THE NAKED ANIMAL

Here’s an episode from my adolescence that came back to me in vivid detail once I reported that I could barely remember anything from that period in my last post:

I was 12 years old, and I hadn’t made it to the National roller skating meet like I had the two years before, so my summer stretched aridly before me without the extra hours of practice and the anticipation of a cross-country trip in August. My dad came to the rescue with the offer of a visit to the Northeast, my and my sister’s first. I can’t remember if this was before or after he’d divorced his short-lived second wife, but the main purpose of the trip was to meet his new fiancee and her eight-year-old son in Philadelphia, then go on for a whirlwind tour of Washington DC, the Jersey Shore, and New York City.

These people were to be part of my new “family,” but I’d already banished that homey concept to the hinterlands of mass wishful thinking after seeing all the ill-will that existed between the members of my own little clan, so I couldn’t have cared less about that sector of the situation. All I wanted to do was travel. I had already fallen in love with traveling because it allowed me to let down my defenses just a bit. Everyone was usually interested enough in something else to be too worried about whether or not I was acting “effeminate,” and I didn’t have to watch my every little move. By 12, I had developed an icy, arrogant, angular facade with which I cut through assaults like a highly sophisticated prey animal eluding certain death. Whatever there was of a real me was somewhere deep inside simply operating the machinery. On the plane, my dad told me and my sister that his fiancee’s son acted “weird” (a blanket term that both my parents used to mean anything even slightly out of the ordinary). He didn’t elaborate, but from the rather queasy look on his face when he said it, I could tell that I was not to be the designated problem child in this particular combination of human elements, and my little tiny self inside all that elaborate armor took a welcome sigh of relief.

Now, my dad used to be someone who was so scared of anything that was out of the ordinary that he regularly derided everything that didn’t fit into his horribly constricted frame of reference. Another way of putting that would be to say he was a bigot. He actually didn’t want us to watch The Jeffersons during our weekends at his place because he didn’t want black people on his television set, and he would fall into a lisping, limp-wristed, stereotyped impersonation of a “homo” every time he saw a man so much as cross his legs. Real men were supposed to simply rest an ankle on the opposite knee, so as to give ample breathing room to their all-important reproductive device. My dad was pretty much obsessed with drawing a wide line between the behavior of “men” and the behavior of “women,” and anyone who didn’t fit into one camp or the other was automatically “weird,” which, coming from his mouth, was like an edict exiling them from the human race. I hated him for this and secretly wished him some sort of revenge for such repulsive behavior.

I could hardly have chosen a more effective agent of vengeance than my soon-to-be little stepbrother; because that roly-poly, not-very-attractive eight-year-old kid with a thick Philly accent still ranks as one of the most raging nelly queens I’ve ever come across in my life–no exaggeration. The first thing he did upon greeting me and my sister–he seemed so excited at the prospect of siblings!–was usher us into his room and show us a full-color, almost life-sized poster of Andy Gibb that hung over his bed. After gushing a bit about how much he loved Andy Gibb and putting on his new album, he got on his bed and carefully planted a big wet kiss on the Gibbster’s crotch shot. My sister and I had no idea what to think, so we giggled nervously and silently guffawed at each other in a swirl of shock, excitement, and embarrassment.

So that’s the kind of “weird” my dad had meant, I remember thinking. I could see that he couldn’t even stand to listen to the child talk. Every time a word escaped his lips, my dad would turn away with a red face, his neck veins straining uncontrollably. I could actually hear his teeth gnash. Ha, I thought. Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Inside, I couldn’t stop laughing, though outside I was just as repelled by the kid as my dad was. The fact that he existed at all made my years of careful facade-building completely meaningless. He was the first overtly “gay-acting” person I’d ever been around in the flesh, and there was something freeing about it, even if he was only eight. I couldn’t believe that he was allowed to get away with such behavior, and my manufactured sense of appeasement and assimilation was brutally mangled by the total lack of repercussions he experienced for his “girly” behavior.

We went on day trips to Washington DC and New York City, but I don’t remember much except the way I was constantly charting my dad’s reaction to his future stepson’s every move and utterance. In DC, the White House was much smaller than I thought it would be, and the Washington Monument was much larger. What I remember most vividly is how my dad said something nasty about him to me every time he was out of his fiancee’s earshot (I don’t remember their names). Since it was obvious that he’d already been talked down from interfering with the kid’s girly behavior by his mother (it must have been DAMNED GOOD sex for him to put up with that), he laid into him for being fat, eating like a pig, or saying “yous,” in the old-school Philly manner, to mean you-plural. “Yous all get together so I can snap a shot,” the child would say, and my dad would go, “Listen to that, he can’t even speak English!” His remarks were poisonous and continuous, and they painfully subdued me into a catatonic silence. There was plenty of tension between him and his fiancee, too, obviously over her son, and that made for extreme emotional tautness no matter what we were doing. In New York City, near the end of our day when we were hurrying a bit to make it back to Philly, my dad started walking too fast for the kid to keep up with us, muttering under his breath, “get a move on, you little fatso,” and whispering an evil little laugh. I remember with a kind of shame the false camaraderie I felt with my dad simply because I could keep up.

My dad and his fiancee fought long into the night after we got home. I couldn’t sleep at all, but my sister was safely dreamside in her own sophisticated shell of armor, and the dear little flamer was snoring up a storm. At some point my dad came out in his underwear to get something to drink, and got very angry when he saw that I was awake. “What are you still doing up?” he hissed, as if children were supposed to sleep peacefully through absolutely anything.

At some time during the wee hours, I did drift off to sleep, and in the morning, my dad, sister and I went out alone to do errands and such so that his fiancee and her son could have some time alone. Talks were being had. Peace was being made, I assumed, by the woman in the equation. As we drove along the brick-heavy streets of Philadelphia, Jose Feliciano came on the radio singing his version of The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” a slickly produced, quietly resonant take with nothing but Feliciano’s acoustic guitar as accompaniment. My dad turned up the radio loud, and went on and on about how amazing it was that Feliciano was blind, and he sang and played the guitar like that. I remember thinking that was strange logic, like the rest of my dad’s surmises about human reality: Who needed to see to be able to play the guitar and sing?

From that point on, both my Dad and the kid were a little quieter, a little less themselves; the fiancee had succeeded in modulating their behavior around each other for the time being. At the Jersey shore, where we spent a long weekend, I took center stage by having an allergy fit during which I could barely breathe for several hours–one of many such episodes I had as an adolescent, which I now see as physical expressions of my repressed emotional state of near-asphyxiation.

When we got home, my dad told us that he and the fiancee had decided to break it off. “The kid comes with the deal,” he told us, “and I just couldn’t deal with that one.” My sister and I said we understood. But as for me, I didn’t understand a thing, and I didn’t want to, certainly nothing about my dad and his feelings. I was too filled with rancor about the way I’d been pounded into the ground all my life for being different to care about trying to understand anyone else’s paltry little emotional bullshit. Now I knew that there were plenty of people out there–even little kids–who were different, very different indeed, and they seemed a HELL of a lot happier than I did.

I’m not sure how much my queeny little almost-stepbrother had to do with it, but it was around that time that I started really feeling my anger as well as my depthless fear. That summer, I decided firmly that any mother fucking tight-assed bigoty bully, well-meaning, cud-chewing, butt-stupid housewife or pin-headed, inbred redneck twit who wanted to try force-feeding me shit about what was “normal” and what wasn’t could go to hell and choke to death on the devil’s dick. I wasn’t tough enough to back this kind of anger up physically, nor did I think physical–or even verbal--confrontation was very clever, but that’s the way I felt, and I felt it so strongly that I was constantly growling under my breath, ready to pounce.

To somewhat slake this irrepressible anger, and to fulfill my truly urgent need to deflect the constant attacks I faced, I developed a weapon far more effective than answering assault with assault. It’s one that I still use today when necessary, though most of my childhood armory has disintegrated. The weapon is simply a look, but not a simple one. It’s a quick, deep, icy stare that says the following: You are so pathetically atavistic and simple-minded that I can barely believe you exist, and if you don’t leave me alone and high-tail it out of my sight in the next two seconds, you know–you know deep down in your soul–that I could inflict some nasty motherfucking pain on you in ways that you can’t even imagine in your woefully unevolved state. It’s extremely efficient, and an indispensable tool for a post-apocalyptic (It already happened, didn’t you know?) warrior pacifist.

I don’t live anymore in a place where I have to defend myself from rabid bigots at every turn, but “the ice” sure does come in handy for deflecting Jesus freaks, crazies and rampant assholes; and it works even through two layers of glass and a rearview mirror–extremely handy for the asshole-laden streets of Los Angeles. So I suppose I should thank that dear little Andy Gibb lover for waking me up decisively to the fact that, as Andy’s more eloquent brothers (cousins?) put it, “...we’re living in a world of fools, breaking us down, when they all should let us be...”

Categories: backstory, family, travel

My therapist once told me that the years between eight and thirteen are always the hardest to talk about for people, and sure enough, I could barely string two sentences together when trying to describe scenes from that era to her. Since then, I’ve attempted to write about certain events from that time, but they’re wrapped in a haze and unreachable by either technique or poetry. This has puzzled me for a while. Did something really awful happen during this time that I am repressing, or is it something more subtle, perhaps even more insidious?

I got my answer when I watched an old video of myself (tranfered from Super 8!) performing in skating competitions back in the 70s. There I am landing jumps and doing footwork and everything, but otherwise feigning nonchalance. In this footage, I perform with no expression whatsoever; I merely go through the moves. Then the camera follows me off the floor where I talk to my coach, and in one particular cut, I’m talking quite animatedly to him with my hands on my hips, fingers facing backwards. I glance at the camera; sheer terror dilates my pupils and immobilizes my face for a split second as I shift my hands so that they’re lower on my hips and my fingers are facing forward.

This was one of many things that my mother, other people’s mothers, my teachers, my schoolmates and various random bystanders told me as they gathered in a tacit culture-wide effort to meld me into the semblance of a heterosexual male, though they could see I was a big faerie: Women put their hands on their hips like THIS (hands at the level of the belly button, fingers facing backward), and men put their hands on their hips like THIS (hands just below the hipbones, fingers facing forward). I was also regularly chastised by just about everyone at the skating rink any time I tried to sneak something the least bit graceful or balletic into my routine–while other guys were mysteriously allowed to queen it up–so it’s no wonder that I was devoid of any personality whatsoever during those performances.

In fact, I was devoid of any personality whatsoever no matter what I was doing. I was so busy constantly monitoring myself for feminine gestures and substituting the correlative male ones that I had no time for an actual personality. Instead, I was furiously working away at developing a persona that no one could ridicule or tear apart so easily, lost in a fugue far more complex than the term “self-conscious” could describe. And I did a great job at it, because I’ve always put my heart and soul into all my endeavors–it’s just that many of them have been self destructive. But seriously, I’m a real artist at it. Self expression had no place in my life. I didn’t even know what it meant. What I was after was a simple respite from constant nagging–even at the expense of my true self. Is it harsh to say I took the easy road out by learning how to “pass” as “normal”? Anyway, I was a kid, and apparently kids are not to be blamed to any great degree for their own actions.

Then suddenly, I wasn’t a kid anymore. When I was thirteen, I discovered both drugs and sex, which opened a maze of conjoined, hidden, alternate universes to me, in any of which I could be myself–at least as convincingly as I possibly could considering my lack of practice in the field. But at least, in those worlds, there was a part of me that felt the fresh air for the first time since I’d begun walking and talking (too much like a girl, even at first). Not that I turned into a flagrant flamer and called everyone “Mary” or anything when allowed to “be myself”–no, my true self was filled much more with anger and fantasy, in equal parts: the anger was in response to the fact that I’d been forced to create a false self in order to survive, and the fantasy was my imagination feverishly constructing a different reality construct, where no one is forced to perform such a violent, invasive operation on himself, and everyone lives in peace and harmony. Yup, I’d like to teach the world to sing. But I’m still learning the song myself.

Perhaps that time of my life doesn’t need to be dredged up any more comprehensively than I’ve done in this post. Recounting the events of the past is only rewarding if you’re searching for their import. If you’ve already gotten emotional satisfaction from your memories without having to tell the whole damned story, incident by mundane little incident, then wouldn’t it be better to spend the time and narrative impetus on moving forward instead? Or do people really enjoy wallowing in the minutiae of reality as regurgitated onto the written page? My mother tells me that people like to read “real” things. I, on the other hand, don’t. I like to read about things that are exactly not “reality,” at least as generally agreed upon, and I like to write those kinds of things, too. So it’s somewhat troubling to me that I feel this sort of compulsion to write a comparatively nuts-n-bolts account of my wild and somewhat dark cavort through the passages of time.

I really don’t know where all this autobiographical writing is going, but I do know this: From age eight to thirteen, I formed an impenetrable cocoon about myself from which the butterfly is still attempting to emerge. Is that age difficult to talk about for everyone (according to my therapist) because everyone goes through an analogous process during that period whether they’re gay, straight, black, white or otherwise? If so, then I propose that it would be a big step toward accelerated human evolution if we all got together and got rid of the part of the growth process where people have to perfect being something they aren’t before finding out what and who they really are–if, in fact, they can do so at all after so many years of denying it. But I don’t think I’d win any votes on that platform....

Categories: backstory, psychotherapy

For Valentine's Day when my sister and I were little, my mother used to leave little heart-shaped chocolates and cute notes outside our doors so that we'd find them when we woke up. This year, she gave us each a copy of Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, which is a completely unsentimental self-transformation manual about how to overcome resistance, which he calls "the enemy within." It's written in a swift, unadorned style, and each short chapter is padded with lots of white space, so that one can read it in one sitting for full impact. Esquire called it "a kick in the ass," and that's exactly how it's posited by its author, who wants to welcome the brave to the harsh world of art as reality rather than coax the timid to join a fantastical, more accommodating world, as so many self-helpers do. The book was such a good pep talk that I read it a second time a couple of days after my first reading. And then, because I wasn't sure I'd really absorbed it, I read it a third time. At that point, I saw that even the reading of a book about conquering resistance had become a form of resistance in my twisted little universe.

I am the Scheherezade of resistance. I can send my psyche down 1001 different paths, each of them seemingly full of promise at the outset, and each will at some point take that dreaded turn toward resistance. Self sabotage, some call it. A cyclical course of internal obstacles that keep us from realizing our potentials. Whence does this fear of becoming great in our own eyes arise? Why is it so hard to become what we truly want to be, and why does most of the difficulty come from within? Why must everything be a battle? Why must we be such fearsome warriors to survive and succeed when we'd rather be viewing cherry blossoms or watching fluffly little clouds? Maybe I'm just talking for myself here. Maybe there are some people who actually like the constant struggle, get off on it, or at least get off on making the most of it. I don't feel like fighting my demons; I'd rather we all got along instead. But apparently this is not allowed in the current reality construct. Invite your demons in for dinner and they end up feasting on you.

At times like this, when I can't get myself to finish a project no matter how close I get, when I feel that none of the work I do is any good anyway, when I feel like my life bears absolutely no resemblance to any life I might have designed for myself, yet there's no one to blame for its current state of affairs other than myself--at times like this, I feel buried alive by resistance. I know there's air out there, and that one solid push will put me in contact with it, but I whine about not being able to breathe as I ineffectually scratch at the inner dimensions of my self-dug grave. And then I couch the situation in metaphors, like I just did, so that I won't have to dig in and really examine my feelings. The truth is, my feelings are still hard to contact, even after lots of therapy that I would categorize as successful. I've evened out, emotionally--the new and improved manic depressive, with lower highs and higher lows!--but it's difficult for me to contact either anguish or joy. And in between, I feel stymied and stifled. Nothing quite gets through. Creating art is channeling energy, according to Pressfield, and that's something I've always felt was true. At this moment in my broadcasting history, my channels are crossed and clogged. Must be time for a detox...

Categories: depression, transformation