as if i wasn't already depressed enough today for many and varied reasons, one of my favorite blogs, www.towleroad.com, had this story about a gay couple's home being burned down in florida, with the words "Die Fags" spray-painted on their front steps.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/orl-locgayburning29072905jul29,0,4207003.story?coll=orl-news-headlines
then at the end of the story, it happens to mention that on sunday, a prominent gay club in Brownsville, Texas (outside houston) was burned down on sunday, and then mentions Fayetteville, Arkansas, my high school stomping ground. the article is here:
http://www.kfsm.com/Global/story.asp?S=3618094
(sorry, i haven't yet learned that whole HTML trick of linking to sites just by highlighting the words.)
the fayetteville club-burning has not yet been attributed to a hate crime, but let's just call a spade a spade, okay? fayetteville has suffered its share of anti-gay crime in recent years, the most notable probably being a young transvestite that was murdered in his apartment after picking up a couple of guys at a club a few years ago.
it's funny how you can just coast along, honestly believing in your heart that things are getting so much better, that people are actually beginning to show more respect and compassion toward one another, when in all actuality, hate crimes against gay people have increased by almost 50% in the past year. but with a hate-mongering president eating out of the hand of the religious right, doing their hateful best to shape our cultural landscape into one of fear, violence, hopelessness, and vengeance, what can you really expect? people are so easily swayed and malleable and weak. i sincerely weep for our future.
Friday, July 29, 2005
i don't like the drugs, but the drugs like me
so, i had one of the most pleasant dreams last night. it was a perfectly mild, breezy, sunny Spring day and i was just riding my bike all over town, so happy to be young and fit and....alive, i guess. that sounds so, like, "life-affirming" or something, but it's true. except the town in which i was riding around was a weird combination of austin, and my hometown in arkansas, but i was riding to 33 Degress (R.I.P) to buy the new rancid record or something. the details are scant, but it was a really good feeling.
i guess the drugs are finally working.
also, on my jog this morning, i noticed that the people in my neighborhood drink a lot. at least judging by all the wine and beer bottles in all of their recycle bins that were sitting out by the curb. perhaps i should start getting to know my neighbors better.
i guess the drugs are finally working.
also, on my jog this morning, i noticed that the people in my neighborhood drink a lot. at least judging by all the wine and beer bottles in all of their recycle bins that were sitting out by the curb. perhaps i should start getting to know my neighbors better.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
so what do you do with a rebel shoe?
i finally submitted my UT application yesterday. i'm really nervous for some reason. i have no doubts that i'll be accepted, but the thought of not being accepted in as a nearly 30-year-old undergrad would be the single most depressing thing that could have happened to me so far in my life.
thus far, not finishing my undergrad degree when i was supposed to is the single biggest regret of my life. in high school i had big dreams of going to NYU, or UCLA, or some small, liberal arts college like Sarah Lawrence. i never really pursued it b/c i was terrified, and probably it's for the best b/c i was never a great student. i finished at the Art Institute with a respectable GPA, but nothing to holler about. i just didn't want to be in school at that time, b/c i couldn't see the value of it, or what "real life" was really gonna be like. so now, here i am, 28, and getting my bachelors. but at least i'm doing it. and i'm going to be a great student, so that i can go to a great grad school when i'm done. and UT has some really cool stuff to offer, like a semester on their campus in Los Angeles, where you can take classes and intern at a studio. i'm also looking into their study abroad program, and i've narrowed it down to 4 cities that i'm really interested in: edinburgh, Scotland, Florence, Auckland, and Buenos Aires. all of which i think would be hella cool.
so who knows what will happen. i'm just gonna go with the flow and deal with what is handed to me, b/c if there's one thing i've learned in my life it's not to make plans, b/c they'll never ever pan out the way you think. you can consult a map, but usually the highways never really end up going where they say they're going to.
thus far, not finishing my undergrad degree when i was supposed to is the single biggest regret of my life. in high school i had big dreams of going to NYU, or UCLA, or some small, liberal arts college like Sarah Lawrence. i never really pursued it b/c i was terrified, and probably it's for the best b/c i was never a great student. i finished at the Art Institute with a respectable GPA, but nothing to holler about. i just didn't want to be in school at that time, b/c i couldn't see the value of it, or what "real life" was really gonna be like. so now, here i am, 28, and getting my bachelors. but at least i'm doing it. and i'm going to be a great student, so that i can go to a great grad school when i'm done. and UT has some really cool stuff to offer, like a semester on their campus in Los Angeles, where you can take classes and intern at a studio. i'm also looking into their study abroad program, and i've narrowed it down to 4 cities that i'm really interested in: edinburgh, Scotland, Florence, Auckland, and Buenos Aires. all of which i think would be hella cool.
so who knows what will happen. i'm just gonna go with the flow and deal with what is handed to me, b/c if there's one thing i've learned in my life it's not to make plans, b/c they'll never ever pan out the way you think. you can consult a map, but usually the highways never really end up going where they say they're going to.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
demented and sad, but social
it's such a great feeling when someone that knows you so well surprises you in a way that they know you'll adore, and you do. and when you're lying in bed at night, unable to relax enough to fall asleep, you think about it, and it makes you involuntarily smile to yourself.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
something in my veins, bloodier than blood
i guess i've always been a little bit of a sucker for serialized drama on television. ever since i've been interested in human behavior and the complexity of relationships, i've enjoyed watching these very things unfold on television, starting as early as "beverly hills 90210" when i was in junior high, up to "my so-called life" in high school. obviously these shows weren't that deep or complicated, and most of the issues were usually pretty wrapped up by the end of the 42-minute episode. but at the time, i could relate to them, and they fed my burgeoning brain the things i think it needed.
lately in my life i've been completely obsessed with "sex and the city." though it definitely has its problems, and there are things about the show i don't care for, i think it's really smart, i like the characters, but more than anything else, i think it's fascinating to watch relationships grow and/or fall apart in more or less real time. having a TV show go on over a span of years enables the writers (if they're any good) to reveal characters slowly to you, to have them be very contradictory, or really surprise you in some way, just like people in real life do. it can reveal the little, minute things that people do or don't do over long periods of time that can make or break relationships. slights that people can hold, or the ways in which someone can harbor something internally for years and have it never reveal itself until one telling moment that it does. i think it's fascinating.
this past weekend i discovered and started watching "six feet under." i can certifiably say i think it's the smartest, most complicated, most painful show that's ever existed. or, at the very least, that i've ever seen. every character is deeply damaged in some way and they're all struggling to just connect with the people in their lives on some kind of true level. they may not know that's what they're doing, or they may fight it, but even more than being a show about death and grieving (which it is), it's a show about lonliness, isolation and pain. it's about trying to stop being afraid of your internal life, and your emotions, and learning to live your life in an open, honest, and fulfilling way. and it isn't easy for any of these characters, all of whom are great. admittedly, it's a bit over the top at times, but that's just kind of the nature of the beast.
and a friend of mine who also watches it told me yesterday that David, the gay brother, reminds her a lot of me, actually, which i guess i'll take as a compliment. he's 31, totally out of touch with himself, angry, lonely, sad, and resentful of the decisions that he's made, but he's also incredibly sweet, endearing, smart, sensitive, and desperately trying to figure out who he is after living his life for other people for 3 decades. and i'm only mid-way through the second season. my friend says he gets a lot more interesting and complicated and weird as time goes on. i'm so excited to see it!
lately in my life i've been completely obsessed with "sex and the city." though it definitely has its problems, and there are things about the show i don't care for, i think it's really smart, i like the characters, but more than anything else, i think it's fascinating to watch relationships grow and/or fall apart in more or less real time. having a TV show go on over a span of years enables the writers (if they're any good) to reveal characters slowly to you, to have them be very contradictory, or really surprise you in some way, just like people in real life do. it can reveal the little, minute things that people do or don't do over long periods of time that can make or break relationships. slights that people can hold, or the ways in which someone can harbor something internally for years and have it never reveal itself until one telling moment that it does. i think it's fascinating.
this past weekend i discovered and started watching "six feet under." i can certifiably say i think it's the smartest, most complicated, most painful show that's ever existed. or, at the very least, that i've ever seen. every character is deeply damaged in some way and they're all struggling to just connect with the people in their lives on some kind of true level. they may not know that's what they're doing, or they may fight it, but even more than being a show about death and grieving (which it is), it's a show about lonliness, isolation and pain. it's about trying to stop being afraid of your internal life, and your emotions, and learning to live your life in an open, honest, and fulfilling way. and it isn't easy for any of these characters, all of whom are great. admittedly, it's a bit over the top at times, but that's just kind of the nature of the beast.
and a friend of mine who also watches it told me yesterday that David, the gay brother, reminds her a lot of me, actually, which i guess i'll take as a compliment. he's 31, totally out of touch with himself, angry, lonely, sad, and resentful of the decisions that he's made, but he's also incredibly sweet, endearing, smart, sensitive, and desperately trying to figure out who he is after living his life for other people for 3 decades. and i'm only mid-way through the second season. my friend says he gets a lot more interesting and complicated and weird as time goes on. i'm so excited to see it!
Thursday, July 21, 2005
you stole my heart, but i love you anyways
i think i found my new Anthem: "Maggie May," by rod stewart. love it. LOVE it!!
Wake up Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you
It's late September and I really should be back at school
I know I keep you amused But I feel I'm being used
Oh Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more
You led me away from home Just to save you from being alone
You stole my heart and that's what really hurts
The morning sun when it's in your eyes really shows your age
But that don't worry me none, in my eyes you're everything
I laughed at all of your jokes
My love you didn't need to coax
Oh Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more
You led me away from home
Just to save you from being alone
You stole my soul and that's a pain I can do without
All I needed was a friend to lend a helping hand
But you turned into a lover and mother, what a lover, you wore me out
All you did was wreck my bed
And in the morning kick me in the head
Oh Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more
You led me away from home'Cause you didn't want to be alone
You stole my heart, I couldn't leave you if I tried
I suppose I could collect my books and go on back to school
Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living at playing pool
Or find myself a rock and roll band
That needs a helping hand
Oh Maggie, I wished I'd never seen your face
You made a first class fool out of me
But I'm as blind as a fool can be
You stole my heart but I love you anyway
I'd never seen your face
I'll get on back home, one of these days
Wake up Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you
It's late September and I really should be back at school
I know I keep you amused But I feel I'm being used
Oh Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more
You led me away from home Just to save you from being alone
You stole my heart and that's what really hurts
The morning sun when it's in your eyes really shows your age
But that don't worry me none, in my eyes you're everything
I laughed at all of your jokes
My love you didn't need to coax
Oh Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more
You led me away from home
Just to save you from being alone
You stole my soul and that's a pain I can do without
All I needed was a friend to lend a helping hand
But you turned into a lover and mother, what a lover, you wore me out
All you did was wreck my bed
And in the morning kick me in the head
Oh Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more
You led me away from home'Cause you didn't want to be alone
You stole my heart, I couldn't leave you if I tried
I suppose I could collect my books and go on back to school
Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living at playing pool
Or find myself a rock and roll band
That needs a helping hand
Oh Maggie, I wished I'd never seen your face
You made a first class fool out of me
But I'm as blind as a fool can be
You stole my heart but I love you anyway
I'd never seen your face
I'll get on back home, one of these days
Memo to the World: Things that have already irritated the crap out of me this morning, and it's only 9am.
1. La Tazza Fresca not being open at 8:00 this morning. THEY'RE A COFFEE SHOP!!!!!!
2.my radio at work never ever ever getting good reception on channel 104.3, which is howard stern.
3. having to stand in line behind people with indecisive little kids at Quack's, after having to drive up there, b/c La Tazza Fresca wasn't open. at 8:00 in the morning.
4. waiting behind same child and father trying to exit the coffee shop, while the kid just stands there staring and chewing on her stuffed animal while the father tries to coax her out the door, but is otherwise blocking it with her stroller.
5. my power steering making that weird grinding noise again.
6. my allergies.
7. terrorists. more explosions in london this morning. i'm getting really sick of this crap. i'm getting to the point where i think we should just nuke the whole middle east. am i becoming a republican?
8. the construction workers constantly closing lanes on 45th street, tearing up all the pavement, then putting it all back down, but leaving huge holes, uneven lanes, cracks, and the roads in much worse shape than they ever were before. i don't understand why when you go in to fix all the pipes (which probably don't even need to be done), you can't replace the pavement smoothly and not leave giant potholes in it.
9. trying to print out my huge report at work, going to the printer to pick it up, then finding out the printer is out of paper, so i fill it up, and all the backed-up reports from all morning start printing out before mine, b/c no one in my office ever goes to the printer and picks up their reports, whereas if they ever did, someone would have noticed, long before i did, that the printer was out of paper, refilled it, had the reports previous to mine come out, then mine could have come out when it was supposed to, rather than have me stand there for 3 hours waiting on everybody else's crap!
2.my radio at work never ever ever getting good reception on channel 104.3, which is howard stern.
3. having to stand in line behind people with indecisive little kids at Quack's, after having to drive up there, b/c La Tazza Fresca wasn't open. at 8:00 in the morning.
4. waiting behind same child and father trying to exit the coffee shop, while the kid just stands there staring and chewing on her stuffed animal while the father tries to coax her out the door, but is otherwise blocking it with her stroller.
5. my power steering making that weird grinding noise again.
6. my allergies.
7. terrorists. more explosions in london this morning. i'm getting really sick of this crap. i'm getting to the point where i think we should just nuke the whole middle east. am i becoming a republican?
8. the construction workers constantly closing lanes on 45th street, tearing up all the pavement, then putting it all back down, but leaving huge holes, uneven lanes, cracks, and the roads in much worse shape than they ever were before. i don't understand why when you go in to fix all the pipes (which probably don't even need to be done), you can't replace the pavement smoothly and not leave giant potholes in it.
9. trying to print out my huge report at work, going to the printer to pick it up, then finding out the printer is out of paper, so i fill it up, and all the backed-up reports from all morning start printing out before mine, b/c no one in my office ever goes to the printer and picks up their reports, whereas if they ever did, someone would have noticed, long before i did, that the printer was out of paper, refilled it, had the reports previous to mine come out, then mine could have come out when it was supposed to, rather than have me stand there for 3 hours waiting on everybody else's crap!
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
we've reached a turning point, a fork stuck in the road
for the first time since i can remember, i'm feeling really good about the future. i have a plan. many plans. i'm relaxed, i'm confident, i can't wait to get started. now i just have to be patient. and strong. i'm scared shitless, frankly, but in a good way.
life is good. i'm looking forward to things, excited about my prospective accomplishments. but i know i can do it. i hope this feeling never ends.
life is good. i'm looking forward to things, excited about my prospective accomplishments. but i know i can do it. i hope this feeling never ends.
Monday, July 18, 2005
i can't remember all the things you might have said
tonight i went over to my friend kat's house to watch some footage from the feature she's currently shooting. she never fails to amaze me. she's shooting on 16mm instead of digital, and it just looks stunning. it looks like a movie from the 80's, in a very good way.
she is so incredibly inspiring, her tenacity, her determination, her will, and her boundless kindness and energy. i don't see nearly enough of her. but when i left her house tonight, i was absolutely beaming with pride for her. her film is going to be amazing, and i can't wait to see it. i can't imagine my life without her. i can't imagine my life without any of the wonderful people that currently populate it today. i have no idea what i've ever done to be so blessed, but it must have been good. they are all the most wonderful, patient, generous, loving, creative, sensitive, brilliant and just GOOD people in this world. each and every one of them in their own special way.
all right, i'm done now. excuse me while i go vomit.
she is so incredibly inspiring, her tenacity, her determination, her will, and her boundless kindness and energy. i don't see nearly enough of her. but when i left her house tonight, i was absolutely beaming with pride for her. her film is going to be amazing, and i can't wait to see it. i can't imagine my life without her. i can't imagine my life without any of the wonderful people that currently populate it today. i have no idea what i've ever done to be so blessed, but it must have been good. they are all the most wonderful, patient, generous, loving, creative, sensitive, brilliant and just GOOD people in this world. each and every one of them in their own special way.
all right, i'm done now. excuse me while i go vomit.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
love is not a victory march, it's a cold and broken hallelujah
i've been doing a lot of thinking lately about men and commitment and monogamy. i guess most men, by nature or by nurture, are afraid of, or at the very least, a little freaked out by, commitment to one other person.
it also seems to me that gay men are inordinately more incapable of commitment and vulnerability than most straight guys, ironically. i've been wracking my brain for days trying to figure out some reason for this; is it because so many of them spent so many years denying, or at best, subverting, who they really are, and what they desire? is it because so many of them have such low self-esteem that they feel unworthy of being loved, thus terrified of letting someone in, only to have them eventually leave? is it simply because "out" gay couples are such a recent, modern phenomenon that there is no real healthy model for how it's supposed to work? (this argument seems a little weak to me, but not entirely unrealistic.)
but now, thanks to some cute little penguins and thousands of years of routine, evolutionary behavior, i think i might have come to my answer. or at least a moderately satisfactory one.
last night i went with some friends to see "March of the Penguins." and while it didn't inspire tears or hit me in the gut the way i was really anticipating and hoping it would, i found it to be a moving, fascinating and competent piece of work about the hell that emporer penguins go through just to reproduce. they suffer 210 mile marches, -80 degree blizzards, months without food, dehydration, exhaustion, predators, and often eventually death, simply to spawn one egg, see it to fruition, only to eventually abandon it, so that the next year, that chick can go through the whole same process and carry on the species. often, for various reasons (they freeze to death, they get eaten, a parent dies, they just simply don't make it) the chicks don't live, and while the penguins clearly grieve, they don't give up. they wait until the next year, find another mate, and try it all again.
so, towards the end of the film, it hit me: gay men have such a hard time committing because there is no biological drive inside of them to mate with someone. of course i'm grossly simplifying here: many gay men eventually grow out of their seemingly endless adolescence and commit, and often have children together, but for the most part, and this isn't just bitterness talking, i really do believe that it's rare. but for straight people, there is nearly always the drive (or at least the societal expectation) to procreate, and the promise of the passing on of genes, and in turn, the ability to make a part of yourself live longer and give back to the world in some way. but what if your desires and relationships can never physically fulfill the evolutionary need for which humans essentially exist? well, simple: there is no reason to commit (evolutionarily), thus, most of them don't.
it's just a starter argument, i realize, and doesn't take into account the myriad of nuances that exist, i.e., straight couples that have no desire to have children, the fact that in a strictly biological sense, straight men should be much more averse to committing than gay men, since they're the ones that are supposed to go and spread their seed everywhere and create as many little miniature versions of themself as humanly possible before they die. and the fact that biologically, most men are just men. but without the societal "trap" of marriage, and the eventual babies to support, gay men are free to live a life of terminal bed-hopping, partner-swapping, closed-off emotions and all the rest.
thoughts?
it also seems to me that gay men are inordinately more incapable of commitment and vulnerability than most straight guys, ironically. i've been wracking my brain for days trying to figure out some reason for this; is it because so many of them spent so many years denying, or at best, subverting, who they really are, and what they desire? is it because so many of them have such low self-esteem that they feel unworthy of being loved, thus terrified of letting someone in, only to have them eventually leave? is it simply because "out" gay couples are such a recent, modern phenomenon that there is no real healthy model for how it's supposed to work? (this argument seems a little weak to me, but not entirely unrealistic.)
but now, thanks to some cute little penguins and thousands of years of routine, evolutionary behavior, i think i might have come to my answer. or at least a moderately satisfactory one.
last night i went with some friends to see "March of the Penguins." and while it didn't inspire tears or hit me in the gut the way i was really anticipating and hoping it would, i found it to be a moving, fascinating and competent piece of work about the hell that emporer penguins go through just to reproduce. they suffer 210 mile marches, -80 degree blizzards, months without food, dehydration, exhaustion, predators, and often eventually death, simply to spawn one egg, see it to fruition, only to eventually abandon it, so that the next year, that chick can go through the whole same process and carry on the species. often, for various reasons (they freeze to death, they get eaten, a parent dies, they just simply don't make it) the chicks don't live, and while the penguins clearly grieve, they don't give up. they wait until the next year, find another mate, and try it all again.
so, towards the end of the film, it hit me: gay men have such a hard time committing because there is no biological drive inside of them to mate with someone. of course i'm grossly simplifying here: many gay men eventually grow out of their seemingly endless adolescence and commit, and often have children together, but for the most part, and this isn't just bitterness talking, i really do believe that it's rare. but for straight people, there is nearly always the drive (or at least the societal expectation) to procreate, and the promise of the passing on of genes, and in turn, the ability to make a part of yourself live longer and give back to the world in some way. but what if your desires and relationships can never physically fulfill the evolutionary need for which humans essentially exist? well, simple: there is no reason to commit (evolutionarily), thus, most of them don't.
it's just a starter argument, i realize, and doesn't take into account the myriad of nuances that exist, i.e., straight couples that have no desire to have children, the fact that in a strictly biological sense, straight men should be much more averse to committing than gay men, since they're the ones that are supposed to go and spread their seed everywhere and create as many little miniature versions of themself as humanly possible before they die. and the fact that biologically, most men are just men. but without the societal "trap" of marriage, and the eventual babies to support, gay men are free to live a life of terminal bed-hopping, partner-swapping, closed-off emotions and all the rest.
thoughts?
Thursday, July 14, 2005
didn't it rain
i had to get up at 5:00 this morning to take a friend to the airport, and since i've been suffering from heightened insomnia this whole week, i didn't get to sleep until about 2:30. therefore, when my alarm went off i was still in the midst of my REM sleep, i think.
i was having a dream that i was walking down a very busy retail street near my house, talking on my phone to a good friend of mine who lives in north carolina that i haven't seen in about 2 years. suddenly i was aware of a presence above me, in the sky, and thunderous sound like a tornado. i looked up only to see a space shuttle (literally) free-falling through the atmosphere and come crashing down in a ball of flames and destruction on top of a whataburger (seriously). the building exploded, and complete pandemonium ensued on the street. people were screaming and running everywhere, cars began all crashing into one another, and flames were shooting out in all directions. i got caught up in a mob of people running away from the wreckage, but somehow a weird barrier had been put up on the street, and they weren't letting people go through.
and then it occurred to me that i was wearing nothing but a pair of red Hanes briefs. i was a little embarrassed, but mostly i was afraid i was going to die. and before i could give it much more thought, more stuff started falling from the sky. a huge wing from a jet fell (but not the rest of the plane, which was MIA) and landed on some condominiums behind a blockbuster, along with a flaming engine. all from a clear blue sky.
and then my alarm went off.
when i went to pick up my friend, i told her about the dream, which she didn't appreciate, since she was about to get on a giant plane and fly to new york. i didn't think of that.
i was having a dream that i was walking down a very busy retail street near my house, talking on my phone to a good friend of mine who lives in north carolina that i haven't seen in about 2 years. suddenly i was aware of a presence above me, in the sky, and thunderous sound like a tornado. i looked up only to see a space shuttle (literally) free-falling through the atmosphere and come crashing down in a ball of flames and destruction on top of a whataburger (seriously). the building exploded, and complete pandemonium ensued on the street. people were screaming and running everywhere, cars began all crashing into one another, and flames were shooting out in all directions. i got caught up in a mob of people running away from the wreckage, but somehow a weird barrier had been put up on the street, and they weren't letting people go through.
and then it occurred to me that i was wearing nothing but a pair of red Hanes briefs. i was a little embarrassed, but mostly i was afraid i was going to die. and before i could give it much more thought, more stuff started falling from the sky. a huge wing from a jet fell (but not the rest of the plane, which was MIA) and landed on some condominiums behind a blockbuster, along with a flaming engine. all from a clear blue sky.
and then my alarm went off.
when i went to pick up my friend, i told her about the dream, which she didn't appreciate, since she was about to get on a giant plane and fly to new york. i didn't think of that.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
no distance left to run
have you ever had those moments in life that you wish more than anything you could just erase? moments that are humiliating, in the deepest sense of the word, or betray too much of your emotion, or of how unstable you are, or at least feel? or because they're just cruel. a slighted word, an accidental antecdote, a slip of the tongue (or keyboard) that you would give anything to take back?
well, i had one of those moments last week. i regret it more than i've regretted almost anything in my entire life, b/c i deeply wounded someone i love more than anyone, and someone that loves me. a simple apology won't suffice; this wound will take time, like that pimple you should have just left alone. it would have been uncomfortable, and taken some time to heal, and been ugly and embarrassing, but left alone, it would go away on its own accord. but no, you had to go play with it, squeeze it, try to rush the healing process along, and now it's going to leave a scar. and everytime you see that scar you're going to think of that pain, or that hideously ugly and violent struggle.
i love you, J. i hope someday you can forgive me.
well, i had one of those moments last week. i regret it more than i've regretted almost anything in my entire life, b/c i deeply wounded someone i love more than anyone, and someone that loves me. a simple apology won't suffice; this wound will take time, like that pimple you should have just left alone. it would have been uncomfortable, and taken some time to heal, and been ugly and embarrassing, but left alone, it would go away on its own accord. but no, you had to go play with it, squeeze it, try to rush the healing process along, and now it's going to leave a scar. and everytime you see that scar you're going to think of that pain, or that hideously ugly and violent struggle.
i love you, J. i hope someday you can forgive me.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
smells like fucking teen spirit
The first time I fell in love, I was 16. I think. I didn’t know it at the time, and I especially never would have acknowledged it, but once it all went sour, and I was crushed, and drove by his house every morning before school, because it was kind of on my way, and then I grew up for another 9 years, it occurred to me one sunny day at the beach. I was head-over-heels in love with J.A. Without a doubt, he was singularly responsible for laying the foundation for what I would forever find attractive, even if he did end up becoming a thuggish, pot-head, racist jock. He didn’t start out that way.
He came from the wilderness of Alaska with an attitude problem and a shitty home life. It was such a cliché as to be nearly unbelievable, but he was the most exotic thing Rogers, Arkansas had possibly ever seen. At least to my feeble 16-year-old imagination, nothing was more glamorous. He had shaggy hair that he dyed purple, and listened to punk rock music, but he was sensitive and played acoustic guitar. Kurt Cobain was his personal god (this was 1993, after all) while I was still listening to pop music and Nirvana was too “crazy” for my choir-boy ears. I have no idea, being who I was at the time, why he appealed to me so strongly. Maybe it was the novelty, and the fact that he happened to be gorgeous and smart and well-read didn’t hurt. As my friend E.S. once so eloquently put it, “half the school wants to be him, and the other half wants to fuck him.” And sometimes, the two shall meet.
As it turned out, his aunt was the piano player for my choir at church, and he was coming down to the mainland to spend some time with her after getting into a fistfight with his stepfather and getting thrown out of his parent’s house in Alaska. We hadn’t yet started school for the fall, which would be our junior year, and his aunt asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking him out some night to show him around, maybe introduce him to some people. I’d always gotten along wonderfully with adults and could charm the pants off anyone over 30 (too bad the majority of my peers I found repellent and unworthy of breathing). So I happily agreed.
I have no idea what we did together that first night, but I liked him. I remember him being relaxed and personable and very open about who he was and why he was there. Maybe he’d seen the movies too, and was playing it up, but I think it was genuine. I can’t imagine him not being terrified, and lonely and eager to fit in.
I listened to his stories with the ears of someone on a first date wanting to make a great impression, and I shared my own stories. That spring my brother had been in a horrible car wreck and barely survived an 8-week coma that left him unable to walk, talk, read, or even feed himself once he awoke. I had spent the summer in a rehab hospital in Dallas with my family, and returned just before school started, after missing the entirety of the first summer I and all my friends could actually drive and stay out late. I felt like I had missed a lot, and I was resentful, but cautious and riddled with guilt for resenting it, after what my brother and parents were going through. All of my friends were supportive and caring, but I felt like my feelings and emotions were too complex for them to comprehend, and for me to even articulate in a meaningful way, so mostly I kept silent. But I was angry, and hurting, and jealous, and felt like shit about it. But J.A. seemed to understand. He really seemed to get it, and understood the separateness I perceived us both to be experiencing, and after about a week of hanging out with him, I felt like we’d grown up together.
Once school started, the fire only grew. Being the most exotic dish anyone in my high school had seen, everyone wanted to know J.A. He immediately amassed a large group of friends, mostly of the artsy, misfit type, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I had something that everybody wanted: for while he quickly made friends, I considered myself to be his best friend. So even though this was clearly not the case, or maybe was, but was purely circumstantial, it played to my favor. I had never been popular in my life, in fact, I was the definition of not popular, and the one person everybody wanted to know, J.A., spent every weekend at my house. We hung out with my friends, played pool in my garage, went swimming in my backyard, watched Singles and at least every Friday, and often Saturday too, he spent the night at my house. For the first time, I felt like I was “fitting in,” and I started making new friends, and gained a confidence in myself that people normally associate with falling madly in love with someone who wants you back just as badly.
In early October, we all went to the annual Benton County Fair. This was a tradition, and the first year that my friends and I could go by ourselves, or not have to be at the gates waiting for our parents at 10:00. We gorged ourselves on hot dogs and cotton candy and rode every ride three times. The night was over too quickly, but on our way out, Jared spotted one of those recording booths, basically a glorified karaoke, where you could record yourself singing a song onto a cassette tape. He stood in the booth, and a video camera and PA set up outside boomed out not only his image, but the sound of his rough voice singing “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” by Creedence Clearwater Revival to anyone passing by. Personally, I’d never cared for CCR, and only associated them with the racist jocks at my school, affectionately dubbed the Dixie Boys by the whole town, because of their penchant for stringing up Rebel flags on the backs of their mud-encrusted pickup trucks and sewing patches of the flags onto their ratty baseball caps, and wearing t-shirts with slogans like, “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God.”
They’d called me a faggot every day of my life starting the first day of Life Science class in 7th grade, and on more than one occasion, I had narrowly escaped a serious beating, along with threats to my very existence. All I had done that day to warrant this attention was show up, but they didn’t like the way I walked, and one person picked up on it, and set the tone for the rest of my public school career. They had “rumbles” in Northwest Park with the growing influx of poor Hispanic kids, complete with chains and sawed-off shotguns. No one ever died, or to my knowledge, was even seriously injured, by even so much as a wayward glance in the cafeteria on Tuesday could bring out a hundred or more kids to fight on Friday, after the park lights had been turned off. These activities were more often than not busted by the cops, but they were legendary and somehow only increased the status of the gringos in most people’s eyes. They were the lone Davy Crocketts of Northwest Arkansas, struggling to keep the white-only status of this small Ozark Mountain town a reality, but with Wal-Mart and Tyson and Hudson Foods, and a phenomenally low cost, but high standard, of living, it was a natural haven for immigrants. Thousands of them started pouring in, many of whom didn’t speak English. It was a culture shock, and an unwelcome one at that, by most everybody, as far as I can remember, particularly the large Baptist churches that dominated the cultural landscape. (Years later, after I had left, the sheriff of Benton County, along with same said Baptist churches, would form an Immigration Coalition, to monitor the influx and keep it in check, which really meant, put as much of a halt to it as possible, along with a plan to wipe out the homosexuals, because “where you have homosexuality, you have pedophilia.” The queers had recently become a problem, apparently, because of their cruising at the Lake Atalanta Park, though I have no idea who figured this out, or how. But I can proudly say that my great-grandfather built and also named the Lake Atalanta Park when he was Mayor, and I can think of no other place I would rather gay men have illicit sex in the dark.)
But standing there that night at the fair, among the hay and cow shit and rednecks and their dirty children, nothing else existed but Jared and that song. To this day, I can’t hear it without conjuring up images of that night, and being transfixed by how much he sounded like John Fogerty himself, and how he even held the headphones to his ear like I’d seen rock stars do in movies and on MTV. That his Voice could come out of his skinny Body astounded me and I smiled. His eyes were closed, and all modesty was gone, or never existed, and he was a true performer, and to me, the original Bad Boy. He even drew a small crowd that applauded him when he stepped from the booth, and he smiled sheepishly when he saw them, as if he really didn’t know people would be watching him. On the way back to my house that night in my car, he made me play the tape 3 times in a row, with the windows down and the stars bright, and the temperature dropping. The leaves of the trees splashed yellow, gold, red, and orange in my headlights, and before long the first snow would fall and the brilliant canvas of Fall would be replaced by a premature crystalline white, covering every surface, even before Halloween.
As I said before, this was the era of the “grunge explosion,” and everywhere I looked, people I knew were forming bands that wanted to sound like Nirvana, or the Pixies, Soundgarden, Hole, and Green Day. My friends started forming bands with names like Egg, Alfred, the Soda Pop Gods, the Total Knock-Outs, and a million other incestuous incarnations that lasted a week or 2 and never had names, but from which forth actual songs sprang and philosophies were formed. Almost overnight I lost interest in going to church and preferred to start spending my time with people that read William S. Burroughs and Communist Manifestoes; people that dyed their hair purple and pink and blue and pierced their lips. A revolution was taking place and it was outrageous and exciting and appealed to my growing sense of disillusionment and anger and confusion over my budding sexuality. I was aware, even then, that this had all already happened 20 years prior, all over the world, but it had never happened in Rogers, Arkansas, and it had never happened to me.
But the Grandaddy of all these bands, and the only one that would last years past high school, was the one fronted by none other than J.A. himself. They called themselves Slur, and had lots of songs (none of which I remember), but the one that everybody loved was a cover of “Killing in the Name of,” by Rage Against the Machine. At the end, went Jared went crazy and belted out, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” over and over, you never saw such hysteria in a group of spoiled, white, bored, suburban punk rock wannabes. The pinnacle of their coolness was reached when, on the next to last day of school, junior year, they played an afternoon school function held on the track field, and had the plug pulled on them during that song. J.A. had gained quite a reputation by that point as being a “rebel” and “dangerous,” and he and I had long since stopped speaking. When his vocals alarmingly went silent he screamed and cussed from the stage, but nothing was done to him. I sat in the stands, rolling my eyes, and wishing he would disappear through a hole in the field. He had so much to fucking prove, and to this day, I have no idea which one of his personalities was the “real” one: the one that I had befriended, or the one that he eventually became. Maybe both, or maybe neither. I ran into him years later, actually, at a Reverend Horton Heat show, when I was up visiting from Dallas. He was really drunk, or really stoned, or really both, and seemed elated to see me, and then asked if he could have some money to buy another beer because he was all out.
Slur soon became It, the benchmark by which all other local bands would compare themselves, and in true rock star fashion, the girls and the drugs and the attitudes followed. They even started getting booked at the “jock” parties. The aggressive “moshable” music appealed to their angsty, white-boy anger, and J.A. soon became one of the first people I’d ever known to successfully straddle the fence between the jocks and the artsy weirdos and have true allies in both camps.
My friend J.T. was another one of these specimens. She had moved to Rogers in junior high, from West Palm Beach, Florida, with tales so sordid, we naturally ate them up and believed every word. I doubt, now, having known her, that any of them were true, but at the time we didn’t question them for a second. Supposedly, she had had a steady girlfriend who had gotten her addicted to heroin, and one night when they were out joyriding in a stolen car while strung out on smack, they had crashed into a cop car and been arrested, and her parents had had enough. They lived in a Brady Bunch-style, 70’s era, split-level home, with Beaver Lake lapping at their backyard. J.T. had the whole downstairs of the house to herself, with her own sliding-glass doors leading out to the rocky shores, which made her house a favorite hangout of ours. To this day, she will be remembered most fondly by all of us, by her cross-dressing party that went down in Rogers party history. Everyone that attended, regardless of gender, was required to wear clothing of the opposite gender before they would be allowed entrance. Only someone as sexy as J.T. was then would have been able to not only pull off such a stunt in such a stilted town, but make it a smashing success. We talked about it for years afterward, and half the school was there.
I had always had a bit of a crush on J.T., frankly. She had a disarming laugh, and an inherent ability to make you feel like you were the most important person in her life. She wrote poetry and listened to Bikini Kill and smoked cigarettes in her backyard, and defiantly made out with other girls in the high school cafeteria, for the sole purpose of pissing off all the jocks that routinely called her a dyke and wanted to fuck her. At my friend M.S.’s (no, that doesn’t stand for multiple sclerosis) birthday party, in January of our junior year, I got to make out with J.T. under a blanket in M.S’s darkened bedroom, while people told ghost stories. This marked the first, I believe, of only about 2 times, that I’ve been truly turned on by a girl with whom I was messing around, and desperately wanted to go further than we did. I remember my erection trying to burst out of my pants, and J.T. fleetingly letting her fingers graze over it, until I thought I was gonna go crazy. I took this as a good sign, as I was desperately trying to internally fight off my growing attraction to men and my longing to not only have sex with them, but to just touch them and hold them, and constantly wonder what it would feel like to kiss them and just lie with our arms around each other. Lying here on the floor with J.T., our legs and tongues entwined, and everyone at the party (including J.A.) knowing what was happening under there, was a real boost to my self-image and completely non-existent feelings of masculinity.
M.S. had been my closest friend since kindergarten, and to this day, we are still close. She is like a sister to me, and no matter what directions our lives have taken, or how far apart on the globe we’ve been in the past, we’ve never gone more than a few weeks without speaking or seeing each other for our entire lives. She grew up on a sprawling farm more than 30 minutes outside of Rogers, and as we got older and could drive and stay out later, the main source of entertainment at M.S’s house became trying to scare ourselves into hysteria. Every birthday party included a freezing (January in the Ozark Mountains) hay ride to the more than a century old graveyard on her property. We would always just go out there and stand around and look at the stones, and try to read the death dates, and imagine that the mud into which they were all sinking was some kind of portal to hell or something. Nothing ever happened, and her dad would always try to scare us, and some girl would “swear” she felt something brush her ankle, or someone would trip and scream, and everybody would freak out and huddle together. We knew we were being ridiculous, but it was fun, and always led up to the inevitable telling of ghost stories in M.S.’s second-floor, haunted, candle-lit bedroom, in her turn-of-the-century farmhouse where “people had died.”
This particular year, M.S.’s dad decided to take the hay ride on a joy ride around the curvy, deserted and pitch-black roads around her farm. As his speed increased and the cold, wet wind picked up, we were all screaming (with delight, of course, and fake terror) and clutching one another for support and warmth, but what should appear out of the darkness, but the one lone headlight of J.A’s newly acquired motorcycle. Ladies and Gentlemen, James Fucking Dean has arrived. Call fucking CNN. It was by far the studliest and most dramatic entrance any one of us could have imagined. We all went nuts as he pulled up alongside the trailer, his black leather jacket and silver and black helmet glowing in the moonlight like some kind of legendary, mysterious dark knight.
We eventually made it back to M.S.’s house, and the ghost stories, then the confessions, began. I don’t know if it was just because we were all dying to be understood, or to feel like we weren’t the only freaks around, but one of our favorite past-times for my friends and me was to play Truth or Dare, which always degenerated into a tear-filled, heartfelt outpouring of secrets and desires. That night, for the first time in my life, I verbalized my growing attraction to men in front of a group of people. I thought I was in a safe environment, and our secrets would never be used against us, but as I later figured out, my confession to a lusty, unattainable fantasy of boning one of the most popular jocks at my school, sowed the seed of J.A.’s growing discomfort of the closeness of our relationship.
I’m sure there were many layers to this decision of his, or to his intuitive understanding of my growing attraction to him, but honest to god, it never even occurred to me to fall in love with him, or to actively pursue him sexually. I just simply wasn’t that in touch with myself at that point, and I guess sometimes we’re the last ones to notice our own subconscious behavior. But I was in love with him, and I thought we were soul mates of sorts, and I thought I was his best friend, and that fateful night at J.T.’s cross-dressing party I was to be set straight in one of the most humiliating ways possible. It’s nothing now, thinking back, but at the time my whole world stopped and I believed myself to be the laughingstock of my entire high school. Probably no one even knew about it, or cared, or maybe they even thought J.A. was the dick for doing what he did, but my perception was one of being totally ridiculed.
It must have been nearing midnight, when my curfew was, because I went to find J.A., who had barely spoken to me all night. He was sitting with his bandmates, his perfect new friends, and though they intimidated me, I broached their circle. The only girl I can ever recall J.A. ever dating while in high school was my own friend Marissa, who dumped him only a couple of months after, and he was heartbroken. One night, while we were still in church choir, he inadvertently cut his finger, or ripped off a hangnail, or something, but his finger was bleeding profusely. His response was to grab a white sheet of paper, and actually scroll out a forlorn letter to Marissa in his own blood. At the time I thought it was silly and a bit creepy, but didn’t recognize it for the melodramatic plea for weirdness that it must have been. (Of course now, as an adult, if a lover of mine wrote out a letter to me in their own blood it would charm my pants off; maybe he was just a decade ahead of me.)
Anyway, I remember a few of the guys having girlfriends, including A.H., the drummer, who had been a friend of mine in elementary school until he came after me on my bike with a butcher knife the size of a sword and he got sent away to juvenile hall – in second grade! It had all been a dumb prank, since the day before my older brother and one of his friends had dared me to fight him, and for no other reason than I was dared, I did it. I held him on the ground with my knees, but didn’t really know what to do with him after that, so after threatening to hit him a couple of times I just let him up, no more satisfied with myself than if I had just won a round of Monopoly with him. But I think he was embarrassed, and as I rode by his house on my bike the next day, he bounded out the front door with said knife, claiming “I’m ready to fight Ryan now,” and making half-hearted jabs at me.
But J.T., of all people, was his girlfriend, and when she wasn’t (supposedly) making out with girls behind his back, she only talked about how big his dick was, which may or may not have been true, since, like me, he was a whisper of a man at that time, only about 105 pounds soaking wet. Since J.T. was one of my best friends, and J.A. was one of my best friends, I felt comfortable exerting my own brand of control over the situation, and casually mentioning that I needed to head home.
“I’m going to stay here,” J.A. replied, all eyes of the circle on me. I knew what was happening, and my heart started pounding, but I really thought we were very close, and my relationship with him was his most cherished. We had spent days and days and nights and nights together, running around naked in the cemetery after curfew, dying each other’s hair, taking long drives and telling secrets and emptying our hearts. To this day, it was one of the best romances I’ve ever had, and the fact that it was never consummated doesn’t hide the fact that he was my first true love. Its innocence was what made it so effortless.
I had no idea how to respond to this rebuttal, and even J.T. was looking up at me with anticipation in her eyes, waiting to see what I would do. Maybe she felt bad and didn’t know how to respond, but I saw this as a betrayal and secretly held it against her for months. The panic was rising.
“But I have to be home in 10 minutes,” I said. “I’m already going to be late.” I can’t imagine how ridiculous I must have looked, standing there in one of M.S.’s miniskirts, and a tank top, nearly pleading to be paid attention to. The fact that everyone else was wearing something similar, or even more outlandish, like a billowy sundress, hardly mattered. I was the fool with the spotlight being shined on him, in front of a bunch boys I wanted more than anything to impress.
“I’m not going,” J.A. said. “I’m gonna stay out later.”
The anger was rising. A couple of the guys had smirks on their faces, and I wanted to pound them into mushy, bleeding stumps, but I could not, could not, lose my cool. My entire future hinged on how I handled this situation, this denial, this crude exertion of his power over me, and how I behaved in the presence of him and his friends, whose parents saw fit not to even give them curfews, those ungrateful motherfuckers.
My fight-or-flight response kicked in, and as has been the case in countless other situations in my life ever since then, I played it cool on the outside so as to avoid confrontation, and left J.T.’s house, seething and desperate on the inside.
I was hurt, and angry. This marks the first time I can really remember in my life what has since become a pattern: responding to my pain with rage, fury and violence instead of just feeling the hurt and being sad. Even still today, it’s incredibly difficult for me to just be sad. I react to my slights, real or imagined, or any situation in which I feel I’ve lost control, generally with ridicule and a mean-spirited ethos of revenge. That night after leaving J.T.’s house, I sped down the dark and curvy roads of her house in the hills back into town too quickly, with probably Nine Inch Nails or Ministry blaring at deafening levels out of my car stereo. My tires squealed on the turns, and more than once, my heart raced as I felt myself slightly lose control of the vehicle. I told myself to calm down, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but thinking about their faces, their smirks, and the way J.T. didn’t jump out of her boyfriend’s lap and dump him on the spot for not sticking up for me made my blood absolutely boil.
As I reached the maybe quarter-mile, flat, straight stretch of the Beaver Lake bridge, crossing the still, black, moon-splattered water, I laid on the gas. My car zoomed up to at least sixty, and with the windows down and guitars screeching from my stereo, I wouldn’t even have noticed a fire truck coming up behind me.
The sudden force of the speed felt good, and I began to calm down, more paranoid about getting caught by a cop out patrolling the pitch-black roads zig-zagging throughout the hills searching for teenagers smoking pot, than about getting into an accident and dying, This danger should have occurred to me more than it did, my brother having been reduced to a near-vegetable only months before in a car accident, going way too fast, but I was sixteen and invincible, like all sixteen-year-olds, and I was fucking pissed.
The next night I called J.A. at his house and confronted him. I was humble about it, but made it clear that I wanted some answers.
He paused for a moment before sputtering out, “I think I’m going to start spending more time with my other friends.”
The words were few, but the meaning was clear: I was being dumped. I had no idea how to respond. I was speechless and my heart was breaking, but I got it. At least I thought I got it. What I was hearing was that I was no longer (or maybe never had been) cool enough to be friends with J.A. I would learn months later, from a reliable source, that he had taken this action because he was totally freaked out about the amount of attention I was paying him, and suspected (both correctly and incorrectly), that my affection was crossing over into more puerile territory. In retrospect, I don’t blame him much for this, but at the time he was the Spawn of Satan.
When I hung up the phone, my brain was reeling. What had I done? Not done? Did I not listen to the right music? Did I still pay too much lip service to church? Was I too trendy? No, fuck him, I was not going to let him get away with this bullshit.
I dialed his number again, and before he even had a chance to speak, I launched into a tirade about what an egotistical, superficial, dumb jerk he was, concluding with the lines, “And just because your life in Alaska was so bad and fucked up, does not give you the right to come here and fuck up all of our lives!” Yeah, hit him where it hurts. Throughout my speech I noticed his breath quickening, but before he could even get in a word, I slammed down the phone, lest he defend himself, or say something that made sense.
I’m sure that if I had just remained calm, and asked him what he was feeling like any rational person would have done, all of the ugliness could have been avoided, and we probably still would have been friends. But that night set off a feud between the Slur groupies, and my camp, (and all the poor souls in the middle who were friends with everyone and didn’t give a shit either way) essentially, that lasted well past graduation, and went so far as house-egging, car-trashing, and all the most vile and vicious shit-talking and gossip you could imagine. It stopped short of physical violence, but not without a fair amount of threats. Less stable teenagers probably would have been shooting at each other in the school parking lot, and far be it from me to say that it didn’t almost come to that. It was that ugly.
I would say how stupid all of this was, and chalk it up to teenage boredom if this kind of behavior wasn’t still my main modus operandi well into my twenties.
He came from the wilderness of Alaska with an attitude problem and a shitty home life. It was such a cliché as to be nearly unbelievable, but he was the most exotic thing Rogers, Arkansas had possibly ever seen. At least to my feeble 16-year-old imagination, nothing was more glamorous. He had shaggy hair that he dyed purple, and listened to punk rock music, but he was sensitive and played acoustic guitar. Kurt Cobain was his personal god (this was 1993, after all) while I was still listening to pop music and Nirvana was too “crazy” for my choir-boy ears. I have no idea, being who I was at the time, why he appealed to me so strongly. Maybe it was the novelty, and the fact that he happened to be gorgeous and smart and well-read didn’t hurt. As my friend E.S. once so eloquently put it, “half the school wants to be him, and the other half wants to fuck him.” And sometimes, the two shall meet.
As it turned out, his aunt was the piano player for my choir at church, and he was coming down to the mainland to spend some time with her after getting into a fistfight with his stepfather and getting thrown out of his parent’s house in Alaska. We hadn’t yet started school for the fall, which would be our junior year, and his aunt asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking him out some night to show him around, maybe introduce him to some people. I’d always gotten along wonderfully with adults and could charm the pants off anyone over 30 (too bad the majority of my peers I found repellent and unworthy of breathing). So I happily agreed.
I have no idea what we did together that first night, but I liked him. I remember him being relaxed and personable and very open about who he was and why he was there. Maybe he’d seen the movies too, and was playing it up, but I think it was genuine. I can’t imagine him not being terrified, and lonely and eager to fit in.
I listened to his stories with the ears of someone on a first date wanting to make a great impression, and I shared my own stories. That spring my brother had been in a horrible car wreck and barely survived an 8-week coma that left him unable to walk, talk, read, or even feed himself once he awoke. I had spent the summer in a rehab hospital in Dallas with my family, and returned just before school started, after missing the entirety of the first summer I and all my friends could actually drive and stay out late. I felt like I had missed a lot, and I was resentful, but cautious and riddled with guilt for resenting it, after what my brother and parents were going through. All of my friends were supportive and caring, but I felt like my feelings and emotions were too complex for them to comprehend, and for me to even articulate in a meaningful way, so mostly I kept silent. But I was angry, and hurting, and jealous, and felt like shit about it. But J.A. seemed to understand. He really seemed to get it, and understood the separateness I perceived us both to be experiencing, and after about a week of hanging out with him, I felt like we’d grown up together.
Once school started, the fire only grew. Being the most exotic dish anyone in my high school had seen, everyone wanted to know J.A. He immediately amassed a large group of friends, mostly of the artsy, misfit type, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I had something that everybody wanted: for while he quickly made friends, I considered myself to be his best friend. So even though this was clearly not the case, or maybe was, but was purely circumstantial, it played to my favor. I had never been popular in my life, in fact, I was the definition of not popular, and the one person everybody wanted to know, J.A., spent every weekend at my house. We hung out with my friends, played pool in my garage, went swimming in my backyard, watched Singles and at least every Friday, and often Saturday too, he spent the night at my house. For the first time, I felt like I was “fitting in,” and I started making new friends, and gained a confidence in myself that people normally associate with falling madly in love with someone who wants you back just as badly.
In early October, we all went to the annual Benton County Fair. This was a tradition, and the first year that my friends and I could go by ourselves, or not have to be at the gates waiting for our parents at 10:00. We gorged ourselves on hot dogs and cotton candy and rode every ride three times. The night was over too quickly, but on our way out, Jared spotted one of those recording booths, basically a glorified karaoke, where you could record yourself singing a song onto a cassette tape. He stood in the booth, and a video camera and PA set up outside boomed out not only his image, but the sound of his rough voice singing “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” by Creedence Clearwater Revival to anyone passing by. Personally, I’d never cared for CCR, and only associated them with the racist jocks at my school, affectionately dubbed the Dixie Boys by the whole town, because of their penchant for stringing up Rebel flags on the backs of their mud-encrusted pickup trucks and sewing patches of the flags onto their ratty baseball caps, and wearing t-shirts with slogans like, “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God.”
They’d called me a faggot every day of my life starting the first day of Life Science class in 7th grade, and on more than one occasion, I had narrowly escaped a serious beating, along with threats to my very existence. All I had done that day to warrant this attention was show up, but they didn’t like the way I walked, and one person picked up on it, and set the tone for the rest of my public school career. They had “rumbles” in Northwest Park with the growing influx of poor Hispanic kids, complete with chains and sawed-off shotguns. No one ever died, or to my knowledge, was even seriously injured, by even so much as a wayward glance in the cafeteria on Tuesday could bring out a hundred or more kids to fight on Friday, after the park lights had been turned off. These activities were more often than not busted by the cops, but they were legendary and somehow only increased the status of the gringos in most people’s eyes. They were the lone Davy Crocketts of Northwest Arkansas, struggling to keep the white-only status of this small Ozark Mountain town a reality, but with Wal-Mart and Tyson and Hudson Foods, and a phenomenally low cost, but high standard, of living, it was a natural haven for immigrants. Thousands of them started pouring in, many of whom didn’t speak English. It was a culture shock, and an unwelcome one at that, by most everybody, as far as I can remember, particularly the large Baptist churches that dominated the cultural landscape. (Years later, after I had left, the sheriff of Benton County, along with same said Baptist churches, would form an Immigration Coalition, to monitor the influx and keep it in check, which really meant, put as much of a halt to it as possible, along with a plan to wipe out the homosexuals, because “where you have homosexuality, you have pedophilia.” The queers had recently become a problem, apparently, because of their cruising at the Lake Atalanta Park, though I have no idea who figured this out, or how. But I can proudly say that my great-grandfather built and also named the Lake Atalanta Park when he was Mayor, and I can think of no other place I would rather gay men have illicit sex in the dark.)
But standing there that night at the fair, among the hay and cow shit and rednecks and their dirty children, nothing else existed but Jared and that song. To this day, I can’t hear it without conjuring up images of that night, and being transfixed by how much he sounded like John Fogerty himself, and how he even held the headphones to his ear like I’d seen rock stars do in movies and on MTV. That his Voice could come out of his skinny Body astounded me and I smiled. His eyes were closed, and all modesty was gone, or never existed, and he was a true performer, and to me, the original Bad Boy. He even drew a small crowd that applauded him when he stepped from the booth, and he smiled sheepishly when he saw them, as if he really didn’t know people would be watching him. On the way back to my house that night in my car, he made me play the tape 3 times in a row, with the windows down and the stars bright, and the temperature dropping. The leaves of the trees splashed yellow, gold, red, and orange in my headlights, and before long the first snow would fall and the brilliant canvas of Fall would be replaced by a premature crystalline white, covering every surface, even before Halloween.
As I said before, this was the era of the “grunge explosion,” and everywhere I looked, people I knew were forming bands that wanted to sound like Nirvana, or the Pixies, Soundgarden, Hole, and Green Day. My friends started forming bands with names like Egg, Alfred, the Soda Pop Gods, the Total Knock-Outs, and a million other incestuous incarnations that lasted a week or 2 and never had names, but from which forth actual songs sprang and philosophies were formed. Almost overnight I lost interest in going to church and preferred to start spending my time with people that read William S. Burroughs and Communist Manifestoes; people that dyed their hair purple and pink and blue and pierced their lips. A revolution was taking place and it was outrageous and exciting and appealed to my growing sense of disillusionment and anger and confusion over my budding sexuality. I was aware, even then, that this had all already happened 20 years prior, all over the world, but it had never happened in Rogers, Arkansas, and it had never happened to me.
But the Grandaddy of all these bands, and the only one that would last years past high school, was the one fronted by none other than J.A. himself. They called themselves Slur, and had lots of songs (none of which I remember), but the one that everybody loved was a cover of “Killing in the Name of,” by Rage Against the Machine. At the end, went Jared went crazy and belted out, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” over and over, you never saw such hysteria in a group of spoiled, white, bored, suburban punk rock wannabes. The pinnacle of their coolness was reached when, on the next to last day of school, junior year, they played an afternoon school function held on the track field, and had the plug pulled on them during that song. J.A. had gained quite a reputation by that point as being a “rebel” and “dangerous,” and he and I had long since stopped speaking. When his vocals alarmingly went silent he screamed and cussed from the stage, but nothing was done to him. I sat in the stands, rolling my eyes, and wishing he would disappear through a hole in the field. He had so much to fucking prove, and to this day, I have no idea which one of his personalities was the “real” one: the one that I had befriended, or the one that he eventually became. Maybe both, or maybe neither. I ran into him years later, actually, at a Reverend Horton Heat show, when I was up visiting from Dallas. He was really drunk, or really stoned, or really both, and seemed elated to see me, and then asked if he could have some money to buy another beer because he was all out.
Slur soon became It, the benchmark by which all other local bands would compare themselves, and in true rock star fashion, the girls and the drugs and the attitudes followed. They even started getting booked at the “jock” parties. The aggressive “moshable” music appealed to their angsty, white-boy anger, and J.A. soon became one of the first people I’d ever known to successfully straddle the fence between the jocks and the artsy weirdos and have true allies in both camps.
My friend J.T. was another one of these specimens. She had moved to Rogers in junior high, from West Palm Beach, Florida, with tales so sordid, we naturally ate them up and believed every word. I doubt, now, having known her, that any of them were true, but at the time we didn’t question them for a second. Supposedly, she had had a steady girlfriend who had gotten her addicted to heroin, and one night when they were out joyriding in a stolen car while strung out on smack, they had crashed into a cop car and been arrested, and her parents had had enough. They lived in a Brady Bunch-style, 70’s era, split-level home, with Beaver Lake lapping at their backyard. J.T. had the whole downstairs of the house to herself, with her own sliding-glass doors leading out to the rocky shores, which made her house a favorite hangout of ours. To this day, she will be remembered most fondly by all of us, by her cross-dressing party that went down in Rogers party history. Everyone that attended, regardless of gender, was required to wear clothing of the opposite gender before they would be allowed entrance. Only someone as sexy as J.T. was then would have been able to not only pull off such a stunt in such a stilted town, but make it a smashing success. We talked about it for years afterward, and half the school was there.
I had always had a bit of a crush on J.T., frankly. She had a disarming laugh, and an inherent ability to make you feel like you were the most important person in her life. She wrote poetry and listened to Bikini Kill and smoked cigarettes in her backyard, and defiantly made out with other girls in the high school cafeteria, for the sole purpose of pissing off all the jocks that routinely called her a dyke and wanted to fuck her. At my friend M.S.’s (no, that doesn’t stand for multiple sclerosis) birthday party, in January of our junior year, I got to make out with J.T. under a blanket in M.S’s darkened bedroom, while people told ghost stories. This marked the first, I believe, of only about 2 times, that I’ve been truly turned on by a girl with whom I was messing around, and desperately wanted to go further than we did. I remember my erection trying to burst out of my pants, and J.T. fleetingly letting her fingers graze over it, until I thought I was gonna go crazy. I took this as a good sign, as I was desperately trying to internally fight off my growing attraction to men and my longing to not only have sex with them, but to just touch them and hold them, and constantly wonder what it would feel like to kiss them and just lie with our arms around each other. Lying here on the floor with J.T., our legs and tongues entwined, and everyone at the party (including J.A.) knowing what was happening under there, was a real boost to my self-image and completely non-existent feelings of masculinity.
M.S. had been my closest friend since kindergarten, and to this day, we are still close. She is like a sister to me, and no matter what directions our lives have taken, or how far apart on the globe we’ve been in the past, we’ve never gone more than a few weeks without speaking or seeing each other for our entire lives. She grew up on a sprawling farm more than 30 minutes outside of Rogers, and as we got older and could drive and stay out later, the main source of entertainment at M.S’s house became trying to scare ourselves into hysteria. Every birthday party included a freezing (January in the Ozark Mountains) hay ride to the more than a century old graveyard on her property. We would always just go out there and stand around and look at the stones, and try to read the death dates, and imagine that the mud into which they were all sinking was some kind of portal to hell or something. Nothing ever happened, and her dad would always try to scare us, and some girl would “swear” she felt something brush her ankle, or someone would trip and scream, and everybody would freak out and huddle together. We knew we were being ridiculous, but it was fun, and always led up to the inevitable telling of ghost stories in M.S.’s second-floor, haunted, candle-lit bedroom, in her turn-of-the-century farmhouse where “people had died.”
This particular year, M.S.’s dad decided to take the hay ride on a joy ride around the curvy, deserted and pitch-black roads around her farm. As his speed increased and the cold, wet wind picked up, we were all screaming (with delight, of course, and fake terror) and clutching one another for support and warmth, but what should appear out of the darkness, but the one lone headlight of J.A’s newly acquired motorcycle. Ladies and Gentlemen, James Fucking Dean has arrived. Call fucking CNN. It was by far the studliest and most dramatic entrance any one of us could have imagined. We all went nuts as he pulled up alongside the trailer, his black leather jacket and silver and black helmet glowing in the moonlight like some kind of legendary, mysterious dark knight.
We eventually made it back to M.S.’s house, and the ghost stories, then the confessions, began. I don’t know if it was just because we were all dying to be understood, or to feel like we weren’t the only freaks around, but one of our favorite past-times for my friends and me was to play Truth or Dare, which always degenerated into a tear-filled, heartfelt outpouring of secrets and desires. That night, for the first time in my life, I verbalized my growing attraction to men in front of a group of people. I thought I was in a safe environment, and our secrets would never be used against us, but as I later figured out, my confession to a lusty, unattainable fantasy of boning one of the most popular jocks at my school, sowed the seed of J.A.’s growing discomfort of the closeness of our relationship.
I’m sure there were many layers to this decision of his, or to his intuitive understanding of my growing attraction to him, but honest to god, it never even occurred to me to fall in love with him, or to actively pursue him sexually. I just simply wasn’t that in touch with myself at that point, and I guess sometimes we’re the last ones to notice our own subconscious behavior. But I was in love with him, and I thought we were soul mates of sorts, and I thought I was his best friend, and that fateful night at J.T.’s cross-dressing party I was to be set straight in one of the most humiliating ways possible. It’s nothing now, thinking back, but at the time my whole world stopped and I believed myself to be the laughingstock of my entire high school. Probably no one even knew about it, or cared, or maybe they even thought J.A. was the dick for doing what he did, but my perception was one of being totally ridiculed.
It must have been nearing midnight, when my curfew was, because I went to find J.A., who had barely spoken to me all night. He was sitting with his bandmates, his perfect new friends, and though they intimidated me, I broached their circle. The only girl I can ever recall J.A. ever dating while in high school was my own friend Marissa, who dumped him only a couple of months after, and he was heartbroken. One night, while we were still in church choir, he inadvertently cut his finger, or ripped off a hangnail, or something, but his finger was bleeding profusely. His response was to grab a white sheet of paper, and actually scroll out a forlorn letter to Marissa in his own blood. At the time I thought it was silly and a bit creepy, but didn’t recognize it for the melodramatic plea for weirdness that it must have been. (Of course now, as an adult, if a lover of mine wrote out a letter to me in their own blood it would charm my pants off; maybe he was just a decade ahead of me.)
Anyway, I remember a few of the guys having girlfriends, including A.H., the drummer, who had been a friend of mine in elementary school until he came after me on my bike with a butcher knife the size of a sword and he got sent away to juvenile hall – in second grade! It had all been a dumb prank, since the day before my older brother and one of his friends had dared me to fight him, and for no other reason than I was dared, I did it. I held him on the ground with my knees, but didn’t really know what to do with him after that, so after threatening to hit him a couple of times I just let him up, no more satisfied with myself than if I had just won a round of Monopoly with him. But I think he was embarrassed, and as I rode by his house on my bike the next day, he bounded out the front door with said knife, claiming “I’m ready to fight Ryan now,” and making half-hearted jabs at me.
But J.T., of all people, was his girlfriend, and when she wasn’t (supposedly) making out with girls behind his back, she only talked about how big his dick was, which may or may not have been true, since, like me, he was a whisper of a man at that time, only about 105 pounds soaking wet. Since J.T. was one of my best friends, and J.A. was one of my best friends, I felt comfortable exerting my own brand of control over the situation, and casually mentioning that I needed to head home.
“I’m going to stay here,” J.A. replied, all eyes of the circle on me. I knew what was happening, and my heart started pounding, but I really thought we were very close, and my relationship with him was his most cherished. We had spent days and days and nights and nights together, running around naked in the cemetery after curfew, dying each other’s hair, taking long drives and telling secrets and emptying our hearts. To this day, it was one of the best romances I’ve ever had, and the fact that it was never consummated doesn’t hide the fact that he was my first true love. Its innocence was what made it so effortless.
I had no idea how to respond to this rebuttal, and even J.T. was looking up at me with anticipation in her eyes, waiting to see what I would do. Maybe she felt bad and didn’t know how to respond, but I saw this as a betrayal and secretly held it against her for months. The panic was rising.
“But I have to be home in 10 minutes,” I said. “I’m already going to be late.” I can’t imagine how ridiculous I must have looked, standing there in one of M.S.’s miniskirts, and a tank top, nearly pleading to be paid attention to. The fact that everyone else was wearing something similar, or even more outlandish, like a billowy sundress, hardly mattered. I was the fool with the spotlight being shined on him, in front of a bunch boys I wanted more than anything to impress.
“I’m not going,” J.A. said. “I’m gonna stay out later.”
The anger was rising. A couple of the guys had smirks on their faces, and I wanted to pound them into mushy, bleeding stumps, but I could not, could not, lose my cool. My entire future hinged on how I handled this situation, this denial, this crude exertion of his power over me, and how I behaved in the presence of him and his friends, whose parents saw fit not to even give them curfews, those ungrateful motherfuckers.
My fight-or-flight response kicked in, and as has been the case in countless other situations in my life ever since then, I played it cool on the outside so as to avoid confrontation, and left J.T.’s house, seething and desperate on the inside.
I was hurt, and angry. This marks the first time I can really remember in my life what has since become a pattern: responding to my pain with rage, fury and violence instead of just feeling the hurt and being sad. Even still today, it’s incredibly difficult for me to just be sad. I react to my slights, real or imagined, or any situation in which I feel I’ve lost control, generally with ridicule and a mean-spirited ethos of revenge. That night after leaving J.T.’s house, I sped down the dark and curvy roads of her house in the hills back into town too quickly, with probably Nine Inch Nails or Ministry blaring at deafening levels out of my car stereo. My tires squealed on the turns, and more than once, my heart raced as I felt myself slightly lose control of the vehicle. I told myself to calm down, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but thinking about their faces, their smirks, and the way J.T. didn’t jump out of her boyfriend’s lap and dump him on the spot for not sticking up for me made my blood absolutely boil.
As I reached the maybe quarter-mile, flat, straight stretch of the Beaver Lake bridge, crossing the still, black, moon-splattered water, I laid on the gas. My car zoomed up to at least sixty, and with the windows down and guitars screeching from my stereo, I wouldn’t even have noticed a fire truck coming up behind me.
The sudden force of the speed felt good, and I began to calm down, more paranoid about getting caught by a cop out patrolling the pitch-black roads zig-zagging throughout the hills searching for teenagers smoking pot, than about getting into an accident and dying, This danger should have occurred to me more than it did, my brother having been reduced to a near-vegetable only months before in a car accident, going way too fast, but I was sixteen and invincible, like all sixteen-year-olds, and I was fucking pissed.
The next night I called J.A. at his house and confronted him. I was humble about it, but made it clear that I wanted some answers.
He paused for a moment before sputtering out, “I think I’m going to start spending more time with my other friends.”
The words were few, but the meaning was clear: I was being dumped. I had no idea how to respond. I was speechless and my heart was breaking, but I got it. At least I thought I got it. What I was hearing was that I was no longer (or maybe never had been) cool enough to be friends with J.A. I would learn months later, from a reliable source, that he had taken this action because he was totally freaked out about the amount of attention I was paying him, and suspected (both correctly and incorrectly), that my affection was crossing over into more puerile territory. In retrospect, I don’t blame him much for this, but at the time he was the Spawn of Satan.
When I hung up the phone, my brain was reeling. What had I done? Not done? Did I not listen to the right music? Did I still pay too much lip service to church? Was I too trendy? No, fuck him, I was not going to let him get away with this bullshit.
I dialed his number again, and before he even had a chance to speak, I launched into a tirade about what an egotistical, superficial, dumb jerk he was, concluding with the lines, “And just because your life in Alaska was so bad and fucked up, does not give you the right to come here and fuck up all of our lives!” Yeah, hit him where it hurts. Throughout my speech I noticed his breath quickening, but before he could even get in a word, I slammed down the phone, lest he defend himself, or say something that made sense.
I’m sure that if I had just remained calm, and asked him what he was feeling like any rational person would have done, all of the ugliness could have been avoided, and we probably still would have been friends. But that night set off a feud between the Slur groupies, and my camp, (and all the poor souls in the middle who were friends with everyone and didn’t give a shit either way) essentially, that lasted well past graduation, and went so far as house-egging, car-trashing, and all the most vile and vicious shit-talking and gossip you could imagine. It stopped short of physical violence, but not without a fair amount of threats. Less stable teenagers probably would have been shooting at each other in the school parking lot, and far be it from me to say that it didn’t almost come to that. It was that ugly.
I would say how stupid all of this was, and chalk it up to teenage boredom if this kind of behavior wasn’t still my main modus operandi well into my twenties.
you are the bluest light
i want to join the anonymous masses and ride the wave. ostensibly i'm using this as a place to publish my current and future writings probably that no on will care about, but i'm sure soon enough it will be full of my raving existential crises. or it might just lie here dormant and neglected. fuck if i know.
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