February 1997

I'm a fish in the desert. I need water, currents, oceans.

I have to give up the beer and the sarcasm. They make me impatient. Perhaps I'll take up wine and humor instead.

I am so paranoid about my teeth, wondering if the wisdom teeth that grow are pushing my front teeth into each other. I feel a slight shift. I'm obsessing. So fastidious when it comes to my looks. I take a toothpick to my teeth and mark their position as a measuring stick. Silly, I know.
Also, I got tested for HIV at the college today. Everything in life is in question right now. But I was not afraid of the needle or of the blood. The queen from the Health Department was unattractive but funny, and we chatted about things.
He asked quick questions about my sexual habits, which I answered with equal celerity. Not always truthfully.
"Have you ever had oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse?" He asked.
'Yes!'
"Well, which?"
'Oh. All.'
What do I think I will turn out to be? Positive or negative? I don't know. But either way I think I will treat myself to a dentist. In Bed! Haha.
I want to admit something here. Confess how incapable I feel when it comes to school, studying, researching and writing papers. Sure, I do better than most but I'm not the best. I'm not great. And I become frustrated with myself feeling that there is great talent inside me, but that somehow insecurity keeps me stifled, fettered. I shall always be conscious of these setbacks until I have overcome them. I am overwhelmed right now. I am taking on too many resolutions. Critical. Strict. And beginning to resent words.

I've been so restless, restless. Though my hair looks fabulous! I miss my past, which contained a spectrum of characters and adventures. I am lost and feeling that I will not survive this world. I am not blind enough, ignorant enough, "male" enough. I think too much, analyze, submerge myself as a woman would. I feel too much. My emotions are my senses. I live by them, make decisions by them, not the intellect. I had a dream in which Vivian and I got our eyeballs pierced. Medal pins were driven through our eyes. I continue to write friends in Chicago desperate letters, but what do I expect from them? To save me? To make life disappear? I resolve that if I should test positive for HIV I am going to drop everything here and return to Chicago. How strange that a part of me wants this. I thrive on big, dramatic, tragic events. Most people want safety. I desire, require atrocity. I've always been like this. Even as a child.
I made the mistake of calling my cousins in Chicago who proceeded to hound me about my spiritual state of mind. They spoke like born-agains and asked questions like: Is the Lord with you? Do you go to church? I couldn't wait to get off the line with them and merely said, 'I have a personal dialogue with God, but I can't do clubs, groups, or organized religion.' Christianity = Homophobia. I have learned this from experience and resolve not to pursue a relationship with them.
When I got off the phone I felt somehow assaulted, and forced myself to remember a different time when I was sixteen and used to go to bars in Lincoln Park with them. How fresh the world was then. How new the alcoholic buzz!

Sex is in the touch of a hand, in kisses, creativity, spontaneity, as well as in the willingness to escape the confines of a traditionally perverse perspective. Everything else has been done, overdone. The foul, the sordid, the bizarre. I want to return to passion. To celebration. To the worship of the physical through the senses of the soul. I want to kneel at the burning temple of intimacy. Familiarity. I want to have sex through trust, respect, laughter, even tears. Sex will be watching him while I read, simply glimpsing him over the open pages. Sex will be listening to him, to his voice, explanations, clarifications. There will be no need for games and methods of enslavement. There will be peace, intelligence, mysticism, and physical or spiritual distances will not be a hindrance, only a space as natural and essential as breath, air, time. Autonomy will foster our identity and will evade control, possession, love-greed. With him I will appreciate my own body, his frailty, our insecurities. And we will escape the stereotypes and the expectations. We will travel and we will have a home. We will have loving friends, enlightened, accepting family members. There will be forests, deserts, oceans, animals, scents, cultures, languages, gestures, music, and musical instruments, voices. There will be ceremony. And to think that some think sex is merely penetration!

Gore Vidal: "Like most natural writers Tennessee Williams could not possess his own life until he had written about it."
Just as I begin to ask myself if I am really happy another thought interjects: Just write and the words will sustain you.
I write frantically as if I am gasping for air, unable to stop and face my feelings of worthlessness, this lack of purpose in my bones, in my life.
Vidal: "He would make a play of the story and then- and this is why he was so compulsive a playwright- he would have the play produced so that he could, like God, rearrange his original experience into something that was no longer God's and unpossessable but his. The frantic lifelong desire for play productions was not just ambition or a need to be busy, it was the only way he ever had of being entirely alive."
I spent the evening having dinner with Mom-Suzie, my aunt Jackie, my great-aunt Clara, and my God-fearing great-grandmother. I was very much reserved with them, hid my true personality because I fear Assyrians and being judged by them. They are so critical. Even their features are imposing. Thick eyebrows, big noses, hard lines. I find myself slipping farther apart from them. I will always be an outcast because of my sexuality, a sinner. I'm growing up and leaving the pride to roam the savanna of my own private loneliness.
Everybody lives with myth. And I am crazy with desire in this house, in this town, this prison. Desire to be elsewhere. Bigger. Better. Jerking off like crazy. Walls all around me. Diaphanous walls within which I confine myself no matter where I run. Escape proves temporary when all illusions are exposed by routine and by time. Every night I am a caged animal, oh but the caged animal finds a way, digs a hole, uncovers an aperture, eats itself alive, crazy from pacing. We will drink beer!

I wish my mother would just deal with her past so that I wouldn't have to!
The weather was beautiful today but inside it was stormy. And I am the king of fantasy. Daydreaming. I slip away so easily. Imagination is sly and I don't catch it at work until I have been hypnotized by it into submission and find I have missed what the teacher has said.
What makes me special enough to avoid contracting HIV? I wonder as I wait for Wednesday's result. What shields me? My looks? My sense of humor? My heart? Magic? Luck? Prayer? Witchcraft? No. Nothing! Nothing protects me. I am not special. And I am not worried as long as I continue to live for tragedy. I don't mind dying young. There is beauty in ephemeral things.
I think of a girl I knew in first grade who did not show up for the first day of classes the following year. She had been struck by a car in the summer and killed. Perhaps she is luckier than the rest of us. All she knew was beautiful, magnificent childhood. Not the pain, suffering, and humiliations of growing up, adulthood, and change. Maybe those who perish as children are spared a greater violence than death. Who knows?

Isn't it wonderful? I am elated. Ecstatic. Relieved. I walked out of the office with chills down my entire body and celebrated having tested negative by getting myself a Foster's and sitting on a bench in the sun. I feel like I have been given a new start, a new life. All the guilt and insecurity have faded.
Michael truly likes "Third Rail" and says he is surprised by it every week. He loves the line: "Sex was an understudy for love." And embarrasses me in class by paying me complements for my work. I simply say thank you and look down, afraid of envy by others.
But I suppose all this life and living has not been in vain and as long as I continue to write I have created a reason for the seemingly senseless musings and fears. I feel too much to simply let it all fade into memory. So I swallow, inhale the intensity of an otherwise dull life into these pages. Just as a runner runs to prepare for a big race the writer lives with an intensity of emotion just to win a line or two.

Every time I run into Rodney on campus he seems to have a Styrofoam cup of beer in his hand. Has he any self-respect? He tells me horrific stories about the way his mother treats him and talks to him. She makes him use the other bathroom in the house because he is gay. Motherhood seems the hardest job in the world, up there with detonating bombs. She could go wrong at any given moment and blow it all.
Vivian and I walked to Diva after classes. These walks are usually very therapeutic for me.
"Guess how much I weigh," Vivian suddenly asked as we walked on a sunny sidewalk.
I surveyed her little body that's always shrouded in flowing diaphanous fabrics, dark-colored layers hanging loosely from her limbs and bosoms like she's a vagabond gypsy.
'Really, I'm not good at this kind of stuff,' I stammered. But Vivian's eyes remained eager, big, and brown. 'Hundred and twelve pounds!' I concluded finally.
Vivian stopped dead in her tracks and shrieked, "Exactly!"
We laughed while the sun warmed us, penetrating our dark hair. We took off our jackets. Vivian even took off her funky knee-high boots because she said they were killing her feet and walked the rest of the way barefoot.
Over sandwiches and pasta salads Vivian told me a story about the Assyrian midwife who'd delivered Vivian's mother in Baghdad. When the midwife had been a young girl she'd fallen in love with an upstanding and handsome young Assyrian man who'd loved her in return. But as he was from a higher class of people his disgruntled father had forbidden their union. He'd further discouraged his son's love for the lesser woman by spreading wild rumors about the poor girl, reducing her to a wily little harlot! The damage had been irrevocable and the young man was finally thwarted and soon after married the daughter of another wealthy family. Meanwhile, the young midwife was devastated that her great love had been finally swayed away from her, believing the wild lies about her supposed misconduct, rumors that had been unjustly confirmed by other influential elder Assyrians in the community. Her reputation was not only ruined now but indefinitely so that no one would look at her twice. She would never marry.
Then there was a death in the community and as it was custom no one was to bathe for seven days. When it rained the mourners sought dry shelter. The day of the funeral arrived and the jilted girl sought revenge. And while the mourners sat in silent pews grieving for the dead they were suddenly startled by the sound of the church doors being violently swung open. There stood the vengeful girl drenched defiantly in the rain, her hair dripping water onto the church floor, her clothes sopped and clinging to her nubile body. Having made her point to those who'd devastated her chances of ever marrying she ran through the muddied neighborhood to a nearby home and helped a laboring young woman deliver Vivian's mother!
Although I found this narrative to be charming as it was retold on a faraway sunny afternoon in America, and Vivian and I did chuckle to ourselves at the irony and chemistry of the Assyrian community as it has evolved very little in respect to women and homosexuality, I was deeply struck and saddened. I couldn't help but imagine that small Assyrian village on the outskirts of Baghdad where women's destinies hung in the hands of brutish men. I tried to imagine the midwife's face, her features, and the symbolic manner in which she'd communicated her rage and defiance. Her courage. As a burgeoning writer I am profoundly tempted and painfully inspired by the stories I hear all around me from Middle Eastern women and their harrowing experiences coming of age. Women I have never met and women in my own family- my mother, my aunt, my grandmother.

All calamities are cushioned with laughter and friendship. I'm always exhausted when I've put too much energy into a person, a place, an event, or a single emotion. I guess this is the price we pay for living. This was a monumental four-day weekend for me, full of discovery. All my relationships seem like appointments with madness and I feel the need to withdraw, cancel, retreat, hide, and rest in the caving-in of my own talents. Chuck was in the Bay Area from Chicago. He is in his forties, a college instructor, a psychologist, and a massage therapist. He is Brandon's dad's partner and Donna's husband- the three are "married".
Chuck rented a car in San Francisco and drove two hours into the Central Valley to pick me up. Of course mother was suspicious. "Who is he? How old is he?" Unwilling to trust that this is a friend who loves me and whose guidance and understanding has helped me on many occasions to get through some of the toughest times.
From the start Chuck was content making no particular plans, simply acting on impulse, just being spontaneous. His energy was cozy, comfortable, relaxed. He surrendered himself to California.
When he walked into the house he was immediately struck by the calm of it, the scarcity of furniture and knickknacks, and the ceilings that rise at angles that give the entire house a feeling of weightlessness. Openness.
"You sure moved up in the world!" Chuck joked referring to our small lightless Chicago apartment on Damen.
"It must have been difficult for you to be able to grow and create in Chicago," he observed.
Indeed it was true what Chuck said. Although I began writing in my father's home it has been since moving to California that I continue to flourish artistically.
I called Karen from Playwriting and she invited Chuck and me to a party she was attending that night. We arrived at the house and Karen greeted us at the door with a flourish of gestures, her gown flowing about her movements, yellow flowers spinning about the fabric that draped dramatically all the way to the floor. Her hair blond and worn up. A flower behind her ear. Mischief in her eyes. A beguiling smile. She hugged and kissed Chuck and me. We were introduced to the others at the party- charming men and women in their thirties, gay and straight. This was a Modesto I had not anticipated nor ever encountered. I felt as though I might have been back in Chicago.
Chuck and I immediately settled into this scene, moving about independently, conversing with others. We smiled at each other from across the softly lighted living room that had a hardwood floor and a gigantic hearth. Here Karen posed for a picture, her head thrown back as if she were riding on the sails of a terrific ship. The very air about her always signaling a desire to be elsewhere, creating the illusion that she is another woman, then another, and another. Never standing still, never sighing in repose, but moving without moving.
Someone played the guitar and we gathered round. Karen and Chuck sat on a sturdy wooden end table having recognized the song and harmonized. I kneeled by them on the floor and listened, sipped my beer.
Karen and I talked over a small candle and cigarettes. She lives a double life. It is hard to imagine there really is a husband. She rarely speaks of him. I have never seen him. Why wasn't he here now with her? It was curious how she'd buried him in the shadows of my imagination.
'You are Anais Nin!' I exclaimed. Karen admitted that she lives inside movies.
After the party Chuck would observe that Karen is in search of someone or something outside of herself to rescue her from her own life. Karen searches for the impossible.
She said that she had recently shaved her pussy because "the hottest man I've ever known" said to her that men love shaved pussies. I chuckled and said that I wanted to see it.
We went into the bathroom where Karen peed, then wiped herself. When she stood up from the toilet she lifted her strapless floral gown to reveal her entire crotch, hairless and vulnerable. I kneeled on the bathroom floor and was intrigued.
'Can I touch it?' I asked.
"Oh, yeah!" Karen answered without any hint of hesitation, matter-of-factly.
Her lips protruded like foreskin, soft and wrinkled and I fingered them out of a kind of childhood curiosity. It was all so innocent and real, quiet. Peaceful.
When Chuck and I got home mom was already in bed, but the two of us stayed up talking well into the early morning hours about Chicago, the people we know, and our own lives.
In the morning we awoke to find that mom had already left for Marin to help Mom-Suzie at the rest home. Both Chuck and I were disappointed to have missed her. I knew though that mom had slipped out, avoiding meeting him, once again shirking one more reality about my life. Mom, the other escapist in the house.
Karen met us at Diva for breakfast and told us about Mount, a gorgeous black man she'd met the night before, and how he'd pressed his penis against her back, pulled her hair, and whispered erotic obscenities into her ear.
After breakfast Chuck and I drove north to San Francisco. The walnut orchards looked magnificent with their early white blossoms. It felt as though we were driving through levitating fields of snow.
In the car we talked about life and self-improvement, about our patterns and the obstinate molds we attempt to break out of. Chuck was full of praise for me and encouraged me, said that I am in fact doing well. I thanked him for his faith in me.
The climate about us changed as we neared San Francisco. The air cooled. The flatness of the earth fell away and hills heaved all around us. And as we entered the city my body was overcome by chills and anticipation. The streets felt volatile here and we both commented on this. Every sound and sight blended in a chaos of congestion, a thrilling moving picture that seemed at first haphazard, but was actually orderly. Everything, everyone moving, pausing, moving, pausing. Sidewalks like lava. Streets like volcanoes. Neon signs like sparks.
We made our way into the Castro and parked.
We went to shops and cafes. Spoke with other young travelers like old friends. Parted with warm smiles, wishes of well-being.
We happened upon a storefront window where dozens of snapshots of half-naked men were adhered in an orderly fashion onto the glass. Pictures of a past street fair. Hunky men of all sorts. Some attractive, others repulsive and yet titillating in leather, pierced, sweating in the sun, still in the photograph but familiar and alive from so many memories of other gay parades and fairs, bars and celebrations.
I turned to Chuck and joked, 'Is this a menu?'
Chuck laughed, as did the three other men who looked at the same collage of nameless fags and friends. One of them, a tall handsome fellow who wore his hair in a ponytail, said to me, "You should come to L.A. We need writers."
A foreshadowing? A sign? How is it that a perfect stranger names our dream while our very own family denies us our truth?
I was too struck by the man's remark and too shy to say anything just then, and merely smiled at him and moved on.
Now it was dark on Castro and one saw a spectacle of gay men, drag queens, and riffraff. Amidst all this I spotted an old hippie who ran a stand selling t-shirts, buttons, and various other items of interest.
'Hold on, Chuck. I'll be right back!' Suddenly I had an idea.
I walked right up to the woman whose hair was long and silver, pulled back, and whose friendly smile revealed missing teeth, her skin deeply wrinkled.
'Do you have a J for sale?' I asked her as though I were asking for a trinket of sorts.
And thus, discreetly I bought a fat joint from the woman who said to donate whatever I could for the clandestine purchase.
Chuck laughed when I came back and opened the palm of my hand revealing the neatly rolled treat. We slipped down a darker side street and took a few puffs as we walked.
A couple blocks down we found a darkly lighted neighborhood bar where we sat talking by the light of a great saltwater aquarium. Here we discovered that even though we have known each other for years we have composed certain myths about each other, assumptions, and misconceptions which we now found crumbling. Chuck admitted that he is not in fact as secure and stable, as "perfect" as I have made him up to be in my own mind, and said that he had battles of his own, demons even at his age, with all his accomplishments.
I guess no matter how old we are and wherever we come from we all have our battles to fight and crosses to bear. It never seems to end.
Hunger invited us into a nearby hole-in-the-wall diner on Market Street. Chuck and I took our seats at the counter. The young waitress asked us if we were together. "Not yet!' I replied. The cute guys sitting nearby laughed with us.
"You're a flirt," Chuck said with a mischievous smile of his own.
'I'm just friendly.'
That night we crashed in a small motel in San Rafael, in Marin. I could feel my family perhaps sleeping in nearby towns. Exhausted we crashed.
In the morning we showered and dressed. When I asked Chuck to hand me my 'trousers' he did so, but laughed, "Trousers? Who calls them trousers anymore?"
I explained from behind the bathroom door where I stood naked in the steam that I prefer to use words that are antiquated, romantic.
Chuck seemed to understand.
Our coastal drive along Highway 1 to Gualala was gorgeous, but exhausting what with all the twists and turns in the road. The ocean looked peaceful from this elevated distance and we stopped to take it all in, turning to look at each other, smiling, nodding.
When we arrived at the remote house in the woods where Chuck was to study meditation and massage practices, we parted rather abruptly. Our hug goodbye felt very hurried as I had to make it back to San Francisco, drop off the rented car, and make a five-o-clock Amtrak back to the Central Valley. I felt exhausted and a little hung over, now lonely driving by myself.
While waiting for the train I befriended a talkative young woman named Krista with whom I smoked the rest of the joint I had bought from Pebbles, the hippie in San Francisco. Once the train was in motion I made my way back to the cafe car and got a bottle of water, walking methodically, dazedly. On my way back to my seat I heard my name called. I turned around. And there stood Rodney, bright-eyed and long-lashed, holding a bouquet of flowers.
'Rodney!' I exclaimed, surprised to see a friend here of all places.
There was something so sad and lost about him just then, standing there with the flowers, also alone, Assyrian, and gay. Although I may disagree with Rodney on many things, and am judgmental of his actions and attitude, I truly care for him. I invited him to join Krista and me.

I don't suppose there are any two words that are as chilling when combined as "human cargo"!
My shifting teeth
A silent hymn of aging grief
Do you hear me upon your breath
When you wish a homosexual's death?

Again the stage dream. It is opening night. I am the main character. I have all my lines memorized except for the last act. I don't even know how the play is to end. It is a mystery. I am in a panic. But I figure if I know the gist of the plot I can fake my way through the show.
I've also had a string of dreams about my father. I was writing a letter to a friend when suddenly I felt an urgency to call my father and speak with him.
'I've had dreams and just wanted to make sure you were alright,' I told him as soon as he got on the phone.
He assured me that he was well and asked if I needed money. I told him no and thanked him. I told him more- all the things I have imagined telling him, how much I love him, that I will always remember him, that I am a better person because of him, that he's always been a caring father, that he can't imagine how much he's done for me. Our voices quivered as we spoke. He said that he wished he had done more.
'No, you've done plenty!' I insisted.
We hung up abruptly. Crying.
I understand that the years I spent living with him in Chicago were difficult for both of us, but I continue to love my father despite all his faults and his alcoholism.
I feel alright. I feel fine. I feel alive for having loved those about me the best I know how. I exist only when I have expressed that love within me.

I live with a series of unanswerable questions. Questions are exhausting, trivial. Answers scant. Scarce.
Liz turned to me in History and said that I am very intelligent. Flattered but unconvinced I said, 'Is that how I come across?' We laughed. She said she liked my comment concerning consumption in the U.S. She called me "striking". I dubbed her 'articulate'. It was a fair exchange.
I find there is magic at work in life. I find fate has many faces. I find coincidence is a tool of a universe with great plans and mysterious intentions. I find that I am still alive and open with unnamed senses, and possess an ability to appreciate these subtleties of an otherwise ephemeral world. When I think of those I know I lose my greatest fears. Laughter heals.

My expectations have increased and block me from writing. How the lines used to run through my head like rivers. Now there is only a drought! Do romance and sex inspire poetry in me? And if go without them do I run the risk of going without poetry?
I reach a point of disenchantment with certain friends.

Life surprises me constantly. Brandon the stoner straight guy in high school becomes my gay-friendly best friend. My Assyrian grandmother undergoes cosmetic surgery. The homely Mexican woman at the train station turns out to speak perfect English without a trace of an accent. I find that it is myself I have to fight in overcoming my prejudices and stereotypes, not the world. And is it really "the world" that has impregnated me with its seed of fear and judgment and run off leaving me to view others with blurred vision? Wish I could drop out of life and read.