Yeyo!

I don’t want to write and there’s no reason to write and just because I’ve been reading a book about writing doesn’t mean that I…

…have to write.

Or does it.

What I mean is…

Oh damn, that sounds artificial and yet maybe not, because who knows?

I don’t know anything about writing.

That much is clear. I didn’t know, although it seems I did it, that there is a second personal narrative. But somehow in Iguanas, I found myself talking to Eric on the screen—although in Iguanas it was on the porch.

OK, so maybe I have one thing right.

But the whole thing annoys me because dammit, I’m tired of having to learn things, tired of people telling me how it all should be done. Can’t they go away? It’s so bloody intrusive—you open a book and there it is, the hectoring, the rules, the gentle prodding and tsk-tsking. 

And yes, dammit, that’s a word.

Why couldn’t the book have stayed closed?

And why, if it had to be opened, couldn’t the author have stayed decently on the page, where an author belongs, instead of jumping out at me, and clinging to my brain?

Is that too much to ask?

Look, even my cats are more civil than that. They loll in the sunshine, yawn, stretch and most…

Ignore me….

Ahhhhh!

But no no, our busy little author has gotten right down to work, and that work is ME!

In the general irritation she’s fogged my brain with, I can’t remember anything specific.

Oh, I am to write.

Every day.

And keep a journal.

And not pretend that the two are the same.

No blook for HER, you see!

But most of the rest of it is jumbled, somehow, in the brain.

Which is maybe where it should be.

Why can’t I write with my fingers—not my brain?

Oh, and by the way—I know this dodge about serving the reader.  I know, I know—no one is interested in my petty struggles, my small remarks, my pointless irritations. Grow up!

Suck it in!

Great—did that for the seven lost years of Christ and guess what!

Don’t ever wanna do it again.

How wayward, how willful I am!

He refuses to see, the nettled Reader cries, that there’s something else in the world but ME ME ME!

Notice the shift in tone?

Not very well done.

MONGA!

It’s a curse and I wanna be done with it.

Why do I have to be productive? Why do I have to create? Why do I make everything work?

Consider it—I have the monga. This phantom disease regularly visits every Puerto Rican, and is greeted joyfully—bed, soup, television! And snoozing, snoozing—while the morning or afternoon traffic jam goes on without you!

MONGA—you inform the boss, and no more will be expected of you.

What is it? A myth that descends if ONE drop of rainwater touches your skin. In 12 hours, you will be limp (the literal meaning of the word), you’ll be congested, you’ll be sneezing, then coughing.

It strikes variously. With Mr. Fernández, a troublesome itching of the eyes commonly presages the syndrome. On other occasions, it’s the feet. Virtually anything, in fact, can signal the disease.

Well, I had been warned of this in nursing school. In fact, said one instructor (rather instructress...though for especially severe pedagogues, shouldn’t it be an instructrix?), there is something called the Puerto Rican Syndrome.

With good Nordic types, one probes for symptoms.

A dairy farmer carrying the bulk of his weight in his gut presents with slight chest pain. The alert nurse questions—shortness of breath? Left arm radiation? Quality of pain?

A Puerto Rican appears: the wise nurse questions—what are your symptoms?

Every sensation the man or woman has ever had will come spilling—rather, gushing out. Nor will the information be solely verbal—the eyes, the hands, the body itself will be brought into play. 

What one doesn’t do is ASK for any specific symptoms, for God’s sakes. 

In the early days I tested this on Mr. Fernández.

He presented with a headache.

“And do you have any itching under your fingernails?” I inquired.

This is clinically unheard of.

“Oh yes,” he crooned—I don’t know how he does, but he does. Or rather, he did.

(Has he stopped, or have I gone deaf to it?)

“It’s terrible—I couldn’t sleep last night, the itching was so bad. I finally had to put my fingers in ice water….”

Right….

And me?  Now? In the present?

Well, I certainly have congestion—my nose is running. I’m coughing, I’m weary, despite having slept like a rock from 8 PM to 4 AM. It’s now 10:42 AM—thanks, bottom right of my computer screen!—and I have had 6 hours of fretful stewing, that is, wakefulness.

And have not been productive.

And I need to produce something because if I don’t produce something—if one single goddamn DAY goes by and the world has not heard from Marc Newhouse…

…then

I’m gonna be a ditch digger!

The words my good father, damn him, said to Eric when he got a D on a spelling test in third grade.

So Eric had to run out and get himself a Pulitzer just to be free of the old man….

Well, it’s now 10:47 AM—sorry, but I did have to leave the keyboard and get myself a paper towel to mop up this nose of mine, which is now red and blazing sore from the roughness of the damn paper towel since of course, of COURSE, I can’t buy Kleenex.

What? 

Kleenex?

When you have some perfectly good paper towels that you mistakenly thought were toilet paper when you were crashing through CVS one day, months back!

We also don’t believe in paper towels.

A rag is perfectly good and doesn’t cost anything and is environmentally correct. And since you have the damn things, then you’ll just have to use them, disfiguring your nose into perpetuity.

Now as I was saying….

If the world doesn’t hear…

And guess what?

The world couldn’t care LESS about Marc Newhouse.

The world is NOT rushing to its feet to get to the phone to call me. The New York Times—shouldn’t they be reviewing Iguanas?

All right—it’s not out there, yet…but shouldn’t there be some prepublication buzz?

I virtually had to take a CHAINSAW to my brothers to get them to read the damn thing, and even so, it took them weeks!

And the younger generation?

A silence that fell like a fire curtain in a theater.

So now my body is aching and weary and—thank you Jack!—OF COURSE I can’t go to bed, or even the bathroom to get toilet paper which might be fractionally less abrasive than this triple X sandpaper I’m using on my nose.

NO NO!

Gotta sit down and right!

Damn, that’s write.

Well, wherever he is, dammit, I hope he’s busy—that father of mine! I hope he’s moving that damn woodpile of his in the celestial skies from one side of heaven and back—just as his damn Norwegian-American mother made him do—a century ago when he wanted or needed the damn 25 cents for the movies!

811 words, now, says the bottom left of my screen.

And can I please go to bed????

Normal

It’s wonderful, when at last things settle down, and you experience…

…normal!

It’s been a time when many things got resolved, some things got relearned, and other things were dropped.

And in the process, time has vanished or warped.

I don’t remember some things—Christmas, or New Year’s.

I remember other things—Taí sitting with me on the floor outside her bedroom, cab rides, a pharmacist checking side effects of Bupropion on her iPhone.

The first week of Lent, and a trek to El Morro. Facing my worst fear—hurricanes—and learning to love the wind, and to call it its name: Domine.

Starting to pick my life up again. Waking at a bit before six, taking my walk, eating a good breakfast of granola and yogurt and a banana in front of the sea.

While listening to Bach…

Coming home, organizing the day, starting to write.

None of the feared events in the anticipated dread occurred.

I’m not wasting time.

I’m not being unproductive.

I don’t miss or yearn for my previous life.

In fact, I tried to remember, last night, what it had been, in those days when I slavishly did my robotic routine. And I can’t connect.

Person is gone….

Or has blended in to the other people I have been—a night nurse, an itinerant cellist, an indifferent student.

And now, I’m somewhere else. 

There is such joy in it. 

Reading what has been dictated, seeing a house get cleaner, feeding and eating well.

A cat who nestles in the crook of my arms, in the hour before I start the day….

Getting to five o’clock, and knowing that my work is done.

And knowing that I know how to do things. 

I receive automatic responses from a publisher whose author I seek to quote?

I call them up, and gently tell a girl—she sounded all of 25—that I submitted the request three months ago, and could she tell me the status of that request?

She’s apologetic.

I reassure her.

And when will that request be granted?

“Today?”

That will be fine.

I go about my day, for which there is a “to do” list.

Most of it I will do.

Some I won’t.

Steps on the stairs—Raf.

The cats move to the foyer, I hear the click of key turning, and shout “Yo!”

He will cook.

I will do the dishes.

And go to bed…

…and rest.

HQ 76

It’s a curious thing when the focus shifts, and you peer out again.

It may have started when I heard music coming from Raf’s computer speakers. It was mildly interesting, so I went over to take a look.

And saw the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir performing Testimony, a debut by Stephen Schwartz. It’s all part of the It Gets Better project.

That I did know about; when I worked at Wal-Mart, I used to cruise the news incessantly—ostensibly for articles for the students to read….

(Really, I was just waiting it out until the end—which we all knew was coming….)

So I knew that that poor kid—the violinist at Rutgers—had jumped off the bridge after being outed by his room-mate…and I knew that kids were offing themselves in various ways after being bullied in school.

Then the axe fell, or rather the guillotine, and my head sorta got disconnected for awhile….

So there I was listening to the Schwartz piece—quite nice, quite moving—but…

…not convincing.

Why, I wonder? Why shouldn’t I be convinced by what is a very sincere, laudable goal—reaching out to kids and telling them, “hey, it gets better….”

Didn’t it get better for me?

So I called up Johnny, who knows about who I was, and asked him who was I. 

Anguished—is the upshot. He remembers reading Steppenwolf, and thinking, ‘wow—how did Hesse know my brother so well!’

Darkness Visible—to borrow from William Styron who, I just found out, took it from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

OK—so what about It Gets Better?

I think back to my own days of being 18 or 19—freshly confronted by my gayness, struggling with the cello, battling depression.

What did I do?

I went to the library and checked it out.

HQ76—the Library of Congress number for books about being gay.

So I read…

…and read…

…and read some more.

I was, I see now (and saw then) not a practicing homosexual (frequent term in those years) but a lectoral (invented term) homosexual.

Meaning I wasn’t actually having sex.

Not surprising, since I was the only homosexual in Madison, Wisconsin.

Or so it appeared.

I knew it wasn’t true, of course. I knew that there was a gay bar—The Pirate’s Ship—that I passed every day. There was the 7% Society—a gay campus group.

But I couldn’t get there.

It was a frequent theme in those years—people would ask: “how many times did you walk around the block before you got the courage to go into a gay bar for the first time?”

The answer was never “none.” 

The average was 4 to 5 times.

Right—so they were there and I was there and… why didn’t we connect?

They were reaching out, but I couldn’t grasp the hand offering the help.

Which is—I think—my problem with It Gets Better.

A woman who is vital in my life spent years anguishing over whether she could tell her father she is a Lesbian. Her father knew; she knew her father knew; her father had coped with the issue of his son being gay, and overcome it (not without some struggle).

So what was the issue?

What was my issue?

For I never looked Jack directly in the eye, and said “Look, Dad, I’m gay.”

I showed him the apartment that Raf and I were living in….

The apartment with one bedroom.

…and one bed.

He looked at me, grasped the situation…

…and I waited for the question.

Which didn’t come.

We locked eyes instead….

So maybe I had told him, without telling him. And maybe my eyes had said, “ask, and I will  tell you…”

There were other hands, reaching out. There was the documentary Word is Out—which I saw every time it appeared on Channel 21, our PBS station.

It was fascinating, it was compelling, and…

…I still didn’t know how to get there.

And it was almost a reproach—those brave guys who had crossed to the other side of the river, and were turning back to me, coward and afraid to cross.

But somehow I did, or am.

It never stops, you see.  

Which is why I found myself in the CEO’s office of Wal-Mart Puerto Rico, along with the Vice President for Human Resources, formally telling them that I was married, and that my spouse needed to be in the health plan. And wasn’t it just a bit inconsistent that Wal-Mart, so fiercely embracing diversity, wouldn’t allow that? Just because it was a “him,” not “her.” And then took a walk in the parking lot, to hear my racing heart beat and taste my dry mouth.

Yeah, I had done it. 

And I never, at age 18, imagined I would do it….

But how had I done it?

I don’t think we need to tell kids—It Gets Better.

I think we gotta figure out—and then give them a river chart and oars—how we all crossed the river.

Junk Mail

It must have been the weakness brought on by two days of non-stop diarrhea. Otherwise, who can explain it?

Why would I buy a book about RickyMartin? 

It was something about Jack, I recall—he used to do this weird stuff. I can still remember the letters from Westinghouse and the funny little corporate trademark they had. And whatever happened to Westinghouse? Where’d they go off to?

Well, things are appearing and disappearing in a strange way, lately. Starting with Sonia—sorry, she’s not a thing, I know that. But there she was, big as life on my morning walk, looking at me as if she’d seen a ghost. 

Maybe she had….

So we agreed that we had to talk.

That we did yesterday, after I had been rescued from Rock River (Río Piedras) by an angel (Ángel) who took me home. In his BMW. 

No, not for what the iguanas do so well. This is a respectable household, sex toys on the carpet notwithstanding….

And he didn’t rescue me from the river, although in a sense he did. It was pretty much a river—just flowing down, not sideways. It was a water zero (aguacero).

Now where was I?     

Oh—Sonia, whom I met with Nicky, yesterday. And the curious news that Whitney Houston is dead. Wow, I said—that terrible voice has been stilled! News to me!

“Whitney Houston is dead,” I remarked to Sonia.

“Yeah, two months ago….”

Oh.

Well, no stranger than learning from Cousin Ruthie from Minnesota but in Chicago (and at the Drake Hotel, no less!) that Romney had won the Puerto Rico primary. We don’t actually vote for president, but we do go to the convention. Well, why not? It’s a party—in several senses of the word—and we do parties well down here. 

OK, I was struggling to hold up my end of the conversation with Cousin Ruthie, but I was able to keep up by mentioning that Rick Santorum was, apparently, a family man, a Christian, a believer in tradi….

“A lizard!” said Ruthie.

Oh. They hadn’t mentioned—or boomed—that.

Or maybe they had.

OK—so Whitney Houston has gone the way of Westinghouse, apparently—or maybe they’re both still going strong. I don’t know.

I do know that I started out talking about Ricky Martin….

And that there’s a book entitled I (yo) in Spanish and the same book entitled Me (me) in English. Written in English—I did check this—by a Puerto Rican (Martin, or Martín) living in Gringolandia to be read by me, a gringo living in Puerto Rico.  

Oh yes, and I had bought the book because I really thought that I should get going. Stir about. Get moving on this failure project, because really, it seems the right thing to do.

Jack would do it.

So Jack wrote to Westinghouse—shouldn’t I write to Ricky? But what would I say?

That’s why I bought the book.

Gotta find out something about the man….

Well, I learned that at Wal-Mart—direct marketing.

And it started out well enough, for Ricky, it seems, is completely in tune with and connected to his fans through…

Twitter.

WHAT!

No. 

I mean, NO!

I am not gonna join Twitter and tweet to Ricky. And hope that he tweets, or twitters, back. It’s gonna be a letter.

But what to say?

Well, here goes….

Dear Ricky,

First an apology. For years, you were the butt of a joke between Raf and me at 12:01 AM on the first day of the January.

We’d gulp the twelve grapes, down the champagne, and then say, soulfully…

“and may this be the year that Ricky finally meets the girl of his dreams!”

That was snide.

I’m sorry.

We do it all at our own rate.

And curiously, our lives seem to be running parallel, but on different tracks.

And in opposite directions.

I’m a classical musician, you’re a pop star.

You’re famous, I’m not.

You’ve written a book about me (yo) and I’ve written a blook—apparently—about my mother.

You’re interested in giving better lives to third-world kids.

I’m interested in giving better deaths to ancients (ancianos).

So that’s why I wrote the blook, and that’s why I need your help.

Your voice is louder than mine….or at least carries farther.

We have, Ricky, you and I (not me) only one year—actually now nine months—to get the word out.

You can cheat the nursing home.

You can slip away from the party, go home, and die in your own bed—all quite legally, morally and comfortably (more or less).

Ricky—read my blook, as I have not read yours.

Who knows anything about me?

Sincerely,

Marc Newhouse

Jack woulda done it better….

A Broken Vessel

Your writing is elliptical, said Susan, my new sister.

Well, if so, then my music is too.

For today, the music she played was another Beethoven symphony—the 7th.

Nor does the “she” in the sentence above refer to Susan.

So, after the walk this morning, I reread the last posts of this blog, and it confirmed it.

What?

“Soy escritor”. I am a writer.

I said it first to the cab driver who explained my mother’s death, in physiological terms. Why don’t you feel hunger or thirst after the first three days of fasting?

And why hadn’t I asked myself that before?

Well, the explanation, to those interested, has something to do with bears and hibernation. Bears stock up and fatten themselves, and then use it all up during their hibernation. 

We do part of the process too—we have a natural trigger to eat and drink. But Franny trod the path of bears. Not fat to begin with, she began to lose her natural trigger to food and drink quite soon. And entered?

Mystery.

And why was I taking a cab?

I was hungry to see my old boss, who had mothered me for so many years.

Oh, and also to see the dentist, to see what could be done about a writer’s mouth.

I had fixed one thing, you see….

A broken vessel.