I asked J to scan a few photos of me and Eduardo from 1983. Except for the last one, these were taken in Eduardo's apartment on 11th St. and Ave. C, the place we shared for a few months the following year. That summer we were very into bleaching our hair, rooftop parties, and dancing at the Roxy. (And taking pictures of ourselves.)
The last one was taken at Jones Beach. That's my friend Liz who was in my class at Parsons. She used to call Eduardo and me the "love affair of the century." I wish I were still friends with Liz.
I'm back in Austin. I arrived last night after 31 hours on an Amtrak train. The trip was, mostly, enjoyable. I was worried for the first couple hours on the train because I managed to choose a seat right in front of 3-year-old twins who chattered, screamed, and cried non-stop. They literally did not shut up. Contemplating two full days of that, I thought I would have a nervous breakdown. But soon I realized there were plenty of other places to hang out, the observation car, the cafe car, etc.
My stomach is a little funny, I'm sure because for two days on the train all I ate was peanuts, ginger snaps, and a foul tuna sandwich I forced myself to eat because I paid $5.50 for it.
I'll write more about the trip and the last part of my stay in Indiana in the next few days,. In the last couple of weeks I've been in touch with several people from my distant past, and such encounters are always revealing. In keeping with the tone of this blog, I will share all the epiphanies, large and small. Right now I'm just glad to be home, cooking in my own kitchen.
I had what I suspect is a typically fucked-up -- typical for homosexual kids, maybe for all kids, I don't know, I don't think people really talk enough (or honestly enough) about these things to know what is typical -- introduction to sex and sexuality. Unacknowledged-by-day (and completely unsatisfying) sex play with a friend starting when I was about 14. Deep fear and shame about it. Eventual admission to myself that I was homosexual. Really sordid "first time" with a predatory older man. (Come to think of it, the second time was of the same genre.) My first criterion when I went to choose a college was that no one I went to high school with be going there, so I could come out without my family or anyone in my hometown finding out.
And when I got to college I came out big time, told anyone who would listen, made plenty of gay friends (I was a theater major), went to my first gay nightclub, developed that sense of defiant pride which is part of any good coming out story. I wore a pink triangle button on my book bag. When people asked me what it meant, I wouldn't say that I was gay, but I would say that it was the symbol homosexuals were made to wear in the Nazi concentration camps.
Two years later, I moved to New York. I was in art school, I lived in the East Village. Being gay was not a big deal; in fact, for years I hardly knew any straight men. I fell in love, and I took my new boyfriend home to Indiana to meet my parents.
What's weird about this is that I was 22 and I still hadn't come out to my family. My folks are fairly liberal about some things, but they have what seem to me very strict, traditional attitudes about sex and relationships. My mother took a dim view of cohabitation before marriage and, especially, divorce. Homosexuality looked to me to fall into the same category.
When Eduardo and I arrived, it was the middle of the day and we went to meet my mother at the library where she worked. I had a thatch of bleached platinum hair on the top of my head with the sides and back clipped short and dark, and Eduardo probably had some equally outlandish haircut. We were both probably wearing oversized plaid Bermuda shorts and Bundeswehr tank tops -- that's what we wore most days (cut me some slack, it was 1983!). [When I get home to Austin, I'll post a photo or two of Eduardo and me from our East Village club days. I have some good ones.]
That night my mom told me how a custodian at work had made a crude gay joke about me to her. She pleaded with me to tone down my appearance while I was in town. She was crying. She said that she didn't want to make me feel ashamed of who I was but that she couldn't bear the ridicule. This is what I remember. She also said something about my earring. (I had had my left ear pierced a few years earlier, my first year of college.) She said that she understood that some men wore earrings as a "symbol of their sexuality," and I understood her to mean that she knew I was homosexual and it was okay. There was nothing more explicit said about it until much later, but I took that conversation to be the moment when I came out to my family.
My father acknowledged the news with stories, told to my mom but meant to be passed along to me, of his own father who he is sure was homosexual, stories that I think he intended to convey that this was not something scary and foreign to him, that he had some context for it. But I'm speculating. My father is a reticent man and was even more so then.
Another piece of this tale is my memory of a slim paperback, left on top of a pile of magazines in a rack in my parents' house, called something like How to Talk to Your Gay Child or What to Say When Your Child Comes Out, I don't remember exactly. This must have been when I was in college, before Eduardo. In my coming out narrative, this scene functions to show how accepting and ready my parents were long before I had the nerve to bring it up to them.
Last week Mom and I were having one of our long, rambling conversations, and she recalled a conversation with my brother, when he was in the Navy and I was in college, in which she told him that I was gay and his jaw just dropped. My brother and I are a year apart, we shared a bedroom growing up, we're very different but have always been close. Mom said he was stunned that he could not know something so important about me. I was trying to figure out when this conversation could have taken place, trying to put the timeline together. I said, "How early did you know?"
She said, "I don't know, I guess it was when you were in college that you came out."
"No -- I didn't come out until I brought Eduardo home."
"Oh, no, it was earlier than that."
"No, I know I didn't tell you before that. I would remember that."
"You must have."
"Well, anyway, I should have known that you knew. You left that book out."
"What book?"
"Like How to Talk to Your Gay Son or something like that."
"I don't remember a book. You must have left that book out. It wasn't us."
"No! It was in the magazine rack. You left it there for me to see."
"I don't remember any book like that."
"I know when I came out to you. I brought Eduardo home, there was that whole flap about my appearance, and I told you."
"Steven, I'm sure you told us earlier than that."
A friend of mine (he's a writer) recently said that as far as he's concerned "one's life is basically a story," and I agree, but I don't like to think that my life is only a good story because I'm writing it after the fact.
My friend The Gardener has disappeared. (I also wrote about him here.) We only saw each other every two or three weeks, and it was a new friendship but, I thought, a deep one. We'd have breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday morning at Los Altos, the dirt-cheap Mexican restaurant just up I-35. We talked about sex and politics mostly. He usually paid, and a couple times he took me out for ice cream which totally made me feel like a girl. In a good way.
He's a sweet man and I think our friendship was getting richer as we got to know each other. I was slowly getting over my urge to lick his neck every time I saw him. But he never introduced me to his long-time partner. I'm sure it was partly because we saw each other so infrequently and there probably wasn't a time when it would have naturally happened, but, also, I felt like maybe he was keeping me to himself. Not that we were having "an affair," but I felt like there was at least a little bit of "the other man" about it, which I liked because it kept our friendship in some small way erotic. Could be all in my head, who knows. At any rate, The Gardener disappeared.
He stopped answering emails. After a break of several weeks, he did reply and say that with the summer he was spending less time at the computer. But then after that, nothing. And I don't have his phone number any more. It was in my cell phone, which I got rid of.
I guess I'm a little worried. His mother died early this year, and a friend killed himself not long before that. He didn't seem particularly thrown by either death, but he's a stolid man, ex-military, not the type to get real emotional. Now, that can mean he has a very healthy attitude, he's philosophical about life and death and deals well with the big stuff. Or it could mean he keeps it all inside and it builds up and he has a meltdown later on. I haven't known him long enough to have an opinion.
I've been thinking of him a lot since I've been here in Indiana with my mom and dad.
I've been wondering today where all the hate goes when somebody so hateful dies. Does it decompose along with his corpse? It seems like it would at least linger like an odor, a whiff of sulfur. He wielded it with such implacable force, bruised and battered so many people and institutions over so many years that it's hard to believe such hate wouldn't be a hard, solid thing.
The tooth is gone. I like that it was tooth #1 on the big master tooth chart (did you know they're all numbered?). He showed it to me after he pulled it out, and it was nasty-looking: huge and discolored, with a big hole in it.
The whole thing took 15 minutes tops and I didn't feel a thing, which is a drag because the oral surgeon was cute. As I was leaving, he said, "Call me if you need me."
My nephew L, who is 12 and cute as the dickens (as my grandma used to say), has a girlfriend. He asked his mom (my sister) if he was allowed to "date," whatever that could possibly mean at 12. She says L and the girl are texting each other all day long.
When my sister told me, I was incredulous and maybe even a little appalled. 12? Isn't that extremely young? He hasn't even started puberty yet. I'm sure I had no interest in dating at 12. But then I remembered (duh) of course I was interested in boys at 12, but my interest didn't lead me to ask my mother if I was allowed to go on a date. I knew that if I ever told anyone about the evil growing inside me, I would spend the rest of my life being raped in jail, and even if I didn't tell anyone I would spend eternity roasting on a spit.
Here's something I can write about. This week, I went back to the dentist, or I should say the hygienist, and she finished cleaning my teeth. And I have an appointment on Thursday with an oral surgeon to have one pulled because the filling has fallen out and it's a wisdom tooth and the hole is close to the nerve so it's easier and cheaper to just yank it. I can't describe the joy this brings me, to know that I'll soon have all the filthy, stinky rotten stuff out of my mouth.
I also feel a twinge of sadness about having a permanent part of my body removed. (Not so permanent, after all.) Being here with my aging parents, I've been thinking so much about getting older in terms of what you give up, the accumulation of loss: the people around you who die one by one, the activities you can no longer manage, the shrinking of your zone of travel, the narrowing of possibility in general, and things like bone loss, memory loss, vision and hearing loss, loss of elasticity in your skin. And the always accelerating contraction of the number of years you have left. All of it.
I'm at a loss for what to write about these days. There's lots going on in my head for sure, some of it pretty fascinating if I do say so myself, but most of it has to do with unpacking my neuroses in light of my parents' habits. I would be an ungrateful son, not to mention a rude guest, to paint what would surely seem to them an unflattering portrait of my parents here. What I want to do, what I wish I could do, here and in my brain, is forgive my parents and paint the unflattering portrait of myself.
I've been here for 4 weeks now. It's been stormy on and off the whole time. But enough sun that the spinach Mom and I planted the week I arrived is big and leafy, and I thinned the basil so there are about a dozen seedlings now about 3 inches tall. I saw a sleek, black spider on one of the spinach leaves this morning and was glad that I found it and not my mom. They gleefully kill everything here, smash spiders with newspapers and Kleenex, lure chipmunks into cages where they shoot them with guns, rig the lawn with Medieval contraptions that impale moles as they commute in their tunnels under the grass. And god help the dandelions, the lepers of the suburban plant world. Poor little yellow things. So pretty and doomed.
I won't mow the lawn. Well, I suppose I would if my dad asked me, but he hasn't and I'm grateful to the point of tears. Mowing grass might as well be the eternal flames of hell. I can't think of any worse torment. And it's been raining a lot since I got here, so the grass needs to be mowed every few days. "Needs to be mowed," they say, but I think it looks beautiful when it gets all long and green and lush. I have to admit that I feel guilty watching my 74-year-old father push the lawn mower back and forth -- but not guilty enough to go out there. I think he enjoys it. I'm going to assume he enjoys it.
I feel such a strong urge to be writing one of those usually icky articles like "what I learned about life and myself while taking care of my sick parent," but I have this rule about not writing personal stuff about other people. It's a tricky rule, and I'm usually very uncertain where to draw the line. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't be interesting to you to read about my mom, but I don't think it's my story to tell. At least, not right now in the middle of it.
Just to reassure anyone who might worry: Mom is doing very well. In fact, you wouldn't even know she'd been sick. Yesterday she had me drag all the furniture from the screened-in porch out onto the lawn so she could scrub the mold off with bleachy water. I'm not sure if I should insist on doing these chores for her, because it seems to me that this is what she does. This is what her days consist of. Taking care of the house and the lawn and the gardens. Because her immune system is compromised by the chemotherapy, she's not allowed to dig in the dirt this summer. I try to keep up with the weeding, but I know somehow that's not the point. Someone else weeding is fine, but it's a distance second to doing it herself.
I can say this without betraying anyone's privacy: I am in a foreign and mysterious place where bushes get pruned to the bloody nub and all the condiments are in upside-down plastic bottles. I miss my wild, overgrown yard, and I miss the sound of a butter knife against the rim of the mustard jar. And I miss J.
My dad is a Civil War buff. The military stuff doesn't interest me much, but the politics do. Over the last two nights, we watched Gods and Generals (it's almost 4 hours long) and he's watching Gettysburg tonight. I'm wandering in to catch bits of it, but I can only take so much. Great acting, and beautiful photography, but the ponderous tone wears me out. I know there's a case to be made that this class of people in this time were more eloquent and sentimental, but was everything that came out of their mouths so lofty?
The best thing about these movies -- and the Civil War era -- is the facial hair. It's infinitely varied, elaborate, masculine, and very sexy.
I got my teeth cleaned today! Well, at least the first stage. Apparently since I hadn't had my teeth cleaned in 6 years, I needed some kind of super comprehensive cleaning. Today they did a "total mouth debridement" (translation: chipping plaque off the teeth with a chisel) and I have another appointment in two weeks for what I think they were calling a "fine scaling," to get whatever the chisel left behind.
I don't have any new cavities, only one where a filling cracked and fell out. The dentist said since it's so close to the nerve I might want to just have it taken out. The tooth, that is. It's a wisdom tooth. Yank it out, I say. That way, I won't have to worry about it any more.
I feel giddy. I had become so self-conscious about my breath that I was avoiding public gatherings, I was really avoiding meeting new people, and I got terribly anxious going into any situation in which I might have to speak with anyone at close range. Any time I had to talk to anyone at school I found myself muttering out of the side of my mouth. But I am an outcast no more!
I'll be in Indiana until some time around the end of July. I'm staying with my mom and dad while my mom recovers from surgery she had a few weeks ago, helping with gardening and cooking and anything else they need and enjoying the nice long visit with my family that I haven't been able to have for many years. My sister and her family along with her in-laws -- they all live about 45 minutes away -- are going on a trip in mid-July, and I'm going to house-sit and cat-sit for them. They're going to pay me for it, which I feel a little strange about because it is something I would happily do anyway, but the money makes it possible for me to stay here for this extended time. So it all works out.
I was also counting on my $600 check from the IRS to help me get through the summer, but now I don't think I'm going to get one, since everyone I know has gotten theirs or at least a letter saying that one is on the way. Not that I necessarily deserve $600 from the federal government, but if everyone else is getting it I want mine too. I deserve to be pandered to as much as anyone! (I don't know if I was excluded because I earned so little money last year, or because I'm a student, or what.)
I don't remember how the subject came up, but shortly after I arrived in New York, T mentioned that he hadn't ever had really good pulled pork in New York. The only barbecue he could find was smothered in thick tomatoey sauce instead of the thin vinegar sauce that he remembered from childhood. I said, "I can make that, easy." So I did.
T wanted me to write down the recipe for him, so I thought I'd share it here, too, since I have it all typed up. I have a large slow-cooker at home that will easily fit half a shoulder roast, but if you have a regular size crockpot, you might want to have a whole shoulder cut into 3 pieces.
This recipe is bare bones, using only what T had handy in his kitchen. If I were making it at home, I might add a couple bay leaves and a big pinch of coriander. But it turned out absolutely delicious. We made 3 meals out of it.
PULLED PORK
Pork shoulder roast with bone 2 or 3 small onions, or 1 big one 8 or 10 garlic cloves orange juice 1 lime brown sugar cider vinegar
Sauté the onions and garlic over medium-high heat in olive oil with a few pinches of salt until they have lots of brown charred spots (but not burnt). Transfer them to the crock pot. If you have carrots or celery around, you can brown them in big chunks with the onions. They’ll add more flavor.
Salt and pepper the roast generously. In the same pan, brown the roast well on all sides. Don’t burn it, but the more char you get on it, the better. Transfer it to the crock pot. Deglaze the pan with orange juice, scrape all the yummy brown bits off the bottom of the pan, and pour it all into the crock pot. Add more orange juice to about 1/2 full. Add a few peels of the lime, more salt, some red pepper flakes.
Cook on high until it starts to simmer, then turn to low and cook until the meat falls apart easily when you stick a fork in it -- it’ll take a few hours. Remove the roast to a plate and let it cool enough to handle, then separate the meat from the fat and bone. Strain the liquid and skim off the fat (I put it in the freezer in a cup while I’m picking apart the meat, so the fat coagulates and is easier to skim off.)
Make the sauce: Heat about a 1/3 cup of orange juice, 1/3 cup of cider vinegar, a couple tablespoons of brown sugar, the juice of the lime, and the liquid from cooking the roast. Boil to reduce by about half. Pour over the meat and let it sit for a little while to absorb some of the liquid. Add salt to taste.
When you eat the leftovers the next day, splash a little vinegar and/or lime juice on the meat when you heat it up. It’ll brighten it up.
COLE SLAW
Shred half a head of cabbage. Toss with 2 tablespoons of sea salt in a colander and let it sit over a bowl for 2 or 3 hours. Rinse well and pat dry with paper towels or a non-fuzzy kitchen towel. Toss with just enough mayo to lightly coat it and a splash of white vinegar or rice vinegar. Easy!
T and I ate the pork topped with cole slaw on potato rolls. I can't think of anything better to come home to late after working all day and you're famished.
I’m in New York. The noise and crowds and traffic are so out of my system now and they stress me out in a way they never did when I lived here. Or, more likely, when I lived here I accepted the stress as a baseline and didn’t read it as stress. I wanted the excitement so badly, I had looked forward to it for so long, and I ate it up and loved it. I had no idea how numb I had become until I left. New York is like white noise: it’s nice for sleeping.
Yesterday, when T and I were driving around midtown, I remembered that during a visit to New York in the summer of 1981, a couple months before I moved here, I witnessed a gruesome murder where two guys hacked another man to death with machetes a few feet away while I was eating dinner with friends at a sidewalk café on 43rd St. and Ninth Ave. It was shocking to be sure, but I don’t remember reacting to it with the kind of horror that I’m sure I would feel now seeing something like that. It was just part of the excitement of New York.
That sounds so perverse when I think about it now. But New York was different then. The subway cars were covered with graffiti, porn shops and prostitutes lined 42nd St., drug dealers descended on you when you walked through Washington Square Park or along First Avenue in the East Village, there was filth everywhere. A machete murder was just part of the mise en scene. New York was scary, and that was a big part of what I loved about it.
We drove down to 26th St. to look at a rehearsal studio. Afterwards, T and his little boy T went to a movie on 125th St. and I caught the A train back to T’s place on 200th and Broadway. It turns out that on weekends, because of some construction in the subway, the A train stops at 168th and you have to catch a shuttle bus for stops farther north. It was a warm day, so I decided to walk the rest of the way instead of taking the bus. 32 blocks is about a mile and a half, which is nothing, and I’d never really seen Harlem and Washington Heights.
Even though it was a mild day, the kind of jacketless day that’s rare in New York, everyone looked grim and gray, and I was depressed by the time I got home. People are so burdened by their lives here, so defensive. I’ve caught a cold too. I haven’t had a cold in years. (My allergies have gotten worse in the meantime, and don’t even talk about cedar fever, but I haven’t had a real cold for a long time.) I’ve been taking mega doses of zinc, which, much to my surprise, works.
J got an email from the Austin Film Society yesterday about a benefit screening of a documentary made by an Austin filmmaker. The filmmaker had been hurt in a car accident on the way to the world premiere at SXSW this year, and the AFS put together this benefit to help him with his medical expenses. It was at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown, so we walked to the 7 o'clock screening.
We love the Alamo. Everybody loves the Alamo. They program everything from first release Hollywood films to obscure local documentaries. They host all kinds of film events, they serve food and beer. They don't let people talk during the movie. It's the best movie theater ever.
Before the film started, when they were showing promos for all the Alamo events, like a night when comedians make fun of Planet of the Apes while its playing, or various sing-along nights, like "Sing Along with Eighties Rock Ballads," etc., we realized we were in the wrong movie! Instead of the benefit, we had stumbled into the "Morrissey Weep-along." We had no idea whether we were in the wrong theater, or it was the wrong night, or what, and we had already ordered food, so -- after a few moments of "Is this going to be fun or awful?" -- we decided to stay. And it was great.
I'd forgotten how incredibly cool The Smiths were, and how much we all loved them. I think the consensus among my friends back then was that, after The Smiths broke up, Morrissey's records weren't as good or interesting or something. His narcissism got to be a little overbearing. But what I'd forgotten is that his music was all about narcissism, and how bracing and beautiful so many of his songs are. The Weep-along was heavy on back catalog Smiths. Remember the video for How Soon is Now? It's mesmerizing and totally holds up as a work of art.
Looking at the work now all these years later, the gay iconography is so painfully obvious, it's hard to imagine a time when all that stuff was buried in code, when Morrissey and Michael Stipe, the two biggest sissies ever to front rock bands, could fly under the radar just by telling interviewers that they were "asexual." Times have changed.
When I met B, my boyfriend through most of my twenties, in 1984, he was the drummer in a band called Crash. B and his friends were the original generation of alt rock gay boys. B was more into old Joy Division and Fairport Convention than the poppier stuff, but they all loved The Smiths, and they all wore straight leg jeans and white t-shirts and mod haircuts.
The songwriter and lead singer in Crash was Mark Dumais. They played around the East Village for a couple years, and Mark created a record label called Justine Records. In 1985, he put out 3 7-inch 45s. One was by Crash, one was by a band called Nothing but Happiness, and one was by The Woods, which consisted of B and I and two women, Mark's friends, a lesbian couple who had just moved to New York from Baltimore. One of them was Linda Smith, who went on to make a name for herself on the cassette home recording scene that flourished for a while in the late 80s and early nineties.
The Woods never really worked because the four of us all had different ideas of what we wanted the band to sound like, but we had a few sublime moments. Our Justine single, "Miracles Tonight" (a Linda Smith song), with the second song I ever wrote, "Love Me Again This Summer" on the B-side, was one of them.
Mark moved to London in search of fame and pop fortune. He died of AIDS a few years later. The guy playing tambourine in this video, a very sweet man who also played saxophone in the band, died of AIDS, too, a few years later. B and I separated in 1989, and I didn't keep in touch with most of our friends from that time who were really B's friends more than mine.
I broke down and turned on the a.c. today. I was going to try to last through Monday when I leave for New York, but after walking all over town with a stack of books, and walking back home with the heaviest ones because nobody wanted to buy them, I turned on the a.c. I guess everybody knows the textbook business is a big scam, so I'll spare you the rant.
I took my last final yesterday! My grades will be posted in a few days, but I'm pretty sure I got all A's except for that one B.
Monday evening I'm flying to New York to help put together a concert performance of Lizzie Borden (a showcase for venue people, producers, and stars we're hoping will want to get involved with the production). I'll be there for about 3 weeks, and then I hope to go to Indiana for a bit. My mother just had major surgery and she'll be recovering, so I want to visit and help out however I can.
("Summer comes marching in with his heavy boots on." from Florida, my favorite Patty Griffin song -- it breaks my heart every time I listen to it, which is a lot)
I'm debating with myself whether I should respond to, ignore, or delete comments like the one from "anonymous" to this post. I appreciate the criticism. I like it when my blog becomes something more than just me sending my thoughts into a vacuum, but, besides the fact that anonymous comments are kind of creepy and underhanded in general, I'm not sure how comments like this, which seem to come from a resentment about something other than my blog post, shed any light on the subject. On the other hand, maybe I'm just feeling insulted or guilty and that's why I think this person is full of shit.
I wish my shy commenter would at least sign his or her name to his or her words of wisdom.
The pressure is off. I got my first B -- in Texas Political History. The grade for the course comes solely from scores on 3 exams. The first two exams had 35 questions each and the third one had 30. The total of the three scores is curved so that the top 25 scores in the class get an A, the next 20 get a B, the next 20, a C, etc. I got a 75, and the cutoff for an A was 77. You wouldn't believe these exams. I've never seen anybody pack a multiple-choice exam so full of obscure trivia.
I kind of enjoyed the course because the subject is interesting to me, but the exams -- and I studied hard for them -- required more memorization than I can manage, I guess. My consolation for the low grade is that I learned a lot.
