Relatable

I don’t remember ever seeing a movie or TV show starring Anne Heche, but I know I did. Looking at IMDb right now, I can see that she’s played characters in Murphy Brown, Donnie Brasco, Volcano, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Ellen, and Six Days Seven Nights – all of which I watched at least once and none of which spark any memory whatsoever, at least where Anne Heche’s performance is concerned. The thing is, I know I watched Volcano more than once (once in earnest and at least one hate watch after that) and I still can’t attach the vague memory of blonde hair to the actual actor. This isn’t Anne Heche’s fault. I’ve never been able to name a star of a movie, and if you put me in LA for six months to work at Paramount Studios I would return to St. Louis having claimed no celebrity sightings. It’s not that Anne Heche is forgettable or inferior as a human being. The problem here is two-fold:

1. I have a disconnect in my brain that renders faces completely unrecognizable unless I’ve seen you every day for a few months and then continue to see you at regular intervals. I believe this to be the same disconnect that renders all driving directions null and void. I know the directions to and from Washington University from my apartment, but only one route. If you put me at another starting point, even one along my regular route, I’m lost. I have to go all the way back home and start over.
2. Anne Heche’s visibility, her identity, is tied to her relationship with Ellen Degeneres – a four year relationship that ended twenty two years ago. Even after her car accident, which left her twenty year old son responsible for choices nobody ever wants to make, which ended her life on a day that she likely didn’t even think about Ellen, the first thing anyone reported was about her probable intoxication (valid), and the second thing anyone reported was Ellen Degeneres’s reaction (what?).

These two problems, and hear me out, are related. I’m not saying that I have a connection to Anne Heche that is inhibited by my face blindness and directional ineptitude. I have no connection at all, and still I’ve opened nearly every news alert on my phone with her name in the title since the accident.

Yes, this is a typical sort of rubbernecking that everyone openly ridicules and secretly does, but the turn of the spotlight from Anne’s misfortune to Ellen’s reaction is not just an exercise in poor taste.  It isn’t uncommon for a successful people to be tied forever to the ghost of failed relationships (hi Brad, Jennifer and Angelina), but here we are at the end of a person’s life looking not toward the life she had in the end, but the partner she had two decades ago – no, to the person that partner appeared to be two decades ago, back when Ellen was goofy and lovable and didn’t yet flip multi-million dollar mansions and have a net worth of $500 million dollars. Back when she had risked her entire career by coming out on her show and in real life.

The tabloids rushed to her not because of any current affiliation with Anne Heche and not because of any current affection the public has for Ellen Degeneres. There are entire sections of social media devoted to Ellen’s loss of any meaningful relatability with the average American. Her 2018 Netflix special is even titled, “Relatable,” and I argue that the title should have a question mark behind it.

But we got lost on the way from 1997 to 2022. The faces we saw on the cover of People and all the other magazines that we used to see when we used to go to the store and stand in line so that a cashier could ring us up don’t match the current faces on Twitter or whatever I’m supposed to be looking at right now. In order to recognize people like Ellen and Anne, we all have to go back to the beginning and start there. I don’t have much nostalgia for the late nineties, but I do remember being a just out lesbian watching Ellen sing “I feel pretty, oh so pretty. I feel pretty and witty and …hey” at the beginning of the coming out episode. I laughed and quietly cheered for her the same way I cheered for Melissa Etheridge and kd lang. In the pivotal scene, where she leans on the microphone at the airport and says, “I’m gay,” I, and nearly every lesbian I knew, felt seen and, well, recognized.

So what does this have to do with Anne Heche crashing her car into a house and destroying the possessions of the person living there and destroying the lives of her kids and other loved ones? Nothing.

And everything.

The four year relationship between Anne and Ellen was reckless in a recognizable way for gay people. It was that overly loud proclamation of true love that you make in middle school when you discover your hormones. It was the home base that we all had to go back and start from in order to find the route to a salon, where Anne Heche apparently stopped and was “coherent” just before driving ninety miles per hour into a home and burning it down.

We don’t know that face. It’s unrecognizable. We don’t understand how she got here just like we don’t understand how we got here.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and try to find the lesbian I was in 1997. Skinny, sort of cute in my short curly hair. The face that looks back is a 49 year old transman. Bald, a little heavy I suppose, and a decent beard. If I didn’t look at my face every day, I wonder if I’d forget what I look like. I wonder which version of me I’d imagine.

I don’t long for my days in a female body, but I do recognize them as the path I had to take to get here, and I suppose I keep checking in on Anne Heche because maybe along the way she got a little lost and I can relate to that. I suppose the tabloids know what we the obnoxious public need – a reference point to when we recognized the world and a spokesperson from that reference point. But that Ellen doesn’t exist anymore than that Anne exists and maybe we need to let them both be who they are now, which I have to keep looking up because I keep forgetting what Anne Heche looks like.

Spike 2005-2018

One night, anticipating a protest on our corner, we made a quick decision to close the store a little early. We had a cracked plate glass window and we worried it could get broken and tear gas could make its way into the store.  I grabbed what was important and headed to my truck. I waited there until my coworkers gathered in the parking lot. The protest didn’t happen. “Let’s head back inside,” Kris said. “Hold on,” I replied. I opened my doors and loaded my arms with the things I could grab. It was quite literally the stuff you grab in a fire. *1 black cat *1 cat carrier *1 bag of fancy feast treats, soft in the middle, crunchy on the outside The end. No cash, no corporate documents.If you wonder how important Spike is to us this is how important he is.Spike was the third black cat to make his way to the front door of Left Bank Books. On December 21, 2018 he passed away. There are details. There are always details. But they aren’t important. It was peaceful for him and unbearable for us.If you worked or shopped at the store, he probably greeted you at the front door. If you were me, he followed you downstairs meowing for his breakfast, lecturing you about being gone. If you are a dog, you no doubt had a run-in with Spike. He had bottomless contempt for you. His 13 year career with Left Bank Books included co-hosting hundreds of Author Events and book signings. He only upstaged half of them. He attended and contributed to every staff meeting and sales rep appointment. He single pawedly upgraded the bookkeeping computer to Windows 10 and created 5 charts from the monthly payment schedule. He had his own Instagram following and was a regular presence on Facebook and Twitter. He had his own staff picks page. His face adorns versions of our logo and store merchandise. There really isn’t a place you can be in the store without being accompanied by his presence. My desk is his bed, his treat deck, his cuddle pad. My beard is his mother’s tongue. I am surrounded by a mug with his face on it. His medicine is in a tray behind me. His bed is nestled between my filing cabinets. His food tray is steps away and his litter box is within sight. My computer screen is his face. If you wonder how much he is loved, this is how much. In his spare time he lived for treats thrown into the air like an injured baby bird where he could seize them from mid air with his claws, sit back on his haunches and eat the crunchy treat from his paw.  We spent hours in the used books section playing hide and chase the treat. He spent years trying to trip me on my way to my office in the basement. It was a game we called Death On The Stairs. He almost won. I could talk about how he was tiny enough to fit into my hand when he was a kitten and how his raspy meow, pink tongue and tiny cat teeth, (one missing on the bottom) were only outcharmed by his expressive eyes. But as Kris said to me as I sobbed at my desk, “Spike is a celebrity.” He had a public and that’s why I’m writing this. People came in specifically to see him. He really did know you. He remembered you from visit to visit. Sometimes he seemed like the only soft thing in this city. Sometimes he seemed like the only soft thing in the world. I hope we did right by him. His life was not on a schedule of convenience or commercial timing. He was beloved in the way only he could be. I had what I thought was one last conversation with him yesterday. I said I would be looking for him in case he wanted to come back in his next life as a bookstore kitty. It turns out that wasn’t my last conversation with him. That came in a lull between people visiting in my dimmed office before the vet came this morning. I was a snotty mess.  “Are you ready to go?” I asked. “Because I don’t want you to go. I think this is stupid. Don’t you?” He sat on my lap curled into my belly. “Don’t you think this is all stupid?” He sat straight up and looked at me directly in the eyes. I expected his demanding drawled meow. It’s usually how we had conversations about Fancy Feast and debated about his presence on my computer keyboard. He didn’t do that though. He just looked at me, steady and questioning. Or maybe the question was the answer. I wish I knew. After he died and I carried him to the car I sat at my desk as others shared stories. I was silent. I couldn’t think of what he’d done, only what he’s doing now. And then, in my shoulders and chest I felt the presence of paws kneading into my muscles and in my lungs I felt the silent joy of a curious cat unencumbered by the hard edges of this world. I don’t know what your beliefs are about life and death. I imagine if you don’t believe animals’ lives are important you wouldn’t have read this far. I think life is a verb, not a circumstance. Alan Watts said, “You are what the universe is doing right now, like a wave is what the ocean is doing.” The universe did something very special on the corner of Euclid and McPherson for the breadth of motion it takes to be a companion to thousands of readers, booksellers, authors, toddlers and masochistic dogs. We are changed for good, Spike. You are loved, my dear friend. You are loved. ReplyForward

The Day After Pride

The day after Pride there was a memorial in the Transgender Memorial Garden for Castilla. I didn’t know her, but I had seen her. I don’t know her last name. It was never spoken at the memorial. The many times I heard stories about her I never heard it. Sometimes she lived in the park near my house. Sometimes she accompanied her friends on their first trip to a beauty supply store. Sometimes the police cut holes in her tent. Sometimes she did jobs to make a little cash. Sometimes she lived in the trans flat. Sometimes she was beaten so hard she had to be hospitalized.
Castilla.

When Sayer started things off he talked about the garden. “It was started by Jarek and Miss Leon” he said “and a whole passel of queers.”
Last names don’t mean much amongst a family whose surname is Queer. Legal IDs are more of a hindrance than a help, and they so rarely tell the real story. They so rarely say who we are.

Castilla came here from Guatemala. She was legal. She had done everything she was supposed to do, but when she tried to go home to her mother she was blocked by the government because her documents had been destroyed between shelters, between tents, between meals, between jobs. Lost. And so she was thrown away. Lost.

This isn’t a post about immigration. It’s not a screed about the lack of safe and welcoming shelters for trans people. It’s not about the lack of treatment for addiction and mental illness for people who sleep behind buildings and not in them.

And it’s about *all* of that.

This year’s Pride Festival brought 300,000 people to downtown St. Louis. Entire corporations and the whole roster of politicians and local celebrities were there. It was the first time my niece got to come to the city and go to Pride and she cried watching the parade. She was overwhelmed. She had never seen so many people who were kind toward her queerness. It was life affirming and beautiful. Necessary.

There were, perhaps, 40 people at the memorial garden. Somebody’s Black Lives Matter yard sign blew from the cooler where it was propped against my legs as a late afternoon thunderstorm threatened. Two local clergy persons delivered messages through a borrowed bullhorn from handwritten pages and notes on their phones. Friends told stories. Activists told anger.

Chanting, the chanting I have grown to love, began with three or four and swelled to all of us. “No Justice, No Peace” Call and response. The kind that carries you like a good sermon from a fiery preacher. NO JUSTICE. NO PEACE.
We called to each other like so many other times some of us have called to the world, voices rising above the garden that we planted just for this purpose. And quietly, then mournfully rising to a wail, a fellow family member cried, collapsed and yelled through tears. Crying the pain in a scream that silenced the chant. We stood in silence and let those around them comfort. We held that space. And then the chorus started to sing “We are a gentle, angry people, and we are singing, singing for our lives.” The storm got loud. The rain started. The perfect coda.

In the end we looked around at each other. Fellow queers we know by first name – even those of us we don’t know well. We hugged told each other we appreciated each other.

In these ways, both fabulous parades and homemade funerals, we’ve got each other. Both are important. After all, Pride was a child born to the Queer family after a long labor of just this kind of grief and anger. This kind of homemade love. But I can’t help but think that if the corporations, politicians and celebrities would show up for Castilla we wouldn’t need a borrowed bullhorn or a fundraiser to save a sister from a pauper’s grave. We need to show up for both.

The trans community will send Castilla back home to her mom, who Sayer had to inform today that her child had died.
In every way the city around us, the state around that, the country around that failed her. We all failed her because this is our watch.

She was a trans woman. She was important even if you’ve never heard of her. She was a human being even if she had no place to go.
Her name was Castilla. She mattered.

Bruno

The day before the decision was made the decision had already been made. He must have wondered what all the tears were about. He leaned into my leg to comfort me and yelped at his own pain.

The air in the house, the place we cuddled, played and fought, was thick with heartbreak. Outside, the weather had been brutal. High 90’s heat. St. Louis humidity. Oppressive. But on this night, the night before we made the decision we had already made, there was a thunderstorm and after it, a break. A cool evening with puddles and wet smells.

The grief was a live wire short circuiting in my chest and radiating a sharp and sustained jolt down my arms and legs.

“I’ll take a walk,” I said. Kris was worried. Late night alone with my thoughts hasn’t been a good idea in a while, so instead I folded laundry, cried, carried clothes upstairs, lingered.

Kris went to bed and I rambled around the kitchen and let out our other dog, Greta. She leapt down the back stairs and made her way into the hostas.

Bruno couldn’t make it outside on his own but wagged his tail at me anyway and followed me to the bathroom, our usual pre-walk ritual. He stands by the bathroom door and waits for me to finish, put on my shoes and get his leash from the bucket by the door.

The house was quiet and there was nobody there to stop us.

I clipped on his leash. Just his regular collar. We’re long past the time of the pinch collar on this 100 lb beast. We stepped carefully onto the front porch then down the stairs to the yard. He limped and dragged to the oak tree we planted after the sycamore blew down. He sniffed and peed.

He looked back at me, the question on both our minds – how far will we go?

Slowly we edged to the sidewalk. He picked up a lumbering pace and headed to our ritual path, the route he and i have walked nearly every day for over a decade. His paws splashed in the puddles. We both breathed the clear air. “No rules tonight, my friend,” i said. “We are free and easy. It’s just us, me and you against the world.” And we both believed it.

I read somewhere that grief, at its essence, isn’t so much about death itself but the sharp recognition of a loss of that which you were unaware could be lost. And here in the night air in sharp relief was the beginning of the loss.

Him, injured hungry and alone walking himself to the bookstore to be found by Kris and adopted by us. The howl on the back porch because he was afraid of the dark that first night when we were too afraid to let him inside. His first bath. His surprise when we had his eyes fixed and could see for the first time. His perpetual posture of dismay at finding himself in this ill-fitting dog suit. The toothy smile and bulldog stomp when he was excited for dinner. Him wearing the ugly christmas sweater and felt antlers beside the tree. The weight of him when he crawled on top of me and guarded me from my own soul’s darkness. Every walk, every time – even when he slowed down with age. Even when he lingered at the same blades of grass both going and coming back. The pride in being his companion. The compliments on his beautiful one-of-a-kind self from passers by. The knowledge that the scene of us walking side by side on the sidewalk made Kris happy. His vendetta against the cats. His fear of both thunder and vacuum cleaners. His whole complicated role in our family drama.

The loss will continue to reveal itself.

Our escape that night lasted for a block and I turned us around. He’d walk all night if i asked him to. Even when he couldn’t move his feet anymore, he’d try. And I wanted to keep walking into the darkness with him, free and easy together side by side.

But I love my friend, my companion, my couch partner, my puppy pile mate; and he has given us all of his dog life and would offer more even in this pain, so I don’t ask.

I will not ask one more thing of him.

By the time you read this, I will have cried for days. We will have chosen between suffering and death. I will have sat next to him on the couch, and when he looked at me with those eyes, the left brown, the right a bluish white, I will have told him as i always do on the last block of our walk, “We’re almost there, buddy. We’re almost home.”

When I post this, our sweet, steady friend will be gone. There will be chew bones and beds and reminders of his life here. I will clean it up and pack it away. I will be a live wire of grief, and i won’t promise an end to it.

And still, forever, we are both exquisitely alive exactly then in the dark street, sneaking out after the rain, when there isn’t a future, but we are free now, and just for this moment it is enough.

Mary Oliver – A Devotion

 

Mary Oliver‘s Devotions comes out in October 2017, but I’ve been carrying the advance reading copy around with me every day.  It’s water-stained.  The pages are folded down.  Various poems are marked for easy reference.  She is in my head.

I’ve visited this forest several times over the past months, marching in each time without the vaguest idea what I needed and crawling out each time with a different message.  It’s a watchful woods.

There’s something sacred about the beat up ARC of Devotions.  Something that echoes the sacred place I’ve found here, deep in the woods, off the trail – alone.  It speaks the same language as this private, peaceful place.

I’ve read the poems to the trees.

It occurred to me that her words are a love affair with just this kind of thing. I had visions of the sounds of them carrying through the branches and across the creek bed, slipping through the spider webs and caressing the tips of the leaves.  So today I marched in, still without the vaguest idea of what I needed but with a mission.  I chose twenty of my favorite poems from the collection, typed them up and carried them into the woods.  I sat in the creek bed and cut the paper, punched the holes, glued the pieces of this tribute together and cut the twine with my pocket knife.  And then I looked for the place.  If you know anything about wild places, they don’t conform to what you want.  They are oblivious to you.  I sat on a fallen tree, disappointed and discouraged.  How can you pick one patch of an infinite continuum of perfection to make words float?

Of course, as it always is, the answer was right in front of me.  There is no patch that is better than another, so right in front of me is where I started.

So, here it is.  Twenty of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver, suspended in a sacred (to me) forest for just a few moments on a day that is like any other in this place, where life and death are the same motion and I am part of the dust and bark.

Top 20 (for now, and in no particular order – ever)

HOW I GO TO THE WOODS

WHEN I AM AMONG THE TREES

BLACK OAKS

I’M NOT THE RIVER

MYSTERIES, YES

PRAYING

DO STONES FEEL?

SEVEN WHITE BUTTERFLIES

THE WORLD I LIVE IN

CAN YOU IMAGINE?

AFTER READING LUCRETIUS, I GO TO THE POND

LIFE STORY

PASSING THE UNWORKED FIELD

I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE

BLUE IRIS

THE OTHER KINGDOMS

ON MEDITATING, SORT OF

THE OLD POETS OF CHINA

I OWN A HOUSE

INVITATION

About Not Interviewing Roxane Gay

This is not a post is not a story of triumph.  There will be no Facebook post with accompanying photo about my interview with Roxane Gay because there will be no interview.

Oh, I was asked.  My bookstore is co-hosting the event for her new memoir, Hunger. But like her book, the first book I’ve been able to successfully read beginning to end in 10 months – ok a year, if I’m being completely honest (I tried, Bruce), my story is not one with a neat happy ending.  Back in October, I melted down completely, spiraled into a horrid depression, and I haven’t been able to read more than a paragraph or two at a time.

My passion for words shrank to scattered thought, then slowly to short poems, then an article or two.  It’s been a nasty little secret until now, so when I got the email asking if I would be “in conversation” with Ms. Gay, I had to read it a few times to actually understand it.  Then I thought for a day or two before answering no, citing vague health issues.  I told the people around me that it wouldn’t make sense for me, a white guy who only struggles mildly with his weight to discuss such a tender, vulnerable subject with someone who has so clearly been subjected to mildly out of shape white guys’ opinions about her body.

The truth is I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to read in time to be articulate in front of a crowd.  I was afraid of being exposed as an illiterate bookseller.  A fraud.  Of course, I’m not really illiterate, not permanently at least.  The strange cognitive twist is that I can still write, but that doesn’t translate to intelligent discussion in front of an audience with someone as formidable as Roxane Gay.

But I regret my “no” answer now, so I’ll express my angst here in a public sort of letter.

Ms. Gay – yours is the very first book I could read, and if I had it to do over again, I would say yes to the interview.  Not because I’m an entitled white guy (although an argument could be made that I am) but because I spent 30 years in a female body I couldn’t reconcile before becoming this guy.

I would have loved to ask you about the bold, daring, stare the fear straight in the eyes courage it took to crack your life wide open in the pages of this book.  We have a lot in common. We could have talked about binging.  We could have talked about sexual assault, about being attacked from within our own bodies.  We could have talked about attacking our own bodies.  We could have talked about trauma housed in every cell that we want to lose, but cannot set free.  We could have talked about being so very alone in our cages – differently shaped cages, yes, but cages.  We could have talked about shame.  About touch.  About both craving it and slapping it away.

We could have talked about bodies, fat bodies, cis female bodies, transgender bodies, black bodies – all of the kinds of bodies that are war zones, that are property put up for public debate and judgement without input from the souls who inhabit those bodies.

We could have talked about taking up space and wishing we could disappear.  We could have talked about public space – TSA lines and airplanes, bathroom stalls and swimming pools.

But we won’t, and I’m sorry.  Sorry, not as an apology to you (you will be great as always and your book and event are not about me) so much as an expression of deep sorrow and regret that I had the chance to sit on a stage with you and talk freely about the experience of a body at war with itself – regret that I *finally* read something all the way through after months of sheer desperation BECAUSE you talked freely in this book and I couldn’t look away.  I couldn’t look away from the devastating beauty of it.

We met before, on your tour for Bad Feminist.  It was hot.  We borrowed the empty space next to the store to accommodate a more people.  I built a stage specifically for the event.  The air conditioner broke that day.  I was the guy with the fan.  You, no doubt, do not remember me and that’s ok.  I was being invisible that day, too.  But I remember you.  I saw you.  I see you now.  And even though we won’t do this conversation in person, I’ll take this small chance to thank you for writing this exquisite book.

So this post ends here.  Not quite satisfying.  Not triumphant.  Not neatly finished.  Imperfect and sort of selfish. But hopeful and grateful.

Dearly Beloved

I was getting my teeth cleaned when Prince died. I can’t be certain of that fact, but by the time I made it back from the outer suburbs of St. Louis to the bookstore and heard the news, enough time had passed that it was conceivable that I was discussing TMJ treatments with the new dental hygienist when he last took a breath.

Or maybe his passing happened earlier in the morning, just before sunrise, when I woke up one of many times wrestling with my cpap machine and rolled over, eyes closed but thoughts circling around and around the Trans Town Hall meeting last night, dissecting the countless ways I could have been cooler, younger, handsomer, smarter talking to the crowd of activists- each exquisite in their vulnerability and power.

Or maybe he had already died as I walked from my truck to the church for the meeting in the rain, first putting on a baseball cap, then taking it off and carrying the umbrella, then wondering if the baseball cap would have made me look less predictable, less depressed, less…just less.  Maybe he had already left the world then.

I don’t remember the first time I heard Little Red Corvette. My musical taste at the time skewed toward Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA.  It would have been a few years later, watching Purple Rain on a jumpy video cassette tape on a VCR I rented from the rental place across from the IGA, that I got it- the complicated sex muscling itself through the ruffled collar, purple suit and cape of hair pinned with sheer will into a pose of androgynous masculinity.

Prince was always surrounded by mist, attitude, music and sex in my imagination.  When I sit in my basement bookstore office and reconcile bills, he crafts moody lyrics in a studio somewhere. When I vacuum dog hair off the couch, he parts the curtain on an impromptu concert somewhere unfathomably cool.

So when, in the middle of a discussion about staff management, someone comes up to me and says “Prince is dead,” I don’t believe them.  It’s impossible that the person who changed his name to a symbol could do something as ordinary as die.

And yet here we are. The world is short a little magic now.  We’re left with a little less swagger. A little less sex. A little less… just less.

Damn it.

 

My Bernie-Hillary Struggle

Let’s talk about politics. Specifically this tedious primary race. I have to start in a church nursery circa 1983.  I know, it doesn’t seem to relate, but trust me with a few minutes of your time.

When I was about 9 or 10 years old I asked my mom if I could babysit with her during church.  The nursery at Gospel Baptist* was in a completely different building, a small converted house, that sat adjacent to the church. I didn’t care about watching the little kids, but I didn’t want to sit still on a pew with my dad, so I sat in the baby room with my mom listening to the transistor radio on the changing table. Brother Ray’s* sermon was being broadcast over a local station and we could hear him building momentum through the tinny speakers.  The toddlers in the room next to us had already built a fevered pitch so mom turned up the volume a little.  Just as she did, Brother Ray hit his stride. You could practically see him wiping his face with the handkerchief.  You could hear the calls of AMEN coming from the congregation.

“You can take this to the bank, my friends. This way is God’s way. God’s way is the only way. And all the other ways are the wrong ways!”

“AMEN”

“And I’ll tell you what,” he continued. “The Catholics and all the rest… the Pentecostals speaking in tongues, they’re all wrong.”

He got quieter. I was familiar with this rhythm.  The slowing and building, each swell outsizing the last.

“And brothers and sisters, I may get into trouble for saying so.  No, no I may!  There are those who won’t want to hear what I’m about to say, but I have to say it. God put the words in my mouth so they must be heard.”

I was riveted. There is no cadence quite like a Southern Baptist Preacher who has a belly full of righteous anger.  It is captivating.

“I’ll say it now and you’ll all be my witness, you here in the pews and you out there listening on the radio.” That was me.  He was talking to me.

“They are CULTS that’s what they are. The only way to heaven is through Jesus, through giving yourself to his will by repenting your sins and giving your life to Jesus, the son of God right here in this church! And I know I’ll get into trouble for saying this on the air and they might take me off the air but I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE.  I TELL YOU, I WILL NEVER APOLOGIZE!”

His voice boomed through the speakers.  I looked out the window to the church to see if armies of other religions had surrounded us.  I worried that the radio feed would be cut for his proclamation, that the heathens would try to silence him.  I was ready to defend.  Let them come.  We had the might of right on our side!

But the heathens never came.  We went to Wendy’s for burgers after the service like usual.  Still, that explosive bad boy/good boy fire stuck with me. I was intoxicated.

I didn’t stay with the church. Mom & dad got divorced and I’m queerer than they’d like, plus the higher power I serve now is bigger than a jealous god. Gospel Baptist probably wouldn’t have me back anyway. But good god, I love fiery passion.  I love the underdog. I love righteous anger. I love holding back the masses to preserve the sacred.  (I am a bookseller, you know.) But I also know about messiahs and how they almost always disappoint you.

And that brings me to this year’s primary race for the Presidency.  Specifically the Democratic primary.

It’s easy to point to a guy like Trump and recognize his self-proclaimed deification as ridiculous and dangerous. Cruz draws from the same pool as Brother Ray. That’s familiar and easy. But Clinton and Sanders?  They’re from the side of the aisle that fights over issues – not personalities.  Progressives are about secular politics, about civil rights, about rational thought and science. Right?

And here we are, supporters of both candidates,  loading our Facebook walls with 40 year old photos of arrests as evidence of civil rights involvement, un-vetted accusations of corruption, memes featuring the other candidate as false and untrustworthy-  bitter arguments among the faithful about which messiah is going to take us to the promised land.

The Clinton camp calls Sanders supporters Bernie Bros or Bernie Bots and condescend based on age and class. Sanders supporters practically paint flames and horns on Clinton, painting her as the embodiment of the establishment, the whole problem with the world.  The entirety of the Democratic base is in a competition to be the surrounded tribe whose underprivileged leader is righteous and holy and we are all convinced, CONVINCED that our choice is the only one. That all others are wrong.

And this brings me back to the church nursery in 1983.  When Brother Ray shouted into the microphone that he WOULD NOT APOLOGIZE for calling all other religions illegitimate cults he had the zealot’s rage of a David spitting in a Goliath’s eye.  It was Gospel Baptist Church of Effingham against literally everybody else in the world.  To quote from the  Tinker Tailor Solder Spy movie, “He’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.” To protect himself from that doubt, he had painted himself into a corner where his religion could not survive if others did and other religions could not survive if his did. There was no room for growth. No room to bring anyone in, just to call everyone out.  Incidentally, a few years later we discovered that Brother Ray had been cheating on his wife with the church secretary and he left in disgrace.

Sooner or later, one candidate will win enough delegates to be the Democratic nominee, and now I fear that each candidate’s supporters have painted themselves into the same corner.  I think that one or the other candidate could end all of it all at once if instead of vilifying anyone or naming their endorsements they just answered a question about a past bad vote or bad position on an issue like this, “I’m sorry.  I apologize for not being where I needed to be on that issue, but I am being the best I can be now and learning every day.  I am not a messiah, but a public servant.  I am a human being who learns from my mistakes and will do my best to represent you.”

The antidote to the overblown narcissism and bellicose rhetoric is humility.  Simple as that.  Real leaders listen. Revolutions succeed because the revolutionaries love each other as much as their cause.

I’ll vote for one or the other.  It’s none of your business who.  But I will say a Clinton-Sanders or Sanders-Clinton ticket would be unstoppable if the supporters of both candidates would stop burning the bridge between them.

*I changed the name of the church and preacher.  Exposing that church and his family would pretty much negate the growth and humility I ask for here.

In the Forever That You Are Gone

A poem I wrote for Transgender Remembrance Day 2015

In the forever that you are gone
No secrets will pass your lips
Your hand will not find mine and we will not share a joke.

In the empty sudden silence without your voice
I won’t wonder how to interrupt your story
I won’t not want to hear it again

You won’t have a point of view
Your favorites will become mundane
There will be no surprises.

You will not see what happened because you were here
And what is lost because you are not.

My foot will find your absence and I will fall into it
You will not catch me.

You will not soothe me
I will find no comfort in you.

In the forever that you are gone
I will know you by the balance of my hand on the steering wheel
The glance at a passing stranger
The drawing of the shade in the night
The yawning expanse of my reach to you

Layers of time will bury you
Generations of dust will gather you to the earth
The sky will swallow you whole

I will carry you into forever in the breath that I take to say your name.

1. – An essay I read at the Trans Spectrum Conference, St. Louis 11/6/2015

Today, at the invitation of a good friend, I pulled on my big boy pants and read an excerpt from a book I’m working on in front of a couple hundred people at the Trans Spectrum Conference at University of Missouri at St. Louis.  It felt pretty good to air out some of what I’m doing even if it’s unfinished.  So- I’ll air it out a little more.  Here it is – a random part of a random chapter in what will be a book about a random trans man.

________________________________________

The shoulders of my suit jacket were too small by an inch, and the sleeves hugged my armpits. If I crowded my plate like I usually do, the cuffs of my dress shirt stuck out in a betrayal of the civilized and citified version of me I was trying to give to the book editors sprinkled around the table with me and the others from the bookstore. My knee bounced and I checked the cloth napkin on my lap every few seconds to be sure I wouldn’t have to lean out of my seat to pick it up if it fell. I was sure the suit jacket would pinch off the blood supply to my arms and head leaving me a gasping, purple puddle on the carpeted floor of the exclusive steak house that the executives from Simon & Schuster had selected, and my charade as a dignified small business owner visiting New York City on business would come to an excruciating end.

I kept thinking of my first office job – a call center in Mascoutah, IL where I took phone calls from smokers of Carlton cigarettes who had saved enough upcs to send off for a prize in the Carlton Collection. My job was to make sure the gift they selected from the Carlton Catalog got to them. For the first time in my life, I could sit down to work. I called my girlfriend that first week on the job to tell her I had to stay late, you know, for a business meeting. That job would eventually come to an end not long after I took a phone call from someone holding their finger over the hole in their neck spoke through a voice box to ask how their duffel bag could have gone missing.

The invitation to lunch wasn’t something you could turn down, and when I thought of Steak House, I thought of all you can eat buffets and buttery rolls. My brain still defaulted to the Ponderosa dessert bar with soft serve dispenser even though I knew to expect hushed and meticulous service while seated among confusing silverware.

It was a large table, and I was isolated at the end with stylish and important women flanking me, chatting amongst themselves about important books while I watched to see what size bite and at which interval I should eat.

“Did you grow up in St. Louis?” I looked past the olive oil decanter at the immaculately manicured hand holding the glass of water, no ice. When my eyes met hers, she smiled and said, “I’ve been there once, I think.”

“Oh, no.” I said. I brought the napkin to my mouth and crossed my ankles under my chair. I silently scolded myself for using the napkin before the end of the meal. Nobody else wiped their mouths between bites. “Uh, no.” I continued. “I grew up in a small town in Illinois.” The three women nearest me paused in their conversation and waited. I took a drink of my water.

“Effingham.” I said. “It’s in the middle of Illinois where two interstates and two railroad lines meet.” Heads tilted in polite but tired permission to go on. “So it’s a crossroads.” Sweat trickled down my side, and I knew there would be a lake of sweat marking the back of my shirt. I was grateful for the jacket. “Our high school mascot was a heart.” I continued. “There was even a costume.”

When I give directions to Effingham, I tell people to drive east from St. Louis until you can’t find good music on the radio or cell phone reception. Then you’re there. If I need to reference a visual clue, I used to use the intersections of interstates 57/70. Now I use the hulking metal cross next to I70 on the way into town. I chattered on, trying to fill in the silence.
“Effingham? That sounds like a curse word.” Manicure smiled.

“It is.” I said and leaned for the first time on the back of my chair. We can laugh at this, I thought. We relaxed into conversation about hometowns. Each of these women paused before taking the next small bite of salad and momentarily visited their own memories of home and escape.

“My family is all still there.” I had relaxed too much. Awl and thayr had slipped in where all and there was supposed to be. I stiffened and sat up straighter.

“Oh, so you don’t see them much anymore?” The woman next to me asked. I forced my gaze to meet hers. Her mascara was flawless. Each eyelash was perfectly formed and feathered. I looked in vain for the usual midday clump in the corner or slight smear beneath the eyelid, but I couldn’t find anything to connect her to the girls I watched practicing with Maybeline in the bathroom mirror in junior high. Just flawless beauty with a seductive whisper of empathy.

I pulled at my pant leg under the tablecloth, a reflexive tug to cover up my Hanes work socks with the stretched out heel bunched up over the back of my slip-on shoes. My partner Kris and fellow booksellers were engrossed in debates with their dining companions about the publishing industry and literature, relaxed and easy. They verbally danced around each other in a seemingly choreographed small talk quickstep while I could only manage an adolescent nod from the school dance punch bowl.

I wanted to be interesting. I wanted to keep the waning attention of these women sending half their salads back to be wrapped to go.

“It’s a complicated story.” I began. “I was poor. We were poor. There was no college dream or expectation.” It was so easy to slip into my familiar hero myth where I overcome an early childhood in a trailer on a dirt road to emerge as a college educated bookstore owner.

“And then there was the transition,” I said. “I transitioned from female to male when I was 30.” My attempt at a conversational waltz had become a hurried fireman’s carry to the finish line. “My son was 10 and my partner was 50, so I went through puberty and menopause at the same time – with them.”

The three women leaned closer in. They glanced at each other and subtly,-so subtly that I wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t look for it every time I come out to someone- looked for the woman hidden away inside my male body.

I knew I had won back the room. I had told my story. I had condensed it down to its minor heroics and scandal and had caricaturized the mundane. We all agreed that I could never have survived there in that town, as if smallness is sinister and population multiplies intelligence.

But that’s only part of the story. It’s only the part that makes me look strong for running away. It’s not the part that calls me back there every month or so, sometimes less, to weedy backyards and broke down swing sets, empty streets and a full Wal-Mart, no-time-for-bullshit-stares and an extra paper plate in case you do show up.

And I keep showing up.

Alongside the oiled roads in the summertime, foxtails grow in the ditches between the road and the soybean fields. There are no cars, and the sound of an oiled bicycle chain rides with you next to that ditch and those foxtails, and the smell of a hog farm heats in the sun, and a bee sting on your ankle aches under a dirty sweat. There is the big sky and a lone tree waving from the field so far away you’re not sure you see it at all.

That tree, a beacon wrinkling in the waves of heat between you and it, calls you in and makes you set out across that field, uncertain if time stops at the edge of it. And you don’t know if it’s your future forming itself or your past folding back in on you, swallowing you whole under the swell. You just lay down your bicycle and start walking toward the tree.