Feeling my stability drift away was enough for me to relinquish any illusions of a normal life. And I felt myself becoming more comfortable with that notion. Everywhere I looked, people were still shopping at expensive stores, overeating at food carts and boozing it up at upper class city bars. It all seemed so trivial, like ants wiling away the hours with self-stimulating pleasantries. But a man who can call any piece of cold concrete his own experiences a level of independence unknown to his home dwelling compatriots. There is an existential freedom to be won on the streets of America, for those who know how to get by on very little. Suddenly, I found myself with nothing to worry about. The collective had community tobacco, and anyway, I had money for my own smokes. I gave most of them away to those who had need for tailors. Typically, any number of the people I ran with had herb, and beer was usually purchased by one or two people on any given night and passed around as much as our women were. We shared our meals, usually stored in stolen supermarket food carts and prepared by the quiet, dignified and gentle Body. It struck me that I actually did not want for any basic necessity while with the occupants there at city hall and later outside of the police station.
My first order of business was, as a matter of course, becoming friendly with the regulars. At a glance, my intention was simply to live among the occupants, observing their behavior and the ways in which their general assembly meetings and spoke councils worked. As a newly homeless youth, I could slip into the ranks quite easily, and I hoped to be a fly on the wall, writing as my life developed among the activists. Sooner than later, I was assimilated into the team. I found myself sympathizing and resonating with them in a way that is hard for me to explain, even now. Maybe it was the lack of direction I had found my life to possess, my general listlessness in dealing with Richard and Jean, who seemed to be unfeeling towards my general wellbeing. I was given allowance to stay with them until I had found an apartment, but when Stephanie showed up the awkwardness prompted me to opt for the street life. It was a relatively unknown quantity, but at least I didn't have to deal with the ugly ways in which the girl had treated me- dealing with me as if I were an unwanted rodent nesting in her underwear drawer.
The people on the street were friendlier. My first strong impression, other than Whitten, who spent most of his hours journaling quietly and keeping to himself, was the most regular night watchman, 99. 99 ran security every night, solid as a rock. Looking like a mixture between an alpha male Rasta man and the Predator, I spent many a night drinking beer with him and discussing the overall strategy of the safety crew and the movement. He kept an eye on things always, and kept them running smoothly. We had an implicit respect for one another, although I could tell we came from different worlds. 99 had done hard time in prison for aggravated robbery and was now on the outside, probably without a place to call his own. On this matter, we could understand one another. His heart and spirit were relentless, and he could be found every night on the same corner, come rain or snow or hail or sleet.
There was Whittenwolf, a ragged, skinny puppy who often bragged of his heritage, claiming "legitimate Scottish Royalty". You could often find him outside of the 7/11 after dark, schmoozing with the other schwillies. He was a drunken animal who boasted openly about any number of unlikely scenarios, but we had been friends until the stabbing incident with Marco, a stabbing that occurred like a good many stabbings do: over a woman. This incident with Marco was enough to cause me to distance myself from Mr. Wolf, a reasonable thing to do out of concern for Marco, and Whittenwolf had been on the run since the stabbing, anyway. Which brings me to Marco.
Marco Polo. With looks like a young Che and the mentality of a young Horus. Marco had a genuine vendetta against society. A streetwise hustler with a soft spot for shitty women. I could never understand how Marco managed to survive the streets for so long with such little common sense when it came to sex. Marco's dossier and his little black book read like a how-to on picking up every psychotic batshit crazy baglady in sight. Marco was, for a time, my most solid connection on the streets. We traveled together, we slept together often side by side, I taught him everything I could about psychic self defense and the arts and he taught me everything he could about being a street kid. When the heat was on, Marco, Nameless and myself took a camping trip to Vancouver, where I initiated Marco into witchcraft. Marco initiated me into the gutter. We were both born anarchists, and as such we sympathetically resonated with one another. Marco's family roots were steeped in the Hell's Angels generationally since the 1960s, and he inherited his distaste for hierarchy and government with a vengeance from his father's father, presumably.
Up until the very bitter end I had fed Marco, paid for his cigarettes and his drugs. After some time spent together in the trenches, his aggressive policy towards women had caused him to disrespect me publicly on more than a few occasions. This is when I first began to feel his competitive machismo turn ugly. After a brief stint in a psychiatric ward I had spent due to mental exhaustion, Marco came back around to the Falcon where I was staying, a boarding house for young mutants and political refugees. My good friend and fellow zen enthusiast Orion caught Marco using my work computer for browsing child pornography, and my better judgment told me to finally give him the boot. This was shortly before I left Portland, the event serving as the last straw that broke the camel's back. He looked at me in the eyes then, knowing that his facade had been lifted and I would now see the naked demon underneath the flesh.
"You're going to have to leave now, Marco."
"That's fine. I'm so sorry. I don't even know what to say... Can I at least have a cigarette before I go?"
"Get the fuck out."
This should have been more depressing to me than it was, but after my break with reality I was left with but a tenuous grasp on my situation until I finally split for the midwest again. And I will explain this, in due time. Concerning the Goetia, the Lesser Key of Solomon and the works of witchcraft, Marco and myself had made a trek into the darker aspects of sorcery together, and I can say now in all honesty that I was hardly surprised. It occurred to me at one point that Marco had served as a familiar, and nothing more. He might have been a demon all along, as Piper at the Falcon had once idly speculated. The truth of the matter was, with my homelife falling apart, my lovelife imploding, and my mental health atrophied from the shock of seeing with a second sight, I could hardly bring myself to care. Hardcore political activism, urban shamanism and drug use had burnt me out. I couldn't even bring myself to feel that last goodbye. I had felt myself to be the stick of dynamite that had exploded, causing the order and stability of the Falcon to collapse around me. Shortly after this, I packed up and left for good. That was the last time I saw Marco.
I first met Marco in the Federal park across the way with Jesse. We smoked a joint, discussing the finer parts of Occupy's general strategy, and how underground journalism might figure into it. I discussed my writing with Modern Mythology, and how I thought writing could be a way to hit the bastards below the belt. "Weaponized art, journalism as a hammer to smash the status quo."
"We aren't looking for that," said Marco, flatly. "We have to be on the high ground. We shouldn't resort to tactics like blackmail or emotional manipulation like they do. We need to be on the up-and-up. Writing is good, but you need to do it with class." I didn't know it at the time, but Marco accusing me of not having class was a tar baby argument. Classy gentleman do not roll like Marco, but I loved him just the same. I stand by my argument that journalism can and should be used as a weapon to level against the establishment. I have followed money trails and legally outed politicians in plain sight, mostly for shits and giggles. There is a sort of a strength in knowing you can harm your enemies through basic manipulation of symbols, another great strength of sorcery. Through the manipulation of logic, we can bring them to their knees and make them pay. The law of the jungle is and has always been, and I would rather be at the top of the human centipede than trailing behind on the caboose. In love and war, there are no rules.
Other regulars were Jesse, a fling of mine and, as I later found out, most of the camp. (Glenn had asked me casually once, "Well, did you flog her, then?") And there was Glenn, a young skater who sold acid with his platonic fuckbuddy Constance. There were the schwilly kids, across the street from city hall. Blue was a good kid, often found painting or playing his guitar which he smashed in front of me one day, when he wasn't drinking. I once gave him a PBR t-shirt I won at an open mic with Amy in Oceanside, just out of love. And there was Maggie and Mike, who had a keen taste in music that kept me talking to them for hours. There was Mick, an older community organizer many suspected to be on the payroll of the police who was a hemorrhoid on my ass from day one. At one point, Mick tried to initiate a rumble over my shagging a girl on the sidewalk. Whittenwolf had slipped me a knife which I held in trembling hands, waiting for Mick's advance while the schwilly kids pleaded for us to stop. The police station being across the street from the park, I dropped the weapon and walked away. I never wanted to cut him. These things, they happen. I myself am not much of a rumbler, but after a few weeks on my own on the streets, I learned to carry a blade of my own, just in case.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Introduce Yourself
Shagging Jesse in the park was enough to push me out of my shell, at least for the time being. I began to feel that familiar old sensation of mammalian lust and life returning to my body. It felt poetic. It had occurred to me that throughout my travels over the east and west coasts, I had not slept with a girl until that night. I genuinely enjoyed Jesse, although her push towards a serious relationship the first night we spent together concerned me. Nevertheless, it felt good to get back on the horse. I returned to Richard and Jean's house the morning after, feeling very much alive but not a little worse for the wear and hungover, scrapes and abrasions covering my knees completely from the playplace suck and fuck fest. Jean and Richard didn't seem to take note of my return. In the weeks leading up to my meeting with Jesse, we had talked to each other less frequently as roommates. I began to feel a sort of an unpleasant and unspoken tension with Richard, who seemed to have very little regard for my presence. As I had learned through a few brief conversations with Jean after I had moved, Richard was to have a friend move into their apartment within a matter of months to take my place. I didn't take it personally, but rather began to plan ahead for the inevitable moment in which I would have to pick up and leave again. I was under the assumption that I still had a few months time to find an apartment on my own, or that something else would come my way. By this time, I was used to making any place I laid my head a home.
A week later, a turning point in my life occurred. Jesse had invited me to a candlelit vigil outside of the Portland City Hall in affiliation with Occupy Portland. The vigil was for a man named Cameron Whitten, a human being I later became convinced was possessed by a true genius and a single pointed vision- the vision of a sociopolitical and economic liberation of the people, and of a peaceful political resistance in the tradition of a Gandhi or of Thoreau. He had been on a hunger strike for 30 days so far, in the name of housing justice and equal rights. Whitten had recently made an attempt at the office of mayor, being the youngest candidate to lose by a narrow margin in recent history. This had undoubtedly concerned more than a few business-as-usual yes-men in the city's public offices. In a stroke of media savvy brilliance, Whitten kept the push alive after his shot at the public office by starving himself outside of city hall. It seemed clear the city was becoming embarrassed of itself and its policies towards its homeless youth population.
The vigil served to kill two birds with one stone for me in my personal life- It was a sort of a casual date with Jesse, a newly forged relationship of mine, and a topic to explore in writing for my twice a month work quota with my editor, JC. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was to be the beginning of my real adventure, my journey towards self-discovery and self-actualization, my voyage into the strange world of countercultural politics and my initiation into the life of a street urchin.
My involvement with the movement over the next year would be sometimes empowering, sometimes maddening. I believe now in hindsight that I needed to lose my self completely, to lose my material possessions, my false pretenses, my pride, and finally my sanity, to come to my senses. I needed to be taught, by hard knocks and experience, just how much I had been brainwashed and placated by my own society. I needed to learn, firsthand through the destruction of my own ignorance and innocence, that the world I had lived in was an elaborate illusion. I needed to feel the pain of betrayal, the kiss of a Judas, the abandonment of my friends and the agony of defeat. And I had needed to learn to snatch victory from the jaws of that defeat, and to be born again. None of this was apparent at the time, although it seemed clear that something in my life was primed to explode. I was a lit fuse, ready to ignite the blast. It was only a matter of time until the floodgates were opened and I crossed the domain from tourist into full-time power weirdo. And like most good things, it all began with a little bit of casual sex.
When I met Whitten that evening, I was with Jesse and the night was young. I sat and listened to him speak to the others for a while before I began questioning him. Some of the official newspapers had their way with him first, and I sat in a foldout chair, docile and unobtrusive. The others sat and roasted food around Whitten, who was already shriveled and emaciated. I laughed to myself. It was the first perfect photo op I had seen myself from the City Hall Occupation. Bleak. In all truthfulness, the best thing to do for a young man who was starving himself to death for the sake of public approval was to roast food while sitting around him in a circle, making sure to take lots of pictures for the press. He didn't look too bothered by it. I waited until the official news sources left to start in. Someone asked if the reporters would stay and have a hot dog with the group, answered by a chorus of resounding professionalism: "No, we couldn't do that. That would be too personal, we can never become too involved with our stories, you know."
Cameron seemed unaware for a moment, his eyes drifting off into a blank stare. "Hang my head, I want to drown my sorrow/No tomorrow, no tomorrow" he sang quietly, under his breath. I sat down across from Whitten and sized him up, making eye contact with him. He locked gaze with me, and I told him I wasn't like the others. That didn't seem to register to him. He nodded dreamily, contemplatively. I asked permission to question him regarding his involvement in the movement, he consented. What followed was the first of a series of field reports while living on the city streets.
"For Immediate Publication. Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law. JC, I know you have a sort of a hidden distaste of Occupy for whatever queer ulterior motives you have against organized human decency. Speaking of which, how's William Clark's bleeding asshole? I hope you at least gave that bastard the common courtesy of a reach around after you ruined his life with that documentary of yours- like something out of Andy Warhol's most sadistic wet dreams. I'm sure his family will never speak to him again. Your personal, professional and ethical degeneration aside, as far as I know, we have a little agreement for a two-piece-a-month quota. You can't suck blood from a turnip, and I've been hard pressed to find anything I haven't already given you in one form or another, both figuratively and literally. So take the Occupy piece and run it, personal opinions be damned. I'm sure you have no problems spotting the economic viability in a group of disenfranchised and heavily exploited young people. Some people build their careers around that sort of thing, JC. Some people.
Speaking with former candidate Cameron Whitten is a humbling experience. He is soft spoken, but lucid, and shows surprising insight for his age. Quick witted and fluent in answering all of my questions, his eyes are dark and piercing. He wears the look of a pugilist in his last few rounds with a formidable adversary. He is now on day 30 of a hunger strike to help raise support for lifting a ban on the use of tents for homeless in Portland to use in inhabiting the city.
"THIS STRIKE is to increase awareness towards the need for decent housing for the poor, the dispossessed, and the entire working class", Cameron says. He has indicated to me that his strike is not exclusively a product of the Occupy Wall Street movement: he views it as its own thing, outside of Occupy, although many activists from Occupy Wall Street inluding himself are present for the vigil.
"I'm really trying to bridge the gap here and find the common ground
between the people and Occupy, on the one hand, and the governing
institutions on the other. This strike is about utilizing my ability to
petition our leaders directly."
Whitten is 21, certainly a young age to have already made a serious attempt at election for Mayor of Portland. He sports a black "Suicidal Tendencies" baseball cap, which makes me hope that it isn't a highly unsettling bit of foreshadowing. A high school honors graduate and registered student of Portland Community University, calm yet assertive, Cameron seems to be alert and on the top of his game. The mood is not just a bit solemn, for many of us know that Cameron has gone a month without food now and could be close to physical and emotional collapse. Even so, he is undaunted, stating simply: "I am doing this to work for a change in how our City Council handles the issues of housing for the poor, the disposessed, and the middle class, post recession."
Whitten has mentioned that although he remains a friend of the Occupy movement, there have been times in which internal schisms within the camps have surfaced regarding the use of protesting space for the homeless to camp and to live in.
"Some people within occupy have been intolerant towards homeless occupants of our public demonstration areas, and I think that in this way the behavior of these individuals has become reminiscent of our own political opposition", he confided. (He's told me he thinks the single biggest opposition against the movement itself, ironically, has come from within its own ranks. Schisms, mostly ego based, and paid disruptors are what he views as being the primary obstacles the Occupy Movement has had to overcome.)
He has been, and remains, however, an adamant supporter of OWS.
In spite of this, Whitten has persisted. He has spoken directly with all of the members of city council. He has made it clear that he will not go away until new implementations of housing projects are put into place by the city. This entails the construction of a new transitional housing site to be run by a non-profit agency called "Right To Dream Too", and the revocation of the city's taxation on an already existing Right To Dream facility, a move which has been so far opposed by certain council members with zoning fines and restrictive politics. The issue remains an ongoing battle within city hall.
" 'Right To Dream' is a non profit, and they want to build a community shelter for those who need to stay, tax free. The tax payers wouldn't pay anything for this", said Whitten.
Councilman and Housing Commissioner Nick Fish, on the other hand, has seen it fit to establish a Mega-Shelter by spending 47 million of the taxpayers' dollars, housing only 130 people. The agenda seems clear: Monopolization over housing projects for the homeless and siphoning the money of the middle class. Beyond this, Fish has denied local families the right to sleep in church parking lots or other public areas in tents, effectively criminalizing homelessness.
As a representative of mortage and construction corporations, the goals of Nick Fish run directly contrary to the interests of thousands of disposessed, impoverished or needy individuals. One can infer, logically, that the interests of Fish are in criminalizing and locking up families who lack housing, taking tax dollars for building insufficient and shoddy transitional housing facilities, and securing the land for the financial interests he represents.
Fish justifies opposing the right of indigent people to live freely and secure from legal oppression by stating that he is "afraid the homeless will become dependent upon tents as temporary solutions to permanent problems", yet he took tax payers' money to build his own center and blocked the non-profit, economically efficient "Right To Dream Too" foundation.
"He's a carpetbagger, and a swine," one man told me. "Nothing more than a puppet. That bastard represents his corporate interests, his agenda."
Beyond securing the ability for "Right To Dream Too" to build its nonprofits, Whitten's general goal is to raise awareness on the issue of housing rights. Tonight, he plans to speak publicly to the crowd that will be attending a candle light vigil for the work that he has set in motion. Many more attendants are expected to arrive. He is undecided as to when he will choose to eat again. He's said that it will hinge upon how seriously the city council of Portland is taking this issue.
Whether or not Whitten meets the goal, one of the most positive things to come from the strike is its sense of generous solidarity and community, which consists primarily of the terminally impoverished and dispossessed. An older, gentle mystic I spoke with named Body who is staying for the entire vigil told me "I've had conversations about Christ Consciousness, love, housing rights for the poor and social justice. This closely aligns with REAL Christianity and its tenets, before it was corrupted. If there were a real Jesus, he never belonged to the greedy landrapers. I think he would be here."
And why not? The scene today has attracted everyone from Asian business men to flaming drag queen queers in pink spandex, blaring Beatles tunes through old boomboxes and gruffly barking their lyrics through megaphones. The general vibe, however, remains pensive and contemplative. This tribute to Whitten pertains to politics, but it is certainly not limited to politics. The people here care about one another: food and drinks are shared freely, and the genuinely needy receive the human compassion, basic provisions, and the love that they need. Perhaps more importantly, they find their strength in numbers.
Cameron remains strong, but the solemnity of the gathering is not diminished by his casual humor or smiles. They can tell he is suffering and has already gone through hell. He remains unswayed, offhandedly remarking that he looks "like a rock star on a year long coke bender."
"It's been a million buck week," he laughs. "I feel like a million dollars."
Leaflets passed through the crowd sum up the entire message of the demonstration with a single, profoundly simple aphorism: "Living is a basic human right."
Indeed. And when sleeping on the streets with adequate provisions is illegal, it is illegal to live and to be homeless. When and where was it decided that the pursuit of happiness, essential human liberty, or even the right to live was to be secured only for and by the private sector or corporate interests? And how long will this madness continue?
The myth of capitalism, the "get in quick, win big, and get out before you lose your ass" pyramid marketing scheme of our planetary work machine has left us all terminally crippled. It was a lie to begin with, it never served the most of us, and after years of ignoring its failure to work for us we are now finally paying the price: The immanent collapse of the American Empire.
This is not a new phenomenon historically, although it has reached a crescendo. Many now believe that it will herald the downfall of the society we have come to love for its depraved luxuries and complacent familiarity. The history of our nation is full of such examples of human greed and stupidity. It is the sort of hubris that makes me think it is through dumb luck that we have even survived as a nation for the comparitively brief time we've spent on top of the shit heap. As William Burroughs once posited, "America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil was there waiting."
How long? And how many more people are going to have to starve to death in the streets before we see the change we have been waiting for?
I, for one, certainly hope that it does not take a Cameron Whitten in every major metropolitan area starving to death publicly to end it, once and for all.
*On a personal note, after tonight, I am now officially homeless. So this may be my last piece for Modern Mythology, at least for a long time. I hope you have enjoyed it. Love yourself, love your life, love people. Do something beautiful, make the bastards pay. Good night, and good luck.
And so much for young rock stars on coke benders. The truth of the matter was, the ragtag group of homeless youth I found myself writing about that evening were now my family, as a simple matter of course. And not a girl or boy, man or woman among us could afford a serious cocaine addiction, although several of us had probably lost teeth due to seriously dehabilitating crank habits. We were all starving to death, in our own ways. It was clear that I was completely on my own now, lost in the land of Oz. But at long last, I wasn't alone. I had found a group of people that were every bit as alienated and disenfranchised from the 9-5 grind status quo as I was- some of them were even as mentally unstable as myself. And as every head intuitively suspects, there is strength in numbers. I would later come to love each and every one of them, for their uniqueness, and and their collectivism.
Jean had called my cell phone that night to tell me she had finally decided it "just wasn't working." What that really meant was, Richard had decided to move his new fuck buddy in early and I was now no longer needed. No matter the social niceties that dictated a civil conversation, I hung up the phone that night feeling like a kamikaze strapping a bomb across my chest. Something inside me had snapped. I looked over towards Jesse, who was busy cooking food for the others and smiling. The tears came easy and genuinely then, so much so that Jesse took notice and stopped what she was doing. She held me then on the sidewalk, and a vision came aligned in my brain. For as long as I could remember, throughout high school and later, higher education, I had felt lied to. I had long since left my family, and I was drifting in the abstract without much of a safety net other than the occasional royalty and a social security check. There, in the light of the sidewalk fire, near the tired eyes of some 40 odd others, I cried. I felt the stability melt away. I felt my home then to be wherever the wind carried me, blown and beaten about by some inner conviction I had yet to understand. A man drove by, blaring the Stones tune "Gimme Shelter", pumping his fist. A crowd of kids cheered.
I slept that night on the sidewalk with Jesse, tucked away in a sleeping bag, my wet eyes pressed down against her fragrant, dark hair. She gave me a handjob under the covers before we both drifted off. It was cold that night, and it was one of the last nights I remember being lucky enough to share another warm body inside of a sleeping bag. The sidewalk soon became my place of rest, my angle repose and my place of business. I traded drugs, sex and food on that sidewalk. I played music with other street people there on the concrete. I helped to make life very difficult for those who were feeling substantially less motivated and substantially more comfortable than I was. And I guess, in hindsight, this was truly enough of an MO for me.
A week later, a turning point in my life occurred. Jesse had invited me to a candlelit vigil outside of the Portland City Hall in affiliation with Occupy Portland. The vigil was for a man named Cameron Whitten, a human being I later became convinced was possessed by a true genius and a single pointed vision- the vision of a sociopolitical and economic liberation of the people, and of a peaceful political resistance in the tradition of a Gandhi or of Thoreau. He had been on a hunger strike for 30 days so far, in the name of housing justice and equal rights. Whitten had recently made an attempt at the office of mayor, being the youngest candidate to lose by a narrow margin in recent history. This had undoubtedly concerned more than a few business-as-usual yes-men in the city's public offices. In a stroke of media savvy brilliance, Whitten kept the push alive after his shot at the public office by starving himself outside of city hall. It seemed clear the city was becoming embarrassed of itself and its policies towards its homeless youth population.
The vigil served to kill two birds with one stone for me in my personal life- It was a sort of a casual date with Jesse, a newly forged relationship of mine, and a topic to explore in writing for my twice a month work quota with my editor, JC. Although I didn't know it at the time, this was to be the beginning of my real adventure, my journey towards self-discovery and self-actualization, my voyage into the strange world of countercultural politics and my initiation into the life of a street urchin.
My involvement with the movement over the next year would be sometimes empowering, sometimes maddening. I believe now in hindsight that I needed to lose my self completely, to lose my material possessions, my false pretenses, my pride, and finally my sanity, to come to my senses. I needed to be taught, by hard knocks and experience, just how much I had been brainwashed and placated by my own society. I needed to learn, firsthand through the destruction of my own ignorance and innocence, that the world I had lived in was an elaborate illusion. I needed to feel the pain of betrayal, the kiss of a Judas, the abandonment of my friends and the agony of defeat. And I had needed to learn to snatch victory from the jaws of that defeat, and to be born again. None of this was apparent at the time, although it seemed clear that something in my life was primed to explode. I was a lit fuse, ready to ignite the blast. It was only a matter of time until the floodgates were opened and I crossed the domain from tourist into full-time power weirdo. And like most good things, it all began with a little bit of casual sex.
When I met Whitten that evening, I was with Jesse and the night was young. I sat and listened to him speak to the others for a while before I began questioning him. Some of the official newspapers had their way with him first, and I sat in a foldout chair, docile and unobtrusive. The others sat and roasted food around Whitten, who was already shriveled and emaciated. I laughed to myself. It was the first perfect photo op I had seen myself from the City Hall Occupation. Bleak. In all truthfulness, the best thing to do for a young man who was starving himself to death for the sake of public approval was to roast food while sitting around him in a circle, making sure to take lots of pictures for the press. He didn't look too bothered by it. I waited until the official news sources left to start in. Someone asked if the reporters would stay and have a hot dog with the group, answered by a chorus of resounding professionalism: "No, we couldn't do that. That would be too personal, we can never become too involved with our stories, you know."
Cameron seemed unaware for a moment, his eyes drifting off into a blank stare. "Hang my head, I want to drown my sorrow/No tomorrow, no tomorrow" he sang quietly, under his breath. I sat down across from Whitten and sized him up, making eye contact with him. He locked gaze with me, and I told him I wasn't like the others. That didn't seem to register to him. He nodded dreamily, contemplatively. I asked permission to question him regarding his involvement in the movement, he consented. What followed was the first of a series of field reports while living on the city streets.
"For Immediate Publication. Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law. JC, I know you have a sort of a hidden distaste of Occupy for whatever queer ulterior motives you have against organized human decency. Speaking of which, how's William Clark's bleeding asshole? I hope you at least gave that bastard the common courtesy of a reach around after you ruined his life with that documentary of yours- like something out of Andy Warhol's most sadistic wet dreams. I'm sure his family will never speak to him again. Your personal, professional and ethical degeneration aside, as far as I know, we have a little agreement for a two-piece-a-month quota. You can't suck blood from a turnip, and I've been hard pressed to find anything I haven't already given you in one form or another, both figuratively and literally. So take the Occupy piece and run it, personal opinions be damned. I'm sure you have no problems spotting the economic viability in a group of disenfranchised and heavily exploited young people. Some people build their careers around that sort of thing, JC. Some people.
30 DAYS, so far.... Former Runnerup for Mayor Cameron Whitten on Hunger Strike*
"Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light."- Dylan Thomas.
Speaking with former candidate Cameron Whitten is a humbling experience. He is soft spoken, but lucid, and shows surprising insight for his age. Quick witted and fluent in answering all of my questions, his eyes are dark and piercing. He wears the look of a pugilist in his last few rounds with a formidable adversary. He is now on day 30 of a hunger strike to help raise support for lifting a ban on the use of tents for homeless in Portland to use in inhabiting the city.
"THIS STRIKE is to increase awareness towards the need for decent housing for the poor, the dispossessed, and the entire working class", Cameron says. He has indicated to me that his strike is not exclusively a product of the Occupy Wall Street movement: he views it as its own thing, outside of Occupy, although many activists from Occupy Wall Street inluding himself are present for the vigil.
Whitten is 21, certainly a young age to have already made a serious attempt at election for Mayor of Portland. He sports a black "Suicidal Tendencies" baseball cap, which makes me hope that it isn't a highly unsettling bit of foreshadowing. A high school honors graduate and registered student of Portland Community University, calm yet assertive, Cameron seems to be alert and on the top of his game. The mood is not just a bit solemn, for many of us know that Cameron has gone a month without food now and could be close to physical and emotional collapse. Even so, he is undaunted, stating simply: "I am doing this to work for a change in how our City Council handles the issues of housing for the poor, the disposessed, and the middle class, post recession."
Whitten has mentioned that although he remains a friend of the Occupy movement, there have been times in which internal schisms within the camps have surfaced regarding the use of protesting space for the homeless to camp and to live in.
"Some people within occupy have been intolerant towards homeless occupants of our public demonstration areas, and I think that in this way the behavior of these individuals has become reminiscent of our own political opposition", he confided. (He's told me he thinks the single biggest opposition against the movement itself, ironically, has come from within its own ranks. Schisms, mostly ego based, and paid disruptors are what he views as being the primary obstacles the Occupy Movement has had to overcome.)
He has been, and remains, however, an adamant supporter of OWS.
"Occupy was my entry point into politics. It was the deciding factor in my running for mayor. I personally have been attacked twice by two people, both incidents isolated and within an hour of each other. This was by people that no one in our camp had ever seen before or since. I've been harassed and unconstitutionally jailed by the police, and also beaten by them. They broke my laptop and they shoved me into a police horse. They beat the fuck out of me there in the streets with batons. They arrested me at a demonstration in 'The World's Smallest Park' here in Portland, just for being there."
In spite of this, Whitten has persisted. He has spoken directly with all of the members of city council. He has made it clear that he will not go away until new implementations of housing projects are put into place by the city. This entails the construction of a new transitional housing site to be run by a non-profit agency called "Right To Dream Too", and the revocation of the city's taxation on an already existing Right To Dream facility, a move which has been so far opposed by certain council members with zoning fines and restrictive politics. The issue remains an ongoing battle within city hall.
" 'Right To Dream' is a non profit, and they want to build a community shelter for those who need to stay, tax free. The tax payers wouldn't pay anything for this", said Whitten.
Councilman and Housing Commissioner Nick Fish, on the other hand, has seen it fit to establish a Mega-Shelter by spending 47 million of the taxpayers' dollars, housing only 130 people. The agenda seems clear: Monopolization over housing projects for the homeless and siphoning the money of the middle class. Beyond this, Fish has denied local families the right to sleep in church parking lots or other public areas in tents, effectively criminalizing homelessness.
As a representative of mortage and construction corporations, the goals of Nick Fish run directly contrary to the interests of thousands of disposessed, impoverished or needy individuals. One can infer, logically, that the interests of Fish are in criminalizing and locking up families who lack housing, taking tax dollars for building insufficient and shoddy transitional housing facilities, and securing the land for the financial interests he represents.
Fish justifies opposing the right of indigent people to live freely and secure from legal oppression by stating that he is "afraid the homeless will become dependent upon tents as temporary solutions to permanent problems", yet he took tax payers' money to build his own center and blocked the non-profit, economically efficient "Right To Dream Too" foundation.
"He's a carpetbagger, and a swine," one man told me. "Nothing more than a puppet. That bastard represents his corporate interests, his agenda."
Beyond securing the ability for "Right To Dream Too" to build its nonprofits, Whitten's general goal is to raise awareness on the issue of housing rights. Tonight, he plans to speak publicly to the crowd that will be attending a candle light vigil for the work that he has set in motion. Many more attendants are expected to arrive. He is undecided as to when he will choose to eat again. He's said that it will hinge upon how seriously the city council of Portland is taking this issue.
Whether or not Whitten meets the goal, one of the most positive things to come from the strike is its sense of generous solidarity and community, which consists primarily of the terminally impoverished and dispossessed. An older, gentle mystic I spoke with named Body who is staying for the entire vigil told me "I've had conversations about Christ Consciousness, love, housing rights for the poor and social justice. This closely aligns with REAL Christianity and its tenets, before it was corrupted. If there were a real Jesus, he never belonged to the greedy landrapers. I think he would be here."
And why not? The scene today has attracted everyone from Asian business men to flaming drag queen queers in pink spandex, blaring Beatles tunes through old boomboxes and gruffly barking their lyrics through megaphones. The general vibe, however, remains pensive and contemplative. This tribute to Whitten pertains to politics, but it is certainly not limited to politics. The people here care about one another: food and drinks are shared freely, and the genuinely needy receive the human compassion, basic provisions, and the love that they need. Perhaps more importantly, they find their strength in numbers.
Cameron remains strong, but the solemnity of the gathering is not diminished by his casual humor or smiles. They can tell he is suffering and has already gone through hell. He remains unswayed, offhandedly remarking that he looks "like a rock star on a year long coke bender."
"It's been a million buck week," he laughs. "I feel like a million dollars."
Leaflets passed through the crowd sum up the entire message of the demonstration with a single, profoundly simple aphorism: "Living is a basic human right."
Indeed. And when sleeping on the streets with adequate provisions is illegal, it is illegal to live and to be homeless. When and where was it decided that the pursuit of happiness, essential human liberty, or even the right to live was to be secured only for and by the private sector or corporate interests? And how long will this madness continue?
The myth of capitalism, the "get in quick, win big, and get out before you lose your ass" pyramid marketing scheme of our planetary work machine has left us all terminally crippled. It was a lie to begin with, it never served the most of us, and after years of ignoring its failure to work for us we are now finally paying the price: The immanent collapse of the American Empire.
This is not a new phenomenon historically, although it has reached a crescendo. Many now believe that it will herald the downfall of the society we have come to love for its depraved luxuries and complacent familiarity. The history of our nation is full of such examples of human greed and stupidity. It is the sort of hubris that makes me think it is through dumb luck that we have even survived as a nation for the comparitively brief time we've spent on top of the shit heap. As William Burroughs once posited, "America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil was there waiting."
How long? And how many more people are going to have to starve to death in the streets before we see the change we have been waiting for?
I, for one, certainly hope that it does not take a Cameron Whitten in every major metropolitan area starving to death publicly to end it, once and for all.
*On a personal note, after tonight, I am now officially homeless. So this may be my last piece for Modern Mythology, at least for a long time. I hope you have enjoyed it. Love yourself, love your life, love people. Do something beautiful, make the bastards pay. Good night, and good luck.
And so much for young rock stars on coke benders. The truth of the matter was, the ragtag group of homeless youth I found myself writing about that evening were now my family, as a simple matter of course. And not a girl or boy, man or woman among us could afford a serious cocaine addiction, although several of us had probably lost teeth due to seriously dehabilitating crank habits. We were all starving to death, in our own ways. It was clear that I was completely on my own now, lost in the land of Oz. But at long last, I wasn't alone. I had found a group of people that were every bit as alienated and disenfranchised from the 9-5 grind status quo as I was- some of them were even as mentally unstable as myself. And as every head intuitively suspects, there is strength in numbers. I would later come to love each and every one of them, for their uniqueness, and and their collectivism.
Jean had called my cell phone that night to tell me she had finally decided it "just wasn't working." What that really meant was, Richard had decided to move his new fuck buddy in early and I was now no longer needed. No matter the social niceties that dictated a civil conversation, I hung up the phone that night feeling like a kamikaze strapping a bomb across my chest. Something inside me had snapped. I looked over towards Jesse, who was busy cooking food for the others and smiling. The tears came easy and genuinely then, so much so that Jesse took notice and stopped what she was doing. She held me then on the sidewalk, and a vision came aligned in my brain. For as long as I could remember, throughout high school and later, higher education, I had felt lied to. I had long since left my family, and I was drifting in the abstract without much of a safety net other than the occasional royalty and a social security check. There, in the light of the sidewalk fire, near the tired eyes of some 40 odd others, I cried. I felt the stability melt away. I felt my home then to be wherever the wind carried me, blown and beaten about by some inner conviction I had yet to understand. A man drove by, blaring the Stones tune "Gimme Shelter", pumping his fist. A crowd of kids cheered.
I slept that night on the sidewalk with Jesse, tucked away in a sleeping bag, my wet eyes pressed down against her fragrant, dark hair. She gave me a handjob under the covers before we both drifted off. It was cold that night, and it was one of the last nights I remember being lucky enough to share another warm body inside of a sleeping bag. The sidewalk soon became my place of rest, my angle repose and my place of business. I traded drugs, sex and food on that sidewalk. I played music with other street people there on the concrete. I helped to make life very difficult for those who were feeling substantially less motivated and substantially more comfortable than I was. And I guess, in hindsight, this was truly enough of an MO for me.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Cultivating Nonattachment
I was in a state of ambivalence when I finally met up with Jesse. I had been friendly with her for some time: The random anonymity, even among friends, on the internet afforded the ability to speak with someone candidly and not to have to worry about it getting out to your friends or family.
Jesse spent most of her time working the Occupy angle. When she wasn't doing that, she was handing out pamphlets for Planned Parenthood. Portland has a huge homeless population, a population I would soon be joining myself. The problem didn't seem to be going away anytime soon. The kids came for the culture, the sex drugs and food carts, and many of them left with broken teeth or busted heads from billy clubs gifted by Portland's finest.
I had always appreciated the idea of the Occupy movement, but never had much of a chance to be involved with it, living as I did so far away from any major metropolitan area around the time the movement had begun. Jesse was my entry point into a life I had never seen, or rather, several lives. The life of a political activist, the life of a permanently disenfranchised street person, and later on down the line the many tangent realities I stumbled drunkenly through while I was a resident of Portland.
I left Jean and Richard's in mid-afternoon. I took a train to meet with Jesse at Pioneer square. She had a fuzzy and brightly colored hat, so she wasn't difficult to spot. We walked and chatted a while about banal things. She had to walk some distance to go pick up a paycheck, and I trekked up the Hawthorne bridge with her. I decided to pop a squat at a local convenient store about half of the way there. I was parched and dehydrated. I got something to drink and sat outside near a garbage dumpster, parsing through my illustrated book on demonology, "The Lesser Key of Solomon." Portland is big on witchcraft, and I had swiped the book from Richard and Jean's apartment after Jean told me she no longer cared to count it among her possessions. "I don't trust them," she had told me.
The Goetia and the Lesser Keys had always fascinated me. It is told that these lesser familiars were employed to build Solomon's temple. I found myself greasily fondling its pages with the enthusiasm of a snark hunter. The bestial illustrations, equal parts toad-cat-Jeb-Bush sometimes made me wonder if we truly did inhabit an exclusively demonic reality. The fuck suck kill foodchain at work and personified, its pages brimmed over with horned princes buttfucking oversized weasels and curmudgeons with dark, slimy pulsating erections. Light reading, to say the least.
After about 45 minutes time and a few odd stares from punkers passing by on the sidewalk, Jesse finally returned. She told me she still had to cash her check, so I spent a little time in a vinyl shop near food cart square while I waited for her to do her thing. The usual posters of Frank Zappa and Iggy Pop taking shits, Black Flag t-shirts, and some bearded Rick Rubin lookalikes with black, thick framed glasses. Wank booths for vinyl fetishes lined the back wall...
We met back out on the front sidewalk, and walked to get a bite to eat and finally to the Occupy spot that was a row of some 20 odd people camped in lawn chairs and sleeping bags outside of city hall. Everyone seemed on the level and nice enough, but at the time I had no inclination that I would become involved in the Occupation of Portland City Hall. It was night time now. We bullshitted a while with the regulars and then hopped a bus to Jesse's. We stayed there briefly, due to a no guest policy from her roommate who was out and about at the time. We chatted a bit and left to buy some beer. I would drink it with her at the bus stop, I thought, and then head back to Jean and Richard's apartment.
Sitting at the bus stop, Jesse reiterated to me that she had a boyfriend who was out of town. She had been flirtatious with me all day, and I didn't mind. It'd been too long since I had any female attention. I had ignored it most of the the day, explaining that I typically don't go after other men's women as a matter of respect. But by this time I was half drunk, rambling about the failed Katherine affair, and she took the liberty to shut me up by raising herself up over and above my pelvis, grinding herself down upon it forcefully, while she silenced me further by jamming her tongue into my mouth in the most lewd and lascivious manner. Several stray teenagers on bicycles road by and beat their fists against the bus stop windows, and I pitched a full beer at one of them, beaming him in the face and screamed at them to go to bed. I slipped my hand into Jesse's shirt, pinching her nipples and tweaking her nipple rings. I cupped her breasts and fondled them as she continued to suck my tongue.
This continued in this manner for several moments or a half an hour when her hand found its way into my pants, slipping my now erect cock from its trousers in full view of the cars and buses passing by on the street. She had me in a corner of the bus shelter, and now her mouth was exploring my body- the inside of my shirt collar, my nipples, my ears and my neck. She stroked me gingerly and then more forcefully, until I could feel the beginnings of pre-cum leaking from my now fully engorged member. I pushed her away and told her that was enough.
"Why?" she asked, laughing and pouting playfully.
"Let's buy some rubbers."
Which we did. We trekked a ways away from the gas station and the bus stop to a semi-secluded playground. We talked for a bit. She told me stories about her boyfriend, and why she didn't want him. It took several minutes of her talk about the man she was dating as foreplay before I pushed her down onto the playground equipment, unbuttoning her pants hurredly. I ripped her underwear away and entered her forcefully. She was already wet. We played like that for a while, I fucked her from behind while pinching and playfully tugging at her nipple rings, smacking her ass as hard as I could and pulling her back by her hair, her ass grinding against my pelvis.
I thrust into her like that until I felt exhausted and close to orgasm, and at that moment I flipped her over to ride me. My knees were already bloodied and scraped from the abrasions of the mulch and the metal children's play place, and my body was trembling. She rode me hard and furiously, her fingernails digging into my body... my chest, my neck and my ass, occasionally drawing blood. I pulled her forth by her nipple rings, bringing my mouth in reach to suck down, hard, and then bit them so as to inflict some measure of pain upon her. She continued to up the pace and frenzy of her thrusts, and by now I was afraid her moaning would draw attention to our little hiding spot there in the park. I bit into her neck, slapped her ass as hard as I could, and I pulled her hair then to shove her mouth back down onto mine to silence her, sucking her tongue into my mouth. She slammed me back against the playplace grate, my head hit the ground and I shot long and hard into her cunt. Rinse. Repeat.
After all was said and done, I sat there silently with my knees pulled up to my chest in my boxers, drinking and staring off into the stars above.
"I want you to be my boyfriend," she told me.
"Wait, now? Why? You already have a boyfriend."
"But I want for you to be mine."
"See, Jesse," I began, standing up. "This is why I can't be with a woman. It is what it is. I can't trust anyone. You spent most of the day telling me about your boyfriend and most of the evening fucking my brains out, quite literally. It's not like I don't appreciate it, but tell me what makes me any different? My last girl. All I wanted to do was please her. I just wanted to love her. But she couldn't love herself. So I was ready to go down kicking and screaming until I realized she didn't even care anymore."
"That's beautiful."
"No, it isn't. It's a lie, and a cultural prefabrication. The hopelessly romantic misconception that there is some nobility in lying to yourself. There is nothing I detest more than the stench of a lie. And anyway, the last time I spoke to her, she called me a pathetic worthless junkie. The things people say to you when you are on junk. Like you aren't even human. I'm not really into letting people in right now."
"I would never call you that."
"Yeah, you say that now."
"When did you start drinking so heavily?" she asked me. "Why do you drink so heavily?"
"Well, I relapsed on junk while I was in California. I turned to booze. Back and forth, you know. I've been off and on IV opiates since I was in college, from a chronic series of cluster headaches that pain me day in and day out. Kills me to not have them, so when I'm trying to stay clean I let the alcohol numb the brain. But I've been drinking since I was 13. I had so many problems with my father, who never understood me. That is a cliched, hackneyed old line of bullshit so I'll stop there and tell you the truth. I'm a drunk. Some things just are."
"I want to hold you, but I'm afraid I'll fall in love."
I didn't want her to fall in love, but she forced her way into my arms anyway.
I sighed and acquiesced.
I had always appreciated the idea of the Occupy movement, but never had much of a chance to be involved with it, living as I did so far away from any major metropolitan area around the time the movement had begun. Jesse was my entry point into a life I had never seen, or rather, several lives. The life of a political activist, the life of a permanently disenfranchised street person, and later on down the line the many tangent realities I stumbled drunkenly through while I was a resident of Portland.
I left Jean and Richard's in mid-afternoon. I took a train to meet with Jesse at Pioneer square. She had a fuzzy and brightly colored hat, so she wasn't difficult to spot. We walked and chatted a while about banal things. She had to walk some distance to go pick up a paycheck, and I trekked up the Hawthorne bridge with her. I decided to pop a squat at a local convenient store about half of the way there. I was parched and dehydrated. I got something to drink and sat outside near a garbage dumpster, parsing through my illustrated book on demonology, "The Lesser Key of Solomon." Portland is big on witchcraft, and I had swiped the book from Richard and Jean's apartment after Jean told me she no longer cared to count it among her possessions. "I don't trust them," she had told me.
The Goetia and the Lesser Keys had always fascinated me. It is told that these lesser familiars were employed to build Solomon's temple. I found myself greasily fondling its pages with the enthusiasm of a snark hunter. The bestial illustrations, equal parts toad-cat-Jeb-Bush sometimes made me wonder if we truly did inhabit an exclusively demonic reality. The fuck suck kill foodchain at work and personified, its pages brimmed over with horned princes buttfucking oversized weasels and curmudgeons with dark, slimy pulsating erections. Light reading, to say the least.
After about 45 minutes time and a few odd stares from punkers passing by on the sidewalk, Jesse finally returned. She told me she still had to cash her check, so I spent a little time in a vinyl shop near food cart square while I waited for her to do her thing. The usual posters of Frank Zappa and Iggy Pop taking shits, Black Flag t-shirts, and some bearded Rick Rubin lookalikes with black, thick framed glasses. Wank booths for vinyl fetishes lined the back wall...
We met back out on the front sidewalk, and walked to get a bite to eat and finally to the Occupy spot that was a row of some 20 odd people camped in lawn chairs and sleeping bags outside of city hall. Everyone seemed on the level and nice enough, but at the time I had no inclination that I would become involved in the Occupation of Portland City Hall. It was night time now. We bullshitted a while with the regulars and then hopped a bus to Jesse's. We stayed there briefly, due to a no guest policy from her roommate who was out and about at the time. We chatted a bit and left to buy some beer. I would drink it with her at the bus stop, I thought, and then head back to Jean and Richard's apartment.
Sitting at the bus stop, Jesse reiterated to me that she had a boyfriend who was out of town. She had been flirtatious with me all day, and I didn't mind. It'd been too long since I had any female attention. I had ignored it most of the the day, explaining that I typically don't go after other men's women as a matter of respect. But by this time I was half drunk, rambling about the failed Katherine affair, and she took the liberty to shut me up by raising herself up over and above my pelvis, grinding herself down upon it forcefully, while she silenced me further by jamming her tongue into my mouth in the most lewd and lascivious manner. Several stray teenagers on bicycles road by and beat their fists against the bus stop windows, and I pitched a full beer at one of them, beaming him in the face and screamed at them to go to bed. I slipped my hand into Jesse's shirt, pinching her nipples and tweaking her nipple rings. I cupped her breasts and fondled them as she continued to suck my tongue.
This continued in this manner for several moments or a half an hour when her hand found its way into my pants, slipping my now erect cock from its trousers in full view of the cars and buses passing by on the street. She had me in a corner of the bus shelter, and now her mouth was exploring my body- the inside of my shirt collar, my nipples, my ears and my neck. She stroked me gingerly and then more forcefully, until I could feel the beginnings of pre-cum leaking from my now fully engorged member. I pushed her away and told her that was enough.
"Why?" she asked, laughing and pouting playfully.
"Let's buy some rubbers."
Which we did. We trekked a ways away from the gas station and the bus stop to a semi-secluded playground. We talked for a bit. She told me stories about her boyfriend, and why she didn't want him. It took several minutes of her talk about the man she was dating as foreplay before I pushed her down onto the playground equipment, unbuttoning her pants hurredly. I ripped her underwear away and entered her forcefully. She was already wet. We played like that for a while, I fucked her from behind while pinching and playfully tugging at her nipple rings, smacking her ass as hard as I could and pulling her back by her hair, her ass grinding against my pelvis.
I thrust into her like that until I felt exhausted and close to orgasm, and at that moment I flipped her over to ride me. My knees were already bloodied and scraped from the abrasions of the mulch and the metal children's play place, and my body was trembling. She rode me hard and furiously, her fingernails digging into my body... my chest, my neck and my ass, occasionally drawing blood. I pulled her forth by her nipple rings, bringing my mouth in reach to suck down, hard, and then bit them so as to inflict some measure of pain upon her. She continued to up the pace and frenzy of her thrusts, and by now I was afraid her moaning would draw attention to our little hiding spot there in the park. I bit into her neck, slapped her ass as hard as I could, and I pulled her hair then to shove her mouth back down onto mine to silence her, sucking her tongue into my mouth. She slammed me back against the playplace grate, my head hit the ground and I shot long and hard into her cunt. Rinse. Repeat.
After all was said and done, I sat there silently with my knees pulled up to my chest in my boxers, drinking and staring off into the stars above.
"I want you to be my boyfriend," she told me.
"Wait, now? Why? You already have a boyfriend."
"But I want for you to be mine."
"See, Jesse," I began, standing up. "This is why I can't be with a woman. It is what it is. I can't trust anyone. You spent most of the day telling me about your boyfriend and most of the evening fucking my brains out, quite literally. It's not like I don't appreciate it, but tell me what makes me any different? My last girl. All I wanted to do was please her. I just wanted to love her. But she couldn't love herself. So I was ready to go down kicking and screaming until I realized she didn't even care anymore."
"That's beautiful."
"No, it isn't. It's a lie, and a cultural prefabrication. The hopelessly romantic misconception that there is some nobility in lying to yourself. There is nothing I detest more than the stench of a lie. And anyway, the last time I spoke to her, she called me a pathetic worthless junkie. The things people say to you when you are on junk. Like you aren't even human. I'm not really into letting people in right now."
"I would never call you that."
"Yeah, you say that now."
"When did you start drinking so heavily?" she asked me. "Why do you drink so heavily?"
"Well, I relapsed on junk while I was in California. I turned to booze. Back and forth, you know. I've been off and on IV opiates since I was in college, from a chronic series of cluster headaches that pain me day in and day out. Kills me to not have them, so when I'm trying to stay clean I let the alcohol numb the brain. But I've been drinking since I was 13. I had so many problems with my father, who never understood me. That is a cliched, hackneyed old line of bullshit so I'll stop there and tell you the truth. I'm a drunk. Some things just are."
"I want to hold you, but I'm afraid I'll fall in love."
I didn't want her to fall in love, but she forced her way into my arms anyway.
I sighed and acquiesced.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Crash, pt 2: Fun With Gender Relations in the 21st Century
So there we were, in the hot tub. Amy, a metrosexual Asian boy, another friend and songwriter named Shane, Crash and myself. Big Jim sat outside of the tub, all smiles. Somehow, he always managed to be immaculately happy. I was shitfaced drunk. I had decided finally that I would wait it out and see if I still felt like killing myself the next day. The absurdity and the basic stupidity of my dilemma was not lost on me. If I had felt like killing myself the next day, I knew I would probably try to put it off until the day after that, and that realization stung. "Shit or get off the pot." But I was somehow constipated, despite my inability to live my life the way I wanted it, on my own terms.
It's amazing how a nice soak in the hot tub with a few pretty girls can shift your perspective around. Before too long, my muscles were relaxed. The headaches I had suffered through for well over three years began to subside. The tension I had been carrying around in my jaw slowly melted away, and the alcohol had numbed my brain to the point at which I was only capable of focusing on the warm jets of bubbles caressing my skin and the ache in my bones. Shane was floating around in the whirlpool in his t-shirt, but I had removed mine. This is when I first began to notice that Crash had been eyeing me, eyes that seemed hungry like the wolf, but playful and mischievous.
I looked away bashfully, slipping out of sight under the water. I felt impervious to any female attention. I was in my own world, and it was one built of regrets and botched opportunities. I found myself with a mild hard on, but I ignored it until it went away. I sank under the water, immersing my entire body into its warmth. I floated there for a while, half smiling at Crash and looking away again. The tub felt like a womb.
After a while, I became drowsy and headed back to the trailer. Amy's house was in an old person's corner of Oceanside. They were numerous, as Oceanside had primarily grown to be a base for marines and a place for the elderly to retire. I walked back from the community pool and hot tub in the darkness. Palm trees surrounded me on all sides. Externally, the place could have been paradise to a boy who had lived in the rust belt midwest his whole life. Internally, all I could think about was Katherine. After I had padded through the back door, I dried myself off and laid down on my cot. I called her, and told her that I'd no longer have a need for her in my life. "I place my self worth in me," I had told her. "I was wrong for ever placing it anywhere else." I fell asleep shortly thereafter.
The next day I awoke, not just a bit hungover. Big Jim drove the metrosexual Asian boy and myself to The Dive to search for my wallet, but it was nowhere to be found. After searching for some 30 minutes time, we decided some of the underage marines who had been at the bar earlier the night before had snatched it, possibly before hopping into the back of the stretch limo with the cougar MILFs. I came home to Amy's trailer, where I sat alone and silently cursed myself for the idiocy of the night before. I played guitar. I read. Somewhere near the late afternoon, Amy and Big Jim left for a show. I stayed home. I drank a bit more, but somehow I couldn't get drunk. I had remembered my debit card number, so about an hour after I began drinking again I ordered a bit of food.
Somewhere in this time, while I was talking to a friend for moral support, my phone had spontaneously stopped working. It would no longer hold a charge, and the its screen had gone completely black. I walked back out to the patio where the pizza had been sitting on the table, and Amy's dog Goulash had knocked it off and onto the concrete below, where it was gnawing on the pie with a sort of zealous enthusiasm that made it difficult for me to be angry at him. Nonetheless, I swatted his butt with a newspaper and screamed at him to get away from my now mangled pizza, which was loaded with jalapenos. "Fantastic," I thought to myself. "I will be cleaning the dog's shit this evening."
Hours passed by. I fiddled with recording some songs on a webcam that I played on Amy's acoustic guitar. I laid on the cot and stared at the ceiling and talked politics with Amy's mother. Finally, around 11:30 in the evening, Big Jim and Amy returned with a bottle of liquor and a very inebriated Crash. I had vague memories of her eying me in the hot tub the night before, but didn't expect that the minute she walked through the door she would step within inches of my face and stare directly into my eyes, grinning like a cat that had brought home a dead bird. There was definitively no avoiding it. She was wearing a short skirt and a skin tight t-shirt that bore the image of a woman with a face like a mannequin and eyes like those of a sex doll, conveniently gagged and presumably bound. The face vaguely resembled Marilyn Monroe. Underneath of the image, the words "THE PERFECT WOMAN" were emblazoned on it in bold with glitter font....
There was a tense silence then, and a period of an unwavering reciprocal gaze. I once again felt the beginnings of an erection returning. I found myself wondering why, and then quickly decided not to think about it.
I broke the silence awkwardly by asking how the show was.
"Fantastic," Amy said. Big Jim looked at me with a tinge of disdain, and quickly left the room. Crash remained fixated on me, staring me in the eyes and refusing to unlock her gaze from mine. I made a move towards the back porch where John and Bill sat, smoking a joint in silence. Crash followed closely behind me, bottle of whiskey in hand. We sat together then, face to face. She mentioned her boyfriend was a DJ, I told her I had limited experience of it myself. She mentioned that she was a writer, and I told her that I too had begun to take journalism more seriously as a lifestyle. We eventually left the others on the back porch, and she told me a bit about herself as we sat at the kitchen table sipping Old Crow.
"...And so, I'm a camgirl. To make extra money. I really want to do stand up. I write out monologues in note books, napkins at restaurants. But uh... I mostly write observations. Everything I do is observation based. Like the observation, 'most times, if you're a man wanting to have a good conversation with a woman, you'd have better look talking to a cup of yogurt.' "
She stared back at me blankly, studying my reaction. I glanced at her t-shirt again. She was trolling me.
"Like, men can't understand the emotional cycles of women. It will never make sense to them." Her eyes sparkled.
"I don't think that men don't have emotional cycles. They have periods, you know."
"Yeah, but not like us."
"Alright, so maybe men will never understand women."
Just then, Big Jim walked in and stared at me angrily. "Speak for yourself, SEXIST."
I shrugged it off and kept talking to Crash.
I liked her. She exuded an animal magnetism I found myself attracted to within minutes of first speaking with her that night. She was fascinating. We agreed at some point, towards the early hours of the morning, to walking back to her apartment so as for her to show me some notebooks full of her work.
On the way from the trailer, she kissed me on the lips. At one point, during the walk home, I tried more assertively to kiss her deep and long. She pulled away, and began to cry. She asked me "What is your name, again?" Only then did I realize how drunk she had become. I forgot that she had drank before hanging out with us at Amy's, and had been drinking whiskey straight since the time she had first arrived. I chuckled to myself and told her. And then shit got heavy, and she told me some things that were very personal and traumatic, and became silent. I felt awkward. I could have walked back, but I didn't. I continued on to her apartment.
We mutually decided not to sleep together when she began throwing up violently sprawled out at the carpet and telling me to fuck myself. She would periodically wake up during the night and scream "fuck you", while I laid in her bed with her on the floor and me curled in a fetal position shivering. Since then, she is a good friend of mine and we can now laugh about this. At the time I was horrified.
I woke up the next morning with her curled around me in her bed, spooning. I didn't push her away but we talked nervously on superficial things to break the tension. It broke the ice a bit more when she bought me a burger and a beer for lunch and we agreed to continue to read each others' writing. Crash has since gone on to do stand up now. We still talk. Awkward situations are great for forging long lasting friendships.
It's amazing how a nice soak in the hot tub with a few pretty girls can shift your perspective around. Before too long, my muscles were relaxed. The headaches I had suffered through for well over three years began to subside. The tension I had been carrying around in my jaw slowly melted away, and the alcohol had numbed my brain to the point at which I was only capable of focusing on the warm jets of bubbles caressing my skin and the ache in my bones. Shane was floating around in the whirlpool in his t-shirt, but I had removed mine. This is when I first began to notice that Crash had been eyeing me, eyes that seemed hungry like the wolf, but playful and mischievous.
I looked away bashfully, slipping out of sight under the water. I felt impervious to any female attention. I was in my own world, and it was one built of regrets and botched opportunities. I found myself with a mild hard on, but I ignored it until it went away. I sank under the water, immersing my entire body into its warmth. I floated there for a while, half smiling at Crash and looking away again. The tub felt like a womb.
After a while, I became drowsy and headed back to the trailer. Amy's house was in an old person's corner of Oceanside. They were numerous, as Oceanside had primarily grown to be a base for marines and a place for the elderly to retire. I walked back from the community pool and hot tub in the darkness. Palm trees surrounded me on all sides. Externally, the place could have been paradise to a boy who had lived in the rust belt midwest his whole life. Internally, all I could think about was Katherine. After I had padded through the back door, I dried myself off and laid down on my cot. I called her, and told her that I'd no longer have a need for her in my life. "I place my self worth in me," I had told her. "I was wrong for ever placing it anywhere else." I fell asleep shortly thereafter.
The next day I awoke, not just a bit hungover. Big Jim drove the metrosexual Asian boy and myself to The Dive to search for my wallet, but it was nowhere to be found. After searching for some 30 minutes time, we decided some of the underage marines who had been at the bar earlier the night before had snatched it, possibly before hopping into the back of the stretch limo with the cougar MILFs. I came home to Amy's trailer, where I sat alone and silently cursed myself for the idiocy of the night before. I played guitar. I read. Somewhere near the late afternoon, Amy and Big Jim left for a show. I stayed home. I drank a bit more, but somehow I couldn't get drunk. I had remembered my debit card number, so about an hour after I began drinking again I ordered a bit of food.
Somewhere in this time, while I was talking to a friend for moral support, my phone had spontaneously stopped working. It would no longer hold a charge, and the its screen had gone completely black. I walked back out to the patio where the pizza had been sitting on the table, and Amy's dog Goulash had knocked it off and onto the concrete below, where it was gnawing on the pie with a sort of zealous enthusiasm that made it difficult for me to be angry at him. Nonetheless, I swatted his butt with a newspaper and screamed at him to get away from my now mangled pizza, which was loaded with jalapenos. "Fantastic," I thought to myself. "I will be cleaning the dog's shit this evening."
Hours passed by. I fiddled with recording some songs on a webcam that I played on Amy's acoustic guitar. I laid on the cot and stared at the ceiling and talked politics with Amy's mother. Finally, around 11:30 in the evening, Big Jim and Amy returned with a bottle of liquor and a very inebriated Crash. I had vague memories of her eying me in the hot tub the night before, but didn't expect that the minute she walked through the door she would step within inches of my face and stare directly into my eyes, grinning like a cat that had brought home a dead bird. There was definitively no avoiding it. She was wearing a short skirt and a skin tight t-shirt that bore the image of a woman with a face like a mannequin and eyes like those of a sex doll, conveniently gagged and presumably bound. The face vaguely resembled Marilyn Monroe. Underneath of the image, the words "THE PERFECT WOMAN" were emblazoned on it in bold with glitter font....
There was a tense silence then, and a period of an unwavering reciprocal gaze. I once again felt the beginnings of an erection returning. I found myself wondering why, and then quickly decided not to think about it.
I broke the silence awkwardly by asking how the show was.
"Fantastic," Amy said. Big Jim looked at me with a tinge of disdain, and quickly left the room. Crash remained fixated on me, staring me in the eyes and refusing to unlock her gaze from mine. I made a move towards the back porch where John and Bill sat, smoking a joint in silence. Crash followed closely behind me, bottle of whiskey in hand. We sat together then, face to face. She mentioned her boyfriend was a DJ, I told her I had limited experience of it myself. She mentioned that she was a writer, and I told her that I too had begun to take journalism more seriously as a lifestyle. We eventually left the others on the back porch, and she told me a bit about herself as we sat at the kitchen table sipping Old Crow.
"...And so, I'm a camgirl. To make extra money. I really want to do stand up. I write out monologues in note books, napkins at restaurants. But uh... I mostly write observations. Everything I do is observation based. Like the observation, 'most times, if you're a man wanting to have a good conversation with a woman, you'd have better look talking to a cup of yogurt.' "
She stared back at me blankly, studying my reaction. I glanced at her t-shirt again. She was trolling me.
"Like, men can't understand the emotional cycles of women. It will never make sense to them." Her eyes sparkled.
"I don't think that men don't have emotional cycles. They have periods, you know."
"Yeah, but not like us."
"Alright, so maybe men will never understand women."
Just then, Big Jim walked in and stared at me angrily. "Speak for yourself, SEXIST."
I shrugged it off and kept talking to Crash.
I liked her. She exuded an animal magnetism I found myself attracted to within minutes of first speaking with her that night. She was fascinating. We agreed at some point, towards the early hours of the morning, to walking back to her apartment so as for her to show me some notebooks full of her work.
On the way from the trailer, she kissed me on the lips. At one point, during the walk home, I tried more assertively to kiss her deep and long. She pulled away, and began to cry. She asked me "What is your name, again?" Only then did I realize how drunk she had become. I forgot that she had drank before hanging out with us at Amy's, and had been drinking whiskey straight since the time she had first arrived. I chuckled to myself and told her. And then shit got heavy, and she told me some things that were very personal and traumatic, and became silent. I felt awkward. I could have walked back, but I didn't. I continued on to her apartment.
We mutually decided not to sleep together when she began throwing up violently sprawled out at the carpet and telling me to fuck myself. She would periodically wake up during the night and scream "fuck you", while I laid in her bed with her on the floor and me curled in a fetal position shivering. Since then, she is a good friend of mine and we can now laugh about this. At the time I was horrified.
I woke up the next morning with her curled around me in her bed, spooning. I didn't push her away but we talked nervously on superficial things to break the tension. It broke the ice a bit more when she bought me a burger and a beer for lunch and we agreed to continue to read each others' writing. Crash has since gone on to do stand up now. We still talk. Awkward situations are great for forging long lasting friendships.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Unintended Consequences
Trip Guide: Dante
I guess that I wanted her to hurt, and now that I admit that to you, do you stand in judgment of me?
I wanted her to hurt like she had hurt me, as if that could ever solve anything. I wanted her to lay awake every night because I couldn't sleep, and I wanted her to toss, and I wanted her to turn, and to pull her hair out every waking moment she could no longer be with me. But I knew that she didn't. I wanted to be as important to her as she had told me that I was. But I knew that I wasn't.
I wanted her to feel, firsthand, the pain she had caused me with hollow words of admiration, empty promises and broken trusts. I wanted her to feel the ways in which she had cut me as if she had cut herself. But I knew that she wouldn't.
I wanted to think that somewhere in her subconscious mind, I was a splinter that could never be removed. That every so often a song on the radio or a phrase randomly uttered would evoke a memory of me to her mind and that she would want to cry, or that she would call to tell me that she had been wrong all along and that she still loved me.
But she never did.
In Southern California, I had admitted to Amy that I was a deeply vengeful person who felt the need to administer consequences personally to those I felt had wronged me. And no one had wronged me as I believed Katherine to have wronged me. This was the baggage I had been carrying with me then, and that I still shoulder from time to time.
"That is very dangerous," she had told me, "and uniquely human. It's the sort of logic that allows us to preemptively invade foreign countries and bomb babies."
Amy had a way of cutting through the bullshit.
What I needed then was a friend, and I found it. The first night I spent in Oceanside, I rolled up my sleeve and showed her the abscess I had gotten in San Francisco. She tried to the best of her ability to conceal her nausea at the sight of it, but the look in her eyes screamed "This is very, very bad and I am not sure if this will be the last time I will see you with that arm."
"Holy Jesus Mother Of Fucking Mary, we need to get you to a hospital, now."
"Really? It's that bad?"
"Your entire inner arm is swollen to the size of a small grapefruit. Yes, it really is that fucking bad. Come on, finish your beer. Let's go."
Explaining to everyone at Amy's house why we had to rush to the emergency room suddenly was a comical attempt at spraying cologne on a turd.
"Woah, what the FUCK happened to your arm, man?" Bill had said then, and looked at me. John was sitting next to him, and as we had been speaking for some time, he had already surmised the problem. He was silent. I gave him a small look of gratitude and our eyes met. He showed no signs of emotion: John normally never did. His short, dark hair cropped close to his head, and his face that completely blank poker face that never changed. They called him "the real scum", for reasons that I will someday revisit, but we all let him get away with whatever he wanted. We tolerated it because, although John with a thief and a con, he was at his heart a sincere and dedicated seeker of truth.
"Spider bite, Bill. Those things can be really nasty."
"What the hell kind of spider does that? How long have you had it?"
"A few days."
"A FEW FUCKING DAYS. Jesus CHRIST, man. Shouldn't you be fucking dead by now?"
I blushed. Amy shot him a look. "Come on, let's go," she said, and she pulled me by the arm and we walked to her car together in the darkness.
I apologized to her enthusiastically. "I know we have only personally met once before, and it was in New York City, and this is my first night staying with you in your mother's home, and I normally don't have pus oozing infected abscesses on my arm" and etcetra etcetra.
"Listen, you don't have to apologize to me for anything. I want you to be OK. I just want you to get taken care of and be OK."
And then, in her eyes, the strangest emotion I hadn't seen in anyone I had met along the road for what seemed like aeons: Genuine warmth, genuine human compassion and empathy. It felt familiar and yet so strange, and somehow welcoming.
We drove to the ER in near silence. Not much was spoken between us then, and there was little risk involved. It was two relatively unfamiliar people, riding together in the dark to do that which needed to be done. Nothing more, nothing less. Periodically, she would look over and give me the slightest of reassuring smiles, but the sadness and genuine concern was welling up in her eyes and right then I felt an idiot impulse kick up inside of me to kiss her and tell her it would be OK, but I did not.
When we arrived at the emergency room, we were pleased to see that somehow we were the first in line. This surprised me, as even in smaller towns I had been known to wait for hours, just to throw a fit and wince my face in pain and demand a fix. Hydromorphone was what they gave you then, if you claimed the pain was severe enough. And at times, for me at least, it was.
As I was being checked in, the doctors asked the usual questions. Drug history, mostly. I sat down in a chair and held my head in my hands, somehow strangely ashamed although I knew I had no real reason to be. Amy rested her hand gently on my shoulder.
"You know, I don't judge you. You will see... One of the things I have yet to tell you, what I am going to tell you now... Maybe we are more alike than you would think."
And what she told me was not much different than many of the other women I had loved. She had been unfaithful to all of the men she had dated, many of whom she didn't seem to like in hindsight. She was running from her father's death, and had been. She avoided intimacy, she couldn't handle it. She acted out sexually. She betrayed lovers, friends and family and lied to them. It was on impulse. It was an addiction. She was now celibate, and had a plan to be celibate until Easter had arrived.
The only thing about it that struck me was the brutal honesty, the integrity and accountability with which she had faced the music and her self and shadow. Her face portrayed a certain tenderness, a genuine sense of understanding that was hard won and snatched from the jaws of defeat. It was real.
And still, somehow, the cognitive dissonance of hearing that in the state of mind I was already in, immediately post Katherine affair, was something that I was not yet ready to hear. I didn't judge her, and I knew that she had been trying. But somehow the very act of the confession, there in the sordid and dimly lit ER waiting room, felt maybe a little too candid and raw and real: Real reality TV, high def. The bipolar liar junkie, the lying borderline sex addict. "Well, we are more alike than otherwise," I thought to myself. "Oh dear, oh dear. What a mess."
But it was a beautiful mess, somehow, and I think maybe that was the first moment I realized that it would be OK.
Amy stood behind me, resting her head on mine and cradling it with her hands, when she wasn't rubbing my back and shoulders. And only now do I realize I had to force myself to not fall in love with her in that waiting room that night, with her broken down confession and earnest eyes, somehow betraying more age and wisdom than I knew she should have possessed at the age of 23. It was the kindness of it. The brutal truth shining through the darkness there as a guiding light. I saw it, and quickly realized to know the truth is preferable in all ways to the fear of having your illusions shattered.
Like Marlowe, I too had come to learn that there was nothing I hated more than the stench of a lie.
After about ten minutes, they came in to take me into the emergency room proper. The emergency room attendants were horrified, but they told me that I probably wouldn't lose my arm.
"You should really learn to just smoke more pot," one of them told me.
I laughed. "Well, if you can't laugh at yourself... Ha Ha Ha."
When the doctor finally came in to lance it, the pain was unbearable. Amy watched by my side the whole time, eyes wide in fascination and awe. They made a slit in the abscess after injecting a numbing agent directly into its swollen aperture. Pus and blood oozed out of my arm like an erupting volcano, and I nearly fainted from the pain while Amy held my hand and squeezed it tight. I squeezed tighter. After they had finished, Amy played the Ukelele and serenaded the ER staff with Dan Bern's "Jerusalem".
Does that make you think less of me?
I guess that I wanted her to hurt, and now that I admit that to you, do you stand in judgment of me?
I wanted her to hurt like she had hurt me, as if that could ever solve anything. I wanted her to lay awake every night because I couldn't sleep, and I wanted her to toss, and I wanted her to turn, and to pull her hair out every waking moment she could no longer be with me. But I knew that she didn't. I wanted to be as important to her as she had told me that I was. But I knew that I wasn't.
I wanted her to feel, firsthand, the pain she had caused me with hollow words of admiration, empty promises and broken trusts. I wanted her to feel the ways in which she had cut me as if she had cut herself. But I knew that she wouldn't.
I wanted to think that somewhere in her subconscious mind, I was a splinter that could never be removed. That every so often a song on the radio or a phrase randomly uttered would evoke a memory of me to her mind and that she would want to cry, or that she would call to tell me that she had been wrong all along and that she still loved me.
But she never did.
In Southern California, I had admitted to Amy that I was a deeply vengeful person who felt the need to administer consequences personally to those I felt had wronged me. And no one had wronged me as I believed Katherine to have wronged me. This was the baggage I had been carrying with me then, and that I still shoulder from time to time.
"That is very dangerous," she had told me, "and uniquely human. It's the sort of logic that allows us to preemptively invade foreign countries and bomb babies."
Amy had a way of cutting through the bullshit.
What I needed then was a friend, and I found it. The first night I spent in Oceanside, I rolled up my sleeve and showed her the abscess I had gotten in San Francisco. She tried to the best of her ability to conceal her nausea at the sight of it, but the look in her eyes screamed "This is very, very bad and I am not sure if this will be the last time I will see you with that arm."
"Holy Jesus Mother Of Fucking Mary, we need to get you to a hospital, now."
"Really? It's that bad?"
"Your entire inner arm is swollen to the size of a small grapefruit. Yes, it really is that fucking bad. Come on, finish your beer. Let's go."
Explaining to everyone at Amy's house why we had to rush to the emergency room suddenly was a comical attempt at spraying cologne on a turd.
"Woah, what the FUCK happened to your arm, man?" Bill had said then, and looked at me. John was sitting next to him, and as we had been speaking for some time, he had already surmised the problem. He was silent. I gave him a small look of gratitude and our eyes met. He showed no signs of emotion: John normally never did. His short, dark hair cropped close to his head, and his face that completely blank poker face that never changed. They called him "the real scum", for reasons that I will someday revisit, but we all let him get away with whatever he wanted. We tolerated it because, although John with a thief and a con, he was at his heart a sincere and dedicated seeker of truth.
"Spider bite, Bill. Those things can be really nasty."
"What the hell kind of spider does that? How long have you had it?"
"A few days."
"A FEW FUCKING DAYS. Jesus CHRIST, man. Shouldn't you be fucking dead by now?"
I blushed. Amy shot him a look. "Come on, let's go," she said, and she pulled me by the arm and we walked to her car together in the darkness.
I apologized to her enthusiastically. "I know we have only personally met once before, and it was in New York City, and this is my first night staying with you in your mother's home, and I normally don't have pus oozing infected abscesses on my arm" and etcetra etcetra.
"Listen, you don't have to apologize to me for anything. I want you to be OK. I just want you to get taken care of and be OK."
And then, in her eyes, the strangest emotion I hadn't seen in anyone I had met along the road for what seemed like aeons: Genuine warmth, genuine human compassion and empathy. It felt familiar and yet so strange, and somehow welcoming.
We drove to the ER in near silence. Not much was spoken between us then, and there was little risk involved. It was two relatively unfamiliar people, riding together in the dark to do that which needed to be done. Nothing more, nothing less. Periodically, she would look over and give me the slightest of reassuring smiles, but the sadness and genuine concern was welling up in her eyes and right then I felt an idiot impulse kick up inside of me to kiss her and tell her it would be OK, but I did not.
When we arrived at the emergency room, we were pleased to see that somehow we were the first in line. This surprised me, as even in smaller towns I had been known to wait for hours, just to throw a fit and wince my face in pain and demand a fix. Hydromorphone was what they gave you then, if you claimed the pain was severe enough. And at times, for me at least, it was.
As I was being checked in, the doctors asked the usual questions. Drug history, mostly. I sat down in a chair and held my head in my hands, somehow strangely ashamed although I knew I had no real reason to be. Amy rested her hand gently on my shoulder.
"You know, I don't judge you. You will see... One of the things I have yet to tell you, what I am going to tell you now... Maybe we are more alike than you would think."
And what she told me was not much different than many of the other women I had loved. She had been unfaithful to all of the men she had dated, many of whom she didn't seem to like in hindsight. She was running from her father's death, and had been. She avoided intimacy, she couldn't handle it. She acted out sexually. She betrayed lovers, friends and family and lied to them. It was on impulse. It was an addiction. She was now celibate, and had a plan to be celibate until Easter had arrived.
The only thing about it that struck me was the brutal honesty, the integrity and accountability with which she had faced the music and her self and shadow. Her face portrayed a certain tenderness, a genuine sense of understanding that was hard won and snatched from the jaws of defeat. It was real.
And still, somehow, the cognitive dissonance of hearing that in the state of mind I was already in, immediately post Katherine affair, was something that I was not yet ready to hear. I didn't judge her, and I knew that she had been trying. But somehow the very act of the confession, there in the sordid and dimly lit ER waiting room, felt maybe a little too candid and raw and real: Real reality TV, high def. The bipolar liar junkie, the lying borderline sex addict. "Well, we are more alike than otherwise," I thought to myself. "Oh dear, oh dear. What a mess."
But it was a beautiful mess, somehow, and I think maybe that was the first moment I realized that it would be OK.
Amy stood behind me, resting her head on mine and cradling it with her hands, when she wasn't rubbing my back and shoulders. And only now do I realize I had to force myself to not fall in love with her in that waiting room that night, with her broken down confession and earnest eyes, somehow betraying more age and wisdom than I knew she should have possessed at the age of 23. It was the kindness of it. The brutal truth shining through the darkness there as a guiding light. I saw it, and quickly realized to know the truth is preferable in all ways to the fear of having your illusions shattered.
Like Marlowe, I too had come to learn that there was nothing I hated more than the stench of a lie.
After about ten minutes, they came in to take me into the emergency room proper. The emergency room attendants were horrified, but they told me that I probably wouldn't lose my arm.
"You should really learn to just smoke more pot," one of them told me.
I laughed. "Well, if you can't laugh at yourself... Ha Ha Ha."
When the doctor finally came in to lance it, the pain was unbearable. Amy watched by my side the whole time, eyes wide in fascination and awe. They made a slit in the abscess after injecting a numbing agent directly into its swollen aperture. Pus and blood oozed out of my arm like an erupting volcano, and I nearly fainted from the pain while Amy held my hand and squeezed it tight. I squeezed tighter. After they had finished, Amy played the Ukelele and serenaded the ER staff with Dan Bern's "Jerusalem".
"When I tell you that I love you, don't test my love,
Accept my love,
Don't test my love.
'Cause maybe I don't love you all that much."Every man in the entire ER ward had fallen in love her her by the end of the night, and I was no exception- Although I was the last to know it. And although all of this had been enough to spark off the renewal of my confidence and faith in others, the wound over the Katherine affair was still raw and bleeding. And I wanted her to feel it for herself, still.
Does that make you think less of me?
Friday, June 22, 2012
The Upside of Down, the Downside of Up: Up on the Downside and Down on the Upside
I've been walking around Portland the last few days, drinking in parks and reading and frequenting the food kitchens. It isn't so bad. Something about sleeping in dirt, on the ground, outside, or in the woods, makes me feel very rooted in my sense of communion with the animal kingdom. It's where we'd all be if society broke down.
I've been ripped off or gypped several times, and when it comes down to it I don't sweat it. Lessons learned, to be sure, but nothing worth dying over. People are OK, mostly. Shit luck situations we deal with in life push us to act in ways we normally wouldn't, more often than not. I understand that now. To that extent, it is a lot more difficult to remain angry at anyone.
And why would I? When I vibrate hatred and anger, that's what I feel in return. To the extent that it seems more powerful and advantageous to me to resonate sympathetically with energies rather than work against them, it makes more sense for me to recognize myself in others.
Lately, I find myself thinking about the story of the zen master who was robbed in his house one night, only for the burglar to find that the only possession the master had was a blanket, and the zen master took a long hard look at him and told him that he could have it. How disarming is that?
"Listen man, if you're that hard up for a few dollars, you obviously need it more than me."
Which was a lie, and quite possibly a justification for why I didn't attempt to jump three random guys on a street corner one night in downtown Portland.
Money has been tight, and I'm not much good with keeping a budget. What can I say? Everyone needs to play, sometimes. All work and no play makes jack a dull etc. I started out in the city proper this week, trying to actually get a feel for its layout and people and hopefully to fulfill my sense of wanting to have done something by the end of the day, even if it only be walk around and drink and people watch.
Several luminous, random and paradigm shifting sexual encounters later, I was sleeping under the bridge by waterfront, three sheets to the wind and wondering how I ended up sleeping under a bridge at 5 in the morning in a random city I'd never thought I'd ever live in. Funny how life happens like that. Bad decisions make for good stories, or at least entertaining anecdotes to remember to never tell your grandchildren for fear that it will corrupt their mortal souls.
And I've been plumbing the subconscious depths of my mortal soul, and some of what I've seen in that is terrifying. I think there is dirt in my teeth. I slept under the bridge in a white t-shirt which got covered in dirt. That may be a disadvantage to sleeping on a cardboard box. I guess it's not that much different from camping, really. Except you're camping with punk rockers, prostitutes, junkies, and flaming queers under a bridge.
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