January 1997

Michael Palin is a handsomely goofy host of a travel show on PBS, a British gentleman who is presently on a boat that carries dried goods from Saudi Arabia to Bombay. I hear familiar names in the background- Hassan, Hakim. Now the boat has arrived at its destination and Palin is shaking everyone's hand.
"Simple and straightforward friendship," he calls it. He's sad knowing he'll never see these men again. I think of Iran.
Talked to Vivian this morning. She said Rodney took her and Maryam to a party where shimmering half naked men pranced about the small San Francisco apartment, crammed onto each other, but laughing, dancing, and having a grand time. She sounded exhausted and dismayed, and complained that they spent midnight wandering the streets of the city because the bars had carded them. She was calling from a payphone.
'Go to breakfast!' I urged. 'You'll feel better.'
Now Palin is in India and staying at a beautiful hotel. He says he feels dislocated after having spent a week atop a ship without a radio, then to a luxurious city hotel. Sounds like my emotions and moods!
I have placed so much pressure on myself to learn and to improve my writing that I keep waking from sleep muttering broken phrases and isolated words in the middle of the night. I live with this urgent feeling as if time is running out. I urge my mind to cooperate, to absorb, to learn, to expand. Explode!
In my own life I no longer want to condemn sex.
It is my imagination that is responsible for moments of fusion with the world. Otherwise, left to my own devices I am a recluse. I have to temper my imagination much of the time, draw a line between it and reality because what I imagine and write are an entirely different matter than what I imagine and live. It is always at night that my imagination swells, as do my anger and humiliation. When everyone's asleep and the ticking of the clock rules in some other part of the house and darkness falls onto the furniture like wrestling children, when bones crack and pop, I try not to allow my past misjudgments to catch up with me and choke me. My angers and humiliations reside in my imagination, in the past. To believe in them is to believe in ghosts like a child.

Go away, doubt. Go away!!!

We return to Modesto, to the fog.
As mom and I were mixing the ingredients for peanut butter cookies the phone rang. My singsong 'hello' was matched by Brandon's own trademark musical "hellew"! Like a schoolgirl I am ecstatic when he calls. I won't be ashamed of this, nor will I worry that I am being false in the friendship. Every friendship has an ulterior theme other than fraternity. A life of its own, deeper than we know. My desire for Brandon survives in imagination and is dormant in reality, it satiates my innermost need for romance. "To escape mediocrity," as Anais Nin would have put it. I will never again submit to it so completely that it breeds such confusion and resentment in me. I don't know how much he knows but he continues to treat me kindly like a friend, and so the friendship lives.

My prayer remains that You give my father joy and satisfaction in the face of all his struggles and worries.
I don't want to die from AIDS. I want to live so that I may continue these wonderful relationships.
Who was I last night? Jeff and I snuck booze into the theater and got really buzzed, left even before the movie ended, and went to Antonio's to see the girls strip. The bar was packed. We chatted with the white trash guys sitting next to us. Who was I last night?
From the introduction of "Four Plays" by Chekhov, "The dramatist, or indeed any other creative artist must know why he is writing his play or novel. If he does not, he is bound to lose his way, and his talent will be his ruin."
I had a dream in which I was a fugitive among other fugitives. Our mode of transportation was a roller coaster. Men and women waited in long lines. There were no children. I sat next to a frightened old woman. I, too, was afraid, but wanted so much to comfort and reassure her. There was a jolt forward, stiff turns, turbulence. People screamed. We did not know if we would survive.

I have to make a decision to allow time to reveal its plans for me. I do not know what's ahead. All I have to do is try and relax and understand that even I will get along just fine in this world. I hate money so much. It is the source of my and everyone else's anxiety. It is the instigator of insecurity. Although I am receiving financial aid for the coming semester at the college I feel strangely uncomfortable about it. I feel tied down, obligated. I feel that I am not committed to my education or really moving toward one particular destination and degree.
I had more dreams last night. I was walking along unfamiliar streets that were fuzzy, blurred. I was in my boxer shorts. My old boss Sue was with me. We were playful. She grabbed for my crotch. We went into an old building and waited for the elevator, but were impatient. We walked down the hall to another elevator, an older, disused one. I had reservations as we got in and went up. Clink! Clank!
In another dream I stood before a house that was on Lee Valley Farm, in Tennessee. It was nighttime. There was someone else there with me, a faceless figure whose gender was unknown to me. We played with a scorpion that viciously whipped its venomous tail at us. We flicked off the tip of the scorpion's poisonous tail and it suddenly and angrily charged at us at great speed. But it could not harm us. It ran under the house and we lost it.
Hung out with Robert and others at a park. Good people, but I feel I have nothing in common with them. Robert and I are on different paths. Drugs preoccupy him. Everyone played Frisbee. I sat out. Too insecure. Though I know the insecurity is all in my mind. I possess the same fears that I collected during the early years in America when I was a fat, effeminate, immigrant child who did not speak English.

Must get out of Modesto, this draining atmosphere where anything slightly eccentric is shot down. But it's worth it, I'm growing.
Froscio!
Again I am wedged between whist and wish. The lottery of dream. Desire. Sexuality. Beer-stained imagination. Often I go to a local bar with Eric and Jeff that is frequented by Mexicans, preppies, and cowboys, where the jukebox plays bad music and all the television screens show sports. The stench of fried foods fills the air. Someone slams a billiard ball into another. We drink pitchers of beer, kill time in this small town. I see a man there tonight who catches my eye. He wears a white t-shirt, work boots, blue jeans. His hair is thin and moves forward. He has a belly, which makes me think of love, the kind between married couples. And suddenly I want to live in his belly, make it my home. Kiss it. Be naked against it. Place my ear to it and listen for my purpose and place in the world that is too wide, too open, too light, too dark, too far, too near. He returns my glances, which are to him foreign promises of forbidden desires. Looks away. But is smiling. I go to the restroom and cocks are like mushrooms in the shade, in the mist, growing out of dampness in fecund soil. Hallucinogens. I've had many intoxicating tastes of people and places. Memories I'd rather deny because of their potency and charm. My hair is combed tonight in tumultuous waves of instinct. The past my mission, my escape. 'Sex is overrated,' I warn Maryam who is Iranian, overweight, young, uncertain.
"I won't have it until I'm married," she reflects.
'Don't have it then, either,' I insist.
Until I learn to trust myself I will never trust anyone else. The gay life is a romantic curse. I think of Anne Rice's vampires. Why should gay sex feel so impossible and dangerous? No amount of spirituality will replace a condom, a dental dam, become a protective shield. And how do we love from the other side of this shield? How do we touch and be touched? In this imploding galaxy of gay desire and science of gay love I sleep, dream, love, laugh, dance, and move uneasily. I do not weep. I hold hopeful private conversations in my room, in my phobic mind, ready to burst with boredom and desire. This great wish for sex, liberation, creativity, understanding, life. I am determined and mute in this limbo of my personal gay universe.

Morning. I need to stop spending money on drinking beer with the boys. I demand self-control!
I must complete myself, find the avocation that's to pacify me.
From "Seduction Of The Minotaur": "'A long time ago,' said Michael, 'I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity.' Lillian, 'But not to feel… not to love… is like dying within life, Michael.'"

A dream with so many colors. I am under water, swimming with a mermaid. We are cartoons. Suddenly we are dropped out of the cartoon into reality, into a massive hall that contains a massive staircase. I am three people- the mermaid, an onlooker, and myself. In the dream the perspective continues to shift. I am everyone but the executive, the man in the suit. I have to hide from this man. One of me babbles ceaselessly so the other of me can hide. I can feel the textures of the dream under my hand. I drop to the floor, crawl. I hide under a chair knowing I am not fully obstructed. 'That's alright,' I think to myself, 'this is make-believe.' The executive walks past, does not see me. I am safe. But he drops his pen. Bends to pick it up and finds me. I gasp in an exaggerated fashion, as in a cartoon.
In another dream I am to memorize lines from an entire play in a single day. I am the main character. I know I can't do it, but I try. I am panic-stricken. I go to the theater and the stage is not ready. Everyone is running about but not accomplishing anything. The show is destined to be a disaster. My aunt Jackie is there, but she is indifferent and seems to be preoccupied with other matters.
From "Seduction Of The Minotaur": "If it were true what we practice on others is secretly what we wish practiced upon ourselves, then he had wanted, needed all the care he gave."

I seem to have no self-control. I go out knowing what's on the menu of events. It is a restaurant I frequent. Routine. I'm hoping school will prevent me. School will be my ball and chain of discipline. When you're poor it hurts to spend. I came home at five in the morning. Mother's disgruntled because Priscilla called at two a.m. She's the woman I met at Cory's murder mystery dinner fiasco/wine fest. She's friends with Karen who told me in Playwriting class that she once gave Priscilla oral pleasure.
"It tasted and felt better than I thought it would. I liked it," Karen had said.
Karen is thirty-six and attractive, but there is something sad and sorry about her. Her energy is consuming. I always walk away feeling exhilarated and exhausted. But she is honest about her craziness and experiences, and I respect her. Her one-act is about a young woman whose father is an alcoholic and dies in a fire. She must load his body into her Volvo station wagon and drive it to the morgue. This is not only a story, but a memory. Karen tells me she is jealous of my youth and talent. In class she throws her leg over mine and swings it. We sip wine, smoke, talk, laugh.
'You flirt with everyone,' I observe.
Karen twirls her blond hair around her finger, turns her blue eyes to the window, and giggles. Again flirting. Always flirting.
I interview for a job at a local coffee shop and come home feeling that I should be doing more with my life, that I ought to be supporting my mother financially like a good Assyrian son, the ideal traditional Assyrian son! I ought to be her pillar. A "man".
Instead I escape into Anais Nin's erotica in "Delta Of Venus".

In the introduction Anais writes of her friends' collective effort to sustain themselves by writing and selling erotic stories for a dollar per page. Their reader/customer was an anonymous old man who demanded "less poetry" of their work, which outraged Anais and the other writers. Anais Nin decides to write to the man.
"The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine."
So, begins my own journey into pages that will for the next few days and hours become my own erotic opiates.
When it comes to life and writing I feel I am an old man whom time passed by. I feel as though I won the lottery but neglected to claim my winnings. I have a need to start growing roots into some place within and without the page. So, I write, write, write, knowing all the while that I must be patient.
I truly believe that I would have died if I hadn't written. Exploded with joy and with resentment.

I read over the poems I wrote in the process of resolving my feelings for Brandon, but while I read I could not tell if the experience was a blessing or an emotional catastrophe. Perhaps a little bit of both, like all of life.
From "Delta of Venus": "Someone told me the delightful story of a crusader who had put a chastity belt on his wife and left the key in care of his best friend in case of his death. He had barely ridden away a few miles when he saw his friend riding furiously after him, calling out, 'You gave me the wrong key!'"
Anais' erotica is easily on the verge of being violent and pedophiliac. Her stories have an air of fantasy Sci-Fi. But I suppose sex is quite strange in reality anyway, alien, a novelty, a mystery, perverse, yet delightful.
The women in Anais Nin's erotica are usually strong, and some even possess masculine qualities. They have occasion to dominate other women, or better yet, other men!
As I read I remember the night Tara revealed to me a secret. It had been a long day at the office, which was now empty. Tara had been the only one there, sitting at the computer, exhausted, typing with one hand, as the other was shorter, deformed at birth. She thought of her lover, Kurt, who was a poet and lived in another state. She missed him. And there at the computer she masturbated. Amidst the invoices, the papers, by the telephone, on the swivel chair.
When I was a child my foreskin was tight. I had tried on many occasions to draw the skin back but it was stubborn and would not retreat. Like new shoes it had to be broken in. Of course, this ultimately resulted in an infection when I was six years old and my mother took me to a doctor in Tehran. He was a gentle Assyrian man whose private office was like a home, comfortable but dark and small. I trusted him and although we were never social with the man I perceived him more as a relative than a doctor. Nonetheless, the experience was a humiliating one, especially since one of my aunts accompanied us. The adults conversed freely in Assyrian while I lay down with my pants and underwear drawn to my knees. The doctor spoke casually with my mother as he gently pulled my foreskin back, which sent shivers all across my small body. He pulled it further back, back all the way for the very first time. I flinched, but did not cry out. I was a good child, intent on behaving myself, always, everywhere, under any condition and circumstance. A little gentleman with a lot of pride. The doctor now wiped the head of my penis with some medicated cloth and with every abrasive brush my entire being quivered, not with pleasure but with intense pain. Pain I quietly accepted that afternoon, so vulnerable and humiliated, and many afternoons later in other places, with other men, struggling to live, to be cleansed, and to hold my head up, my screams in.
Anais Nin is the truth serum that allows me to speak of my own experiences without shame. I am a conscript, not of war but of words.

In a dream I sneak off into another room while my entire family cleans up after dinner. I shut the door and unzip my pants. My penis is enormous. I have a hunch that it is not even my own, but someone else's.
What to do tonight? Friends invite me out, but money remains an issue. I know I will be restless this evening and must think of something. Do I want to be alone? I have overwhelmed myself. Easy to do.

I had friends over for a small barbeque tonight, and now everyone is gone and I am alone, prepared for bed. If I don't get some solitary hours in a day I begin to malfunction. It's essential that I escape into aloneness. The semester will begin soon and another phase is ending. I miss it already, every inch of it. Listening to Maria callas, reading Anais Nin, the intoxication, the Christmas tree, the rain and the fog, solitude, sleep.

Good things. Michael was generous with complements today on our first day of Playwriting. I was surprised when he announced to the entire class that he will be producing "Cabin Fever". I wish he hadn't done so and hope that the other students will forget. He will choose two others from this term.
I talked to my grandmother today who said that she has told my uncle Fred about my play being chosen, and at first I was thrilled. She said what Fred had said, "Creative careers are full of surprises. A person struggles for many years in his art and is suddenly recognized and becomes a millionaire."
I was horrified when I suddenly realized that my worth should depend on my financial success, on wealth. My family is always lauding people who make a lot of money and are "successful". How will I ever earn their respect if I am a poor writer all my life?
I finally came to a place of balance in my response to my conversation with my grandmother when I realized that my family only wants the best for itself; after all, great sacrifices were made, entire lives were rearranged, certain work ethics and values were instilled through many generations, and there are duties that need to be fulfilled, obligations to be met by us first-generation Assyrians whose ancestors paved the way. They fled wars and political upheaval so that we may have better futures, bigger opportunities.
I feel so guilty for having so far failed my parents, but I have learned so much along the way, and wish for them some rest, some solace, some miracle.
I received a letter from David in Kansas. Poor, poor David who continues to struggle with AIDS, so many surgeries, musical medications; off this experimental drug and on that! And yet, he deals with it so beautifully. When he talks about his experience it is not a drag, one cannot feel pity for him, it is a mere update. I have always liked David so much. In his letter he writes that he and Michael are still together and have moved into a cabin just outside Topeka. A lesbian friend who also owns a gay bar in town owns the cabin itself.
I live with the dreams of a millionaire and the budget of a pauper. Sabotage. Doubt. Comparisons.
I have always preferred the suspense of tragedies, their indefinite outcome. My friendship with Brandon possessed this kind of mystery, or more truthfully, my desire for him possessed the mystery. Sometimes when we were alone and drunk he spoke with a certain monotone candor, but never fully revealed what he was feeling. Always nuances, hints, oblique disclosures, Vicodin. And always my own amorous wishes and imagination, which together concocted the urge to love him, to love me. Waiting as I did for the unanswered prayer, the one without words, from my being, implied by my gestures, sacrifices, nerve-endings, in my hands, face, even in my hair as it grew. Holding my breath within the void and spasm, and the many unfinished sentences. The truth and I thrown by the moment, the mood, the setting, and the intoxication, that only revealed itself, not the eroticism. Dazed and stuttering. Yes, I have always preferred the suspense of unuttered words, half-forgotten sentences.

Tuesday. And the cold comes with fierce intentions. I saw ice and felt Chicago in my bones. My old, glossy-eyed professor of Critical Thinking, in whose cluttered dusty office I once sat seeking advice, urges us to "get published!" And I am reminded that time is a torrent of missed chances. My dreams and dreaming are a single dinosaur. It is time for breath and action! Because I am not smart I must work harder than others. Hard work will get me out of the gutter and into the story. Although I am fearful I realize that there is no more time left to waste. Whether I am talented or delusional I must improve.
I have been thinking that I have every right to enjoy the same colors and textures of life which women are permitted to enjoy, the "feminine" things in the world. I have always wondered if my indecision makes me feminine, assuming that women are indecisive. (Is a decisive woman then masculine?) As a man I have always felt a certain pang of shame for my own tastes and intentions, sensations to which I have a right without having to feel emasculated by them. But why should it be called "the feminine side"? Aren't I born to and from the same myriad possibilities that the next person is, whatever his or her gender? Possibilities, voyages, kisses, desires, ideas, concepts, rights? Aren't our needs infinite, yet same whatever our name? Why should I be denied the pleasures and insights from which I am torn even at birth by pink-for-her and by blue-for-him? By balls and flowers? It seems irresponsible. I am man and I am woman, not because of my genitals or how I choose to use them, but because I have an androgynous birthright to all and any of life's various interests and endeavors.

I am old enough to join the ranks of the privy and to be a part of the oral account of our family history. I had always known that my maternal grandfather in Iran, a handsome and eccentric man, had been abusive to my grandmother for the thirty years that they were married, but it was one particular thing Mom-Suzie said today that made it all alarmingly real and immediate. She said, "Your poor mother. She was greatly affected by his rage. I was finally able to get the little ones out of that house but your mother and Sam were older. The damage was already done. And it was no better when she married…" The things that I had chosen to overlook for so long now resounded inside of me and I felt their reverberation in the form of heavy emotions I could not just then reconcile. Something inside me sank. My grandmother has a way of making things that seem distant and unbelievable, even forgettable, real and palpable with her mere presence and authority.
Now and still my mother struggles to cope, to hope. She is the broken product of the very lifestyle she urges me to live, in turn condemning my own fate that remains different on the surface from hers and her wishes. But very much similar in every other aspect- to live, to love, to be understood and accepted.
As I fight to flourish into my own identity I come to understand that she never even had a chance. From her father's domain she was handed over into her in-laws' without an identity, so young.
And one day when mother was still just a newlywed one of dad's cruel sisters took her by the hand- young, naïve, fair, and so beautiful, so beautiful- back to her father's, knocked on the door, and said, "Here. Take her back. We don't want her." At mid-forties my mother tells me this haunting tale as she weeps into my shoulder, herself haunted by so many demons, things I don't even know about. Why wasn't I there? To help, to intervene.
Is it this pain that has made mother so stubborn that I cannot break through? The only thing I can do now in the States, light-years later, is listen. I'm the only one she can break down with and cry to. I'm not stoic enough to remain unaffected and become filled with her pain, and my own rage becomes two-fold. Why won't she identify with me and see that our struggle to be free and accepted is the same? Why won't she accept me? But I tell myself to remain open, open, open.
From "The Mystic Of Sex" by Anais Nin: "I intend the greater part of my writing to be received directly through the senses, as one receives painting and music."
"Nothing that we do not discover emotionally will have the power to alter our vision. The constant evasion of emotional experience has created an immaturity which turns all experience into traumatic shocks from which the human being derives no strength or development, but neurosis."
"It was while writing a diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments. Keeping a diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing… The most important is naturalness and spontaneity… I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found that this fervor, this enthusiasm produced a vividness, which often withered in the formal work. Improvisation, free association, obedience to mood, impulse, brought forth countless images, portraits, descriptions, impressionistic sketches, symphonic experiments, into which I could dip in at any time for material."
"The writer's task is to overthrow the taboos rather than accept them."
Anais Nin believed that writer's block is psychological. "What am I afraid of? Of transgressing taboos which will bring retaliation and criticism? Do I fear ridicule? Do I feel the theme too difficult, too intricate for me? Is it a childhood fear of the consequences of being truthful… We fear exposure of self even when we are not writing about ourselves."
"Timidity, indecision, tension, all affect writing."
"Art is our most effective way of overcoming human resistance to truth."
"Our fate is what we call our character."
"The inner world is almost in opposition to our surface world… It can be compared with jazz. It is unwritten music in the sense that it is constantly being improvised."
"There is no adventure without danger."
If I had discovered Anais' work in my teens I feel I would have had an advocate and a motivator to sort my inner conflicts. How I always- sometimes even successfully- pushed myself inward to discover the wound and its possible remedy. Truth. Self-confrontation. I am finally learning to compose and sort out my thoughts when in the past they floated in chaotic limbo. Now they begin to form patterns, a line, a uniform and comprehensible direction. I have entered the world of "true education", self-education. I am an autodidact. There is no turning back!
I feel Anais is expressing for me the eternal burning inside of me, which I could never find the will to explain, when she writes, "We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure, enchant, and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."

If I were to win an award I would thank, 'Desire. Desire brought me into this world and it is desire that has brought me thus far.'

Where does guilt come from? Not everyone has it. And those who share this ailment feel it on various levels of intensity. For me guilt has been a lifelong battle. First I had to recognize its existence, then I had to acknowledge its destructiveness. But later I would discover that a certain amount of guilt is natural, human, and even necessary in life. Necessary perhaps to protect us from ourselves. But is it guilt that should be necessary or knowledge and resilience? Today I know more, that guilt is in all shapes and forms destructive, and it has never stopped me from doing the things that are natural to the human psyche and body. I also believe that guilt is external no matter how immediate it may feel, that it has been planted in us by culture, family, society, and to a certain extent even by us.

I may be losing my sight by reading so much but I'm gaining vision. I have struggled for so long, in life and in this journal, with the fear of being misunderstood and discriminated against as a homosexual. I have also feared being misunderstood as a budding writer for whom English is a third language. My lifelong inability to effectively express myself has continued to fuel this fear. For so long I did not have the language with which to communicate, and everything I said and wrote simply felt wrong. I am not yet out of the woods but certainly feel more competent than I ever did. In those early helpless months when we first moved to the States my motto was, 'When I learn English I will have acquired everything I ever wanted!' The journey continues. I have read that an important part of a writer's equipment is a large and active vocabulary.
Language. Emotive language.
When Mr. Hahn forgets himself in a lecture because he is elderly, and gallops off into a distant sunset of unrelated matters I daydream. I escape through the windows as I always have in every classroom and build phrases in my head, poems, dialogue, characters. Columbus is the father of atrocity. America the birth of atrocity. Television a tool of atrocity. Pigeons glide in fours. Outside and gray and oaks. Oaks are living columns that sway. Sky is traffic of clouds, greyly ebbing. Pigeons are complex props.
My attention is back in the classroom when Hahn urges us to "get published!" I know that success relies on a combination of talent and effort, for what's the use of a tool if one does not use it? I know I have a long long way to go but that doesn't mean I have to suffer along the way. I will take care along the journey in this vast sea of superb talents. Patience will be my life preserver. I will wear it out and I will grow, grow!

It's late. My mother was quite discontented that I was home so late. "Your eyes are red!" she seemed to hiss, the ugliest expressions illustrating her vast dissatisfaction. She is the lioness that lashes out and I am both tickled and alarmed by the kitten that she remains.
And when I drink I turn a profound shade of playful blue and think that listens to my secrets a fink!
Last summer at a party overlooking Halsted Street Fair Brandon and I drank with the others and took turns going into the bathroom for an assignation with a white powder. There were multicolored miniature cups of Jell-O-shots in the fridge. The street below was occupied mostly by men and the gay bars overflowed. I longed to be down on the street, in the bars, but I remained in the apartment amidst the straights. Wistful. High. Severed from my own true desires. I even suggested we drop into Sidetrack one last time to say goodbye to my memories of Marcelo and my youth, but Brandon said no. We had to meet up with others elsewhere in the city. The bustling city. Summer and humidity. I allowed myself to be swayed and taken, begrudgingly.
Another night, after Brandon had gone to bed and I was to sleep on his sofa, high and desiring more life, more distraction, more Chicago, I snuck away in the middle of the night. I caught a cab to Boystown. I went to The Lucky Horseshoe on Halsted near Belmont to visit John, a sweet bartender with whom I had had many a warm conversation. But he was not there. I sat at the busy bar and ordered a drink, asked this bartender if John still worked there. But the young bartender's face grew grim and he hesitated, then said sadly but matter-of-factly, "John died."
The news hit me like a brick in my intoxication. I had known that John was sick.
I then met a transsexual who looked uncannily like Tori Spelling and we flirted as we walked to The Manhole. She got me in for free and seemed to know everyone who worked that night. She flirted with the handsome bartender who greeted her with a kiss and gave us our vodka tonics. She waited for me to pay and I looked at her sheepishly and shrugged. I had no money. She sneered at me and just walked away in her precariously high heels.
I wandered the bar by myself dejected and blue. The lights flashed all around but failed to penetrate me and my mood. High but low. Dragging through the people whose faces remained nameless and blurred. Near the dance floor I saw the transsexual who had all but spit in my face and swished away in her miniskirt and red pageboy wig. She turned to her companion now, pointed at me and snarled, "There he is! That's him." I continued to walk, pretending to be unaffected, which is always easy to do when one is very drunk and high.
I flirted with other men, boys. Slender and conventional. All the while I tried to make sense of the power I had always allowed Brandon to have over me. I had always told him my fantasies, he his heartaches. What was it I really wanted from him? His friendship really, or his love, his sexual love?
In the fog of beautiful men and music and smoke one man caught my attention. He sat at the bar and was alone, older, bigger, different.
The walls of the loft where he lived angled sharply and were painted deep rich colors. He lay on his back and I sat on him, rubbing his belly, which was substantial but firm. The hair on it parted in soft wisps into different directions. With my fingertips I followed their path upon his body. He watched. I felt comfortable having chosen someone "inferior", and played with him in the light of a single bedside lamp. His dog occasionally watched us from where he lay snoozing on the floor of the bedroom.
I licked the man after having handled him for some time. An hour? His penis was substantial. He watched me. I licked it delicately, exploring his pleasure. It was pierced. I was safe and did not take it fully into my mouth.
"You're the first person who's licked my dick since I got the Prince Albert," he said smiling from his pillow.
I felt as though he was saying I am the first to arrive at the scene of the sexual crime, of the exchange of skin, hair, breath. I spread out confidently in the light. I stroked us. He fingered me. Soon I was stroking harder, faster, my testicles bouncing painfully, teasingly, as they were released by the heat and dangled lower, freer in the humidity. His hand remained between my buttocks that were slightly raised from the sheets by desire, by every willing muscle. It felt as though his entire fist were inside me, up my ass, which now moved in circles, without doubt.
I came. Hot. Fierce. I twisted, breathed openly, and I came and came until my entire body became sensitive and fell to the sheets. I asked him to pull out what now felt like an arm inside me. He teased. I must've gripped him, my muscles spasmodic still like small intermittent gasps of pleasure.
Catching my breath I asked him, 'Just how many fingers did you have in me?'
He held up his hand, which glistened from the lube, and playfully said, "Only four, of course!"
I had neglected to notice that he possessed only four fingers and that one looked like it had been chopped off in an accident of sorts, a stub.
We laughed. Then slept comfortably. But in the morning the shower was uncomfortable, walking the dog together was uncomfortable, watching Oprah and sipping coffee were uncomfortable.
Passion is my biggest regret, sadly.
Sex.
I called Tom- Brandon's father- with whom I had plans to have breakfast. He laughed when I told him I was calling from a stranger's home. At the restaurant Tom asked if I'd been safe the night before and I assured him that I had, but a certain weight remained all through the day. It seems almost pointless to be "safe" when all that remains in the aftermath of every sexual exchange is guilt, fear, paranoia. Emotional suicide. The food we ate was tasteless, the coffee strong.
We met up with Tom's partners Chuck and Donna, a married couple. We strolled through a nursery as Donna named all the plants and commented on their needs and care. The sun felt nice and there was a hint of humidity in the air. But inside I struggled, ripped, and twisted. I wished so much that I hadn't left Brandon's sofa the night before. I wished so much that things were different and that I was a different person.
I asked Tom, who is a hairdresser, to bleach my hair! This took hours and hours and in the end even changing my hair color to the most extreme degree did not make things different.
But life in Chicago for those few days last summer possessed a certain romance even if nothing was perfect. There was magic. As there is in most stories.
Now my eyes ache and I must sleep and cuddle with wishes and visions, regrets and fears, new words I have learned, and ideas not yet had…

Michael approached me before Playwriting, which I am taking again, and said that he just might want to produce my new one-act. He loves Darlene the main character who prefers to go by the name George. "As in Boy, C. Scott, Washington, George Sand. She was a woman!" I am tentatively calling this play "Third Rail". When Jennifer read the part in front of the class everyone applauded. Michael said "Third Rail" would make a wonderful off-Broadway show. I try to remain quiet and inconspicuous in class though this is difficult for me. I am not comfortable with the applause and the complements.

I am visited frequently by snapshots, images, and living moments that are otherwise known as memory. Most are static and disconnected, not near enough to each other to create a moving reel but they are not devoid of emotion and inspiration. Emotionally I return to those events and places in search of something I might have missed, finding a mouthful of feelings in retrospection. Tonight I visited the old apartment in Chicago on Damen. I wore the nostalgic shoes of then, and again understood who I was, why I made the choices I made, and the nature of my motivations. I stood in those small rooms, inside that climate of youth and confusion, within the darkness, and I lay on the floor on my belly where I used to write poetry and fill endless journal entries just to gather some sense, collect thoughts, string the haphazard words together, shuffle them, shake them, see where they may land, what they might reveal. I saw my insistence on some sense of order in a home ruled by an alcoholic father and a distant brother. And I saw how this desire for order created further havoc. Fights. Dissonance. When I return from these reflections it feels like I am returning to a town in which I have lived for a hundred years. How different I feel today though I may climb in and out of the shadows of memories, like a sylph, a sexual and wonderful young man whose desires remain alive, alive.
And although I may feel at times that my ties in Modesto are perfunctory and life here lacks the romance and magic of Chicago I fight to create meaning, poetry, eroticism, intoxication. Life is a series of sacrifices and compromises, and requires great patience and maturity, which I do not possess, so I cultivate inner romance because my environment lacks romance.
I fill the void with books and poetry, replacing Modesto's mediocrity with imagination and creative artifice.
I had a dream last night in which I was on a long journey on the back of a donkey. We happened upon a very steep hill where I dismounted the donkey and led us up to the very top. Here there was a farmer's market run by Indian men. I bought some goods from the men and headed back down the hill. Our descent was precarious and it felt as though we might slip and fall. The earth crumbled beneath our step. I noticed a shortcut- a rather wide jump to level ground. We made the difficult jump and just as we were about to land on the other side I noticed a beautiful black-haired child sitting there. I strained to clear the small child whose gender remained ambiguous, but who looked very much like myself as a boy, and landed miraculously on a moist green patch of grass. A feeling of great relief overcame me but my journey was not over. I had to scale a heap of black gravel on my hands and knees and as I got closer to the top I looked up and saw my destination: a female figure standing in silence wearing an Indian Sari.

Even as children in Tehran, when Iran was at war with Iraq, we walked six mornings a week to the bus stop wondering amongst ourselves about the universe. We, Assyrian, Armenian, Turkish, and Iranian adolescents looked up at the endless sky and though our traditions and religions varied we asked the same questions. Who is God? And if he created all this who created him? We could not fathom the beginning of it all. "Where does it stop?" we asked aloud searching each other's faces. I remember it so vividly, the way these new thoughts and questions gave me a new sensation inside, a new pulse that was quicker and deeper. It seemed that even the way my small body moved and functioned changed as my mind and curiosities about the world grew in size and proportion.
Even now as an "adult" I feel just as inadequate and inferior as I did then in Tehran. Life continues to illustrate just how infinitesimal I am, we are. I imagine that the universe is a heart and that we are the cells. And each time the heart contracts we perish. I imagine that my entire existence is but a single heartbeat in time, in space. And this idea makes me feel safe somehow, small and safe. There shall never be a word for this ___. I am a part of this great ___. ___ does not have a limit and is not limited by man and language. I live, love, and laugh within the ___ and all the while relish the mystery of it all!

In a dream in which there was an eclipse of the sun I asked a boy what it meant to dream in black. He answered, "I believe something good will happen to you."

I dream that I am mom looking at myself in the mirror and am dissatisfied with what I see. One entire side of my mouth is missing teeth. I am restless but weak.
I have a feeling that I am still in flight, a motionless run, inner sprints. Hence the exhaustion. What am I running from?
I feel I am so behind in life. There seems to be no catching up in a race against the self. How will I fend for myself as a "man"? What will happen to me as an "artist"? My bedroom feels like a cell of illusions. I cannot be inside it tonight.
Jose calls. Why won't he give up? I try to make myself sound as boring as possible on the line, but to no avail. I'm struggling but hopeful. Tonight I feel like an escapist and am going to the drum circle with the others.
I am too drunk to write, but at the drum circle I had ideas for a story about a man named Garner for whom sex was a matter of ritual, costumes. Just as men are defined by suits and ties, uniforms, kilts, robes, leather, Garner insisted on taking me in white. A white suit, white gloves only, a dress, or boxers he would pull to one side revealing his eager member. Garner always took me in white. Only white. Always white. Once he wore nothing but white wingtips, fucking me while standing…

I strive for a sound mental and spiritual state of being. The drum circle proved to be a productive occasion. I am officially out to Robert and others and it was as easy as I had anticipated. What a group of lovely young men and women! I also had a fascinating conversation with an older gentleman who was out for a walk with "Stretchie" the duck.
Vivian and I walked to Diva and talked along the way. She speaks so clearly and tells stories in such a detailed fashion, always arriving at an interesting conclusion into which she eases the listener. So articulate! We enjoyed each other thoroughly and I was able to reassure her that one day she will grow into her intelligence and her emotions which seem oftentimes much too large for her, and that her inadequacy is a part of youth. Her body does not seem to be strong enough, sturdy enough, large enough for all the tumult in her head.
'Maybe that's why you've had this desire lately to be taller and went out and bought those fabulous platform boots!' I reminded her.
Ignorance may be bliss but intelligence makes Vivian an Amazon! Larger than life, so bright!
Mother reads a letter she received from a relative in Iran out loud to me and as I listen I am automatically transported to another time, another place. I recall bits and pieces, objects, favorite toys I had to abandon in our big move, scents, scenes, and my fascination quietly grows as Iran, Iran, Iran itself grows more and more distant. Fascination and love always high above somewhere in the room, lingering there, gathering momentum.