Grand Exits
by Adam Klein
For the past decade, taking a long bath has been a good substitute for nodding out. Lately, I use an hourglass-shaped tub that fills rapidly and presumably saves water. It does not save time.
I’ll come back from a stint teaching overseas, in one of the cities that registers alarmingly on the air quality index, having acquired a mysterious rash or lingering respiratory infection, and it’s in the bath where I rebuild myself; deep breathing, reading, and then sliding under the water, just up to my lips, closing my eyes and minding out. Moments of my life, perverse fabrications and memories, tap away at the calm, like a bird at an old tree’s bark. The old tree feels through its old knots some dull, earlier ring. That reminds me…there’s a crow that pecks away at the bathroom’s skylight, whose black beak teasingly appears in it, lifting away small pieces of wood, so that at varying points while I’m stretched out in the tub, I fear it will come crashing down. This doesn’t help my general sense of foreboding.
Once, at my parents’ home in Cave Creek, Arizona, a large chuckwalla fell from a ceiling tile and landed in the bathtub, dazed. My father, in the same house, had listened to an owl pick a rabbit clean in the fireplace flue, dropping the bones one at a time over a good forty minutes while the animal fought and wailed and gave up. I’ve never seen him more disturbed about anything, except when he spoke about a dog that had attached itself to his starving regiment during the Korean War and followed behind them for three days before it was betrayed.
I wasn’t privy to my father’s emotional life and early on decided I wanted nothing to do with it. But before he died, I saw that aggrieved expression again, after he’d lifted my mother, with his bad back, from her bed to a porta-potty shortly after she’d had her kidney removed, the start of other ravaging.
My bathing time usually amounts to nothing, but that’s probably true of most of my time. When I used heroin, I liked the way it enabled me to be embodied without time. I felt I could sink into my own cells and imagined myself a literal and figurative bloodstream. But we don’t get to be embodied for long without time reclaiming the minutes we’ve fled. Time is always coming due. I associate it with withdrawal itself, which is not only about a lack of drug in the system, but a set of unwanted feelings we withdraw from and that return, that seem to ride in the blood. We’re always somehow negotiating and dispersing pain by simple means: a walk, a sad song, a laugh with old friends, a bath. But when we merely veil them, we lose those methods of dispersal. The affect theorist Silvan Thompson describes helping a fear response to “burn out.” We must apply this, too, to pain. When time returns, if it has been avoided, it does so with unrelievable force, as though it were vengeful, a usurious, emotional fine.
With age (and sobriety, of course), the past doesn’t seem so furious. My body is now the source of my aches and complaints. I have spinal stenosis, which has me sitting and standing uncomfortably all day, and which nothing fully relieves. But I’m grateful that I’m mostly healed of the aches of my early life. I think of them now as phantom feelings, no longer in my body; desires and humiliations I’ve foreclosed or redirected. I remember them but worry sometimes at not being able to feel them any longer.
It could be this band of phantom feeling that separates my early life from the one I live now, delineates past from present, though the past is still vivid to me, lurid even, and while I can’t imagine making any of the choices I once made, and no longer relate to the feelings that troubled my behavior, I’m amused, even grateful, to have lived so recklessly and against rote. My adolescence, more than my childhood, returns unexpectedly. Its old shames and confusions are containable and almost quaint. It stuns me that they were ever large.
Not long ago, in the bath, after the crow had flown off with its siding, I stood up, and through the mists collected on the bathroom mirror, noticed a skintag or a mole under my arm. I drew a sharp breath, reached out and cleared the mirror with my palm, flooded by an entirely out of proportion fear, because I remembered my father’s moles and how they disgusted me. To see my body become like his brought up a long-buried dread. But, as any Freudian well knows, it wasn’t first disgust that I felt for his body. I examined myself closer, and the mole was not there; it was merely an aberration of vision. But in its place, a brief childhood memory hungered for examination.
I was eleven years old, standing behind my father in the shower, a hand over an erection, waiting on him to finish washing off and to pass the soap. This weird indoctrination to “military showers” as he called them, was meant to be quick, water-saving. But also, to toughen me up, to show me that men don’t linger, his lesson in pragmatic manliness.
He’s entirely unknown to me, a traveling camera salesman who comes and goes, and with whom there is never a conversation deeper than the banter he carries to potential buyers up and down the Florida panhandle. The conflicts of my early sexuality, the hostilities and violations I meet with at school and outside it, he cannot imagine. I’m as buried away as his war photographs, the photo albums my mother later threw out, with pictures of him in uniform, his regiment in snow-obliterated landscapes. He’s perplexed that she’s thrown them out, even she seems confused by it, claiming she was carried away by her compulsion to clean.
My erotic curiosity attaches to him, water beading on the pitted plane of his back, his flat buttocks, the neat lines of his barber-cut hair, a “military cut,” disciplined, precise, with his big ears standing out, soap behind them. I want to hide my arousal which isn’t for him, really, but for mature men, men I may one day become. When my father did turn to pass the soap, he looked past me, beyond my concave, naked chest, and my flushed cheeks, one hand still covering myself and the other held out like an impossible Eve. His might as well have been one of the candelabrum-bearing arms in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, only bearing a soap dish. Of course, this was the best reaction he could have had, his only logical choice, neither to embarrass nor molest me, and yet the feeling of his looking past me, as though to see me would be too indecent, would become a stubborn impediment in my life, a desire to expose myself (not as a doorway exhibitionist) to emotionally estranged men while at the same time carrying a fury at being overlooked by them.
In Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works, Thomas Ogden writes of the psychoanalyst Harold Searles’ “utterly and tragically unrealizable” transference love for a male client with whom the analyst imagined being “on the threshold of marriage.” Ogden quotes at length a passage of Searles in which he discloses other unrealizable and prohibited attractions that, outside the field of psychoanalysis, drift too close to the incest taboo and are abruptly denounced. And yet, Searles believes some acknowledgement of a child’s nascent erotic life is instrumental to the full articulation of adult sexuality.
I used at times to feel somewhat worried when [my daughter] would play the supremely confident coquette with me and I would feel enthralled by her charms; but then I came to the conviction, some time ago, that such moments of relatedness could only be nourishing for her developing personality as well as delightful to me. If a little girl cannot feel herself able to win the heart of her father […] I reasoned, then how can the young woman who comes later have any deep confidence in the power of her womanliness.
It is impossible to imagine now what my life would have looked like if my father had somehow shared Searles’ magnanimity and concern for my sexual development. I don’t know what would have been an appropriate reaction for him to have had; it is all too easy to imagine the inappropriate reactions. But surely it wasn’t to have blotted out the sight of his son, awkward as it may have been to see him. But this was too much to ask. And so it happens that at sixty, my father’s mole, his body that I never ceased to reject, asserts itself after his death, as though he’s permanently in mid-turn, and I never take the soap from him, or learn that in the military they didn’t provide towels, so the men planed the water from their bodies with their hands. What could have made my father imagine he was teaching me something when he told me that?
It started from there, my contempt for practical knowledge. If he had said, enough of the showering and the male bonding and maybe go find yourself a buddy to play doctor with, I might not have had to break off the showers that helped him to fondly recollect those he once shared with other men.
From then on, I terminated every suggestion he made, practically before he’d make it. If he wanted me to join him on a drive “up the line” to absorb his methods for avoiding the cops on his CB radio, meeting his clients, learning sales, etc., I’d pantomime poking my finger down my throat. I had more class contempt than Veda Pierce.
Once my father’s eyes had steered past me, I hated him and searched for a father whose eyes would settle on me. I became a coquette, possessed by a promiscuous and ambivalent attraction to older men. I thought often about what I sought in them. Their admiration, I suppose, and a host of more conventional desires encouraged in pop songs of the time: someone to make me feel sexy, singular, loved—the things I could not do for myself. They had to be loyal, too, because the pecking order is very clear to a gay kid whose most attractive feature is that he’s young.
I wonder if that early, shameful, unseen or to my mind rejected erection had set in place an array of hates—my hatred of manners, modesty, and orthodoxy. And I hated my father’s body with granular particularity. The only reason I didn’t hate men was that I needed to conquer their indifference, but after enough sex in my adolescence and early adulthood, I avenged myself with indifference to them.
I’ll come back from a stint teaching overseas, in one of the cities that registers alarmingly on the air quality index, having acquired a mysterious rash or lingering respiratory infection, and it’s in the bath where I rebuild myself; deep breathing, reading, and then sliding under the water, just up to my lips, closing my eyes and minding out. Moments of my life, perverse fabrications and memories, tap away at the calm, like a bird at an old tree’s bark. The old tree feels through its old knots some dull, earlier ring. That reminds me…there’s a crow that pecks away at the bathroom’s skylight, whose black beak teasingly appears in it, lifting away small pieces of wood, so that at varying points while I’m stretched out in the tub, I fear it will come crashing down. This doesn’t help my general sense of foreboding.
Once, at my parents’ home in Cave Creek, Arizona, a large chuckwalla fell from a ceiling tile and landed in the bathtub, dazed. My father, in the same house, had listened to an owl pick a rabbit clean in the fireplace flue, dropping the bones one at a time over a good forty minutes while the animal fought and wailed and gave up. I’ve never seen him more disturbed about anything, except when he spoke about a dog that had attached itself to his starving regiment during the Korean War and followed behind them for three days before it was betrayed.
I wasn’t privy to my father’s emotional life and early on decided I wanted nothing to do with it. But before he died, I saw that aggrieved expression again, after he’d lifted my mother, with his bad back, from her bed to a porta-potty shortly after she’d had her kidney removed, the start of other ravaging.
My bathing time usually amounts to nothing, but that’s probably true of most of my time. When I used heroin, I liked the way it enabled me to be embodied without time. I felt I could sink into my own cells and imagined myself a literal and figurative bloodstream. But we don’t get to be embodied for long without time reclaiming the minutes we’ve fled. Time is always coming due. I associate it with withdrawal itself, which is not only about a lack of drug in the system, but a set of unwanted feelings we withdraw from and that return, that seem to ride in the blood. We’re always somehow negotiating and dispersing pain by simple means: a walk, a sad song, a laugh with old friends, a bath. But when we merely veil them, we lose those methods of dispersal. The affect theorist Silvan Thompson describes helping a fear response to “burn out.” We must apply this, too, to pain. When time returns, if it has been avoided, it does so with unrelievable force, as though it were vengeful, a usurious, emotional fine.
With age (and sobriety, of course), the past doesn’t seem so furious. My body is now the source of my aches and complaints. I have spinal stenosis, which has me sitting and standing uncomfortably all day, and which nothing fully relieves. But I’m grateful that I’m mostly healed of the aches of my early life. I think of them now as phantom feelings, no longer in my body; desires and humiliations I’ve foreclosed or redirected. I remember them but worry sometimes at not being able to feel them any longer.
It could be this band of phantom feeling that separates my early life from the one I live now, delineates past from present, though the past is still vivid to me, lurid even, and while I can’t imagine making any of the choices I once made, and no longer relate to the feelings that troubled my behavior, I’m amused, even grateful, to have lived so recklessly and against rote. My adolescence, more than my childhood, returns unexpectedly. Its old shames and confusions are containable and almost quaint. It stuns me that they were ever large.
Not long ago, in the bath, after the crow had flown off with its siding, I stood up, and through the mists collected on the bathroom mirror, noticed a skintag or a mole under my arm. I drew a sharp breath, reached out and cleared the mirror with my palm, flooded by an entirely out of proportion fear, because I remembered my father’s moles and how they disgusted me. To see my body become like his brought up a long-buried dread. But, as any Freudian well knows, it wasn’t first disgust that I felt for his body. I examined myself closer, and the mole was not there; it was merely an aberration of vision. But in its place, a brief childhood memory hungered for examination.
I was eleven years old, standing behind my father in the shower, a hand over an erection, waiting on him to finish washing off and to pass the soap. This weird indoctrination to “military showers” as he called them, was meant to be quick, water-saving. But also, to toughen me up, to show me that men don’t linger, his lesson in pragmatic manliness.
He’s entirely unknown to me, a traveling camera salesman who comes and goes, and with whom there is never a conversation deeper than the banter he carries to potential buyers up and down the Florida panhandle. The conflicts of my early sexuality, the hostilities and violations I meet with at school and outside it, he cannot imagine. I’m as buried away as his war photographs, the photo albums my mother later threw out, with pictures of him in uniform, his regiment in snow-obliterated landscapes. He’s perplexed that she’s thrown them out, even she seems confused by it, claiming she was carried away by her compulsion to clean.
My erotic curiosity attaches to him, water beading on the pitted plane of his back, his flat buttocks, the neat lines of his barber-cut hair, a “military cut,” disciplined, precise, with his big ears standing out, soap behind them. I want to hide my arousal which isn’t for him, really, but for mature men, men I may one day become. When my father did turn to pass the soap, he looked past me, beyond my concave, naked chest, and my flushed cheeks, one hand still covering myself and the other held out like an impossible Eve. His might as well have been one of the candelabrum-bearing arms in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, only bearing a soap dish. Of course, this was the best reaction he could have had, his only logical choice, neither to embarrass nor molest me, and yet the feeling of his looking past me, as though to see me would be too indecent, would become a stubborn impediment in my life, a desire to expose myself (not as a doorway exhibitionist) to emotionally estranged men while at the same time carrying a fury at being overlooked by them.
In Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works, Thomas Ogden writes of the psychoanalyst Harold Searles’ “utterly and tragically unrealizable” transference love for a male client with whom the analyst imagined being “on the threshold of marriage.” Ogden quotes at length a passage of Searles in which he discloses other unrealizable and prohibited attractions that, outside the field of psychoanalysis, drift too close to the incest taboo and are abruptly denounced. And yet, Searles believes some acknowledgement of a child’s nascent erotic life is instrumental to the full articulation of adult sexuality.
I used at times to feel somewhat worried when [my daughter] would play the supremely confident coquette with me and I would feel enthralled by her charms; but then I came to the conviction, some time ago, that such moments of relatedness could only be nourishing for her developing personality as well as delightful to me. If a little girl cannot feel herself able to win the heart of her father […] I reasoned, then how can the young woman who comes later have any deep confidence in the power of her womanliness.
It is impossible to imagine now what my life would have looked like if my father had somehow shared Searles’ magnanimity and concern for my sexual development. I don’t know what would have been an appropriate reaction for him to have had; it is all too easy to imagine the inappropriate reactions. But surely it wasn’t to have blotted out the sight of his son, awkward as it may have been to see him. But this was too much to ask. And so it happens that at sixty, my father’s mole, his body that I never ceased to reject, asserts itself after his death, as though he’s permanently in mid-turn, and I never take the soap from him, or learn that in the military they didn’t provide towels, so the men planed the water from their bodies with their hands. What could have made my father imagine he was teaching me something when he told me that?
It started from there, my contempt for practical knowledge. If he had said, enough of the showering and the male bonding and maybe go find yourself a buddy to play doctor with, I might not have had to break off the showers that helped him to fondly recollect those he once shared with other men.
From then on, I terminated every suggestion he made, practically before he’d make it. If he wanted me to join him on a drive “up the line” to absorb his methods for avoiding the cops on his CB radio, meeting his clients, learning sales, etc., I’d pantomime poking my finger down my throat. I had more class contempt than Veda Pierce.
Once my father’s eyes had steered past me, I hated him and searched for a father whose eyes would settle on me. I became a coquette, possessed by a promiscuous and ambivalent attraction to older men. I thought often about what I sought in them. Their admiration, I suppose, and a host of more conventional desires encouraged in pop songs of the time: someone to make me feel sexy, singular, loved—the things I could not do for myself. They had to be loyal, too, because the pecking order is very clear to a gay kid whose most attractive feature is that he’s young.
I wonder if that early, shameful, unseen or to my mind rejected erection had set in place an array of hates—my hatred of manners, modesty, and orthodoxy. And I hated my father’s body with granular particularity. The only reason I didn’t hate men was that I needed to conquer their indifference, but after enough sex in my adolescence and early adulthood, I avenged myself with indifference to them.
*
I fell achingly in love with men we’d now call predators. I looked older than my age, a certain leeriness and stubbornness in my face that was easy to confuse with experience. No matter how brief or insubstantial, those interactions lit up a constellation of ecstasies and disappointments from which I could map-make, then navigate, the treacherous journey toward others. I fell to earth early in love, when I reckoned with the fact that I could be replaced, that love is fickle as a moon out of whack, one day bright, the next day dark with hours that don’t pass.
I didn’t experience love-forsakenness in isolation but with a group of gay Cuban friends in Miami. They were all my age, maybe sixteen. Mario, Alberto, Jorge, Mandy, a little gang, permitted entry to warehouse clubs where daddies with armbands and bulging shorts rubbed against us, plied us with drugs and booze, then took us out through a sea of cars, each promising low light and bucket seats, a private chance to fondle and fuck. After sex in cars, the little gang would reconfigure in brightly lit, all-night diners downtown over a stack of pancakes, to discuss what we’d said yes to and what we declined, if we declined anything. We all agreed, to learn the world, you had to meet a lot of strangers.
Besides love, which we were regularly in and out of, we’d sound off on fashion, music, sex, and family life. We drank coffee until the sun threatened to rise, and confessed everything, which was easy to do since we were ashamed of nothing. We argued about models and designers and identified with them. I’d ogle the Jeanloup Sieff nude photos of Yves Saint Laurent for the ad campaign, Pour L’homme. I fancied I looked like him, had the same long hair and bony body, the glasses, his impudent confidence.
We gave a lot of consideration to details, to every shock the fashion world delivered. Even the smallest considerations could threaten the rigid order of the day. To use clear nail polish or not? To wear the belt over the shirt? Collar up? Strong opinions about beard stubble, hairy legs, talk during sex. Sylvester’s caftan at a Fort Lauderdale tea dance. Grace Jones at the Copa. The Diva carried in on a palanquin at almost three in the morning by men in jockstraps, as though Cleopatra had been celebrated in the locker rooms of antiquity. We died for Donna Summer’s Egyptian-cut wig in the Skrebneski back-cover photo of I Remember Yesterday, and the candy striping of her YSL dress.
There was no point in returning home after those late nights, but we weren’t prepared to leave home either. We knew we’d one day have to leave our families, become unreadable to them in the same way they were obvious to us. We learned the power of the grandiose, the exaggerated gesture. We hollowed our cheeks and folded a hand under our chins while we chatted. We poured long vowels into our words and spoke of our homelives as if they were utterly fatiguing. We were preoccupied with gloss, with chic, a culture where people were seen, snapped, lionized, because to die in line with the everyday, in the sludge of the unspectacular, was too awful to think about.
Perhaps we were, in our own grandiose ways, vying for our families’ attention, sending out an S.O.S., waving glittering scarves on a distant shore, or better, from an airplane. Society had erased us, tried to convince us to participate in our own erasure. But real society, Society Proper, we knew studied us. Envied us. Imagine a world without Truman, Liz, or Andy. We shuddered. If our families couldn’t figure it out, we’d show them.
I didn’t experience love-forsakenness in isolation but with a group of gay Cuban friends in Miami. They were all my age, maybe sixteen. Mario, Alberto, Jorge, Mandy, a little gang, permitted entry to warehouse clubs where daddies with armbands and bulging shorts rubbed against us, plied us with drugs and booze, then took us out through a sea of cars, each promising low light and bucket seats, a private chance to fondle and fuck. After sex in cars, the little gang would reconfigure in brightly lit, all-night diners downtown over a stack of pancakes, to discuss what we’d said yes to and what we declined, if we declined anything. We all agreed, to learn the world, you had to meet a lot of strangers.
Besides love, which we were regularly in and out of, we’d sound off on fashion, music, sex, and family life. We drank coffee until the sun threatened to rise, and confessed everything, which was easy to do since we were ashamed of nothing. We argued about models and designers and identified with them. I’d ogle the Jeanloup Sieff nude photos of Yves Saint Laurent for the ad campaign, Pour L’homme. I fancied I looked like him, had the same long hair and bony body, the glasses, his impudent confidence.
We gave a lot of consideration to details, to every shock the fashion world delivered. Even the smallest considerations could threaten the rigid order of the day. To use clear nail polish or not? To wear the belt over the shirt? Collar up? Strong opinions about beard stubble, hairy legs, talk during sex. Sylvester’s caftan at a Fort Lauderdale tea dance. Grace Jones at the Copa. The Diva carried in on a palanquin at almost three in the morning by men in jockstraps, as though Cleopatra had been celebrated in the locker rooms of antiquity. We died for Donna Summer’s Egyptian-cut wig in the Skrebneski back-cover photo of I Remember Yesterday, and the candy striping of her YSL dress.
There was no point in returning home after those late nights, but we weren’t prepared to leave home either. We knew we’d one day have to leave our families, become unreadable to them in the same way they were obvious to us. We learned the power of the grandiose, the exaggerated gesture. We hollowed our cheeks and folded a hand under our chins while we chatted. We poured long vowels into our words and spoke of our homelives as if they were utterly fatiguing. We were preoccupied with gloss, with chic, a culture where people were seen, snapped, lionized, because to die in line with the everyday, in the sludge of the unspectacular, was too awful to think about.
Perhaps we were, in our own grandiose ways, vying for our families’ attention, sending out an S.O.S., waving glittering scarves on a distant shore, or better, from an airplane. Society had erased us, tried to convince us to participate in our own erasure. But real society, Society Proper, we knew studied us. Envied us. Imagine a world without Truman, Liz, or Andy. We shuddered. If our families couldn’t figure it out, we’d show them.
*
Running away was a good way for a latchkey kid to be noticed by their family. Even the most unengaged parents dreaded their children might run wild, turn bad. Bad kids occupied a lot of representational space during the 70s. Afternoon TV specials warned about us: Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic; Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway; Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn (an early depiction of gay hustlers).
Those were the days when every depiction of a teenager showed them in squalor, near madness, ragged in a blanket on the side of a highway. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem must have deeply penetrated the television writers’ rooms. They churned out specials meant to chill us, to corrosively threaten us with the dangers of becoming.
One devastating example, Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring, came out in 1971. Dennie (Sally Field) is a runaway at the start of the film. She and her hippie boyfriend, Flack (David Carradine) are dining and dashing in Los Angeles. After a suggested assault, Dennie splits and returns home, apologizing to her parents and begging to stay. But her adjustment back is no easier. Her distracted parents are always arguing with her pill-popping younger sister, Susie. The family literally speak to each other through an intercom system. They rifle Susie’s drawers in search of drugs. After Dennie’s abrupt departure from her boyfriend, he’s left chanting “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” beside a campfire, a sitar ringing offscreen.
Then one day Flack shows up outside Dennie’s house, an unwashed and frankly pathetic specter in a stolen ice cream truck, pleading for her to rejoin him—for her to escape the dull, predictable lives of her parents. The family assembles at the poolside to dissuade her, the hungover parents who’ve hosted a wild party of charades the night before, and the irascible and impressionable Susie. Dennie, who can’t handle Flack’s pressuring her, needs time to think. Unable to wait around, Flack drives off, a warbling ribbon of ice cream truck music behind him. The following morning, Susie has run off. Possibly to meet Flack or simply inspired by him. Such was the irresistible call of the streets.
For me, the story of the seventies resides in its warnings, its schlocky, propagandistic movies of the week. And from those terrible fates, we gathered our courage and formed our fascinations, eventually learning to flee.
Those were the days when every depiction of a teenager showed them in squalor, near madness, ragged in a blanket on the side of a highway. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem must have deeply penetrated the television writers’ rooms. They churned out specials meant to chill us, to corrosively threaten us with the dangers of becoming.
One devastating example, Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring, came out in 1971. Dennie (Sally Field) is a runaway at the start of the film. She and her hippie boyfriend, Flack (David Carradine) are dining and dashing in Los Angeles. After a suggested assault, Dennie splits and returns home, apologizing to her parents and begging to stay. But her adjustment back is no easier. Her distracted parents are always arguing with her pill-popping younger sister, Susie. The family literally speak to each other through an intercom system. They rifle Susie’s drawers in search of drugs. After Dennie’s abrupt departure from her boyfriend, he’s left chanting “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” beside a campfire, a sitar ringing offscreen.
Then one day Flack shows up outside Dennie’s house, an unwashed and frankly pathetic specter in a stolen ice cream truck, pleading for her to rejoin him—for her to escape the dull, predictable lives of her parents. The family assembles at the poolside to dissuade her, the hungover parents who’ve hosted a wild party of charades the night before, and the irascible and impressionable Susie. Dennie, who can’t handle Flack’s pressuring her, needs time to think. Unable to wait around, Flack drives off, a warbling ribbon of ice cream truck music behind him. The following morning, Susie has run off. Possibly to meet Flack or simply inspired by him. Such was the irresistible call of the streets.
For me, the story of the seventies resides in its warnings, its schlocky, propagandistic movies of the week. And from those terrible fates, we gathered our courage and formed our fascinations, eventually learning to flee.
*
Once, my father brought me a Hare Krishna change purse from the airport, where he’d been assailed by chanting neophytes. My eyes lit up. Surely, this was a way out. Saffron robes, vegetarian fare, transcendence. My mother, catching the thrilled expression in my eyes, asked why on earth had he bought it? Her skepticism for young people, for anyone who hadn’t chosen suburbia, was well-established. But India was a step farther than hippiedom—a sustained, bent note on the edge of consciousness. Who knows how she imagined it, whether she had ever encountered images of its bearded, ash-covered holy men on the shores of the Ganges. Or perhaps the Krishnas’ sandals and cymbals were enough to denote a place of aimless wandering and eye-fluttering surrender.
A year earlier, on a visit to Bourbon Street, she warned my father that “the kids” were selling underground newspapers. The word underground shuttled in a vast corruption of the mind and senses. Whatever you do, don’t take one, Al! But he already had the poison pages in his hand, those illicit cartoons, that indecent anti-war propaganda. Into the trash! She knew he was a salesman but also a sucker. The world she prohibited, and the world he might bumble into, was my world, the world of kids who’d taken the wrong path, and found themselves nowhere in the universe’s vastness.
I swear that little change purse was my first introduction to the mysteries of the East. A sitar string vibrated across my life. The only thing that kept me from becoming a Hare Krishna was my love of fashion.
A year earlier, on a visit to Bourbon Street, she warned my father that “the kids” were selling underground newspapers. The word underground shuttled in a vast corruption of the mind and senses. Whatever you do, don’t take one, Al! But he already had the poison pages in his hand, those illicit cartoons, that indecent anti-war propaganda. Into the trash! She knew he was a salesman but also a sucker. The world she prohibited, and the world he might bumble into, was my world, the world of kids who’d taken the wrong path, and found themselves nowhere in the universe’s vastness.
I swear that little change purse was my first introduction to the mysteries of the East. A sitar string vibrated across my life. The only thing that kept me from becoming a Hare Krishna was my love of fashion.
*
Because I couldn’t find a stylish way to run away from home, I did my best to turn home into a club. My mother loved having the Dominguez brothers come over to play the piano. They were both gay, and brilliant entertainers. I don’t think I ever settled on which of the brothers I loved more. Roberto died in the 2010s, and since I left Miami as a teenager and missed most of his life, I can only track his adulthood through memorial pictures I’ve seen on his timeline. There’s always a sunset feeling about revisiting his expressions captured over time, the handsome brightness of his adult face, trailed by the grief of those remembering him.
Both brothers could tear up a songbook, and my mother would sing operatic renditions of “Fly Me To The Moon” and “Up, Up, and Away.” Any song that offered a bird’s-eye view, a little lift out of the life we knew. She would not share with that gaggle of adoring gay boys assembled around her that during her teenage years she’d stopped singing in the West Village because she was uncomfortable in gay bars, the only place where she could sing the “classical pop” she loved, the domesticated versions of rock songs on the radio. She told me once, with some distaste, how there were “every kind of person” in “places like that.” To give her credit, places like that were often raided, so perhaps she wasn’t comfortable with the risk.
On a good night, our living room was like a piano bar. Camaraderie, jokes, everyone joining in. When the parents were away on vacation, it lapsed into an orgy, everyone joining in but no singing. I imagine there were more than a few people who had their first sexual experience on my parents’ bed. As party host, I announced, “Everybody, please feel free to defile any room.” I remember pulling a grass skirt from my father’s closet long before drag crossed my mind. He had worn it on a trip to Tahiti, and photographs showed him wearing it, a string of small seashells around his neck, a happy face sticker over one nipple. I emerged from his closet hula-ing and continued my moves while pouring white rum from my parents’ bar.
There were another two brothers, Cuban twins, both gay, one blonde, the other black-haired, who were so beautiful that when they sat together, they glowed like two candles. I remember only one of their names, Hector. I don’t remember them ever coming to my home which grants them an inviolable eroticism, as though they somehow managed to avoid having parents at all. The twins both wore their shirts wide open, and their chests were smooth and molded like plastic. Clothing hung from them and clung to them in all the right places. They wore slinky, synthetic shirts and fake gold, and shined their lips with Vaseline. There’s nothing else to say about them, nothing more I remember except that to sit with them was to sit in the light.
In the end, I chose a pragmatic escape from High School, and eventually Miami: The General Education Diploma, a misfits’ yellow brick road to emancipation.
On the Miami Dade Community College campus, I felt calm for the first time in my life. Free of beefed-up Cuban boys looking to beat the hell out of me, I studied fashion and poetry, and my poetry teacher fawned over me. He and his wife would take me to an Italian restaurant not far from the college, and we’d talk about George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, John Cage’s stone-strung piano, and James Merrill’s Ouija board. And wasn’t Tristan Tzara’s poetry underrated? They’d let me proclaim anything, and they’d both put their hands on mine and say, “Go on.”
After seeing a single photo in Interview magazine, likely in Glenn O’Brien’s Beat column, of a woman attending a party with a dog stretched across her shoulders instead of a mink, I was finished with fashion. I was sold on safety pins, holey sweaters over torn T-shirts, a flasher’s coat. I menaced the college quad in my father’s WWII paratrooper outfit—somehow my mother hadn’t thrown it out. I spent my weekends at a “New Wave” club in Fort Lauderdale where it seemed everyone had taken scissors to the contents of their closets.
Disco had prematurely aged under the influence of cocaine and the middle class. It was hollowed out to make good Bar Mitzvah music and novelty songs. I needed punk, not because I rejected the queerness of disco, which led a swathe of the country to burn their albums in public, but because by then stockbrokers went to discos. And if Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, The Slits, and the Runaways weren’t queer, I don’t know what was. Everything that was innovative was punk. Virginia Woolf was punk. Pasolini, Fassbinder, Warhol. Einstein on the Beach was punk. I didn’t need as much sex as I did during my disco days. Been there, done that. The only older man I desired then was John Ashbery as he appeared on the cover of Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Even he was punk.
I remember falling in love with a football-team dropout, Domingo, and him taking me to see my first John Waters film. Divine was my initial encounter with the goddess Kali, minus a necklace of skulls, but carrying a steak between her legs. This all brings me in a roundabout way to the scene in Female Trouble where Dawn Davenport’s daughter, Taffy (Mink Stole), decides to join the Krishnas and begins chanting. Dawn warns her, “If I’m ever downtown and see you dressed in one of those ridiculous outfits, bothering shoppers and dancing around like some sort of a fool, I’ll kill you.” To which Taffy replies, “You can’t kill love, mother. You can’t kill Krishna because Krishna is consciousness.”
Those two characters were my adult imagoes: Divine, the homicidal, performance artist; and Mink Stole, the rebellious, bratty, spiritual seeker. They are locked in a familial battle in my psyche. Dawn Davenport, of course, murders her daughter. But in my own life, Taffy wins the argument: love and consciousness can’t be killed.
Somehow, for all my father’s blundering, he’d done the right thing with that Hare Krishna change purse. I’d eventually find a home in India. A difficult one, no doubt, but one where I could live as an adult, where the internal voices of my parents and my adolescent bullies would be drowned out by horns, firecrackers, and barking dogs. When I made my first journey there, during the second wave of AIDS, I wondered if anything could be more indifferent than the American political landscape. Yes, I learned. But India offered a different kind of indifference, like John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape #4 (March No. 2) in which twelve radios play at the same time, tuned to different frequencies, none requiring all of one’s attention, let alone all of one’s annoyance.
With my college requirements passed, with the lowest possible grade point average required to transfer, I went off to Iowa as an undergraduate. My parents supported me, unconvinced I was on the right track. It was a track, at least. I spent a psychedelic year living at Black’s Gaslight Village in Iowa City as a poetry student, workshopping lengthy but insular poems with Marvin Bell. I was seventeen and for the first time, truly on my own. That feeling of being finally alone is something I still search for today.
I earned small money by giving punk haircuts in my apartment. I attacked with an electric clipper, making patchwork of my friends’ heads, and justified the butchery by calling the look “Mange.” I dropped out after a year and returned home briefly with a blue-black mohawk and a spray-painted jacket from the Mennonite thrift store. My mother could barely look at me, my father never had. But shortly afterwards, I left home again on my way to Chicago, then Boston, San Francisco. Leaving home a second and last time, I played the roles of both Dennie and Susie in that Movie of the Week. I never returned to Miami and for years spoke infrequently to my parents, calling from payphones, then flip phones, to inform them what city I was living in. It seemed I was always picking up my last check from a job, moving in with another friend.
In the last decade of their lives, I had a rapprochement with my parents. I made short visits. The arguments were brief flares. I conceded they’d done their best for me, given the norms of the time. They no longer reminded me of the car I destroyed in high school or the fact that I hadn’t saved any money.
I grew to appreciate our nights out in Arizona where they’d eventually moved, the orange-cream light that seemed always present on the horizon. We went regularly to Harold’s, half restaurant, half rodeo, its vast desert parking lot always packed with trucks. We were all out of our element there, which I’d learned is the best way to forget the person you think you are.
We’d drive to the Dairy Queen on our way home, and things seemed, finally, very simple, a choice of Blizzards. Their home in Cave Creek was pristine, adequately but sparsely furnished, though they’d lived there for years. It was very quiet but for the hollow ticking of a counterfeit, antique grandfather clock that my father wound by hand. The piano was long gone. Many of the boys from Miami who’d once sung around it were gone, too. Over the years, I returned to Arizona from Dhaka, Beirut, and Kabul. But my mother knew it was India I’d return to. By then I’d taught in Mumbai, North Bengal, Kanpur and Bangalore.
I remember her once saying, “You’ve replaced me with Mother India.”
I considered it. “All mothers are impossible,” I said.
Both brothers could tear up a songbook, and my mother would sing operatic renditions of “Fly Me To The Moon” and “Up, Up, and Away.” Any song that offered a bird’s-eye view, a little lift out of the life we knew. She would not share with that gaggle of adoring gay boys assembled around her that during her teenage years she’d stopped singing in the West Village because she was uncomfortable in gay bars, the only place where she could sing the “classical pop” she loved, the domesticated versions of rock songs on the radio. She told me once, with some distaste, how there were “every kind of person” in “places like that.” To give her credit, places like that were often raided, so perhaps she wasn’t comfortable with the risk.
On a good night, our living room was like a piano bar. Camaraderie, jokes, everyone joining in. When the parents were away on vacation, it lapsed into an orgy, everyone joining in but no singing. I imagine there were more than a few people who had their first sexual experience on my parents’ bed. As party host, I announced, “Everybody, please feel free to defile any room.” I remember pulling a grass skirt from my father’s closet long before drag crossed my mind. He had worn it on a trip to Tahiti, and photographs showed him wearing it, a string of small seashells around his neck, a happy face sticker over one nipple. I emerged from his closet hula-ing and continued my moves while pouring white rum from my parents’ bar.
There were another two brothers, Cuban twins, both gay, one blonde, the other black-haired, who were so beautiful that when they sat together, they glowed like two candles. I remember only one of their names, Hector. I don’t remember them ever coming to my home which grants them an inviolable eroticism, as though they somehow managed to avoid having parents at all. The twins both wore their shirts wide open, and their chests were smooth and molded like plastic. Clothing hung from them and clung to them in all the right places. They wore slinky, synthetic shirts and fake gold, and shined their lips with Vaseline. There’s nothing else to say about them, nothing more I remember except that to sit with them was to sit in the light.
In the end, I chose a pragmatic escape from High School, and eventually Miami: The General Education Diploma, a misfits’ yellow brick road to emancipation.
On the Miami Dade Community College campus, I felt calm for the first time in my life. Free of beefed-up Cuban boys looking to beat the hell out of me, I studied fashion and poetry, and my poetry teacher fawned over me. He and his wife would take me to an Italian restaurant not far from the college, and we’d talk about George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, John Cage’s stone-strung piano, and James Merrill’s Ouija board. And wasn’t Tristan Tzara’s poetry underrated? They’d let me proclaim anything, and they’d both put their hands on mine and say, “Go on.”
After seeing a single photo in Interview magazine, likely in Glenn O’Brien’s Beat column, of a woman attending a party with a dog stretched across her shoulders instead of a mink, I was finished with fashion. I was sold on safety pins, holey sweaters over torn T-shirts, a flasher’s coat. I menaced the college quad in my father’s WWII paratrooper outfit—somehow my mother hadn’t thrown it out. I spent my weekends at a “New Wave” club in Fort Lauderdale where it seemed everyone had taken scissors to the contents of their closets.
Disco had prematurely aged under the influence of cocaine and the middle class. It was hollowed out to make good Bar Mitzvah music and novelty songs. I needed punk, not because I rejected the queerness of disco, which led a swathe of the country to burn their albums in public, but because by then stockbrokers went to discos. And if Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, The Slits, and the Runaways weren’t queer, I don’t know what was. Everything that was innovative was punk. Virginia Woolf was punk. Pasolini, Fassbinder, Warhol. Einstein on the Beach was punk. I didn’t need as much sex as I did during my disco days. Been there, done that. The only older man I desired then was John Ashbery as he appeared on the cover of Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Even he was punk.
I remember falling in love with a football-team dropout, Domingo, and him taking me to see my first John Waters film. Divine was my initial encounter with the goddess Kali, minus a necklace of skulls, but carrying a steak between her legs. This all brings me in a roundabout way to the scene in Female Trouble where Dawn Davenport’s daughter, Taffy (Mink Stole), decides to join the Krishnas and begins chanting. Dawn warns her, “If I’m ever downtown and see you dressed in one of those ridiculous outfits, bothering shoppers and dancing around like some sort of a fool, I’ll kill you.” To which Taffy replies, “You can’t kill love, mother. You can’t kill Krishna because Krishna is consciousness.”
Those two characters were my adult imagoes: Divine, the homicidal, performance artist; and Mink Stole, the rebellious, bratty, spiritual seeker. They are locked in a familial battle in my psyche. Dawn Davenport, of course, murders her daughter. But in my own life, Taffy wins the argument: love and consciousness can’t be killed.
Somehow, for all my father’s blundering, he’d done the right thing with that Hare Krishna change purse. I’d eventually find a home in India. A difficult one, no doubt, but one where I could live as an adult, where the internal voices of my parents and my adolescent bullies would be drowned out by horns, firecrackers, and barking dogs. When I made my first journey there, during the second wave of AIDS, I wondered if anything could be more indifferent than the American political landscape. Yes, I learned. But India offered a different kind of indifference, like John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape #4 (March No. 2) in which twelve radios play at the same time, tuned to different frequencies, none requiring all of one’s attention, let alone all of one’s annoyance.
With my college requirements passed, with the lowest possible grade point average required to transfer, I went off to Iowa as an undergraduate. My parents supported me, unconvinced I was on the right track. It was a track, at least. I spent a psychedelic year living at Black’s Gaslight Village in Iowa City as a poetry student, workshopping lengthy but insular poems with Marvin Bell. I was seventeen and for the first time, truly on my own. That feeling of being finally alone is something I still search for today.
I earned small money by giving punk haircuts in my apartment. I attacked with an electric clipper, making patchwork of my friends’ heads, and justified the butchery by calling the look “Mange.” I dropped out after a year and returned home briefly with a blue-black mohawk and a spray-painted jacket from the Mennonite thrift store. My mother could barely look at me, my father never had. But shortly afterwards, I left home again on my way to Chicago, then Boston, San Francisco. Leaving home a second and last time, I played the roles of both Dennie and Susie in that Movie of the Week. I never returned to Miami and for years spoke infrequently to my parents, calling from payphones, then flip phones, to inform them what city I was living in. It seemed I was always picking up my last check from a job, moving in with another friend.
In the last decade of their lives, I had a rapprochement with my parents. I made short visits. The arguments were brief flares. I conceded they’d done their best for me, given the norms of the time. They no longer reminded me of the car I destroyed in high school or the fact that I hadn’t saved any money.
I grew to appreciate our nights out in Arizona where they’d eventually moved, the orange-cream light that seemed always present on the horizon. We went regularly to Harold’s, half restaurant, half rodeo, its vast desert parking lot always packed with trucks. We were all out of our element there, which I’d learned is the best way to forget the person you think you are.
We’d drive to the Dairy Queen on our way home, and things seemed, finally, very simple, a choice of Blizzards. Their home in Cave Creek was pristine, adequately but sparsely furnished, though they’d lived there for years. It was very quiet but for the hollow ticking of a counterfeit, antique grandfather clock that my father wound by hand. The piano was long gone. Many of the boys from Miami who’d once sung around it were gone, too. Over the years, I returned to Arizona from Dhaka, Beirut, and Kabul. But my mother knew it was India I’d return to. By then I’d taught in Mumbai, North Bengal, Kanpur and Bangalore.
I remember her once saying, “You’ve replaced me with Mother India.”
I considered it. “All mothers are impossible,” I said.
*
The last time I saw her, I had returned from Kabul with pneumonia and was laid up for six weeks. It was the longest amount of time I’d spent with my parents, the longest I’d ever spent in bed, and it was shortly before my mother was diagnosed with her second brain cancer, the fatal one. She had brain cancer in my early teens, underwent sixteen hours of surgery that paralyzed one side of her face, left an eye permanently half closed, a smile that drooped.
Every day my parents brought in hot and sour soup for me. I wanted anything that I could feel in my lungs. “Here’s your soup, Sonny Boy,” my mother would say, blowing on it for me. We both understood it was much easier to mother an adult than a child, and she was having a second go at it. It’s a gift, I now realize, that we had that time, because shortly after my recuperation, after I’d again left the country, she felt those puzzling symptoms return after decades, a tipsy lightheadedness that required she prop herself in the doorway so the room could settle.
At night, I’d hear her watching Forensic Files from her bedroom. My father was in his den, watching Benny Hill, which I now realize wasn’t a far leap from his favorite book, Jokes for the John. That is often how I think of them, like two TVs playing, one show serious in its approach to death, the other in which life is taken no more seriously than slipping on a banana peel.
Two years after my mother’s death, my father did slip and broke his hip and, refusing to take his physical therapy seriously, was moved into a skilled nursing facility. My sister and I were told that he’d have to desist from making off-color jokes to the nursing staff. It was a message I had to convey to him, one I’d last conveyed as an embittered teenager, embarrassed by the dirty jokes he told our waitresses. He meant well, as usual. He liked the attention from the young ladies. It was a generational thing, but a generation no longer tolerated.
I was called to Arizona to sell the house and I lived in it for a year, with friends joining me for a few months at a time. No one defiled it. Rather, we all admired its austere orderliness. A couple of times a week, I’d visit my father, bring him lunch, see if we could settle on a way to be related.
I think he was happy to see me, to have company and hot food delivered. I was the one with expectations. But by that age, nearly fifty, I could barely remember what I desired from him, and knew it wasn’t available. Maybe I just wanted my years of struggle recognized. I may even have told him that. Hell, it was good enough that we were talking, even if by then, revelation seemed impossible.
When I told him we had to sell the house, he was confounded. He imagined himself returning there one day, though I don’t know why he thought he could. My sister had been paying the skilled nursing facility. We had no idea how long he’d live, but the costs were enough to purchase a home every year. Everything came as a surprise to him. He told me, “I can’t believe your mother is gone.” She was eighty and survived how many cancers? He was childlike in ways I couldn’t imagine or tolerate, having lost a generation of friends, having lived in post-conflict and active war zones.
In the month before he died, when I was talking to him about the struggles I had growing up, ones I expected him not to have noticed, he offered, I expect in support, that he never really knew my mother’s sexuality. “She might have been a lesbian,” he said. “I never really thought she was comfortable with sex. But that’s just how things were then.”
I sat quietly. I almost wanted to laugh. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not surprised. She was a tough one.” Then quickly I understood how my mother, too, had been overlooked, perhaps had not wanted him to know her real desires. Or hadn’t wanted to know them herself. I imagined her singing in a West Village nightclub, circled by queer people like me. I thought her desire might have occurred to her if she sang one more number, hung around for an encore.
But then again, she’d probably just want out of there. She’d flee through the fire exit, on fire.
Every day my parents brought in hot and sour soup for me. I wanted anything that I could feel in my lungs. “Here’s your soup, Sonny Boy,” my mother would say, blowing on it for me. We both understood it was much easier to mother an adult than a child, and she was having a second go at it. It’s a gift, I now realize, that we had that time, because shortly after my recuperation, after I’d again left the country, she felt those puzzling symptoms return after decades, a tipsy lightheadedness that required she prop herself in the doorway so the room could settle.
At night, I’d hear her watching Forensic Files from her bedroom. My father was in his den, watching Benny Hill, which I now realize wasn’t a far leap from his favorite book, Jokes for the John. That is often how I think of them, like two TVs playing, one show serious in its approach to death, the other in which life is taken no more seriously than slipping on a banana peel.
Two years after my mother’s death, my father did slip and broke his hip and, refusing to take his physical therapy seriously, was moved into a skilled nursing facility. My sister and I were told that he’d have to desist from making off-color jokes to the nursing staff. It was a message I had to convey to him, one I’d last conveyed as an embittered teenager, embarrassed by the dirty jokes he told our waitresses. He meant well, as usual. He liked the attention from the young ladies. It was a generational thing, but a generation no longer tolerated.
I was called to Arizona to sell the house and I lived in it for a year, with friends joining me for a few months at a time. No one defiled it. Rather, we all admired its austere orderliness. A couple of times a week, I’d visit my father, bring him lunch, see if we could settle on a way to be related.
I think he was happy to see me, to have company and hot food delivered. I was the one with expectations. But by that age, nearly fifty, I could barely remember what I desired from him, and knew it wasn’t available. Maybe I just wanted my years of struggle recognized. I may even have told him that. Hell, it was good enough that we were talking, even if by then, revelation seemed impossible.
When I told him we had to sell the house, he was confounded. He imagined himself returning there one day, though I don’t know why he thought he could. My sister had been paying the skilled nursing facility. We had no idea how long he’d live, but the costs were enough to purchase a home every year. Everything came as a surprise to him. He told me, “I can’t believe your mother is gone.” She was eighty and survived how many cancers? He was childlike in ways I couldn’t imagine or tolerate, having lost a generation of friends, having lived in post-conflict and active war zones.
In the month before he died, when I was talking to him about the struggles I had growing up, ones I expected him not to have noticed, he offered, I expect in support, that he never really knew my mother’s sexuality. “She might have been a lesbian,” he said. “I never really thought she was comfortable with sex. But that’s just how things were then.”
I sat quietly. I almost wanted to laugh. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not surprised. She was a tough one.” Then quickly I understood how my mother, too, had been overlooked, perhaps had not wanted him to know her real desires. Or hadn’t wanted to know them herself. I imagined her singing in a West Village nightclub, circled by queer people like me. I thought her desire might have occurred to her if she sang one more number, hung around for an encore.
But then again, she’d probably just want out of there. She’d flee through the fire exit, on fire.