a list of blessings that I'm profaning. So what?
My head hurts, I just want to sleep now.

Title lyric from "Frozen" by Madonna.

I Messed Up My Entire Life

2008-11-24T15:36:00.003-05:00

Robbie was angry with me. Robbie felt like he had been terribly insulted, and that I should have sided with him. Robbie doesn't always deal with his anger well, so...
First he went somewhere and obtained a bottle of liquor - cheap rotgut stuff, I suspect, but even that is a pretty good trick in Pennsylvania on a Sunday, when liquor sales are illegal. He proceeded to get good and roaring drunk. I tried to reason with him when he came home, and that only pissed him off more. At some point, he figured out where I'd hid his gun and snuck it out of the house in his coat. Then, he headed for the city to score. I can't say I know what he was getting any more surely than I know what he had come home pretty well blasted on the night before - but it sure wasn't booze, I'll tell you that.
The young lady who drove him had one or two beers in the car, and Robbie helped himself to one or both... and in the process, he spilled some. They young lady who drove him also had a headlight out, which is a minor traffic infraction in Pennsylvania. They got pulled over in a small town adjacent to the city that is notorious for having very... efficient law enforcement, unlike the Big Woods. The car smelled of alcohol, Robbie was acting 'fidgety and suspicious,' and they knew the driver was too young to drink. They asked Robbie to exit the car. They breathalyzed him, and then they patted him down. Of course they found the gun. Loaded, naturally.
So, as I write this, Robbie is in the county jail on two firearms charges and one underage intoxication charge. I have tracked down his mother, father, stepfather and grandmother and talked to each one of them - it was extremely necessary, since none of them will speak to each other. Then I called a bail bondsman and started making arrangements. With a little luck, I'll have him back with us by the end of the week... For awhile, anyway.
HB sat and watched me make phone calls and notes while he smoked a cigarette. In a pause between calls, he said, "What do you think will happen to him? What kind of sentence will he get?"
"It could go a couple ways," I answered as honestly as I could. I was so tired. I hadn't slept since the night before - and I still haven't, so forgive me if my prose line isn't all it could be. "He might get a short sentence, six months to two years, and he'll have to do one third of the minimum. He might get parole with time served and then probation. Or, in a fanciful best-case scenario, he might get years of probation. It depends on so many things." I waved my hand around at him and shrugged.
"Are you guys talking about Robbie?" Aaron asked timidly from the doorway behind us. I nodded and beckoned him over. I told him everything that I knew and told him that he should write Robbie a letter right away and I'd put it in the mail with mine and his mother's.
"This is so awful," Aaron commented. "I feel so bad for him! Is there anything he can do when he gets out to make his sentence lighter?"
I shrugged again. "If he's smart - or if he'd listen to me, which amounts to the same thing - he'll go straight into an alcohol rehab program. Judges love that."
"Do they," HB said, and crushed out his smoke. His tone of voice made me look at him, startled. "So that's what he should do if he was smart and listened to you? I think if you were smart you'd go right in there with him and hold his hand." He was angry, and I wasn't precisely sure why. I mean, yes, I get that he thinks I am at least partly culpable (and probably entirely, big brave me didn't really want to ask) for Robbie's behavior. Maybe he's right, maybe I am. God knows there are plenty of days when I feel like I only have to be in the general vicinity of things to make them fuck up. Right now I'm operating on the same rationale I gave all of his family: the situation is what it is and we can all sit down and take turns pointing the finger at each other and saying I-told-you-so after we get him out. Until then we have a job to do.
So there you have it: Robbie's in jail, HB's angry at me and disappointed in me, the rest of the kids are in shock and I'm trying to pull everything together. Hope I don't fuck this up too.

Title lyric from "Because I Got High" by Afroman.

When I Say I Love You, You Say 'You Better'

2008-11-23T21:45:00.000-05:00

Why do you never see the big conflicts coming far enough ahead to avoid them?
We all sat down to breakfast this morning around nine thirty. Everyone was in a pretty good mood, especially since (for a change) they all went to bed at a relatively decent hour. Everyone, that is, except Robbie, who looked like ten miles of rough road. He got in last night around 3 AM, and from the look of his eyes he was still at least an hour from coming down off whatever he came home high on. I couldn't see the inside of his elbow, or I'd have made a relatively educated guess as to what that was.
I set down a big plate on the table and sat down. I was actually feeling rather queasy, but I had my cup of tea and some dry toast and I was looking forward to listening to the kids chatter. So of course that's when the shit hit the fan, so to speak.
"French toast?" Robbie said petulantly. He sounded like a kid whose mother has proposed dressing up for Sunday School. "I fucking hate french toast. Anybody ever tell you that you cook like a fucking french pouf, Bigg?"
That's when HB stood up, his thighs scraping his chair backwards. He reached across the table and picked the top slice of toast off Robbie's plate - and slapped it right in the middle of Robbie's forehead. It stuck there for a second, partially obscuring Robbie's astonished face, and then it slid slowly down over his face and fell off his chin, leaving a snail-trail of pecan syrup behind it. Exclamations broke out all around, and Andrea shrieked with involuntary laughter.
"Maybe you'd rather wear it, then," HB said.
Robbie stood up fast enough to knock his own chair over and might have tried to come around the table if Randy hadn't been sitting next to him. Robbie's maybe five two or three; Randy's about six three or four, and deadlifts about half again as much as Robbie weighs. He snagged the back of Robbie's sweatshirt and dragged him backwards with one hand, never losing his own astonished expression.
As for me? Paint me flabbergasted. I had no idea this little confrontation was even coming. No idea.
"Uh, honey? Why don't you go on upstairs and I'll be right up?" I said, and I was proud of how calm I sounded - considering my heart was thundering in my ears.
HB pointed his stiff index finger in Robbie's face. "You want to bring it?" he said. His face was dead pale, except of course for the oval spot of color on each cheek. I've never seen him so furious. "Bring it then, you sawed-off little bastard."
"HB," I said, "go upstairs."
He pushed past me, still making his hard face at Robbie, and a second later I heard his feet pounding up the stairs.
"That's it!" Robbie roared, and reached in his pocket. He slapped his little derringer on the table between us. "I love you, Bigg, but I'm gonna kill your little boyfriend there."
I looked down at his derringer. "Really?" I said gravely. "Because you're gonna hafta kill me first."
Robbie gaped at me. "He means more to you than me?"
I held up my index finger - wait - and turned to reach into the cereal cupboard above the stove, a step behind us. I grabbed my gun - my grandmother's Colt pistol - and turned to slap it down on the table next to his derringer. "I love you, Robbie," I said, still just as grave. "You know I do. But before you raise a hand to him, I'll cut you down like a rabid dog." I glanced down at the guns on the table, lying silent and deadly between syrup and sugar bowl and extra silver. "Count on it." I looked back up at him.
The silence after I said this was huge, thundering. I could hear the floorboards creaking overhead as HB paced our bedroom. Robbie's face was a study in stoned hurt.
J cleared his throat. "Um... guys, this is crazy."
"Shuttup," Amber said, waving her hand in his face, clearly absorbed in this confrontation.
Everyone around the table was standing. Randy and Brad looked miserable. Amber was powerfully excited; I actually think she might have watched me shoot Robbie with the same fascinated expression. J looked stricken; Andrea was redfaced, trying not to meet my eyes.
Just about then Aaron came wandering in, stretching and yawning in his pajama pants. "Oh, yes!" he said. "French toast!" He took in the solemn tableau around the table and stopped, suddenly alert. "What's going on?"
"Shhh!" Amber hushed him with an impatient wave. "Dad's gonna shoot Robbie!"
"I'm not going to shoot anybody," I said, giving her a hard look. "You mind?"
I turned back to Robbie. "Drop this. Now. Got it?"
He stared at me. Then he turned, kicked the wall several times hard enough to rattle the whole house, and stalked out. A moment later, the front door slammed.
The collective sigh of relief around the table was enough to stir the napkins in their holder. One by one, they all sagged back into their chairs. Aaron still stood in the doorway, goggling at me as I scooped up the guns and put them away.
"All of you," I said, turning my finger around the table, "are not going to mention this. Ever."
"HB's just pissed because Robbie got you stuff yesterday when you promised him you wouldn't do that anymore," J supplied helpfully. "You should go up there and make sure he's okay."
I stared him down. "Telling me how to manage things?" I asked him. He dropped his eyes and muttered no to the tabletop. "All right then," I growled, and left the room. As I headed upstairs, I heard a muted buzz of conversation resume. I could just imagine what they were saying, but I had more important things on my mind.
"HB," I called as I headed up to our room. "You okay?"

Title lyric from "You Better You Bet" by The Who.

Under The Covers Staying Safe And Warm

2008-11-21T23:07:00.003-05:00

Today was an insanely busy day. David came to see me first thing this morning. It was nice to see him, and we had a really good laugh over a common acquaintance's very drunken and public misfortune which made the front page of the paper yesterday. J is staying here for at least a few days; I am tiptoeing on eggshells because he and Jill are on a 'break,' and when I tried to console him he reminded me that I'd never liked her. but I love you, honey, I replied, and I hate to see you look so miserable. I'm working hard to pamper his blues away, but I imagine that if this doesn't work a few visits from his high school love interests should do the trick. I only have his best interests at heart, y'know. Amber is also, as of nine o'clock tonight, my guest for the weekend. She brought home the news that she makes three in a row: Robbie and Katherine have split up, J and Jill are on a break, and now Amber and Ricky are officially over as well. Tonight my family room's full of late teens and early twenties as my kids look over potential new victims. As Aaron so cattily observed, rebound is in the air.
Meanwhile I am worried about HB. I wouldn't exactly say we argued, but we did have a pretty intense discussion earlier. He seems stressed, and I think it's over his plans for us to live in Erie. I know that while he's happy to live with J or Amber or even Brad, he really thought he'd seen the last of Robbie for awhile. Now Robbie is confidently talking about how he'll live with us, and I'm afraid J and I just did the anti-nod and said well, okay without even consulting HB. Worse, he kept his mouth shut about it and suffered in silence. It took Amber to point out to me what should have been a glaringly obvious mistake, and she also took it upon herself to rectify it without even consulting me. She marched up to Robbie (in front of HB), tapped him on the shoulder and said: you can't move in with Dad in Erie because I'm going to live there and I don't want you to. Robbie tried to give me his stricken, pleading look, and Amber told him it was final and if he tried to change my mind she'd punch him in the stomach. For some reason, this approach frequently works for her. For the record, I'd've socked Robbie in the stomach to keep even the thought of him living with us from bothering HB, but Amber beat me... well, to the punch, y'know.
So now that the kids are cranking it up downstairs, we're going to retreat up a floor or two and I'm going to do my best to make it up to him. Our bed seems extra warm, extra soft, and smells just right to me ever since we got back from Chicago, and cold nights like tonight were just made for curling up together. That is, of course, if I can lure him away from the party; right now some slightly tipsy young lady is attempting to demonstrate a new dance step for my son or inviting him to impregnate her from an awkward angle, I can't quite decipher which, and HB's laughing so hard he's almost crying. It's great to see him happy, and I want him to have all of that he needs.
I'm sure he'll come and find me sooner or later, and until then I can wait.
Evening, everybody.

Title lyric from "Bubbly" by Colby Caillat.

I Scare Myself To Death, That's Why I Keep On Running

2008-11-20T16:26:00.000-05:00

As soon as we passed the dirt roads on Concord Ridge all signs of people vanished. We have about two feet of snow on the ground, more in the narrow folds and ravines where the wind dumps drifts like clay on the wheel and then carves them into aerodynamic sculpture. The pine trees are big cones of solid white with just a little bristle of green needles showing here and there. The deciduous trees had their fingery branches full of snowballs. It's white everywhere in the Big Woods, the ground and the trees and bushes and the snow always falling. Even the sky is so pale and washed that it looks more gray-blue-white than cerulean.
I had pulled a little ahead, so I reigned my gelding back and waited for HB. The horses belonged to a neighbor of Duff's, who lent them without a single question. They were really placid, even for big horses; I'm no equestrian, but I have noticed that it's the smaller horses that are fiery and nervous, while the big ones are just calm and agreeable. HB took the mare, and she was so stolid I half expected her to fall asleep if we stopped for too long. I just sat on mine, feeling how warm he was between my legs, stroking his untidy mane and taking in the winter world.
Then HB came over the crest of the little slope to my left. He had the hood of his parka turned back, and his long hair whipped around his shoulders and pooled in the hollow of his neck. His breath was smoking in the cold air, and the fur trim on his parka made a smoky gold halo behind his darker hair. I know I say it all the time, but he really is just plain a beautiful young man. Watching him move with the rise and fall of the mare's back as she trotted down the slope to us, the way his tense thighs held him almost to a standing posture in the stirrups... It suddenly explained some things I've never understood about women's feelings on men and romance. I think I'll treasure the memory of how he looked today for the rest of my life. My hero on horseback.
Thing is, he was a little put-out with me last night. J came (without his girlfriend, o happy day!) out for the night, and several of his friends and of course my boys stayed up until after midnight. For some reason - I think it was a young lady, the girlfriend of one of J's college chums, who brought it up when she realized that HB and I were a couple - the subject of gay marriage got dragged into the conversation. I've pretty much given up drinking since my stomach can't take it, but I had two small ones last night and it loosened my tongue enough for me to blurt out my real thoughts. Big mistake.
What I said was this: I would never oppose legalizing gay marriage, but I don't really strongly support it, either. In fact, I think it's sort of wrong. Not because of any tiresome moral objection - you should surely know me better than that - but because I look at the current state of gay relations as being a kind of Eden, the sort of thing that straight people are moving toward and will probably be more happy in the long run emulating. I'm aware of the legal entitlements that come with a governmentally recognized relationship, but at the same time I think that letting the serpents of divorce lawyers and the equal division of property and palimony into our happy, childish garden we'll - as a collective people - regret it bitterly.
HB took me immediately aside and gave me the rough side of tongue over that one, I can tell you. He took what I'd said to mean that I don't want to marry him, when (as I protested) I already consider us married, wed, signed sealed delivered. I don't need a tax break or a framed certificate to validate that. He said that I only feel that way because of my wife, and that I was painting my anger over the wreck of my marriage onto a much wider issue. He pointed out - as if he needed to! - that he's not D. It was about then that I realized I needed to reassure him way more than I needed to defend my position, so I did some backtracking and foot-swallowing. I think it worked, though he went to bed surly and arose grumpy still.
I think he's pretty much over it because of something I overheard this morning. Maybe he will read this here, although with his poor fancy phone a victim of the fire it might take awhile. I was standing in the kitchen, and the boys were in the little library room where Robbie does his tattoos, and those two rooms share a wall. I'm pretty deaf, but I definitely got the gist.
J and HB were looking through the local papers for a rental house in Erie. They were talking about how many bathrooms would be necessary, and what neighborhoods would be best, and whether or not they were close to the Cancer Center on the west side. I heard HB mention in particular the class schedule for his alma mater almost as if he were considering taking classes there again in the winter/spring semester. They mentioned living with Amber, with Brad, with Robbie. They talked about all the accomodations they'd make for me like kids planning how they'd build a clubhouse.
I don't know how to feel about it, to tell you the absolute unvarnished truth. I've been making my peace with leaving the house for at least the duration of the winter, but the last place I wanted to go was to Erie. I know J's in school there, and Amber, and if that's really where HB would want to go on to school... I dunno. I've been trying to be philosophical and resigned, but I might just be a little too selfish to gracefully swallow the location without a struggle. Erie is just more of what I have to contend with in the Big Woods, plus higher prices, more legal complications and no state lines between me and my delightful estranged spouse. When I mentioned some of these things to Aaron (who is skipping school yet again today) he said, it's always got to be about what you want, huh? That might actually have offended me if I wasn't so acutely aware that I'm the one who encouraged him to be thoughtfully honest with me.
But now that I've warmed up again after getting completely frozen out riding over half the county, I have to go and pay attention to all of them again. Play the patriarch, keep the tables clean and the food rolling out. Bake another couple loaves of bread, which were a giant hit last night. Maybe even make a big bread pudding if I can get someone to bring home dried cranberries and raisins from the store. Do the country holiday thing in my snowdrifted winter house, try to have a normal good time in the rooms of ruin.
I hope you are all as warm and busy and surrounded by people who love you as I am this afternoon.

Title lyric from "Feel" by Robbie Williams.

What Heaven Brought You And Me Cannot Be Forgotten

2008-11-19T14:00:00.000-05:00

So, now that I have slept for eight hours in my own bed, now that I'm not half crazy with the fourteen hour drive and being awake for thirty six hours straight, maybe I can tell you a little better what it was like.
A city like Erie does nothing to prepare you for a real city like Chicago. Erie's idea of a traffic jam includes sitting still for five whole minutes at a time, pounding the steering wheel and cursing every other driver on the road. Chicago's traffic seemed to me like a video game where your opponent is shooting cars instead of bullets at you... with an Uzi. Erie's downtown could have fit nicely into some of Chicago's smaller neighborhoods three times over. There are probably more people on the sidewalks around the Art Institute and DePaul than are gainfully employed within the Erie city limits. The whole time I was there, every time I turned around or looked up, it hit me like a mallet between the eyes: Chicago is big. Too big.
I always think of HB as a city kid, and it took going to real city for him to point out to me that I'm not exactly correct. True, he grew up in the suburbs around a really big, really old city just a hop skip and a jump from New York, but the boundaries he did that growing up in defined a place much more like Erie than Chicago, much more suburban than urban. He loved the big city things like the Museum of Science and Industry, Washington Park, the History Museum, the Aquarium... But when we were on the crowded sidewalk together and the cold wind came smiting down across the lake, he shivered and said, "You know, I don't really like it here."
I was surprised. "I thought you liked the city? Big cities, that is?"
He looked up at the buildings towering over us. We had just gotten off the El and I think we were on State Street, or maybe Lake Street, anywhere very close to the Sears tower. To a country boy like me, it seemed unnecessarily tall and vast. Arrogant, even.
He shivered again, and wrapped his scarf around his neck. "This isn't a city. It's a monstrosity," he said, and I hugged him right there in front of God and everybody.
He gave me a hard look, but he hugged me back with one arm. "You insisted that we come here, and now you're happy that I don't like it. You contradict yourself much more consistently and you'll turn into a girl."
The fact is that I did insist. Chicago has some very fine schools, places that HB's middle-of-the-road grades and slow-but-determined attitude could blossom into real mastery... if he wanted them to, of course. I thought maybe being in a big city might just seduce him into the wide world out there, and then he could drag me along whether I really wanted to go or not.
Plus (of course) the Slav and Duff bankrolled my trip in return for making a connection there, which made Chicago convenient if not my first choice. I think that's why I only gave Duff and the Slav half of what they wanted, their big score but not a lasting connection. The way Robbie and I left that deal allows no possibility of further transaction, to say the least. Not what they wanted, but as I look at it, win/win for me. As Lem was just singing to me, they got the money, hey! You know they got away. I will allow myself a moment of smugness in that it went just the way I planned it: the big city player thought that he knew exactly what they were getting in the deal with skinny, cracked-out looking me, and instead of fooling me I fooled him. Now the trick will be keeping that smugness from developing into foolhardiness and pride, for me and for Robbie. It goeth before a fall, y'know. HB's nose is still out of joint that I planned all this without telling him, that I used Robbie when this is just the sort of criminally reckless (or maybe recklessly criminal?) behavior he absolutely glories in, and that I took such an excessively large risk for no other return than money. From my perspective, though, I got more than money; I know that HB liked the things about Chicago that I hoped he would, didn't like most of the things about Chicago that I hoped he wouldn't, and still forgave me for putting myself in harm's way. Or at least mostly forgave, anyway. He held me in his arms last night and told me that he loves me, and that's close enough for now.
I know now, though, that this house of mine in the country isn't where he needs to spend this decade of his life. The years between twenty one and thirty are in some ways the best years we get, and I want him to have so much more than my backwards Big Woods compatriots and the comforts of a slow and uneventful life. Those comforts are better suited to the years I'm entering and hope to live through now, but I'll still give them up for him. I think I'd give up just about anything for him.
It's holiday time now, though, and home comforts are part of the holiday tradition. Duff is taking HB, Ricky, and (of all people) Aaron out turkey hunting this weekend, and we will have a deep-fried wild turkey to go with the twenty eight pound mutant turkey I have waiting in the deep freeze. Today I am cooking beef stew on the woodstove in a five gallon Dutch oven, and the whole house smells of beef broth and potatoes and bay leaf. The electric company sent around a local tree service to trim some of the snow-damaged trees on our road, and for a taste of what we brought back from Chi-town they cut me a week's worth of stove-length logs from my neighbors' property and stacked it in my driveway. Tomorrow HB and I have a date to go horseback riding in the deep snow, big Percheron sized draft horses with hooves the size of dinner plates. The kids from up the street will be sled riding on my hill this afternoon after school, and Aaron and Brad will probably be right out there with them. I might even go myself. If I must give up my country comforts, I want to wallow in all of them that I can while they're still available, y'understand.
So now I have to go and clean, and stir my stew, and maybe get that wad of frozen bread dough out and bake a couple loaves to go with the stew for dinner. I have already promised my wonderful, comfortable, cloud-fluffy bed that it can have its way with me for naptime this afternoon. I have some emails to answer (I have lots to say, Doris!) and some more posts to write, and I'm in absolutely no hurry. The snow is coming down outside in big fluffy goose feathers, and they haven't plowed down as far as my house for the last week, so the house is one big oblong drift with doors. I have to keep reminding myself how much I hate the snow and cold when it's so damn pretty.
Good day, everyone.

Title lyric from "Southern Cross" by Crosby, Stills and Nash.

This World I'm Bound To Ramble

2008-11-19T05:41:00.000-05:00

My breath steams in the cold wind off the lake. The streetlights are orange-yellow, the same as in the city by my own more familiar lake Erie; they tint the shadows on the snow an unnatural yellow-brown-purple, like the last stage of a faded bruise. The shadows on the snow at home in the Big Woods are sky blue, shell pink, aubergine and magenta. Pure colors, spiritual pastels. Not this oily, soiled, dirty shit that falls on the Windy City.
Finally HB pulls up to the intersection in his SUV.
"Sorry," he says immediately when I jump in and slam the door. "I got lost. Englewood's goddamn big, y'know?"
"S'cool." I jerk my chin at the street. "You should probably drive now. Not fast, but get us outta here." I wait until we've cleared a few blocks. "Left here." Then another few. "Here," I say, and toss him a folded wad of bills. "Put that in your pocket."
He glances down, feels the weight of the folded bills. "You didn't get it?"
"Oh, I got it." I point down at a large old boat, some sort of Cadillac, turning down a narrow drive between high buildings. "Turn here."
"Yeah?" he tosses a glance at me.
"Yeah." I'm sure.
He turns, and less than ten yards into the alley I tell him to stop. He does, but he gives me a hard-lipped, angry look. I just lean back and unlock the rear seat door behind me. Smooth as silk, Robbie slides in and bangs the door lock down behind him.
"Go, man!" Robbie hisses. "Go go go go!"
HB lays cautiously on the gas, the tires making a minute screech on the slush-slick pavement, and we roll down the concrete canyon to the first right.
"Here," I tug HB's elbow automatically, and we shoot back onto the main drag. Robbie and I have retained our natural head for directions: left here, right there, around the corner, and soon we are back in Hyde Park. I direct HB back another alley, and sure enough we are back in the parking lot without having passed under the security camera.
"So you didn't get it," HB says with the engine shut off. "We came all this way for nothing."
"Oh, I got it." I can't help sounding smug. To Robbie, I casually say, "How did you leave him?"
"Breathing," Robbie says, and the two of us helplessly crack up in falsetto laughter as HB glares at us. Alas, we are shameless. Robbie tosses a square lump into my lap, and then riffles bills by his ear with a self-satisfied grin. Bad, yes. But desperation is apparently the same all over.
HB pulls out the wad of bills from his pocket and weighs it in his hand. He's asked me twice already, but I know he doesn't believe me. He should have more faith. How does that verse go? I can do all things through God which strengtheneth me. I can use all the strength I can get, from God or his opposite or any independent party throwing their hat in the ring. I'm an equal opportunity agent that way, you could say. "So you got it all," HB says, "And you have all the Slav's money, too. How does that work?"
"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," Robbie replies smugly before I can say anything, and then he and I have to do that fist pound thing all the kids are crazy about. He was such a good boy, y'know.
Exiting the vehicle, we go back to our temporarily borrowed quarters and count our fiduciary blessings. We have everything we were given money to get, plus the money we were actually given. Vitam age in libertate aut morere, I think it goes. By midnight, all our belongings are packed again, and by six AM we are halfway back to the Big Woods.
With Robbie snoring in the backseat, HB says to me: "So... Did Chi-town strike you as someplace you'd want to live?"
With six days of Chicago living under my belt, I have to snort. "What, more snow, more crime, more cops and higher prices for everything? Not hardly."
He seems relieved as he crouches over the steering wheel. He won't let me drive for more than an hour or so at a time, plus he's sucked down caffeinated energy drinks like water, so I know he's gotta piss sometime soon. "Want to try someplace else? Warmer? Y'know, more south?"
This makes me grin in the light from the dashboard dials, which probably make my teeth look green. So be it. "How does southwest sound? I bet they got killer deals on dope in Phoenix or Taos or San Diego." I don't really want to hang out in the deep south for long, even though I really love those little town in Louisiana and Mississippi that time has completely passed by. We need to find a safe harbor, and fast. Those places aren't really too good for two guys like us, especially when we're trying not to stick out.
"How much did you make off this?" he finally asks.
"Everything Duff and the Slav sent with us, plus everything dude had in his pockets." I give him my matter-of-fact look. "I think Robbie even took a couple small things that looked like they might be worth a buck or two back home, too." I know, I know. But we are trying to survive here, people. I mean, really. It's them or us.
HB does the side-to-side Big Woods head bob that means maybe so, maybe not. It's a sort of gesture of equivocation, like a shrug or a half-knod. "Okay, then..." he finally says, "we'll have at least enough for gas money to drive someplace warm, right?"
You have to admire his spirit, don't you? I lay my hand on his knee. "That's right. We'll buy gas, and we'll drive someplace warm. Some place where the sun shines, the living is cheap and the snow never falls."
"Olé," HB says ironically. "As long as we don't have to pass any borders or show any passports."
I want to commend him on his attitude, but I'm tired. My stomach has been grinding a lot lately, in an all-too-familiar way, and sometimes I have to hurry away from him and puke some place where he won't see. Such is the way of things.
But now, we have arrived home, and I am once again in the Big Woods with Aaron and Brad and Ricky and Amber and J and Tom. My house is warm, and smells of the pine and ash logs burning in the wood stove. The wiring is at least halfway fixed, and now I have the money to get more renovation work done before we leave again. I expect to at least celebrate the day of turkey slaughter with my oldest kids, and my adopted kids, and HB (of course) under the roof of my ancestral home before we have to leave again and try someplace new. HB and I are going to sleep tonight in our familiar bed, and with the lake effect snow (currently two plus feet on the ground, yipee, plus nothing but a foot a day in the future forecast) I don't expect our cozy family holiday will be much interrupted by the evil forces of the outside world.
I am still trying as hard as I can to get better, to recover, to become a new man, and I am ignoring any pains or ills or signals to the contrary. I want to find a new place for HB and I, a new beginning. I believe I can still make one.
Please believe that with me, if you can.

Title lyric from "Man Of Constant Sorrows" by John Hartford.

Even When Your Hope Is Gone, Move Along Just To Make It Through

2008-11-13T10:15:00.004-05:00

"Come on, I want to show you something." HB took me by the hand and led me out of the apartment full of laughing, talking people and out onto the street.
It's never as cold in the city, right at the lakeshore, as it is in the Big Woods. From the people scurrying by in winter coats, gloves and hats and scarves and boots, you'd think it was Alaska. I strolled along next to HB in my autumn jacket, collar unzipped, and enjoyed it. The snow had mostly melted, and the constant foot traffic cleared the sidewalks of slush. It was a beautiful night if you like the city.
"Where are we going?" I finally asked him.
He smiled at me. I think he gets better looking all the time. His face is very slowly losing its softness, becoming harder and squarer as he comes into his prime. His long hair is as glorious as ever. "You'll see," he told me with a wink.
People tell me that prejudice against our kind is the same everywhere. Those people have obviously never spent much time in western Pennsylvania. The casual hatred of 'fags' and 'queers' and 'perverts' colors every viewpoint and informs every turn of speech. Not that we're alone in being the objects of their contempt: race, religion, national origin and being born anywhere but in this sad old historied land all qualify one equally as subhuman. Nevertheless, HB and I have kissed on the street, embraced in parting within full view of the public, and identified each other as 'mine.' I will not say that we have been embraced with open arms, but I do find it interesting that this seems to invite others to express their viewpoints laughingly and openly, as if being unafraid to 'call a spade a spade' makes them somehow enlightened. You fags are no shock to us, their attitudes say. We just laugh at you, and that makes us better than people who jeer, gay bash and commit hate crimes. Aren't we open minded?
These were my thoughts as we walked a few blocks from the party. HB was quiet, too. He so often is; like me, he gets lost in his thoughts. It came almost as a surprise when he tugged at my arm and led me across the street to a looming brick house, one of the anti-Victorians built around the turn of the last century in the better neighborhoods. Prominently displayed in the bay window by the entry was a sign: FOR RENT.
I stood next to him looking up at the brick facade. The ground and second floors were obviously occupied, but the third floor, a jumble of dormers, corner towers and balconies, was dark. The windows were the old lead-mullioned style, arched at the top. Having some experience with these houses and their architectural quirks, I guessed that the apartment behind those windows would be of a fairly good size, and interestingly arranged.
"So what do you think?" he finally asked me.
I shot him a cautious look, but he was still gazing up. "Think about what?" Yes, I knew what he meant, but I was stalling for time.
He gave me a sidewise impatient grimace. "Hm, about what?" He turned his eyes up again. "It's an empty apartment. What do you think I mean?"
"I..." This turned out to be one of those times when I had to grope not only for words, but for what I actually did feel and mean. "I don't know what to think. How could we afford it?"
"I could find a job up here." He thrust his hands into his pockets. "You want to go up and see it?"
"Now?" I looked suspiciously around the dark street. "It's what, nine - ten o'clock? Who shows an apartment at this hour, vampires?"
He chuckled vaguely. "The landlady lives right here on the bottom floor. She'll show it to us." He pointed at the bright yellow glow seeping through the curtained window to our right. "She's clearly still awake."
"I... don't know, HB. This seems like too much." I gestured vaguely, helplessly. "I don't know how it would work."
He nodded, and after a moment led me back to the sidewalk again. "So what are we going to do, then?" he asked as we started slowly walking again. "Go back to the Big Woods? Freeze in the house all winter? Wait for disability to kick in when that could take until next summer?" He shrugged. "We gotta do SOMEthing, you know."
"I know," I agreed. I do know. We do have to do something. I just wish I had an easy answer as to what that should be.
"You wanna go back to Andrea's party?" he asked after while.
"Nah. Let's go back to J's apartment, they'll be gone for at least another two hours. We can take advantage of the empty room."
He nodded thoughtfully. "You know I always want to do that, but... It won't solve anything."
I sighed. "No, it won't." I gave him a brief smile. "Still, let's go."
So we did. But still I am locked in this quandary, and still he waits patiently for me to find my way out of it. Stay or go? Wait or act? Pick a goal and work toward it or stand still and hope for the best? I honestly don't know what to do. What I would really like to do is to go home to the Big Woods, build up a giant fire in the woodstove, sink down into my own warm, soft, familiar smelling bed with him and sleep. Hibernate for the winter. Not think, not worry, not act. Stop feeling like all eyes are on me, waiting for me to make a move when every possible step is taken in the wrong direction. Let the tension and fear dissolve, let the strain on us and on my poor old battered sense of self drain away.
Of course, I don't think I'll get to do that. But I can still wish, right?

Title lyric from "Move Along" by the All American Rejects.

All Those Shadows There Filled Up With Doubt

2008-11-11T08:26:00.004-05:00

I hate cities. Hard to believe how much fun I'm having in spite of that.
Everything is different in the city. The people, the constant stream of people and traffic and light. Concrete and buildings instead of the trees and grass. Still, the snow is the same, and the wind off the lake is the same, and the people still speak with the same accent and want the same things. The difference is not so much the physical context as the mindset.
In the Big Woods, I have a long-founded identity. My face is known. Even those who have never met me can place me; if they haven't heard my name, then we can play the 'I'm related to' game and fix our degree of shared genetic heritage within five minutes. My address has been fixed there for forty years. Here in the city, I find that I am reverting to an earlier, stronger, less complicated self. In the dance of culture and currency that defines predator and prey, I walk on the carnivorous side. I find that it suits me.
Last night J and Amber took me to a college party at an honest-to-god frat house. I expected to be sorely out of place, a fossil, a relic... but within a few conversations I had taken the measure of the room and called the Slav. He sent someone he knows in the city to meet me, and from the simple act of connecting what boys want with the people I know, I made over a hundred dollars in less than twenty minutes. Far from out of place, I was popular. Just think, I started the evening with less than two dollars in my pocket. Truly, America is still the land of opportunity.
HB patiently waited until I was done shearing the happy little lambs, and then we went to a bar, just the two of us. We are, of course, the only ones of my circle of kids old enough to be legally served, after all. The exercise and steriods and perserverant diet have all evidently done me good: HB and I were relentlessly, remorselessly hit on the entire time, both singly and together. Boys just old enough to drink, a couple who were at least a decade older than me, even one of the bartenders. HB, who rarely drinks and even more seldom to excess, was feeling his tequila. I drank water and kept a sharp eye on him. When we danced together he certainly felt less inhibited than he usually does at home when we dance with the kids. The bump and grind he put me through would have reduced coffee beans to espresso in seconds. They practically had to throw us out at last call. A good time, no qualifications.
I know that this is just a transition period. We won't stay here, no matter what happens. I hate the city, and hate even more the idea of moving to an even larger metropolis anywhere that it snows. I have had enough of winter for now. When we talk about it, places like Phoenix and San Francisco and Key West are discussed. He also mentions Provincetown, Ann Arbor, Seattle. I have dismissed these as snowy, snowier, rainy and conducive to suicide. I mentioned New York; he nixed that immediately, and I haven't brought it up again. We will see.
For the time, though, we abide. We are housed, fed, clothed, medicated, frugally monied and cautious. This is a multiple-college town; there are many fresh-faced youngsters here with cash in their pockets, dreams in their heads and easily commodified desires. I do my thing, and it works. The other sheepskin-tailored wolves recognize me as easily as I recognize them.
Robbie will join us today, and together he and I will begin work on securing a real amount of capital. HB is unhappy with my methods as always, but so far we have been too comfortable for his objections to break the surface tension and emerge as obstacles. Perhaps that will remain the case... or not.
For now, I am not Bigg in the Big Woods, but Bigg in the city. I find that there's a difference, and though I will tire of it quickly for now it's absorbing my attention.
All my best, everyone.

Title lyric from "Bad Things" by Jace Everett.

There Has Got To Be A Way

2008-11-08T09:13:00.006-05:00

I am really not sure what to do this time.
This fire came at a bad, bad time for us. So much is going on between me and HB; our relationship is passing through a transition, one of those stages that people who live together go through. We're no longer wading in the shallows of the big love ocean, we're all the way out to deep water now and there's no land in sight. That can be scary stuff, whether you're twenty three or forty... something.
It went like this:
I heard the smoke alarm first, and I was just annoyed to be woken so soon - just after 2 AM - and my only thought was that the boys had made a fire in the woodstove and let it smoke into the house, something I detest. Makes the whole house smell like a campfire. Then I heard Kipper bark, his high, yipping 'come get me' bark. He was actually in the basement at the time. He never barks in the house unless someone is at the door, and that's a very different bark, very basso and threatening. I hurried down the stairs, and noticed in passing that the stairwell was very warm and smelled very strongly of smoke.
"HB!" I bellowed. "Aaron!" They were the only ones in the house at the time. "Get your asses up!"
I ran through the living room, the dining room and kitchen and opened the basement door. Smoke roiled out, and Kipper shot past me almost hard enough to knock me down, yipping and and whining in flat out terror. I heard feet on the stairs, and knew that at least one of them was awake. I grabbed a dishtowel and soaked it in the cold dishwater before I stepped into the basement stairwell and shut the door. I opened the other door at the right that leads outside to let the smoke out and then I ran down the basement stairs. A patch on the east wall and floorboards above was black and smoking, but there were only a few flames that I could see. So, I grabbed the shovel propped in the corner and tied the dishcloth across my face and proceeded to destroy both the shovel and the brand new water lines they put in just a few years ago. Thank god it was PVC and not metal. After the shovel broke, I ran back upstairs and grabbed the hatchet off the porch to finish the job. I managed to get a few clear breaths of air, too, and when I was coughing Aaron and HB realized I hadn't run to use a phone but had still been inside. They came around the house just in time to see me going back down the stairs again.
The water line was right above the fire, and I managed to split it a little in enough places that it was leaking all over the wall, but doing very little for the floor joists. Still, I think that's what slowed it down. I remember that Aaron tried to grab my arm and make me stop trying to put the fire out, and then somebody with gloves on just grabbed both my arms and pretty much dragged me backwards right up the stairs, my bare heels thudding against each step on the way up. That was Andy, one of the local volunteer firemen, and those boys had the whole thing out in no time. HB had gone upstairs, gotten Aaron awake, run outside and called 911 all in the time it took me to get downstairs and start banging on the pipe.
There's a lot of damage to the basement and the back room that has been a bedroom, a library and most recently Robbie's tattoo parlor. But my axe job on the water pipe and the damage to the wiring to the entire house rendered this place at least temporarily uninhabitable.
Minor structure fire was how the local press described it. I got tons of offers to come and stay with people, starting with two of the firemen and running the gamut from David to Duff to an elderly lady who attends my parents' church and has a twenty one room house on the edge of town where she lives all alone. We ended up going with Duff, even Aaron, who caught the schoolbus with Duff's daughter to school the next morning.
I picked Duff because I didn't want to hear everyone in town congratulating me on my luck once again, mostly. Oh, yes, they think I'm lucky, and in their hardheaded analysis I probably was lucky. My house is two centuries old, held together with handmade nails. A house of cards is less flammable, and I heat with an ancient woodstove and smoke and overload the equally ancient wiring on a daily basis. The damage was totted up at less then five thousand dollars, and while I have homeowner's insurance it's part of my mortgage and I don't know whether that money will come to me or go the mortgage company. I do know that as of yesterday an electrician and a contractor have come, surveyed the damage, made extensive repairs and cut off the electric to the upper third of the house. You use them rooms? the electrician asked me. In the summer, yes, I replied. He nodded and said, Then I s'pose I can let that go for right now. Knowing how these things often work, I persisted: But you WILL come and fix it ALL, right? He smiled and said, Fer what they pay me n'hour you bet your ass I will. This leads me to suspect that the money has already gone to the mortgage company, and that they have decided exactly what repairs will be made and how much will be allotted for each: no more than absolutely necessary for the minimum job.
The contractor is still hammering away in there, replacing panelling. They scraped away the blackened wood in some spots and laminated some joists onto the burned ones, and when last I looked the plywood flooring was replaced along the wall. This, I suspect, will be all I get in the way of structural repair. No new baseboard, no jacking up the house and replacing the beams on top of the foundation, no cleaning crew for smoke and water damage. I think I saw some packages of ceiling tile amongst the contractor's mess. Let's hope.
Now I am dithering. What to do? I am so worried about HB. He very tearfully told me he was sorry after the fire, but it took me a little while to realize that he feels responsible, that it happened because of his rewiring job. I have tried to reassure him, and I will say it again for him to read here: you are not to blame for this. We've talked a lot, these past few days, and I know that even though we haven't mentioned it as much he's as afraid as I am about money. I know that this damage to the house has sent my plan to rent it out up in smoke, too. I have also known since the day, over three weeks ago, that my weight rose over 155 and I started keeping a much greater share of my meals down that he was afraid I'd go back to my regular earning habits, and that's why I haven't. Now he's more than afraid, and I will confess that I really might have done just that during this last terrible week if it weren't for that one small but inflexible rule of economics: it takes money to make money. With no money to invest, I have nothing to sell, and no current way to make myself a little profit by acting as the necessary evil middleman. I don't blame him for that part, but just his worry because I am healthier now does, I will confess, hurt more than a little. It says something about me, I think, that I am easier to love when I am sick and wretched and even possibly at death's door than when I am (while still certainly not well) feeling physically and mentally competent.
So now I don't know what will immediately happen. It's possible that I won't be able to post here for some time, especially if we have to leave the house until the final repairs are made. I'm not even sure I will spend the nights here, though I want to very badly. It's funny, I suppose: HB's motives and mine have done a reversal. He feels bad, and wants the house repaired so that everything will be the same again as it was before. I feel deep in my gut that this is a sign, an omen, and that as soon as we have some money we should do as he really wanted (and still wants, I think, under the other stuff) and leave here, at least for a little while. Find another place to live, get another course of chemo or radiation or even (yes! even that) surgery. If he doesn't want to go on with school, there must be something lucrative and relatively honorable that HB can do with his undergrad degree in a more developed part of the country. I tell myself that we can always come back in the spring; surely there will be at least one more spring allotted to me, and if my current health is any indication, maybe quite a few more than that. But who knows?
I didn't think that this would happen, either.
Oh, well. At least I didn't have any trouble picking today's title lyric and song.

Title lyric from "Burning Down The House" by the Talking Heads.

STILL ALIVE

2008-11-07T18:48:00.002-05:00

Bigg wanted me 2 post & let u all know that he is ok. We had a fire on Monday. It was mostly the basment & part of a wall in a downstairs room. We have been staying w/Duff but theres no internet or even cell phone signal so we have been out of touch. We hope 2 be back home full time 2morrow if I can get the wiring fixed & the studs & paneling replaced. Hope he will write here again soon.
HB

There's No Easy Explanation For It

2008-11-02T22:43:00.001-05:00

God bless that Aaron, the little dumbass.
I went for a walk this afternoon. I just had to get out of the house, all the heavy discussions and turmoil and end-of-the-world feeling were just a little too much for me. So I left the house and went up on the hill. There are these big rocks at the brow of the hill, surrounded by trees but forcing their own clear vantage point out of the crowding branches. I think they're probably leftovers from the glaciers, because they're big and out of place and they all have these little symmetrical lines on their surfaces, sort of like they're corrugated. They're a really great place to sit and think while you look out across town down in the valley.
That's where I was when Aaron found me. Good thing, too. I'd made it most of the way through a pack of cigarettes, and it was starting to get cold.
"Hey," he said when he sat down next to me. "Sorta chilly up here, innit?"
I gave him a look. "Yep."
He looked at me closely and said: "Please tell me you're not sitting up here obsessing 'cause you and HB had a tiff."
"A tiff?" I chuffed out smoke and gave him the evil eye. "Please."
He laughed at me, bless his little black heart. "I cannot believe you are being this way. Isn't this, like, the first serious fight you guys have had?"
I opened my mouth to say something indignant, then shut it again. I think HB and I have had a few disagreements, yes, but they've never really been anything but honest and good-natured and over within twenty four hours. This couldn't be our first serious fight... right?
"Here I thought you were better than that," Aaron went on. "What the fuck are you thinking? Just go back to the house and tell him to bang you like a screen door for a couple hours and everything'll be copacetic. Isn't that what you'd say to me?"
"I would not ever advise you to use the phrase 'like a screen door' in any event, nor am I going to keep teaching you words you can't spell." But I couldn't help but smile a little, because damn him, he did make me feel a little better.
Aaron gathered his jacket around him and stood up, offering me his hand. I took it and levered myself off the rock, feeling just about as stiff and likely to crack as the stone I'd been sitting on.
"Well," Aaron opined, "I would never officially advise you to just wait until you're living in a big city and then snatch some relatively attractive immigrant baby and tell HB it followed you home, but that's sure as shit what I would do instead of fighting about it now."
"Fuck you, Aaron," I said, but we say that in the Big Woods the way they say 'please don't talk like that' in more civilized parts.
"Oh, goody!" he exclaimed brightly. "You're on. But first-" and he waved his hands from the wrists in possibly the nelliest gesture ever at the soggy, mulchy ground around us "-clear us a space, will you? I don't want to get dead leaves in my crack."
Of course, that made me laugh right out loud. So I told him to come on, let's go, and he took me back to the house, and now I'm working very hard at pretending the whole ugly disagreement never happened.
I won't even ask for you to wish me luck on that score, because I know it ain't gonna last.

Title lyric from "Love Will Never Do Without You" by Janet Jackson.

Do You Understand Me Now?

2008-11-01T21:45:00.000-04:00

HB read my last post, the way I thought he would. He sat down and read it start to finish on his phone, holding up the others who were waiting to take him to a Halloween party. I had begged off - I don't mind being the only one over thirty five in the room, but I won't be the only one over twenty five. Nuh uh, not happening, as Aaron might say. So they were going to the party without me. When he was done HB got up and gave me a rough kiss and told me, "We'll talk when I get back." He started for the door, then came back a few steps. "Did you not write about what you want, what you asked me for, because you're afraid everyone else will feel the way I do?" Then he left.
That stung a little.
So here's the thing. I figured HB would go to grad school and I would try to find a way to have another course of chemo or the surgery or whatever they tell me. I'm okay with that. I can close up my house or rent it out and tell myself that I can go back there next summer or the summer after or whenever. I tell myself there will be time for all that. HB loves the story up to this point, although I get the feeling he's still not firm on going back to school. Then, I go on to figure, if I can get to where I'm feeling okay - maybe even feeling good, you know, better - we could make a real home together. Maybe here, maybe somewhere else. But a real home... with a child of our own. I've mentioned it idly before, but I really tried to make him understand how great that sounds. How bad I want it. I even told him how I figured that it would probably be best if the kid were HB's biologically, so if anything did happen to me, he wouldn't have to mess with anything like custody. Plus I thought of this really great name that's part my name and part HB's and would work for a boy or a girl... Okay, I'm a big awkward sap. I get that.
I just miss my kids so much. I never get to see them. D's got someone else there now, and I hear they call him Dad. That hurts me so bad. I can't even tell you. They're so close, and yet they might as well be on the moon. I could be such a good father, too... So I guess I'm selfish, or whatever, because I want to have that with HB. I want to raise a kid that's part of him. I want us to be a family. Sure, it would be hard on us, on the kid, it would add an extra strain to every situation. Do you really think it wasn't hard on me and my wife to raise kids on my salary? Do you think being poor and struggling doesn't add an extra strain that way? No family really has it easy. I'm telling you, I know enough now to honorably acquit myself on the field of parenthood. Whatever hardships we faced would be more than compensated by the love we have to give. It could be so beautiful.
HB didn't think so.
He reacted very negatively (to say the least!) when I threw the idea out there. He didn't really give me a reason... and then we had to leave for the Halloween party. Afterward I wanted very badly to ask him why, what was so wrong, but somehow I just didn't dare bring the subject up. But then, this morning... I was headachey and a little nauseous and I slammed a few things and cursed as I tried to get breakfast and coffee ready. I broke a saucer, just a little cheap one anyway, but HB came in and jokingly said - as he cleaned up the broken china and put toast down and handed me down the coffee, credit where credit is due - that I could barely take care of myself, how could I take care of a kid?
That stung a bit, too. I feel a ton better than I did just a month ago. Eating better, exercising better, looking better. Okay, so still not tip top. But I could get there.
All of a sudden we were talking about it again, and before I'd had a drop of caffeine or a cigarette. That's probably why I was unwise enough to share some of the details I'd thought of, like HB being the biological father. He listened, I'll give him that.
Then he said: "I love you. I want to be with you for the rest of your life. I'll take care of you even if you're old and feeble and an utter smelly pain in the ass. But I don't want to have a kid. Not for any reason. Ever." He probably would have elaborated, but that's when the mail came with those stupid fliers from grad schools. Of course that made it look like some great big orchestrated plan in place, which wasn't at all the case. Not that it made me look any less stupid or conniving to say so, but I tried. Right about then J and Robbie came home.
They stayed for the day, and we had a really good visit. I just didn't get to talk to HB alone. Not even for a minute. Even when I was blogging, he was out with them. But he promised me on the couch - and again before they walked out the door - that we would talk about this.
Since I know it will come up on his phone as soon as I post this, I'd just like to close by saying that I'd hack off one of my limbs to stay with him and keep him safe and happy. I don't have any grand scheme or master plan. I just want to be with him, and be completely happy, and when I try to imagine a future that has us together in it that's what I see. If he wants different things then we'll do them instead. I just want us to be together.
So now I've told the whole truth, and between my last post and this one, I hope I've captured a true and accurate record of my thoughts and intentions. But between the busy day and all the tension, I'm pretty tired now.
Have a good night, all.

Title lyric from "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" by The Animals.

Understanding Is What We Need

2008-11-01T14:33:00.000-04:00

We went to a Halloween thing last night together. HB and I had only a moderately good time, although I think for different reasons. Neither of us felt much like drinking, and it wasn't really the sort of party where people danced or did group activities. Just a bunch of straight people hanging out in little groups talking about each other, sort of a yawn. And don't get me wrong - it's even more boring when gay people do that at parties, but it happens.
So when we came home we were both a little buzzed but not at all drunk, and we were moody and out-of-sorts. We'd started having a conversation right before they came to get us for the party, a really heavy conversation about the future that we probably shouldn't have allowed to be interrupted. But we did, and it just sort of hung in the air like a bad smell that wouldn't go away. After the party it was even worse: I felt like I'd said the wrong thing, I'm guessing he felt the same way, and neither of us really wanted to just let it hang there but neither did we want to start chewing on it again, either. So we went to bed dissatisfied and unhappy, which is never good.
Then this morning we started talking somehow before we'd even had a bite of breakfast or any caffeine, which I'm sure you know is no way to run a relationship, either. HB hasn't so much given up on moving away at least temporarily, and I thought I was being agreeable and upbeat by saying that we should do that. I mentioned a few different places I thought might be good, and stupidly burbled about some of the things I'd like to do if-when we go. Just personal things, the sort of dreams for the future that I thought it was okay to share. He gave me a funny look and asked me to clarify what I meant, so I tried to.
Right about then the mail came, and in with the political ads and flea-market fliers were several brochures for graduate schools. I'd contacted them online and asked them to send us more information; I even contacted one admissions office and asked some questions about things I know are important to HB when it comes to school, and they sent a whole big packet.
As it turned out, this was a mistake. Perhaps some of you have spotted that, and are shaking your heads at me. Good for you. Picture me dismayed when he was immediately angry: that's me, the deer in the headlights saying "wha-?" right before the bumper hits him.
"How could you do that?" he asked me, and I could tell that he was really wounded by it. "Why wouldn't you let me make this kind of decision for myself?"
Of course, right about then J and Robbie walked in.
They immediately knew that something was up. "Is this... um, a bad time?" J asked, and Robbie mimed utter horror and said "Don't tell me that my favorite Daddy Boytoy relationship is on the rocks!"
I glared at him and he threw up his hands in surrender. "Sorry, sorry!" He laughed. "Come on guys, lighten up."
HB actually seemed rather relieved to see them. The three of them ran out to cut wood right away, and when J and Robbie made a run to McD's, he got right on MSN and chatted with someone so he wouldn't have to talk.
So after we had our burgers and whatnot - the pumpkin shake isn't half bad, by the way - I sat down behind HB with a leg on either side of him and rubbed his back.
"Can we talk about this?" I whispered in his ear.
He swallowed his last bite and turned his head. "Right now?" His ear was bumping my lips.
"No. But soon." I love his hair, the way it snags in my beard and swirls around his shoulders.
He shrugged. "Okay. Gonna say you're sorry?"
"I'm sorry you're upset," I said right away.
He nodded. "That's about what I thought." He bummed a cig from Robbie and lit up. "I guess we can talk about it," he sighed out along with a cloud of Marlboro smoke.
I really hope I can state my case well in this talk, because I sense that this is the big one. This is the make-or-break issue that comes up in every couplehood, the one that breaks the bond or pulls you tighter together. I don't want to - I can't afford to - fuck this one up. I'll give, I'll bend, I'll compromise. It's just... I want him to be able to go to grad school, and he's not even sure that's the right thing for him, and I want certain things and he's pretty certain that's not the right thing for him. Or for me. This is gonna be one rough impasse to negotiate, folks.
Wish me luck with that.

Title lyric from "Understanding" by Xscape.

Some Other Cat Looking Over His Shoulder At Me

2008-10-31T18:08:00.003-04:00

So it's Halloween, I'll tell you something that happened to me recently.
I have this cat. I used to have its mother, but then she had her first litter under my couch and killed the kits one by one until only the runt was left. It was her first litter, and she just didn't really know what to do with it, and I was too sick back then to really pay attention, so my cat's siblings all died. But I kept the runt alive, fed it milk with an eyedropper and all that, and now it's the tiniest cat you've ever seen. I can hold it comfortably on the palm of one hand. I've seen four month old kittens that were bigger, and my cat's all of nine months now. Started out as a boy. I've seen lots of cat genitals in my day, and I feel qualified to express my clear understanding of its anatomical arrangement: it had balls. Then a week or so ago this cat's behavior completely changed. It used to attack my ankles, bite my fingers, stalk my pantslegs. It was cute, but evil. Then one day it hopped up in my lap, kneaded my thighs gently, turned in a circle and lay down. Purring.
"What the fuck's gotten into you?" I asked, and picked it up. It purred more, and instead of biting my fingers it licked them. If it weren't distinctively marked, I'd've thought I had the wrong cat. I stroked it, I turned it over... and there, between its back legs, was the evidence. No more balls: presto, now it was a girl. I know, I know, you're thinking to yourself you were just wrong, dummy, it was girl all along with a certain satisfaction. If the laws of physics work the way they always said in school, then you must be right. I dunno, myself. I saw that cat's balls a thousand times. It was a boy, I'm telling you. Like my grandma was always saying, wonders never cease.
So the other day I'm lying on my bed in my bedroom, just thinking about how many times I've been in that room over the course of my lifetime. It was the room my mother brought me home to when I was little. That was the room where I was first scared by the monster in the closet, that was the room where I first had sex with the boy from across the street when we were six or seven, that was the room where I first smoked pot, that was the room where I slept with Rod, that was the room that I fled to when Tammy and I broke up, that was the room I took Amber to when she was a baby... Jesus, I could go on and on. Anyway, I was just lying there, when the cat got up from the end of the bed and went over to sit expectantly in front of the door. You know that pose, when cats sit up straight with their tails curled around their feet, a look that means they're paying attention. Sure enough, the doorknob turned and the door swung open, even though I was alone in the house. I froze, and waited for someone to step in, but nobody did. Then the cat made her weird little chortle that she only makes when someone she really likes walks in - it's sort of her hello. She got up, and she started twining in a tight little circle while she arched and humped her back. Kind of the way she does when she's wrapping around my ankles, frantic to be fed. Of course, there was nobody there. She did that for a minute or so, then just stopped and went downstairs, her tiny little paws pattering like the world's tiniest drumroll on the steps. I waited, still frozen, for another minute. I thought surely that if there was a ghost or spirit there, that this was my big chance. In a second I'd feel an unaccountable breeze, or I'd just know... It'd be my mother, my grandmother, my brother (take your pick of which one), somebody.
But it wasn't. There was nobody there, and after a bit I just got up and shut the door and shrugged it off.
I told Aaron about it, and he said, "Well, maybe the ghost wasn't there for you. To see you, I mean." He frowned to see if I was following him. "Maybe it was there to see the cat."
"That cat's never seen anyone that died," I told him. I mean, jeez, are we gonna follow the rules or what here? "It's only been out of the house once in its entire life."
"Maybe it knew the ghost in a different life. Cats have nine of them, smarty," and he made a face at me. "Or maybe the ghost is from somebody who lived here a long time ago and just doesn't care for you. Maybe it only likes cats."
"Maybe it's prejudiced against sodomites, you mean," I replied. "Which explains why it doesn't like you, either."
He stuck his tongue out at me, and that was the end of that. Tonight him and some of the other boys and their friends will have a seance in my old bedroom on the third floor and mess with a Ouija board. Aaron wants to see if there's really a ghost in the house. Good luck. I told them that the basement is actually the oldest part of the house, and that it would be much more authentic down there.
"Just like it will be much more hygienic on the third floor," Aaron shot back, and so that's what they'll do. I think they're nuts, myself.
Happy Halloween, everybody.

Title lyric from "Season Of The Witch" by Donovan.

It's Our God-Forsaken Right To Be Loved, Loved, Loved

2008-10-30T17:22:00.000-04:00

I wanted to do something nice for HB. No, not just something nice; something great, something wow, something... that would say how I feel. How great he is for being there when I need him, and always surprising me with how strong and level-headed he is. But what could I do?
Everything I tried turned out wrong too. Tried to make his favorite dinner, and while it turned out edible that was probably the best you could say of it. Cleaned up our room, put on the best flannel sheets... and then spilled a half-cup of tea I'd hidden in the headboard and forgotten about all over them. He always needles me about that, too. So I had to take the sheets off and try to dry the mattress before I could put the old ones back on. Then I washed his favoritest jeans with the flannel sheets and somehow managed to get a prominent bleach spot on both of them. Finally I got the bed re-made and the family room barely presentable and discovered that the movie he'd wanted to watch had somehow failed to record.
That was about the point I sat down and indulged in a heavy duty pity party for yours truly. Poor old me, I'm just such a pain in the ass and I can't do anything right to make it better.
Then Aaron came breezing in from school. He's currently still on top of the world. Seems Aaron thinks that his gaydar wasn't so far off in targeting his macho high school love interest, and right now he's Sherlock Holmes assembling every valid argument for why it's destined to be. I didn't argue with him. He baked cookies, very good cookies, and cleaned the bathroom without even being asked. I whined to him about HB's movie, and he produced the DVD from his backpack. Wonders never cease.
Then HB came home, tired and out of sorts from work. He kissed my cheek, had a cigarette, and when he found his only-passable dinner parceled into tupperware in the fridge, he nuked it and dove right in without a single complaint. Afterward he helped himself to several of Aaron's cookies and responded to my story about the movie and Aaron's DVD with a succinct that's cool. So I took him upstairs to show him the bleach spot on his jeans and on the sheets. He shrugged off the spot on the jeans, and then shucked out of his work clothes and tossed himself carelessly down on the bed naked.
"See?" he told me. "When I'm laying here you can't even see the spot, can you?"
And of course I couldn't, because as the old song says I only had eyes for him.
Afterward I tried to tell him how I'd wanted to do something nice for him but it turned out all wrong, and he just laughed at me.
"Seems just fine to me," he told me. "You gonna complain about it all night, or you wanna go down and watch the movie?"
I really don't deserve him.

Title lyric from "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz.

I Caused Nothing But Trouble

2008-10-29T18:06:00.000-04:00

Last night HB had plans for us. As soon as Brad was out of class, the three of us piled into Brad's car and headed out of town. I didn't even know where we were headed; HB wouldn't tell me, no matter what inducement, and neither would Brad. Still, it didn't take me long to figure out from the general direction we were headed that they were taking me to Duff's.
Imagine my surprise when we got there and found my two middlest girls at Duff's house. I haven't seen them since Father's Day: my ex, D, won't let me anywhere near them. Ever since HB and I exchanged rings I've been one step lower than Hitler in her estimation. How Duff and HB managed it I'll never know, and they're not telling. I got to hang out with the girls for almost two hours. It was so... wonderful. It made me happy. So happy.
Then my daughter Jenny had to call home. When her mother demanded to know where she was, Jenny told her. Then D wanted to know who was there, and once again, Jenny told her. When D heard I was there, she went ballistic. I mean, really, really over the top. When Jenny put down the phone and said, "She hung up on me," I knew.
"That means she's on her way over. You guys better put your coats on." I hugged them and kissed them and told them that I love them. They told me that they love me, and that they'll sneak out of the house sometime soon to see me.
As predicted, she drove to Duff's - about a ten minute drive from her new abode, and marched right in.
Duff met her at the door. Ain't having no drama at my house, thanks, he told her, and kept her corralled at the door while the girls got ready to go. If I had any sense I'd've stayed in the kitchen and kept my mouth shut and been satisfied with having seen the girls. But you know me better than that, right?
As soon as Duff left the room I slipped out the back door to his wrap-around deck and ghosted around to stand in the side yard. As I expected, D lingered to exchange a few hard words with Duff, who did an admirable job of returning the favor. About then I cleared my throat and politely waited.
They turned and saw me. "Aw shit," Duff muttered and went right back inside. I just waited. It had been snowing a little on and off all evening, and now that it was getting dark the snow had started spitting down harder, wet and heavy.
D asked me if I had something to say. I shrugged. She told me she'd have me arrested for seeing the girls. I shrugged again. She told me that I was a low, despicable, underhanded, repulsive individual, speculated on the validity of my parents' marriage, and observed that fags everywhere should get AIDS and die. I shrugged yet again. Third time's the charm.
She turned to leave, and I said her name. She turned back. "You know the only reason you hate me is that you're jealous," I said calmly. "I found someone who really loves me and I'm happy without you. That's killing you, isn't it? Why don't you just admit you want me back?"
She spat at me and ran off to her car. I watched her go, unimpressed by her crocodile tears, and went back inside.
The drive home from Duff's was terrible. The snow coated the roads, which twist and turn up and down cliff-steep hills. Brad had downed about five beers at Duff's, plus god knows how much of Duff's homemade applejack. I kept one hand on the wheel and chanted don't brake don't brake don't touch the brake while I waited for a fast-moving SUV to come around a hairpin turn and cream us. Not exactly a tension reliever, folks.
Finally we crept down the hill to the house, though. Still alive. I built up a big fire, using the last of the cut wood in the firebox, and we all stripped down to boxers right there in the family room. I had clean jammies folded in a basket by the couch, and we wrapped our asses in flannel and polar fleece while the wind whooped and shrieked around my eaves. I made cocoa from the kettle on the woodstove and then we all rolled off to bed.
That was crazy, I said to HB as I stretched next to him. Let's not talk about it, he grunted. I sighed and held him and we started to drift off. Then he said, half asleep, why did you have to go and mess with D? Things would have been fine if you hadn't done that. Now Duff's pissed at both of us. I patted him gently and promised we could argue about it in the morning. He was so warm and close, I just didn't have the energy to wake back up and talk about it.
When I woke up it was cold. That was wrong. I couldn't hear the heater running. Also wrong. I sat up and looked for the little orange tell-tale light on the heater. Not there. I swung my feet down to the freezing floor and pulled the curtain back. The whole town, spreading down into the valley, was dark. Power was out all over town. They'd predicted two inches of lake effect snow for the night. According to the battery driven clock, it was four AM. I was looking down on at least six inches of wet, heavy snow.
"What's wrong?" HB said behind me, his voice still thick and sleepy.
"Power's out." He groaned, and I sat back down on the bed. "All over town," I told him. "Not just us."
He smacked his thigh with his fist. "Fuck!"
I put my hand on his chest and kissed his forehead. "It's okay." I got a lighter from the shelf behind our head. I lit the candles, better than a dozen of them, and then one of his cardboard tasting non-menthol cigarettes and passed it over to him. I got him an ashtray and lay down next to him while he moodily smoked. "Look on the bright side," I told him. "No work today."
"What?"
"They'll shut down the shop for the day. At least today. Call and see if I'm not right."
"But we need the money!" he groaned and stubbed out his smoke and rolled over, covering his head with a pillow. Damn, damn, damndamnhellfirefuckingdamn!"
I patted his back. "Feel better?" I didn't really care. I already had thought of the last of the cut wood I'd burned before we went to bed - now the chainsaw, a little electric model, wouldn't work. The big saw was out of gas, and now the gas station would be closed with no juice to run the pumps or the cash registers. The next fire would be built out of wood cut with the bowsaw by hand. Still didn't care. It was warming up in our little room from our body heat and the candles, I had a three gallon jug of white kerosene tucked away behind the kerosene heater in the basement if it came to that. I had HB. We were together. I couldn't be anything but lighthearted right then. I'd seen the girls, I was with my lover, and so what if the power was out. We'd been through worse.
But HB had a very gloomy day today. This outage has made him more determined than ever that we should move away for at least the winter, and he cursed at cutting wood (which I tried to do most of), cooking on the woodstove and every other little necessity forced on us by the situation. Twice I saw him try to go to his computer and then turn away with a groan. I did my very best to raise his spirits, and I'd like to think that I showed him a pretty good time this afternoon. Still he is not content, and I can hardly blame him.
The power came back on around five thirty this afternoon, and both of us were quite happy to run to our computers and dive back into the endless internet sea. I put supper on to cook, and now the whole house is warm again, smells wonderfully of pork chops and has working phone, cable and internet. So, while the moment lasts, I'm going to go and enjoy it.

Title lyric from "White Flag" by Dido.

Gonna Muster Every Ounce Of Confidence I Have

2008-10-28T03:18:00.000-04:00

I got up this morning and got busy.
I made HB a nice breakfast, especially considering I made it on a woodstove over a fire I built myself. Pancakes and bacon. He deserved it, that's for sure. I can't tell you how hard he worked on Sunday down in my wet cavernous basement, trying to fix my antiquated wiring while I was warm and safe and neatly attended to at David's. I don't think HB was really ready to forgive David yet, but when the lights went out that was the first person he called. I know he did that for me, the way he's always doing things for me and giving up things for me.
So I saw him off to work, and then I did the best I could to batten the house down for winter. Every year it gets a little harder; the house is what, two hundred plus years old, and while it's still holding together, it's malfunctioning in a thousand ways. I put down all the storm windows, closed off some of the rooms we're not using now, hung the thick quilted covers over the doors that my grandmother made. I started in the family room, right inside the front door, and worked my way all the way up to the third floor. As I was covering the third floor window, it started to very fitfully spit down snow. For some reason, it felt very much like a sign of things to come.
After the halfassed insulating job, I did laundry and dumped the makings of a stew in my cast iron dutch oven and put it on the fender of the woodstove. Then I built up the fire, shut it down to burn slow and went back upstairs to make the bedroom nice. As I was fluffing the pillows I looked out the window and saw the late afternoon slant to the sunlight - how did it get so late so fast? - and saw that it was snowing again, a little harder this time. Still just a dusting, for now.
HB got home not much later than that. He appreciated his stew, changed into his nice clean lounge-around-the-house clothes and gave me a kiss in our spandy clean bedroom. I hardly noticed that he went downstairs to soak up some internet. Like I said, he deserves it, and I was beat.
But then I woke up, and there he was asleep beside me. It's never completely warm in this room we've moved to; the heat gets sucked away to the third floor, making the drafts swirl around the walls and ceiling. We could move to a different room now, with the house so much emptier for winter. Or...
Or I could take him seriously, and I could leave here. I could probably get HUD to rent this house from me. That would give me an income and a ticket out. We could go wherever he wants. Grad schools tend to be located in large, tolerant college towns. If we stick out, it will be as a pair of yokels. Or I will, anyway. HB is a city kid, I forget sometimes. Anyway, we could... I suppose... find some other place that he would like better. A place where he could thrive instead of being trapped like a hothouse flower. I've thought about it again and again as I wrote this. Someplace where we could walk down the street holding hands and not attract a second glance. A place where he could already be started on his way in a new life when I'm not there anymore.
Thing is, I don't want to leave here. I don't want to give this place up. The harder you fight to keep something, the more it means to you. The people here may be bigots and racists and just plain ignorants hicks, but I'm related to most of them and I happen to think they're okay, for who and where they are. Sure, things could be better. That's part of why I try to teach all my kids not to be prejudiced, homophobic, sexist, racist... But I know I'm one of only a few voices in a sea of louder messages and that things won't change overnight. I guess I've learned to live with that, if not to accept it. But maybe... just maybe, okay? But yes, maybe it is time I thought about seeing someplace different, where minds are broader and economic opportunities are more lucrative.
I don't know, though. I just don't know.

Title lyric from "For You I Will" by Teddy Geiger.

Kicking Around On A Piece Of Ground In Your Hometown

2008-10-27T03:11:00.001-04:00

What an ordeal this weekend has been.
At the end of last week the Amish came to look over the trees on my property. We have five acres of woods behind the house, and thanks to my grandmother a great many of the trees are black walnut and native cherry, both very valuable as lumber. Just one of my older trees could probably be converted into eight to fifteen thousand dollars worth of sawn planks on the current market. I hate to have them cut, mostly because I want tomorrow to be the same as yesterday; I want to walk under the trees my grandmother planted, maybe even teach my children and grandchildren the secret names I gave some of them as a child. Foolish, I know.
But I promised HB awhile ago that I would give up the business. It's what he wanted, and I was just getting too damn sick to keep after it anyway. For awhile it even felt noble and upright: the things I did over the summer for money were dangerous and vain and... lucrative, dammit. I hate being broke. So I finally bent my stiff neck and deigned to sell off some of the trees that I loved. After all, you can't hold on to things, right?
The Amish man, a very earnest and honest fellow I've known for years, walked the entire property with me. He gravely nodded and stroked his very full beard - he's been married for years, has around twelve kids and has definitely earned his beard by their standards - and then wrote me up an appraisal and very soberly explained to me why he could not buy my trees. The location is bad, the trees are of good quality but can only be sold wholesale unless I'm willing to cut and saw them myself, there are the city taxes to think of... and on, and on. He has dealt with our illustrious city fathers here in the Big Woods and he knows their grasping ways. I have shopped these trees to lumber companies, appraisers, even a pulpwood paper company. Once again, I'm thwarted by my peers, the good fellows who came up with and before me. In response to his hints and implications, I can only shrug philosphically and make a few calm, bitter comments. I am a Big Woods man too, and stoicism and acceptance are valued over temper. So our lives are shaped.
Barely two hours after I'd absorbed this setback, another natural disaster occurred. My property has high banks over the dirt road that makes an elbow bend in front of my house; down this street a little ways the banks washed out, not an uncommon occurrence now that the ground refuses to freeze solid until the middle of November, instead of in the last week of September the way it did when I was a kid. This time, though, the banks took a telephone pole with them. It might seem laughable to some of you, who live in houses a decade or two old at most, but my house has stood here for the last two hundred years at least, and I am damn lucky to get the quality of electric, telephone and internet that I do over the antiquated lines strung on those poles. Until, that is, one of them went down.
I've stayed in the house without utilities before, and we did through Friday night and into Saturday. HB was convinced that the problem was with our breaker box, an antique installed in '61, and that he could fix it. Neither of us knew about the wires spitting and sparking in the road, mostly because nobody goes down that way. It's a dead end, just a lane and a half of poorly maintained dirt and gravel hardpack between my fields and the huge backyards of the houses north of us. When the linemen showed up Saturday afternoon, I was bundled in a sleeping bag on the couch in spite of the fire burning in the woodstove. I've been feeling off for a couple days now, and HB was tearing his beautiful long hair out over what an antique my house is, my neighborhood is, and also are the attitudes that prevail around here. Trust me, Barack Obama is not wrong about Western Pennsylvania.
They rapped on our door, told us about the problem and opined that it would be fixed 'no later than Tuesday, maybe Wednesday at the latest.' Then they went out to eat McDonalds and smoke while they surveyed the problem for about another two hours, the bastards. I'm really not feeling too generous toward them, in case you hadn't noticed.
HB calmly packed a bag, escorted me to the shower and dressed me heavily afterwards. I suppose it's a sign of how much I trust him that I didn't even ask where we were going until he was pointing at my Farmer Brown boots by the door.
"David's," he told me grimly.
"I don't want to," I replied, and sat down on the couch.
HB arched an eyebrow at me - he never used to do that, only does it now to mock me in my humble opinion - and said: "Randy?"
"Righto," Randy said, and wrapped his arms around me from behind. "You gonna come quietly, or do I gotta carry you, bossman?"
"I'll go quietly," I sighed... and instead of kicking and screaming and locking myself in the bathroom (trust me, I thought about it) I packed a few things and let them bundle me into the backseat of HB's SUV. And off we went.
David was a determinedly congenial host. We stayed in his guest room, and HB even turned down an extra shift though we really need the money just to stay there with me. In a way it was nice to get away from the house. I certainly availed myself of David's hospitality, and drank about a gallon of juice and milk apiece. We all exercised quite a bit, that being David's drug of choice. You should see his six pack.
Then HB slipped away this morning, and Jack came over, and it all just got extremely tedious somehow. I smiled. I tried to listen. Seems Cliff had called David and expressed an open-door policy should David ever have second thoughts. I thought of some of Aaron's choice little comments and smiled to myself. Plus Jack has some new love interest that he's crowing over. He showed me a picture, and my private opinion is that the guy's either a crack or meth addict, but hey! Live and let live, right? I smiled. I nodded. Very nice, said I.
The sun was almost down when HB came back and very quietly told me to pack. He went and made our manners to David, and I gave David a kiss on the cheek on the way out and thanked him very kindly, and then HB took me home.
The electric's still not working. We have power in only a few rooms, but I'm used to this. They have 'patched through' somebody else's line, but it's the equivalent of two household outlets of power. Naturally, I picked computer/modem/telephone/TV on a power strip for one and a hotplate for the other. We have lots of oil lamps and candles, and the woodstove for heat. The electric company assures me that it will all be fixed by Wednesday... maybe Thursday at latest. Certainly before the weekend. They, too, run on Big Woods time.
When HB brought me back here, he got me very comfortable on the couch and we had a shared cup of cocoa off the woodstove.
"I want you to get the stuff that means the most to you together," he told me very gravely, looking over the steam curling up from his mug. Steam always looks different in lamplight. "If we can't get the power fixed in a day or so, we're out of here."
"I really don't want to impose on David," I said. I don't, either.
"I don't mean that," was what he said to me. "I'm talking about getting out of here. Out of this house, out of the Big Woods, out of Pennsylvania altogether. Just get your stuff together so we can go."
I didn't really know what to say. They'll fix the power, they always do. In a few days, a week, maybe week and a half at most. We could get by... I always do. He was talking about leaving for real, for good, and I don't really want that. But I couldn't say no. I still can't. How do I argue with what's best for him?
So I'm home now... for the moment.

Title lyric from "Time" by Pink Floyd.

I Look To The Time With You To Keep Me Awake And Alive

2008-10-23T09:52:00.003-04:00

HB woke up morning before last from what he said was a dream of lying on the beach, feeling the hot sand under him. When he opened his eyes he realized that the hot sand under him was in fact me; my temperature, which never went all the way down, had spiked back up again.
This is how good he is to and for me: he got up, snuck downstairs and called the doctor's office, made tea and warmed up the car. Then he went and got Randy, and the two of them woke me, dressed me and bundled me into the front seat with my insulated mug of tea. I was on the way to the doctor's before I was even all the way awake.
Dr. Zed took my temperature, examined my neck and scolded me. HB joined right in for that part, not so good, but he thinks I'm just relapsing because I went out with the boys for firewood and didn't dress (in his opinion) warmly enough. So, I got antibiotics, some pain meds for my neck and a trip to the lab for blood work. More needles. More waiting rooms. By the time noon rolled around and they let us leave I will admit to having been mildly difficult. No breakfast cigarette, pokes and prods, lectures from doctors and lab techs... I'm sick to death of all that nonsense.
When we got home HB put me to bed and insisted I stay there. I read a book, I watched some TV - around two hundred times the channels we had when I was a kid and still it boils down to a choice between three decent things to watch - and generally chafed at being restricted until I finally took a nap. What fun.
Then this morning I was awakened by my dog going absolutely ballistic - someone had forgotten to bring him in for the night, and doghouse or not I bet it was a chilly night at best. When I went down to bring him in, I discovered what was making him freak out. David was in my driveway in a borrowed truck with a dump-bed full of slab wood for the fireplace. He gruffly told me that HB had filled him in on how I'd gotten sick from going out after fire wood, so maybe this would keep my dumb ass in the house. It was so nice of him to do... and nice of him to be a dick about it too so I didn't have to get too choked up over him making this sort of gesture after we'd been fighting.
I did mention to him as he was leaving, though, that I was sorry about the whole mess with Cliff and Aaron.
He laughed. "Do you know what that little shit said to me yesterday?"
"No," I frowned. "Didn't know you talked to him yesterday."
"You were sleeping. Anyway, he told me that I didn't miss much anyway because 'Cliffie' is lousy in bed." David shook his head and tried very hard not to smile. "Wasn't that kind of him to take a bullet for me that way?"
"Well, that's Aaron. Always sacrificing himself," said I, and we laughed together for a minute. That was good. I'm getting tired of always having to mend things that shouldn't be strained or broken between me and the people I care about. Guess I should be more thoughtful, huh?
So now David's gone, and my house is warm again, and I'm going back to bed. No fever, the ibuprofen/hydrocodone pills have taken care of that, and my neck is only a nagging ache. HB's at work, Randy's at work, Robbie is asleep, Aaron's at school, Katherine and Brad and Nick are away at college and I have the house for the time being to myself.
Why waste all that free time by working, right?

Title lyric from "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel.

Are You Sad Because You're On Your Own?

2008-10-21T09:31:00.003-04:00

I finally faced the music last night and called David. When he wouldn't answer his phone - damn cell phones and their caller ID - I slipped out with Brad and had him drive me over to David's house. I say slipped out because I left without telling HB where I was going; he would've insisted on driving me there, and I didn't want him to be there when I talked to David. Some things that were said the other night really crossed a line, and though he won't show it I know that they still bother HB. He and David were becoming friends before all that happened, and I can't rebuild that bridge for either of them, that's just something between them that they'll have to work out on their own. Much like my own feelings with David needed to be worked out privately. I love him, he was there for me during the hard days after my wife and I split, and it's just too much to throw away over a tipsy Saturday night spat. So I went, and I confronted him.
David and I broke up almost two years ago now. Hard to believe that time is flying by so quickly, isn't it? He wanted to take a break, mostly because (and this is just my take, so grain of salt and all that) his father offered him a position in the church and he knew our relationship would keep him from getting it. This is the church we were both raised in, the church that made my mother a raving lunatic. Baptist, but a unique and twisted mutant variety: they're quite proud of having been rejected by the GARBC, a body they view as 'far too liberal and condoning.' That stupid church has always been very important to David, and he wanted to establish himself there before seeing me on anything more than the most discreet and closeted basis. He even talked about reconciling with his wife, and briefly did after things were over between us. That was my main reason, anyway; of course, there was that disastrous threesome we had (I won't even link to it, it's just too shameful) and various conflicts we had over what was too public or unmasculine, the kind of problems every relationship has. But when he offered me a break, I told him I wouldn't be put on a shelf to gather dust. Any break was going to be a break up... and it was.
Shortly after we split, I dated (and yes, slept with) a mutual friend we'd made in the city. David really liked this guy, thought he was hot, and it was probably only circumstance that I dated the guy first. But I did. And I felt like it was cheating. That's always been my rule of thumb where infidelity is concerned: if it doesn't feel like cheating when you're doing it and it doesn't feel like cheating the morning after, then it wasn't. If you can be intimate with someone outside your relationship and not feel like it was dishonest or dishonorable, then you really weren't committed enough to that relationship to call it being faithful in the first place. Maybe that sounds bitter or angry when it shouldn't, because it really is just how I feel about that. And when I was with this other person, I felt in my heart like I was cheating on David. When David found out about, he concurred - even though, as even Jack said, WE WERE BROKEN UP AT THE TIME. Evidently that's an important distinction to some people. For myself, I've always felt like I could have walked away from my time with David as the innocent one, the one who was wronged and abandoned, if I hadn't been with that guy. Instead I have to share in the guilt of having thrown away something great for a stupid reason.
If it hadn't happened I wouldn't be with HB, though. I wouldn't want to say it to David, at least not in a hurtful way, but my relationship with HB is better. I didn't grow up with him. He's not from the Big Woods. He's a lot younger, and he didn't have to absorb all the poisonous shit that the Reagan and Elder Bush years crammed down our throats. To quote Aaron, 'he gets me.' HB understands and appreciates me. Plus I love him more than I knew I could. When you can say that, why would you ever want anything else? I just wanted to stay friends with David, because for some reason loving HB doesn't stop me from loving David too. Not in the same way I did, not any more, but I care about him. I'd be devastated if something happened to him. It's important to me to know he's okay.
So I went to his house, and I talked to him. He was pitching hay in his old barn, and he stalked back and forth in the loft with his pitchfork and farmer brown boots and chaff in his hair. He would only speak in single syllable grunts, but he did speak... and after while, he started really talking again. I don't want to quote our whole conversation here, but I did get a sense that he's really very unhappy. I think maybe he's finally seen that the church has no absolute answers and wouldn't offer them to someone like us if they did. Or maybe it's just... God, this is hard to say because I don't want to sound arrogant or stupid, but I really felt like he wants a closer relationship. With me, yes, but also with HB. He sees what we have and he wants it, the way someone shivering in the cold will look through a stranger's window at an open fire and want to go in and warm himself. I think if we were younger or more open-minded he'd propose a thruple type-deal. Of course, I'm not going for that, I'm not gonna rock the cozy boat that HB and I are sailing. Seeing that hunger in his eyes made me feel so bad and hurt for him, but what can I honestly do? Just be there and be his friend, I guess, and that's what I intend to do.
He just better get in touch with HB and try to make amends now, because I won't forgive him entirely until he does. He's just stupid to endanger the really great friendship they were starting to have, and that's all I have to say about that.
Oh! I asked Aaron yesterday after school if he'd heard from Cliff, and he very nonchalantly replied that Cliff had made the obligatory postcoital call to praise his skills in bed, and that he was flattered and all. Of course, Aaron said, I really am the best he'll ever have, so he should just be grateful. I chewed my tongue until I was sure I wouldn't laugh and asked when he'd see Cliff again. Ah, says Aaron with a dismissive little wave, I might do him once or twice more, but I mostly just wanted to show you and David that I could. He gave me a sassy little head-and-hips shake. So there. Then he grabbed a fistful of Oreos out of the jar on the counter and ran off to play video games with Brad and Randy.
The little shitbird's lucky I'm somewhat fond of him, or I could make things better in a hurry between David, HB and me by letting them take turns strangling him.
C'est la vie, right?

Title lyric from "C'est La Vie" by Robbie Neville.

The Best Of Plans Mislaid

2008-10-19T11:21:00.000-04:00

Last night did not go well at all, kids. Not at all.
The first part was certainly pleasant enough. There were four of my boys, Randy, Tom, Aaron and Robbie, Robbie's girlfriend Katherine and of course HB and me, plus David, Jack, Tony (an ex of David's) and the promised new guy, Cliff.
That's Cliff as in 'ought to be pushed over one.'
We all sat around my family room and ate the big basket of homemade cookies Jack brought over. He loves to cook and bake, and he's got this weird fetish for gift baskets. It's like he's a fugitive from Harry & David, with all the pine cones and colored cellophane and little ribbons and crap. He brought about five dozen cookies and they were gone before dinner even started. When we did sit down it was in the dining room (which we never use) with actual matching plates, will wonders never cease. I served about five bottles of Duff's homemade wine with the meal, and things got a little raucous right from the get-go. I had Aaron seated next to Cliff and David on the opposite side. Aaron approaches flirting the way the military approaches enemy targets: all guns blazing at once. I could tell he was trying too hard and kept wanting to tell him to tone it down a notch, but I couldn't think of a polite way without embarrassing him, so I got to watch from the other end of the table.
What really surprised me, though, was David's reaction. He was getting visibly more and more annoyed with Aaron, and it took a bit for the whole thing to click together for me: when David said 'he's too young' about Cliff, what he might've meant was, 'he's too young but I'm dating him anyway,' only I didn't so much catch that unspoken part. Uh oh. Praise Jebus I didn't actually tell Aaron that I was trying to set him up with this guy - just Cliff's physical presence was enough to set Aaron off and running. In the meantime David was fuming and tossing sarcastic little barbs and HB and Randy were covering their mouths to hide how hard they were laughing. So I called Aaron into the kitchen and very calmly told him that I thought Cliff had come with David and would leave with him, so it would probably be polite to lay off Cliff just a titch. To which Aaron replied, Just because he came with David doesn't mean he HAS to leave with him, and he minced right back out to the table and started cooing at Cliff all over again. Figures, don't it?
So after dinner I tried to pour oil on troubled waters, or however that saying goes, by inviting David, Tony and Jack to come and watch Sordid Lives with me while the boys went back to the family room to play games on the X-Box. As a good host(ess) I offered Cliff his choice of which party to join... and naturally he picked X-Box.
Now, I should say here that this kid is twenty five, maybe twenty six at the outside, and an absolute brute. He's built like an ox, right down to the absence of a clearly defined neck. I've seen less evidence of steriods in the WWF, just so we're clear. I had no doubt that Randy and Tom would challenge him to arm-wrestle before the night was over. I no longer even hold out hope that nobody will get hurt in these little contests, now I just worry about my furniture. I will also add my two cents worth that I'd never have picked Cliff to have a touch of lavender about him, either. My dear brother would say that he reeked of rough trade.
David decided to spend our time together bitching at and needling me over Aaron's behavior. I listened with good grace (at least at first), made excuses, and pointed out over and over that Aaron's having a rough time of it. In one ear and out the other: clearly, I should have kept Aaron on a leash, preferably tied in the basement. Finally I asked David if he was more offended by Aaron's blatant come-ons or by Cliff's failure to rebuff them, and things went right downhill at rollercoaster speed from there.
David and I had a rather loud argument that actually drew HB out of the other room to listen. Jack thought he'd soothe things by uncorking the bottle of Patron he'd brought for me, and David and I did manage to calm down long enough to have a shot with Jack and HB (Tony is AA all the way). The tequila, which I adore above all other alcohols, burned me like acid all the way down and made me feel rather nauseous right away. Sad, just sad. We sat down and I tried hard to mentally quiet my stomach, which is not actually possible, and then as soon as the boys had drifted back to the family room David started right in again. Now, though, I wasn't feeling good, and I was already irritated with David (and with Aaron, but that's hardly new) and the whole damn situation. So I said something like, 'No, I'm glad for you and Cliff, really. And I'm flattered by the emulation, too. I just didn't realize that HB and I were starting a trend.' Okay, maybe sort of snarky, but hardly enough to set David off the way it did. He said a few ugly things about how someday HB's worship will wear off long enough for him to clearly see me for who and what I am, and that he'll try hard to feel sorry for me when that happens even though I richly deserve it, and that what I don't deserve is somebody as great as HB when other people search for real love for years, and a few other choice tidbits I've forgotten now. David got rather loud during this pronouncement, which brought HB back again.
This time HB spoke up and asked David what the problem was, and if this was really the time or venue to air it. David answered that none of us like to hear the truth spoken out loud. He also made some rather pithy observations about my recent chance-meeting with Rod and his prediction for the future on that score, based of course on how I'd treated him when we were together. It was right about then that I realized he'd probably had more wine and tequila than was good for him. I think Jack thought so too, because he decided just about then that 'Oh, goodness, look at the time, we REALLY should be going,' and I love him for that. David gathered his jacket and shoes in a huff and told Cliff they were leaving, and that's when the proverbial shit hit the fan.
"I think I'll stay a little longer," Cliff said casually, glancing at the other boys ranged around the couches. They were playing some crazy new game that HB got, a shoot 'em up style game with lots of loud gunfire. "I can catch a ride home with one of these guys."
David's face got so dark red I thought he might just be having a heart attack, but he said, "Fine with me," and stomped out to his car. I ran after them to tell him to call me and we'd talk about this whole mess, but all I got was a flash of Tony and Jack's pale faces in the dome light as David spun out of my driveway in a spray of gravel. I must admit, I felt really sorry for the poor bastard.
Just to put the final icing on the cake, Cliff spent the night here. Yes, with Aaron. Yes, they did it, all right. I think the neighbors could hear them, and my nearest neighbors are barely within sight of my house. Aaron is so proud of himself I think he might just burst. I've been watching him like a hawk to keep him from calling David and rubbing it in his face. As I write this, Cliff is still here, observing 4:20 and playing that same damn game with Randy, Aaron and Tom in the family room. I know at some point I'll have to call David, but I think I'd almost as happily face a firing squad.
This is what I get for bragging about how I'm never bored, right?

Title lyric from "Fascination" by the Human League.

It's Getting Cold, Picked Up The Pace

2008-10-18T15:55:00.003-04:00

Today we are cutting wood.
We had a hard frost last night. Now the leaves are falling like rain, and I have Aaron and Countyboy's girlfriend raking them up to fill paper grocery bags. The bags get rolled up tight and tied with a bit of twine, then I burn them like logs in the fireplace. We have ten good sized trees, all of them standing dead, cut down and ready to be sawn with the chainsaw into fire logs. Randy and Tom are showing off as usual, competing to see who can drag the biggest log or bring down the biggest tree. HB and I are a little more prudent, and we cut the branches that broke off but haven't fallen since the last big wind. Altogether, we have my back deck stacked with about a week or so's worth of wood - and that's burning it 24/7 to heat the whole house. I am ready for the short term, but I still wonder about the future.
Aaron and I had our talk. He listened, but how much he absorbed... I dunno. The things I remember clearest from my own parents and grandmother are the things they said the most often, so I try to repeat the high points. Surprisingly, Randy has been very sympathetic to Aaron's feelings for a straight guy; I guess it's refreshing since Randy's straight as an arrow and a jock besides, and I half expected him to find the whole idea a little threatening. Not so. I heard him tell Aaron that the object of his affection would be potbellied and bald before he was twenty five and probably and alcoholic besides, and of course Aaron seemed much more cheered by this than anything I could've said. In any case he's grimly agreed to keep plugging away at school, and that's what counts.
Tonight David and Jack are coming over with a few of our other friends. As I've mentioned before, Jack is an incorrigible gift-giver, and his offerings tonight will surely include food and candy. The boys, whose heads are easily turned, adore Jack's presents enough to overlook his frequent flirting. David is providing the main course for dinner, but I have the house cleaned and salad and pasta made, so I feel reasonably assured that the whole evening will be pleasant enough. David is bringing someone new to meet me, and since he's described this new fellow as 'too young,' I'm hoping it might be someone interesting to (and interested in) Aaron. I want to see him happy, you know.
Have a great weekend at whatever you're doing, everyone.

Title lyric from "Counting Blue Cars" by Dishwalla.

Just Took A Long Look In The Mirror

2008-10-17T10:35:00.003-04:00

Interestingly enough, it was Duff's daughter who told me the secret of Aaron's dissatisfaction with school: he has a crush on a classmate and knows that it's hopeless. I will shamelessly admit that I eavesdropped on them when she was teasing him, and I even followed up by getting her alone and questioning her about it. She was rather offhand about it, and that pissed me off, but I'll deal with her later. Making cow eyes at my guy, anyhow. I mean please.
This thing with Aaron bothers me. I remember when Amber was in high school and she liked this or that boy; we would invite him over, arrange supervised dates, give them brief periods of 'alone time.' I tried to help her land the boys she wanted because I thought that was the best course of action. She's a straight girl, very attractive, and an early education in the battlefield strategies of love should, I figured, help her avoid some of the horrible mistakes her peers were making. Parts of that were right and parts of that were wrong, but at least some of it must have helped - because now she is a wise and confident player in the game. J was so much easier, partly because his aspirations were so much simpler - he wanted a girlfriend who would put out - and because he has always been so much more obedient and trusting than Amber. She knows her own mind, while he will follow my lead. Neither of them gave me the experience I need to deal with Aaron, though.
I see now that I probably did do wrong in reminiscing with HB and Aaron about my adolescence and my relationship with Rod. Not just because of the tension that it caused between HB and me, but because I dwelt on the good things and didn't manage to convey the really huge price that I paid for being the only known homosexual in my high school... a price that very nearly included my life. Not that the price I paid made that relationship and time not worthwhile, no. I guess because I made Aaron feel that it was something that could and would happen to him, and that if it didn't it meant he'd been cheated. I fell in love with straight boys by the score and nobody ever made me think that any of them might return the feeling, I was open about my relationship out of naiveté not bravery or any sense of assurance in my rights, and those are the true facts. Now I feel like I am obligated, very strongly obligated, to make Aaron see that falling for straight guys is like falling for someone in porn: being able to see them and hear them and follow their adventures makes you sometimes feel like you can reach through that bulletproof glass wall that divides you and touch them, but you can't. In a very real sense, the person that you're pining over doesn't exist anywhere outside your imagination, and you can't touch an imaginary friend. I learned that lesson the hard, painful way. How can I get it across to Aaron so that he doesn't have to do the same thing?
We are picking Aaron up from school this afternoon, so I suppose I will have some time to think it over between now and then. I am trying to catch up with my overflowing housework without him, and at the moment I'm very glad of the very thorough neck massage I got last night, it really seems to have helped with the stiffness and pain. The boys will grill outside tonight, so I don't have to worry about cooking or dishes (yet) and I am free to brood on what I'll say and how I'll make my pitch.
Wish me luck.

Title lyric from "Guys Do It All The Time" by Mindy McCready.

The Moon Don't Hang Quite As High As It Used To

2008-10-16T04:20:00.001-04:00

I was having this intensely vivid dream, which almost never happens to me - or I never remember them, however that works. I was dreaming that it was the icy, dreary end of winter. You know, that gray ass end of February period when it's so dreary that lemmings start to seem like some pretty smart little mammals. In the dream I was lying in my bed and it was dark and HB was beside me, all of which were true, but I was thinking how tired I was of winter when I heard the foehn winds start to blow up from the southeast, from Lem's territory. I heard the wind rise and gust around the eaves and I remember thinking, that will break winter's back. The snow and ice will melt now. Then I woke up.
The room was exactly the same as in my dream, but it was late autumn outside and relatively temperate for the season. There wasn't the slightest breath of wind, just HB's slow grumbly sleeping breath beside me. I pushed myself up on my elbows and then sat up all the way. Just like that, the pressure in my sinuses peaked for one agonizing flash and then broke with a creak and a snap; my ears popped, explosively hard, and my nose started dripping like a faucet. I was still all stiff and sleepy, but I scrambled up and into the bathroom - now conveniently just across the hall - and spent five minutes emptying my sinuses into a paper towel. Gross, but it sure felt great. I could smell again. I could taste again. Hell, I could hear again. I stuck my head out the window and breathed in the fall air. Wonderful. Then I snuck a cigarette out and lit it. Even better. No smobriety for me, thanks. After I had my cig I took my temperature: 100.2 degrees, lowest in days. I didn't even try bending my neck to the left because I knew it would hurt like hell. As Meatloaf taught us so long ago, two outta three ain't bad.
Afterwards I brushed my teeth and freshened up a bit before I crawled back in bed with HB. He came up and sacked out with me for almost three hours right after work last night, which is unusual for him. We both got up and watched a movie together, plus doing our own things online. I've noticed that he's branching out more, he's going back to his own sites and communities and friends online that I'm not a part of, mostly because they really don't appeal to me. Did you know there's more than one online group discussing civil engineering? From what I've seen over his shoulder, one of them is devoted to concrete, people. I mean, it's all well and good that the internet has a place for everyone, but... that's just not my style. Plus, like certain religions, I think some of the other participants in his groups are secretly robots. Anyway, it just makes me smile a little to see him. I've seen a lot of people discover the internet at my house, not just use it to google dirty words or phone numbers but really find sites and people who speak to them. Sometimes the consequences are good and sometimes they're bad. I won't mention the person for whose online porn addiction I bear some slight responsibility... *cough* David! *cough* ...because that would be gossip, you know. But HB's just picking up his old internet life where he left off at the beginning of the year when I interrupted everything for him so badly. All good. I got mine, he's got his... right? Somebody reassure me any time now. I suppose if it starts making me really nervous I could make a gesture like deleting my old Manhunt and Squirt accounts, but he deleted his a long time ago.
So now the sun will come up in a few hours and another damn day will start all over again. Robbie just got up and he's stumping around grouching about the jeans that he thinks he can't find but are in fact washed and folded on the dining room table, right along with a pair of socks and a t-shirt and boxers. He's definitely one of the Attention Deficit Generation, alrighty. Aaron got me to put a good sized TV set and old hard drive in his room and last night Tom and Randy hung out up there with him. I think they all slept up there last night, well and good, but if they let him drink beer with them he's still getting up and going to school even if he's gotta go in late with my footprints all over his ass and that's all I have to say about that. HB would probably appreciate it if I made him a lunch to take to work, we're down to one clean towel in the bathroom and I still haven't mailed out my next wad of disability paperwork. Coffee's usually pretty hard on my stomach, but I might make a pot and have some anyway. I stayed mostly immobile all day yesterday and now I have things to do, people.
Have a happy one, everybody.

Title lyric from "3 AM" by Matchbox 20.

And So You're Back From Outer Space

2008-10-14T17:22:00.000-04:00

HB was barely in the door before he was lifting the curtain and looking back out.
"Um, Bigg," he said, "There's a strange car pulling up. A very nice strange car."
What can that possibly mean but trouble? I could tell he was nervous; hell, I was nervous too. Process server? Constable? Jehovah's Witnesses? Who knows?
I watched him look out from my nest on the couch. I felt like crap. I was all wrapped up in the big quilt my grandma left me, rubbing the worn satin ribbon edging between my fingers. My fever's gone down a little but my neck is a solid steel bar of pain. I think it's because my glands are swollen. At least my nose isn't runny. Instead my sinuses are blocked up harder than quick dry cement. All the joys of the common cold. I was really feeling it right then, too.
HB's face changed from anxious to surprised to rather indignant. Then he looked at me, and my entire midsection just sort of hollowed out and disappeared.
Couldn't be.
Aaron ran up beside HB and looked out. "Who's the guy talking to Brad?" He turned and took in HB's glare at me. "Is that your dad? Nice car."
"No." HB bit off every word and spit it out. "That. Is. Not. My. Dad." He started to march past me, out of the room, but I reached over the back of the couch and snagged his wrist as he went by. He tried hard to pull away, but I still have a little grip left and I wasn't going to let him.
"Sit down," I asked him. "Please?" He did.
Good thing he did, too, 'cause right about then the door opened and Brad came in... and Rod was with him.
Of course Rod was with him. He's known where I live since he was fourteen, hasn't he? Dammit!
"Dude here wants to know if I'm your son," Brad said with great amusement, pointing to Rod with his thumb. "Don't think he believes I'm not." Thank God it was Brad and not Randy. For some reason HB and Randy are very tight lately, and Randy probably would have knocked Rod's block off.
Mistaking Brad for my son makes everybody but Rod and HB (and me!) crack up a little. They were snickering because J looks nothing like me, and people are constantly mistaking Brad and Randy and even Aaron for my kid when we go out in public. In fact, if I'm in public with J and any of the abovementioned boys, people will always pick them over J as my offspring. I saw Rod look around a little uncertainly, not realizing he'd stepped in a private joke.
"Only by adoption," say I, and give Rod a limp little wave. "Hey... how are you?"
Now, I'm one of those people who just can't stand the thought of someone being the object of rudeness under my roof. The injunction to be warmly, over the top polite in all situations is pretty deeply ingrained in Big Woods kids. At the same time, I'd do anything for HB. The question right at that instant, at least as I saw it, was whether or not I was really gonna hafta do something as distasteful as flat out telling Rod that no matter how innocent his intentions my boyfriend was having a problem with it and I had to put him first, so just buzz off. I hate awkward social situations like that.
"Hey," Rod said, and smiled, and his eyes twinkled. "You never called me. I tried to find you in the book, but you're not listed." His smiling eyes traveled over HB sitting next to me, my hand clenched in his, and the quilt still mostly around my shoulders. "You feeling okay? This a bad time?"
I turned helplessly to HB, who grimaced but said, "No, not a bad time." He made a show of tucking the blanket back around me.
"Well, great!" Rod sat back and grinned. "So how you been? Feeling a little sick?"
"Yeah." I tried inhaling through my nose and got only this sucking little squeak of escaping pressure. "A cold, I guess."
He nodded and kept right on grinning. Either he never has been able to read a social subtext or he just doesn't give a damn how uncomfortable he makes somebody else, I've never really been able to figure it out. At least he's relatively charming about it.
We managed to make some inconsequential small talk, quite a bit of it between him and the boys about his car. Even HB joined in on that one, but I sort of zoned out. I won't be driving again any time soon, I don't need to salivate over his car any more than I want to go to Old Country Buffet and watch other people eat. It's hard to be gracious about that sort of thing. He also managed to work in that he co-owns his own business (with his brother Craig, I could laugh myself to death) and that if any of the boys wanted a motorcycle or snowmobile he could really "hook them up." Granted, this was about his life since we parted, and that's what I wanted to hear about, but it was just stuff I didn't so much like and answered none of the questions I was really burning to ask. Ain't life grand?
Then the boys had to go out and look at his car, but he stayed behind. HB did too, watching me like he had me in custody and I might make a break for it at any moment.
"While I gotcha mostly alone," Rod said to me, and tipped HB a wink, "There's something I really wanted to ask you. I hope you won't think I'm too nosey..."
"Just ask," and I tried to smile. I showed my teeth, anyway. Feeling so gross just made it impossible for this to turn out pleasantly.
"When did you get sick?" he said, and for some reason this seemed important to him.
"God, over a week ago," I groaned and rubbed my face. Bet I looked like hell. "Don't worry, you didn't give me this, it's just a bug I picked up somewhere."
His face did several things: impatience, amusement... "No, Bigg. I mean when did you get sick? You know, sick."
I was mystified, but suddenly HB put his hand on my knee and laughed. "No, no," he said. "You think Bigg has AIDS, right? But no. You were wrong." He laughed and pointed rather disrespectfully at Rod's expression. "No, he was always careful." HB patted my knee with that hand. "And married, and stuff." He leaned forward, and I swear he almost seemed like he enjoyed telling Rod, "He doesn't have AIDS or HIV, he has cancer."
Rod looked shocked. "My God, what kind?"
So I told him, and we talked a little more about that, but then the boys came trooping back in and announced that it was starting to rain and Rod's sunroof or moonroof or skylight or whatever was open. Rod apparently took that as his signal to go. He gave me an awkward little hug, shook HB's hand, gave the boys a thumbs-up and a wave and drove off in his spandy little car. Bet that sucker cost him a fortune.
When he was gone, I turned to HB and said, "Go ahead. Lay it on me."
"Lay what on you?" He was all innocent and puzzled, but I thought he was simmering underneath. "Only thing I don't see is how he found you if you didn't call him."
"I lived here back when I knew him," I pointed out, figuring that we'd argue now, no matter how much I didn't want that.
HB just shrugged and said, "Okay. It's cool." He smiled at me. "Don't worry. I'm not gonna freak out or anything." He yawned and stretched. "I feel like playing some X-Box. Got the new Saints Row 2. What'd you make for supper?"
Aaron jumped up. "I made supper, after I got home from school." That's my Aaron, always the martyred drama queen. "I will get you a plate." And he swept off to the kitchen.
"When Robbie gets home I'm gonna take pills and go to bed. Just so you know," I told HB, and he nodded and put his hand on my knee again. "You wanna go up to bed now? You want anything?"
"Nope, it's cool." I kissed him and got up and wobbled my way up the stairs... but I stopped in the doorway and looked back at him for a minute on the way. Can you ever know how somebody else's mind works?
So I came upstairs and I wrote the whole thing down so he at least would know how my mind works. I thought we were just starting to really be past the issues Rod brought up, and here he is again. I still can't say I understand what set HB off so hard about Rod the first time - I mean, David's tried to tell me every way but interpretive dance but all I get is it's not just jealousy, it's some sort of inadequacy feeling that has to do with our ages and my (okay, MUCH MORE EXTENSIVE) relationship history and my alleged idolizing of Rod but I don't really understand it because I never really was very capable of jealousy. Or, to hear David tell it, remorse, but he's a bitch anyway and I digress. I don't want HB to feel that way, and I don't understand why Rod does that to him and not David, whom he seems to like for some unfathomable reason. All I know is, I love that boy, and I don't want this to be a problem. If I have to, I'll tell Rod to piss off. I wouldn't like that, because (at least in my estimation) he's done nothing wrong, but I'd do it to keep the peace.
Right now, I guess it's HB's call.

Title lyric from "I Will Survive" as covered by Cake (Yes, we all agree Gloria did it better, but these boys aren't bad.)

I've Wandered Much Further Today Than I Should

2008-10-13T15:01:00.000-04:00

Okay, I give. I'm sick today. My fever's climbed another notch, I ache all over, I can't turn my head to the left. I holler uncle, I'm beat. I got up just long enough to help make dinner, and now I'm done.
I'm just lying here considering the shapes on the ceiling, actually. I've looked at them a lot since they moved HB and me down here to the second floor. There's this water stain over the head of the bed, it looks like a face in profile. Sad face. Eyes and mouth turned down. Then there's the hairline cracks in the old plaster, two of them that zigzag together to make an interlocking 'S' and 'M' by the light fixture. First initial of my last name, first initial of his. All the little bumps and brushstrokes laid down in the plaster by someone I didn't know more than by name and will never meet, as he's been dead for decades. It's my history that informs this room for me: this was my first bedroom, my nursery, when they brought me home to this house from the hospital. I remember being four years old and my bed being exactly where it is now, and how the shapes I imagined that I saw in my closet frightened me so. Or when I was a teenager and slept with my first lover in that room. With my first wife. With D. I also remember lying next to David in this room just a few years ago and looking at those cracks, wondering if I'd ever know someone whose name started with the 'M' wrapped around my 'S.' HB's last name starts with an 'M.' You know, I feel sorry for people who move around so much. My house is my skin.
Aaron had the day off school today, and HB got off work early. Aaron calls Columbus day the "Advent of Syphilis In Europe" day, which at least proves that he's been reading, right? HB asked me how to sign onto MSN messenger, so I'd guess he's found someone to talk to online. I think that's usually a good thing, and he'll tell me about it when he's ready. Or not. We'll see. Right now I can hear them both in the kitchen, the room directly below this one, rummaging in the fridge and the cupboards. Hungry again. Too bad; J was here and he cleaned me right out, I mean that kid eats like a lawnmower cuts grass. I hobbled down earlier and helped the girls get all that turkey in and out of the oven, and they had a giant spread for J before he and Jill left. They wanted me to eat but it all tasted like sand and kleenex to me, just tasteless textures in my mouth. Plus when I keep my mouth closed long enough to chew I could suffocate. At least it got me out of doing any of the dishes. Duff took home two of the finished turkeys, Katherine took one to school and J took one home. They all had the other two stuffed and baked for J's sendoff dinner, hurray for them. I am enjoying my hot water with lemon and phenylephrine just as much as I would have the turkey I'm sure.
I wish I had more energy. It's my only real complaint. I can take pills if it hurts and every head cold passes, but I don't get anything done when I stay in bed most of the day. Pretty soon I'll get up and do some laundry, wash the dishes from whatever mess HB and Aaron are making down there, pick up the family room. Probably. I won't make Aaron do it, because he should be reading something or doing math until he catches up in school. I don't want HB to do it because he worked today, half day, sure, but he worked and I didn't and that makes me responsible for the house part. Maybe a cup of coffee could light a fire under my ass, but I doubt it, and it's so rough on my stomach and... whatnot.
So maybe I'll get up sometime soon, or maybe not. Maybe I'll just read some blogs, watch recorded episodes of Sordid Lives, smoke a cigarette (that'll make me cough), stare at the ceiling and wait for HB to come back up. There's always tomorrow, right? A day is never wasted and all that. Still, the way I feel right now, today was definitely a waste. I've always been a big believer in better living through chemistry, but just now it's letting me down.
So maybe tomorrow will be better. I hope so.

Title lyric from "House At Pooh Corner" by Kenny Loggins.

Girls - To Do The Dishes, To Clean Up My Room, To Do The Laundry, And In The Bathroom

2008-10-12T13:40:00.000-04:00

"God, how do you stand it?" Jill pulls out another tuft of feathers and blows a raspberry. "This is the grossest thing in the world." Her fingers are sticky with old blood.
The girls and I are gathered on my back deck: Katherine, Jill, Jessy (Duff's woman) and I, all plucking wild turkey carcasses. Out here in the Big Woods we know how to have a good time. I am in fact swaying on my ankles as I squat, and the back of my neck is a solid bar of pain. My breath rumbles in and out of my chest, my throat furred with phlegm. My fever remains steady. Like everything else, this does not stop me. In my time I have seen lightning, fire, flood, deep sickness and ill will. They wash over me and pass by, they take what they can take but I remain. That's my secret: I abide, and I endure. My bones are made of stone. Either that or I've finally crossed over the border between sick and delirious. Your call.
I am singeing the pinfeathers and broken quill stubs from the denuded carcasses with a butane torch turned way up so high that if I'm not careful I could lose an eyebrow. We have six birds in all, half of them shot with arrows right here on my property not from where we are squatting. Mother Earth still provides her bounty. The smoke, smelling of burnt hair, curls around my face and lingers in a noxious cloud. Thank god I'm so stuffy that I can't smell it.
"I've thrown up everything in the world," I tell Jill, echoing her turn of phrase, "and there's nothing left that can gross me out." Satisfied with the job I've done on the third bird, I add it to the giant kettle of salt water to my left and holler for Aaron. After a minute, he appears and gingerly lifts the naked bird's body, sans head, feet and feathers, from the brine with a pair of barbecue tongs at arm's length and hotfoots it back into the kitchen with his other hand pinching his nose. What a baby. "You done with that one?" I ask Katherine, and she hands me over another forlorn carcass to pass over the flame. I hold the torch between my feet and pass the bird back and forth, never catching my fingers but searing every inch of denuded skin. Katherine is a good girl, and stoic, and she wanted to learn how to do this the old school way. I like to think that you could drop just about any of my kids in the wilderness, a la Survivorman, and they'd come out of the experience just about as fat and sassy as they started.
"So tell me what you're gonna do with them when we're done one more time," Jill says, looking rather green around the gills.
"We're gonna stuff them with cornbread soaked in molasses and sprinkle them with sage and oregano," I tell her, turning the bird over and over to burn off the little bits you can't pluck. "Then we're gonna roast them for about five hours, give or take, with sweet potatoes in the jacket. Oughta have a pretty nice spread tomorrow night."
She nods and keeps pulling out handfuls of loose feathers. We'd already dipped the dead, gutted bodies in boiling water to make the feathers come off easier, but it's still a messy unpleasant job. I guess I should feel bad for volunteering her for it, right? But cheerleader Barbie wanted to show that she's a big girl, and here she is, poor thing.
She flashes her big pale blue eyes at me. "So, how do you feel about Francie's crush on HB?" she asks me casually. That's Duff's daughter, the one that thinks HB is her ideal man. I think I told you about that.
"Oh, I'm so jealous," I assure her, spuriously jolly. I couldn't honestly care any less - like he's really gonna leave me for a fifteen year old girl. Or even screw one whose father tends to say 'I don't like you' with guns. Riiiight. "She's so much hotter than me, y'know?"
Katherine snorts out involuntary cynical laughter and tosses a handful of feathers over her shoulder, but says nothing. I really admire her for that.
"You better watch out," Jill challenges me. "She's closer to his age than you are and she's a lot hotter than you think." She stares me down for a minute, but she's still the first one to drop her eyes. I watch her even after, my hands making deft little circles with the turkey carcass over the flame without needing visual supervision. I've done this a time or two. I see that Jessy, Duff's woman, is trying to hide a smile; Francie is her stepdaughter, and they are not close.
"When Francie can do what I do," I say dryly, "I'll start to worry." I drop the thoroughly flamed turkey into the brine and take Katherine's plucked body. As soon as Jill is done they'll all be finished. I see a spot between the legs that Jill's missed and point it out. "Missed a spot - right there."
She pinches her lips together and dutifully attends to it. Little snot just better not forget who pecks who in this here henhouse, that's all I'm saying. All day yesterday and today I've kept my peace by briefly imagining my hands around her throat, choking the spunky cute-as-a-button life out of her whenever she irritates me, and so far that's working.
The door to the deck bangs open and J, Robbie, HB and Brad spill out behind us.
"Fuck that smells!" Robbie exclaims, waving his hand theatrically before his nose. "You really gotta do that?"
"If you want your dinner tomorrow to taste like turkey instead of burnt feathers, yes!" Jill archly informs him, and hands her finished corpse over to me. I start waving it over the flames, sending up a new wave of curling smoke in the boys' direction.
"Ugh, that smells like burnt hair," Brad gasps, one hand covering his mouth and his nose simultaneously while the other massages his stomach. "We gonna be able to eat that?"
Katherine rises smoothly to her feet and glares at them, fists planted on her baby-making hips. "Maybe if you get out of here and let us get it done!" She shoos them imperially away. Even HB shuffles away, shamefaced. The girls are right about this: killing them is the easy part, and the real work is always women's work. Too bad I gotta teach them how to do it. I would normally think this was fun, but my head aches and my neck aches and I have to hawk and spit every few minutes. When the birds are done I'm taking a pill.
"There," I say when they're gone, and chuck the last bird into the brine. "Aaron!" He reappears, still pinching his nose, and lugs the brine kettle away with the birds in it. "C'mon, let's go stuff 'em and we're done."
"Only if we're having a glass of wine while we do it," Jill opines, and Katherine casts a jaundiced eye at her.
"I don't know about you," and Katherine shucks off her bloody, befeathered apron, "but I'm having a big old shot of tequila. How 'bout you, Bigg?"
I grimace and rub my breastbone with my fist. "Can't really stomach the hard stuff much anymore, sunshine, but I'll match you the first one." I follow the girls inside, and Duff's lady contributes her first addition to the conversation:
"Pour me a triple," she says, massaging the small of her back with a groan. "Duff's gonna want me to make supper tonight still."
I wave that off with a grimace. I know how she feels, because my neck is killing me. "Screw him, sweetie. We're sending Randy down for pizzas, Duff can bring the kids here and they can damn well eat that."
She regards me with tired, hollow eyes. "You sure? He'll probably pitch in for the pizza if you want." Then she smiles again, a big full smile this time. "Francie will love this."
"We can worry about pizza money when he gets here," I tell her. "Pull up a chair and take a load off." I holler for Robbie and he comes running with my pills.
Katherine gets out the bottle of tequila, the wine bottles and glasses. She deftly pours and passes them around, and then raises her shot glass.
"A toast," she offers us, and we all raise our glasses to match her. "To the Big Woods bitches, because nobody's a match for us." She tosses hers down, and we follow suit. I wash a pill or three down with mine.
I'll wish her a silent amen; may I be counted in that number, and let nothing truly be a match for me. I sure am feeling like a bitch today, anyway. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Title lyric from "Girls" by the Beastie Boys.

Electricity So Fine

2008-10-11T05:19:00.000-04:00

We are dancing.
I thought it would be appropriate to make a bit of fuss over J being here, so I decided we would celebrate. I spent forty five minutes on the phone summoning those who matter. They started arriving soon after supper; Duff brought several cases of his homemade wine, aged for over a year, and Brad lugged in a half keg of beer, but I wasn't going to be outdone. A party calls for something memorable, and I certainly managed that. God bless the natural bounty of the Big Woods.
So now the music is thundering through not four, not eight, but fourteen speakers distributed around the ground floor of my house. You can hear the bass line from several blocks away, not that any of my neighbors care. A good share of them are here, shaking their tails to the beat in my family room turned dance floor.
Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" thunders to a close, and is replaced by Madonna. HB mimicks her dance from the video, holding one hand on his head while he does an improvised country cowboy shuffle, his arm crooked around the small of my back while I pelvises rock and bob in time to the music. Near us, Jill is dancing with her back against J, and they are doing a very creditable job of moving their dance of simulated intercourse to the beat. Katherine and Robbie are matching their movements together, their fists held loosely over their heads as their feet plant, shift and turn. I see David dip Aaron over his arm like a folded towel, and the flush and smile on Aaron's face say that he likes it. The music changes: now it's K7 and the Swing Kids. Another great song to dance to, everyone singing with the "Swingers! Ho!" lines. The room is an abstract pulsing cloud of sound and color, my heightened senses overwhelmed. I know that my fever has risen because I can practically feel the moist air from the bubbling kettle on the woodstove evaporating on contact with my skin. That's okay. Maybe it's the music, maybe it's the party favors, but I feel like I could dance forever.
The beat changes and Jason Mraz begins to jauntily sing of love. HB seizes my hips and bobs and swings while he sings the lyrics to me: if we have a contemporary song to call our own, it's this one. I see Robbie, who is a very accomplished dancer, doing a hilariously appropriate amalgam of jitterbug and cakewalk, swinging Katherine through turns and exaggerated hand gestures to general applause.
"Our time is short, I'm yours," HB croons to me, pulling me close... and then the next number starts, an easy dirty dancing number from Britney. HB turns me and begins gyrating against my back while I bump and grind against him. Amber and Ricky shout with laughter; I see that she's whipped off her shirt, weaving like a cobra in her strapless undershirt while she sings the lyrics to Ricky. Jill has pushed J away and is doing a girl-on-girl slither with one her friends while J bops and grins idiotically, watching with avid glittering eyes. 'Aw, oh yeah,' Aaron mouths the words and thrusts his ass against David's crotch, and David wriggles his hips in time. The lights, colored and timed by my media player, flash and swirl with psychedelic patterns across the contours of the room. The bass thunders until I can feel it in my chest.
Now comes Zidler's rap, and both HB and I shout the words, underheard under the music, in basso profundo. For a minute we are separated and Amber and I are against each other, chanting: 'Got some dark desire? Why not play with fire?' Then Ricky claims her again and HB and I are face to face.
'Because we can can can,' we whisper to each other, and then everyone is jumping in time to the music. This is more than dance, it's serious exercise. HB whips his head around and splats of sweat shower me from his long locks. I am transported by fever and drugs and pounding music, not even sure if I'm keeping the beat. All around me bodies thrash and leap in time.
'Everybody can can!' we all shout and continue to writhe. J hooks HB neatly aside and dances with me to the rising crescendo of the song, my heart pounding so hard I can see its pulse in colored lights overlying my vision. I can feel sweat on the back of my twinging neck, I can feel it trickling into my shoes. Tomorrow I will probably lie in bed all day, but tonight is worth it. The beat hardly changes as Crystal Waters takes over.
When the joy and beat and upwelling energy finally fade I stumble a little bit, but HB's ready for this. He guides me through the other dancing couples, out through the darkened house and up to bed. I can feel the fever burning in my body like the flame in an oil lamp, but all I can feel tonight is jubilation. Tomorrow can come and bring its freightload of pain and regrets, but for tonight I am sixteen again and channeling the life-force of the very planet.
I can't wait for HB to get done in the bathroom. I want to be with him before the feeling fades altogether, and I am alone again inside my fading skin. I hope you can all get at least an echo of this marvelous feeling from my words, and I wish you a wonderful weekend.
Goodnight, all.

Title lyric from "Stepping Out" by Joe Jackson.

Letting The Days Go By

2008-10-10T10:12:00.003-04:00

I woke up in agony this morning.
I couldn't sleep very well last night, just didn't feel all that great, so I didn't drift off until almost four. Since taking the garbage out is another offensive in our neverending war with the raccoons I waited until the middle of the night to put it out, so naturally everyone was sleeping and I got to do it all by myself, and I could feel my neck twinging then. When I finally opened my eyes today, though, the entire left side of the back of my neck was one solid scream of pain and my head had that bad-cold feeling like your brain is packed full of snot. Not fun.
I levered myself out of bed and gimped my way across the hall looking for pills. All of the regular hiding places were empty. I ended up going up to the third floor and ransacking Aaron's space up there, rewarded with an almost empty bottle: three forlorn little buggers rattling around in the bottom. I wrenched the cap off and chewed them up like M&M's. Fabulously bitter. I thought vaguely on my way down the stairs again that a cup of tea might take that awful taste out of my mouth, so I headed for the kitchen.
Surprise, surprise. The house wasn't totally empty after all. J was sitting at my kitchen table, facedown in the pan of stuffed shells left over from my dinner with HB. There was a pie plate on the table next to the pasta, empty but for crumbs and a few puddles of juice from the caramel apple filling. He always did eat dessert first.
He looked up with a surprised grunt and we stared at each other for a minute. He had a big blot of sauce on either side of his mouth, reminding me very forcibly of the eight year old boy he'd been. No-one else's eyes could ever be so blue.
"Dad!" he got up and hugged me, hard, making me yelp involuntarily. My neck felt like someone was turning screws in there when he squeezed it with his arm. He let me go and held my shoulders in either hand. "What's wrong?" I could feel a smear of sauce on my own face now from him.
Running feet came pattering up behind us, and a pair of tattooed arms circled my midriff and squeezed, making my back and neck hurt like crazy all over again. "Robbie," I hissed, and J slapped at his arms.
"He's hurt, quit it!" J ordered.
So they practically carried me to the couch and examined me like a broken lawnmower. I kept telling them that I just slept on my neck wrong, but I'm all stuffy and they weren't settling for that. They both bitched at me for having a fever - although neither expert thought to actually take my temperature - and went absolutely ballistic because the glands behind my jaw and on the back of my neck are a little swollen. They weren't satisfied until they'd bundled me up in a mummy-style sleeping bag until I looked like a folded tent. Then they sat down on the couches opposite me and we all talked for a bit while the morphine started dissolving the worst of the pain in my neck. I finally made them believe that I was still sleepy from last night and got them to let me go back to bed and take J's laptop with me. So here I lie, warm and snug, my morphine-lubricated fingers able to tapdance again and my neck no more than a distant ache.
HB was really angry with me over the whole Rod thing, although I'm still just as certain that I handled the whole thing correctly and that he'll see that with some time and perspective. He didn't exactly appreciate me pleading my case with him by blogging about it all, either, but last night when we were sitting up talking about it he called up those posts on the computer in our bedroom and read them through again and again. In a weird way I think it kept the discussion from devolving into one of those 'I said-you said-he said' morasses that just keep anything from being resolved.
'I'll say this for you, Bigg, he told me at one point. 'I never thought I'd see my life turned into words quite this way before I met you.' I'm taking that one as a compliment.
He's out hunting with Duff right now, and I gotta tell you why that's funny before I go and pay attention to J and Robbie. You see, Duff has a daughter from a previous relationship who's all of fifteen years old, and she is utterly smitten with HB. Talks about him, writes her first name and his last name together in her schoolbooks, giggles and flirts and generally goes a little crazy whenever he's in the same room. So Duff came to us recently and told us that he was taking her bowhunting and he'd really like HB to tag along if possible. (She's a country girl, and they hunt. That's how it is.) Duff very forthrightly explained his thinking this way: HB is gay, she's crazy about HB, so if HB shows a little polite interest maybe she'll stay crazy about him instead of finding someone her own age who might really want to get in her pants. I personally think Duff's onto something there, since as far as his little girl's concerned HB's as safe and gender-neutral as a Ken doll or a Disney prince, but I didn't think he'd like hunting. He was very enthused, to my surprise, and now he's out somewhere in the woods with Duff, his daugher and a lot of primitive weapons. I doubt he's gonna have as much fun as he thinks, but we'll see.
Now I must go back downstairs and spend time with my son while I'm still feeling the pills enough not to wince every time I turn my head. He wants to show me half a million pictures of him and his girlfriend... Wish me luck.

Title lyric from "Once In A Lifetime" by the Talking Heads.

It's Gonna Be Alright

2008-10-09T18:35:00.000-04:00

I wanted to have a special little evening all arranged when HB got home. I made stuffed shells with brasciole and sweet sausage, I cleaned our bedroom and did laundry, I even invited David over to help me get all spruced up. It sounds like a lot of work, I know, but it was easy as pie. I did it like this:

"How are you ever gonna get a job if you don't AT LEAST finish high school? Grab that spoon over there and stir the sauce. Not that fast, you're splattering it. Oh, hell, let me do it. I heard the dryer buzz a second ago, you can go get the clean towels and fold them. Well, go on, hurry up!" I'll give Aaron this much credit, I've never seen such a repertoire of dirty, sullen and resentful looks. With ability like that he could be a detainee on Cops - they are still making that series, right? I worked him like he was my bitch the entire day and thundered up a sermon on education at the same time, mostly while I sat on my ass. I didn't even know David had arrived until I heard him burst out laughing.

"-might be nice for weekends but professional drag queen is not a lucrative career choice and guys who like drag queens still only like the smart educated witty ones so if you ever wanna land a man you better lose that attitude and get your ass to-" I was saying.

"Jesus, Bigg, take a breath," David told me, wiping his eyes. "It's like you're channeling my sainted momma." Then he laughed some more.

"Your momma's a fat evil bitch," I growled without thinking. I mean, she is, but I didn't mean to say it right out loud like that.

"Yeah, and you're not fat, right Bigg?" Aaron smiled at me, all sweet malice. "I folded Katherine's underwear and the food's pretty much ready, so may I pretty please sit down and make a phone call?"

"Go find that expensive razor HB bought me last week first." I turned to David. "Look, I'm sorry about the crack about your mother."

He laughed yet more and shook his head. "If it weren't true I'd've called you out on it," he assured me. "What'd you make good to eat?"

"I made an entire Italian feast," Aaron said as he squeezed by us in the narrow doorway to my kitchen. "The white slaver there just barked orders and bitched."

"Good to see someone loves you enough to nurture you, princess," David returned smartly. "Don't worry, I'm gonna keep him busy for a few minutes." He looked at me, then reached up and appraised the short bristles of my crewcut with his palm. "You just want me to trim this up, right? Damn, you are hot!" His hand traveled down onto my forehead, so I knew he wasn't telling me how good I look in jeans. "You taken anything today?"

"He's been sick all day!" Aaron hollered from the other room. He's so helpful. "Make him go lay down!"

"Lie down, Aaron!" I yelled back. "And I will not! HB's gonna be home in-" I glanced at the clock "-oh, crap. C'mon, we gotta get hustling." I dragged David upstairs.

So, after I went through all that, naturally HB would come home early, go clumping up the stairs and open the bathroom door... Only to bust me and David, me stripped to the waist with little puffs of shaving cream on my shoulders while David shaved my back. I saw HB's reflection in the mirror first - and actually caught my own deer-in-the-headlights look.

"Hi, honey," I said weakly. "I made dinner and cleaned the house and everything! I wanted to surprise you."

"Color me surprised, all right," he said calmly. "But you didn't have to go to all this trouble." He met my eyes in the reflection and something passed between us, but I couldn't really say what. "What'd you make for dinner? David, you staying?" And just like that, I felt like some of the awkwardness from that very unfortunate misunderstanding that we will never mention again (but you know I will, right?) just sort of melt away.

"Nope, I gotta go," David said briskly, and splashed rubbing alcohol all up and down my spine with both hands. Cold, burning rubbing alcohol. While I spasmed, he grabbed a towel and started patting my back dry with little slaps. "There, all set." He put one arm around my bare stomach and kissed my ear, right there in front of HB, which was sort of irritating but whatever. He and HB said hello and goodbye to each other while David picked up the razor and shaving cream and stuff and generally tidied up, and then we all went back downstairs.

Aaron met us at the bottom of the stairs. "You staying for dinner?" he asked David, who again demurred and left through the side door. "Right this way, then," Aaron said, and led us to the dining room table that we never use. It was sparkling clean and set with placemats and table service, napkins and even candles. "Dinner is served," Aaron said grandly, and came bustling out with a loaded tray. And finally, things were right again. Really right.

Finally.

Title lyric from "Love is Alright Tonight" by Rick Springfield.

You Make The Change, You Rearrange Me Til I'm Sane

2008-10-09T04:02:00.000-04:00

I couldn't sleep. I've been having that spiders-crawling-on-me goosebumps sensation plus some wicked chills, so when I visited the loo - now conveniently right across the hall! - I stuck the thermometer in my mouth and made gargoyle faces at myself in the mirror. Juvenile, I know. When I dug the little glass rod back out from under my tongue, the red ribbon of mercury ended just past 101. Doesn't that just figure?
So I went downstairs to look for some pills. The house was big and very dark and silent, but there was light coming through the family room door. Whoever was in there was making little nonverbal sounds, but I couldn't tell if they were laughing or...
I went and peeked through.
Aaron was sitting on the couch watching Sordid Lives on LOGO and crying. He had a big bowl of popcorn in his lap that he was liberally salting with his tears like something straight out of a country song. A really bad country song.
So I went and sat with him and put my arm around him, and when he was done crying on my shoulder he asked me why. He asked me why, when we're all guys and go through the exact same things together, why do we treat each other this way?
That's when I knew that something had gone wrong with his new boyfriend. Only a month in, too. Damn. And I was right: new boyfriend is officially ancient history and his name shall now be stricken from the records for all time. Too bad, the little bastard was cute.
I'm past the point where I feel like I'm expert enough to give somebody advice. So I had some of his soggy teary popcorn and told him that no matter how wonderful that kid seemed, he just wasn't the one. There would be someone... If I know you, a LOT of someones, I told him and gave him a sly dig in the ribs with my elbow. I also told him that it seems to be a hard truth that for guys like us relationships can be short or long, but only a very few are going to last right up to the end, so it's probably best to make a lot of really good friends to fall back on. But whatever you do, I told him, don't get a cat. You'll end up that crazy lady that nobody will visit because she's got twenty of them and her house smells like litterbox. Then he laughed and then cried some more and I hugged him some more, and he finally thought to ask why I came down. I told him I was looking for my pills, and he said that might be a good idea, I looked kinda pale, and of course he went and felt my forehead like he's suddenly my mother. At least that motivated him to run and dig me out the pill bottle.
"Oh yeah," he said while he watched me swallow them down with swig of fizzy water - gross! - "what happened with you and HB?"
I waved him off with the bottle still to my mouth. "Dear God," I said, wiping my lips on the back of my hand - okay, and a little on my bathrobe sleeve, hey, it's just water - "Let's not talk about all that mess. I think that's all over."
"Oh yeah?" he nodded gravely. "So what happened though? You went out with somebody you used to live with or sleep with or something?"
"I bumped into an old friend at the mall," I said and smiled. Nicely, I thought.
"Jeez, you don't hafta bite my head off," he groused. "I've just never seen HB as pissed as he was last night. Bowled a two hundred game, though."
"Yeah, he was all bent out of shape because he thought... Hold up a second. Did you say bowling? HB took you bowling last night?"
Aaron looked bewildered. "He didn't tell you?"
"No. I thought he was off somewhere being pissed at me."
"Oh, he was pissed, okay," Aaron giggled. "He said..."
"Yes? Go on."
"He said what a great guy you are and that I have a super big mouth, isn't that true?" and he giggled again. "You guys seemed fine tonight."
"Yeah, yeah. We are, at least as far as I know." But I bet I know just how to find out for sure. The way to a man's heart is through his... well it's lower than his stomach, anyway. I rubbed my hand over my forehead and it felt hot to me all over again. "I think I'm gonna go back to bed. Gimme those pills."
"Nothing doing. HB and Robbie would skin me. They gotta last until Robbie gets back." He made a face and shook two more out of the bottle and extended them on his palm. "Have these in case you need more. I'm gonna go to bed too."
"Here?" I was sort of surprised; he's spent a lot of nights at his mother's, now that they're getting along better. Sure wish we hadn't introduced her to the asshole-in-disguise she's dating right now, poor thing.
"Yeah." He stood up, stretched hugely and yawned. "I'm gonna have the whole third floor to myself. Woo hoo!"
I shook my head. He came over and gave me another hug, and I kissed him on the forehead. "Go to bed, silly. What time you gotta be up for school?"
He made another disdainful face and wagged his neck. "I ain't going to school tomorrow," he told me. "Fuck that place. I'm getting a GED, or something."
"What, still? Who is it this time?"
"It's bedtime, Bigg," he told me, and started pulling me toward the stairs by the arm. He's getting bigger, I'm getting smaller, one of these damn days we'll pass each other. "I don't wanna argue. That place is a shithole, and everybody in it has tiny little cramped up minds like constipated assholes. I hate it. It sucks. I'm never going back."
"Well, you almost got one part right," I told him outside my bedroom door. "We are gonna argue about this. Since you're not going to school tomorrow, I guess we'll have time to argue about it a lot. Won't that be fun? Night, honey."
"Yeah, night to you too, mommy," he said crossly, but he'll be fine.
Maybe I'll even feel better enough to get up and fix him a nice breakfast before I start chewing his head off. Wish me luck with that.

Title lyric from "Brain Damage" by Pink Floyd.

The Best Advice Of Friends Unheeded

2008-10-08T06:43:00.003-04:00

Well, that backfired on me.
"Wow," David said reflectively and leaned his chair back on two legs. "Rod. The legendary long-gone first lover." He stretched his arms behind his head, fingers linked, until his shoulders crackled. His melony biceps popped and flexed, bracketing his head. "Can I ask you a question?"
"You just did." That's what I always say in response to that particular non sequitur. "Just ask already."
"You get with this kid who's what, twenty? And you-"
"If you're referring to HB, he's twenty-two," I cut him off icily. "Twenty three in less than a month. You gotta point?"
He glared. "Will you let me finish?" He pouted until I gestured for him to go on. "As I was saying, you're with a twenty-two year old kid. Sure, he's mature for his age, how can he help it with what you tell me he went through as a teenager? And you fill his head not only with how much you love him and need him and won't recover from freakin' cancer without him, but at the same time you feed him the same stories you gave me. Rod, your first and only true great love. How attractive he was, how much you loved him, how you just wish more than you want to live that you could find him and make it right with him, but..." He paused and struck a pose of theatrical suspense. God I hate him sometimes... mostly because he's stayed such a damn good friend. That happens. "But you think he must be dead already because you looked and searched and prostated yourself with grief because you couldn't find him-"
"The word," I said, my teeth clenched so tight my jaw hurt, "is prostrated."
He stared at me for a minute. I wish he'd let me post his picture here; he's everything a man wants to be at his age, buff, authorative, suave. Too bad he's so full of shit, y'know? Then he pointed at me. "That shit there," he said, exaggerating the weave of his neck and the shaming pointed finger, "does NOT help, just so you know." He brushed one hand indignantly through his hair and then settled again. "Bottom line, you made this kid think that your first lover was a saint on an unattainably high pedestal who was now almost certainly seated at the right hand of Christ and that he'd never measure up to that. You might not think so, but I know because you did it to me."
Just for the record, he's lying. I barely ever mentioned Rod to him.
"The sad thing is," he preached right on, "you forget-" he raked his pointed finger down at me in tempo with his little sermon "-that I was in wrestling with him too, and I remember him the way he really was, which was and probably is a sawed off, cocky, drunkass little jock wannabe who basically treated you the way rock stars treat groupies." He threw his hands up in mock disbelief. "So now... So NOW you call me over here to defend you for ditching HB to talk to that swaggering little shit. AND get his number. AND promise to meet him again." He was certainly in his glory. Jack's had an effect on him, because he was talking more flamboyantly with his hands than most italians I know. Plus the way he cocked his eyebrow and wagged his neck when he said, "Really! Really? Honestly, Bigg? REALLY."
"That wasn't how it was," I objected. You read my last post - it really wasn't. Not at all.
"Oh? So you didn't get his number. Oh, and you didn't tell him you'd see him again. Is that right? Is that what you're telling me?"
"I didn't say I'd see him again." Now he was really making me feel obstinate. "You make it sound like I plan to boink him next Saturday after a nice dinner and a movie."
"You're right," he said in a falsely compassionate voice, "Randy's just a big old liar and you didn't say you'd see him again at all."
"That little bastard," I muttered. Jeez, can't any of them keep their mouths shut? All I meant when I said "see you" was that I'd live to see him again. I really hope I do, too - just like I hope it's another twenty five years from now. So stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.
"I'd like to see you call Randy little to his face," said David, bland as possible. Damn him, he was enjoying this. "Or are you referring to Saint Rodney?"
"Don't call him that."
"Aaw, did I touch a nerve?"
And of course right then HB walked in. We both looked at him, and he froze in the doorway.
"Great," he said. "Wonder what you're talking about. Or I should probably say who."
"Aw, Christ." I put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. "Fine. I saw somebody I used to know and I wasn't a total asshole to him. I've wondered what happened to him for the last twenty five years so I selfishly talked to him for what, half an hour. Forty minutes maybe. That's right, I'm Satan. So go ahead and hate me." Okay, that was a little over the top, but David had me all wound up. Or, maybe, I don't know, even though I know there's nothing to it the fact that everybody's acting like we ran straight to a public restroom and hooked up in a stall is starting to get to me.
David looked back and forth between us and then sprang to his feet. "Okay, then. Time for me to go!"
"Yep. See you later." HB still stood in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, watching David gather up his boots and coat and go.
When he was gone, HB finally came in came over to me. He poked me hard in the side, probably because he knows I hate that. He's always poking me.
"Come on," he told me. "We're gonna go upstairs and talk."
"Why can't we talk down here?"
He gave me a stern look. "'Cause I might wanna talk real loud." And he went up the stairs without a backward glance.
What could I do? I followed him.

Title lyric from "Fascination" by the Human League.