Lady Sonnets

“What,” cried Lady in complete disgust, “I can’t believe you don’t understand my sonnet! I mean, you can read Shakespeare and Donne, but you can’t get my sonnet? I don’t get that!”

I didn’t get it either, nor did César, when I spoke with him three or four hours later.

“What does ‘condone’ mean to you,” César asked.

“It means not to punish or take action, or something like that,” I said.

“Right, but when Lady used it in her poem, she thought it meant to deny or reject, so it gave one line a completely different meaning. So we talked about that, and when I left Lady was lying in bed, driving Google nuts with searches for possible alternative meanings of ‘condone.’”

“I think she meant ‘condemn,’” I told him. “Anyway, it would work, if she did, since it wouldn’t screw up her rhyme scheme.”

Lady had her surgery three weeks ago, and her world is now reduced to the twenty feet between bed and bathroom. Except that she is also roaming through Stanford University, thanks to an online poetry course.

“So why Stanford,” I asked.

“Because it’s Stanford,” she replied, as if everyone knew that Stanford was the ground zero for poetry education.

“I have two other students who are critiquing me, and they always rip me apart. Snobs! But the professor gave me an A, for the sonnet you don’t understand!”

“I read it when my brain was tired, after a hard class,” I told her. So we resolved, we would tackle the sonnet after she got done speaking to Yesi, an ex-employee, whom nobody had much liked working with. All right, tell the truth: Jorge, the manager, had given an ultimatum—it was him or her.

“I don’t want to be alone with her, so don’t leave me, Marc,” said Lady. I was good with that, since I figured that Lady wanted to use my being there as an excuse not to have what would likely be a hard conversation. So what happened?

…the hard conversation.

So there I was, at the foot of Lady’s bed, busy writing yesterday’s post, and listening to Cristóbal de Morales, and it worked too! Except for the silence between movements, during which I learned…

“….you broke my heart!”

“…it’s just that I can’t trust anyone…”

“…you can’t allow your insecurities to run your life…”

So I can tell you that the hard conversation lasted through the de Morales, and most of the way through the Orlando di Lasso that YouTube, quite logically, decided to follow up with. Then it was time for the sonnet. Lady, like Montalvo, is of the opinion that all you have to do is read the poem aloud, and the meaning will be automatically clear. So she reads the sonnet:

Can I have your lips pressed against my own?

Boast to the balance of wine’s crystal orb,

From which no love’s tacit tongue could condone,


And drink at will the cause of its reward?


Tipsy shy your humble vanity’s force—


That leads me to dilute my manner’s hold, 


Pray, single soul, if not, one seeks divorce,


That you, as I, can own our own threshold!


The vintage cup at harvest time’s enough. 


May all my weathered seasons be the Fall!


But for two, love, decisions of the crush


Can only be hand picked, if not at all!


Consuming God is our free will bestowed


So your mouth from thus, I devote my ode.

“Now do you get it?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t do poetry very well,” I told her. “There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get.”

So she explains it, and I get it, sort of, though it’s still sort of not there. But that’s OK, since Montalvo has also sent me a poem, via a text on my cell phone. So we read that, somewhat guiltily, since Montalvo had sent it just to me.

“I like the image,” I said, and Lady agreed, though we both felt it should be ‘I am a flower growing in a cave,’ instead of ‘I feel like…’

“Hey, ‘I am a flower growing in a cave,’ is perfect iambic pentameter,” I told her.

Don’t worry, iambic pentameter is just five “ta DUMS.”

“I may write a sonnet with that as the opening line, just to see if I can. After all, I made Montalvo do it, so I should probably do it as well.”

Lady responded by smacking her lips shark-ily and rubbing her hands together.

“After all, if Montalvo can do it, I should be able to do it, right?”

Strata of epidermis are flying everywhere!

“And it can’t be that hard, though I had forgotten about the damn twist in the third quatrain….”

Lady has become the alph- hyena zeroing in on the kill.

“OK—so I’ll do it!”

Time for a kiss, and I’m off, asking over my shoulder, “Hey, you need anything?”

“THAT SONNET” she flared back.

Here it is, Lady!

 Flower in a Cave Wall

(Dedicated to Pablo, current-Christian, ex-gay)

So vile the flower growing in a cave,

Its thorny roots refusing rain from God,

Content to rove in beds of filth and crave

The dark, the dank, the peace of steps ne’er trod.

The flower all rank shades of wounds adorn,

Puss-Purple, orange, bile in green and more.

Of him from Blessed Mary then was born

From you, my love, my bleeding heart they tore.

He died upon the rough-hewn cross, they say,

I died the day you crucified our love

And turned to find another game to play.

Dear Jesus, keep my soul in heav’n above!

He died, was wept, and lifted to the sky.

I turn to him in love and yet I die!

  

Another Life, Not my Own

Today’s question: Should I be happy for Pablo or not?

He was one of my students at Walmart, and I liked him a lot: He had worked his way up from being a stocker to being a buyer, and that—if you can handle the pressure of having to sell twenty million dollars of merchandise in a year—is a great job. So he had done well, and the class that he was in was one of my favorites.

In that class was another student, who at one time gave a presentation on Facebook, which in those days I didn’t use. OK—I did, but I didn’t accept friend requests from my co-workers. Why would anyone? I spent ten hours or so every workday with these people—was I now to go home and spend more time—electronically—with them?

All that changed when Walmart and I parted ways; then, Facebook became my connection to the four hundred students / friends I had lost. And I quickly learned: My Facebook friends were a lot more diverse than most friends are.

There was María, for example, also in the same class with Pablo, and also a wonderful student. Her story was essentially the same as Pablo’s, with the exception that she had been married and divorced twice, and was trudging along the arduous road of single-motherhood.

She was helped on the way as many are: By a deep faith in God. Nor was it as much God, perhaps, as it was Jesus, and I knew that she went to an Evangelical church. But it was only after reading her Facebook posts that I realized how “Evangelical” the church was, and how deeply it was affecting her thinking. She quoted chapter and verse incessantly, and was convinced that the Godless—should that word be capped? Interesting theological and grammatical question—were imminently poised to snatch whatever last tatters of religious liberty she could still cling to. How crazy was she? Well, she urged her Facebook friends to sign a petition of support for Dolce and Gabana, since they were being persecuted by the gay Nazis.

I learned a long time ago: Facebook can bring out the absolute nastiest in a person, though YouTube, with its greater anonymity, may well top it. At any rate, I didn’t sign the petition, nor did I respond to her increasing rants that we gay people were threatening to topple marriage and Western Civilization into the abyss of sin and moral turpitude. Reading her posts, you could hear the fabric of our society being torn, slashed, rent, sundered, and burned. Presumably, we gay people were dancing Satanically on the ashes.

What made it ironic, I thought, was that Pablo, her classmate, was…well, my gaydar can occasionally blip, but my guess was that Pablo was either heterosexually challenged or homosexually gifted. And since I knew that she was a good friend of Pablo’s outside of work, and they were undoubtedly Facebook friends, I wondered how he felt about all the proselytizing and commentary.

Well, my gaydar had not blipped, but Pablo certainly had, at least in my eyes. Because Millie had liked what Pablo had written:

A mi querida Apóstol Wanda Rolón:

Llegue a la iglesia la Senda Antigua con una vida hecha pedazos, sin trabajo, en depresión, buscando llenar un vacío que había en mi corazón, sin identidad, creyendo que practicando el homosexualismo Dios se equivocó conmigo.  

(To my dear Apostle Wanda Rolón, I arrived at the Church of the Ancient Path with a life in tatters, without work, in depression, seeking to fill a void in my heart, without identity, believing that by practicing homosexuality God had erred with me.)

And who is the dear Apostle Wanda Rolón? Well, everybody in Puerto Rico knows her, since she has the gumption—or perhaps the craftiness—of standing up and telling it like it is: Ricky Martin is an ambassador from Hell. Oh, and she’s not afraid to tell homosexuals the truth, either, and that is that…oh, do I really have to tell you?

More recently, she had been criticized for having received a prophecy—stuff like this happens to Evangelicals—that a group of businessmen would buy her a private jet, since her “theology” is that old, well, actually Ancient Path: “health and wealth theology.” OK—I would call it swindling or, perhaps more politely, hucksterism, since she is the middle man here, between God and man, and her take is 10%, and isn’t that fair? Besides, is she to blame for a prophecy someone made over her? Who wouldn’t be happy, on hearing the news that a private jet was on the way? Oh, and by the way, it never arrived, or maybe we should be hopeful—or perhaps up the commission to 20%--and believe that the prophecy has yet to be fulfilled. The Lord, as you know, works….

Anyway, all of the Godless, in whose camp I reluctantly fall, were sniggering about this, and that was what inspired Pablo to write what he did in Facebook.  

Well, I read the entire post several times over, and came upon the telling sentence:

Hoy por hoy gracias a esta pastora altamente criticada por fariseos y gente incrédula se ha dejado utilizar por Dios para sacar gente como yo de esa cárcel y de vivir una vida de maldición.

(Today, thanks to this pastor highly criticized by Pharisees and unknowing people I have allowed God to use me to free people like me from the prison of living a life of evil.)

I looked, then, at his Facebook page, and realized that sometime after I left Walmart, Pablo had married a woman: He looks, in his pictures, to be quite happy, and he is holding a child (presumably his / theirs) with his wife sitting next to an older child (presumably hers / now theirs).

I pondered the whole question yesterday, when I wasn’t teaching. Was it real, Pablo’s conversion, his “healing” from the “sickness” of homosexuality? Was he bisexual, and thus able to turn his homosexual side off? What had his background been, and why had he felt that God had erred by making him gay?

More—didn’t I want him to be happy? He stands in his photos with a wife and children, and who could not want that for a friend? I am very clear—I don’t need everyone around me to be gay.

But I also wondered—what had Pablo found out there, in those years when he was practicing that evil of homosexuality? Because it’s a different world, now, for Pablo than it was for me, at his age thirty years ago. And in some ways, I had it easier—there were still bars, and are there any today? Because however much we tended to become drunks, the bars were community. But isn’t everything now over the Internet? Is there any community at all?

Well, I check it out, and yes—there are bars, and there are churches (not, thankfully, of that ancient path) and there are social activism groups, since we have a large gay pride march, and who organizes that? So there were things to do, people to meet, and a life to be led, if Pablo had wanted it.

Or could have gotten to it. Since was it truly the apostle’s doing, this loathing of the sin of homosexuality? Isn’t it more likely that he had felt that way all his life, had been taught that being gay was sinful and horrible, and had been ashamed and hurting for years before getting back on the ancient path? And now that he’s back, well…will he stay back? Anyone’s marriage is a mystery, but how will his fare? His wife clearly knows that he has homosexuality in his past: Will she worry that he’ll go back to being gay? Will she watch him, to see if he watches men? What will all that do to his marriage?

What will he feel, as he grows older? And isn’t it odd that I ask that, since that t was supposed to be the worst fate of gay men: We would grow old, our beauty gone, our money frittered away, our friends fickle and then…bam, we would look around us, and see our heterosexual friends and family surrounded by their children and grandchildren, and how would we feel? Ah, then we’d regret the errors of our ways, as we sat lonely and poor and despised while the whole world went happily on its way, leaving us only misery and dejection! Hah! See!

Did it happen that way? Sure, for some. But more often, I saw people who, like my uncle, had been married and had had children and grandchildren, and yes, that was a blessing. But there was a lingering sense that something had been deprived of him, and of all the other gay men who had played straight all those years.

Two things have happened as I write this: A heart-stoppingly beautiful man has walked into the café, and a sister-in-law has called, since there will be a family gathering tomorrow which of course I don’t want to attend but have to because otherwise there will be hell to pay, since don’t forget, this is Mother’s Day weekend, and for me not to go? Hah, better it would be to spit in her dear face!

I tell you this, since the beautiful man has left the coffee shop untouched by anything but some lecherous looks and memories from me. And it made me remember days long gone with Mr. Fernández, when the love and the sex was newly minted, and had the shine and the value of an ingot of gold. It’s just as good, and even more valuable, but it’s different. And how often have we borrowed against that capital? Because am I spilling any secrets when I tell that every marriage well, tinkers on the brink of insolvency at times? We, like everyone else, have held on when there wasn’t much there to hold onto. And will Pablo have that? Was there ever enough fire raging to produce embers to warm them in later years?

And my sister-in-law? Well, she is one more reminder of how deeply embedded I am in Mr. Fernández’s family, since it is absolutely natural that at any moment Marc can and must be called, for an affair as important as a funeral or as trivial as a search for the right music to play for the event I don’t want to go to. So rather than facing a lonely old age, I’ll have to have well-whetted machetes to break through the family ties that bind.

So I tell myself, I should be happy for him. But the question that nags, really, is this: Is Pablo really happy? Assuming that he is suppressing his homosexuality and feigning someone else’s heterosexuality, well…how could he be? For that matter, when I was trading my soul for the spoils of the corporate world, was I happy?

I ended up happy to have done it, and happier still to have done with it. But there’s a reason, I think, why the whole issue of marriage equality resonates so strongly. Every one of us at Walmart felt the same way, and many of us said it openly: When I walk out that door, I leave it behind me. Put it this way—everybody had a picture of the wife and kids on their desk at work. But how many had a picture of the Home Office next to their bed?

And so Pablo has been saved, and is now married and with children. No, I don’t know if he’s happy, or if I should be happy if he is, or even if he thinks he is. What do I know?

Well, I hope he really has been saved, and that God came in and did a good scrubbing, and tossed that old devil homosexuality out of Pablo’s life, and left the temple orderly and immaculate and straight, God dammit! Because otherwise?

Pablo’s marriage is a sham.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Jorge Departs the Doomed

Well now, just how bad is it, down here in sunny Puerto Rico?

As always, it depends on who you ask, if, indeed there is anyone to ask since where is Jorge, who should be making me coffee and comparing notes on the cute tourists in the shop next door? Well, Jorge is now in Miami, along with 334,000 other Puerto Ricans, at least according to the BBC, and would the BBC lie? Of course not.

So it’s beginning to feel like my old days in Madison, Wisconsin, since among all the other hardships of starting a relationship, the process in a college towns has a distinct challenge: People graduate. That’s great, of course, but then they go off to get an advanced degree somewhere else, or their dream job happens to be three states away in some unspeakable town. Do you follow camp or start over, hoping for a better outcome?

Well, Jorge had in a sense graduated, as well, since his brother had been an earlier statistic in the 334,000 departing Puerto Ricans, and the brother has a café or restaurant or anyway something involving food, and that means that Jorge can ply his managerial skills for the benefit of his brother.

“Man, I needed a change, ‘cause I just can’t stand this attitude thing they have down here….”

It was another curious example of identity shift, which takes place in our lives somewhat like continental drift. Because Jorge had been born up in the mountains, and both his mother and father were the real deal: They had the mancha de plátano (that’s the stain of the plantain, and the mark of a real Puerto Rican) indelibly on their hands.

So Jorge had grown up in coffee country, but had lived for years in San Francisco and then New York.

“Man, that’s when I learned: You got to work on time, and your costumers didn’t care about who you were. So at first, it felt really strange, but then I got to see, it was really the best way. So a customer comes in and he knows just what he wants, and he orders it and you make it, and that’s it! But the people here?”

Notice that “the people?”

“First they come in and half the time there’s nobody around to greet them or serve them, since Raf crashed his car and somebody else is sick so that means there’s only one person, not two, and that person is making a sandwich in the kitchen. So the customer—maybe—waits until someone appears, but does that person look up, smile, and say hello to the customer? Nah, he gives the sandwich to the other customer, and then goes back into the kitchen, since he’s pissed that the other costumer gave him attitude.”

“Wouldn’t work at Walmart,” I told him.

“And then, the customer who has been waiting for five minutes calls out to get some service, so the guy walks out and the first question is, ‘do you sell coffee?’ Like, how retarded is that? She’s been standing in front of a big sign that has all the coffees, all the sandwiches, all the food we sell, and what has she been doing? Checking her cell phone, because her cell phone is the most important thing in her life, so now we have to go through the entire menu, drink by drink, and she has to ask a million questions, like do we have any natural sweeteners like blue agave and do we have soy milk? Then, after about three changes of government, we finally get her order, but does she want the agave and the soymilk? No she wants plain black coffee!”

“Frustrating, I know.”

“But gringos know just what they want, and they order it, and they pay for it, and they leave! No attitude, no waste of time, no nothing! It’s so much simpler.”

“Tell me,” I said, “since just going to the grocery store….”

“Super-Hell,” he roared, though the real name is Super-Max or occasionally Super-slow. Jorge can’t go in there, since he once got into a fight with the manager, and they all but threw him out.

“I mean, I told this guy, ‘I don’t know what you do? Do they pay you just to sit around and watch your cashiers, as they desert their customers and go running through the aisles looking for the price of items? Aren’t you supposed to do that?”

So now we’re grumbling, since Super-Whatever is about as popular as a condom at the National Council of Catholic Bishops.

“You know how they hire them,” I told Jorge. “They have them sit in a big room, and then someone runs in and shouts FUEGO and FIRE! Then, anyone who has just sat there with their mouth open looking vacant—well, those are the ones they hire…”

“Very likely,” he said. “Anyway, the first thing I do is shout servicio when I walk in the door, since it will take the manager ten minutes to respond, and by then I’ll have found what I wanted, and joined the line where everybody is just standing around, not doing anything, and if you try asking what’s up, you’re the one with attitude! You’ve got the problem! Because it’s not about helping you, it’s just about putting in your hours so you can get paid!”

So Jorge has had a fight with the manager of the grocery store next door, and is now persona non gratis and probably can’t go into the store now, but no problem, since he is now in Miami. In the meantime, he is missing the lovely spectacle of an island sinking under a colossal debt, and a governor who is wrangling with the six members of his own party who voted against his cherished plan of a 16% Value Added Tax.

So now the governor is threatening to shut down the government, and the creditors have given the power company a fourth extension, and the students are in the streets—or at least threatening to—and the unions are closing down the access to the Minillas Building (where all the government agencies are), and oh, did I mention the water situation? It hasn’t rained, and so now we’re going to have no government AND no water. I know all of this, since Mr. Fernández snoozes through the radioed recitation of all this misery, while I contemplate which is worse: Just staying in bed and refusing to get up and deal with anything, or get up and face and hopefully resist the temptation of the kitchen knives. Not to mention the bottle of Scotch next to the television.

But I don’t stay in bed: I get up, I take my walk, and then go off to the café, where I immerse myself again in all this awfulness. Then it occurs to me: Birds! Since there is utterly, absolutely nothing I can do about any of the woes afflicting us, so why don’t I do what the birds do? That’s when the BBC came through, and what respectable blogger could fail not to read the list of the ten sexiest birds?

Well, first I had to take a gander at the wattle of the long-wattled umbrellabird, and then gaze at the satyr tragopan, and then look at the ribbon-tailed astrapia, and guess who long the ribbon is? Three feet, and you try flying through the forests of New Guinea with a 3-foot tail floating after you! Though it is undeniably sexy….

Then I came to the superb lyrebird, and here I can tell you: The world is in perilous state, since close to 15 million people have been driven to watch this lunatic bird, as it imitates car alarms, cameras clicking, and chain saws! It does occur to me, though, that while there might be female drivers and lady photographers, well…

….what’s the likelihood of a woman lumberjack?      

        

Plodding down the Midnight Path

OK—here’s what I should have done: Taught my class at 8:15, gone for a three-mile walk while listening to Cristobal de Morales, eaten breakfast, written a blog post, taken the modem to Plaza las Américas (the Caribbean’s largest mall!) argued with the lady at the modem place, prevailed, come back home and clean house. Oh, somewhere along the line I would have eaten lunch, checked my email, glanced shudderingly at the news, and played an hour of Bach suites.

What have I done?

Major news—I got out of bed.

If you are saying, “why, Marc, why is getting out of bed a big deal,” then you don’t have what I have, nor do I know what I have. But Andrew Solomon, as you can see below, does a rather wonderful job of writing and describing the travelogue of depression, and his central point—that depression is not just a big sadness, but rather the absence of vitality—is very true.

Perhaps you’ll say, “and so what have you got to be depressed about,” and that’s a logical question, isn’t it? Except we’re not dealing with logic here, or even reality, or maybe we are, since it turns out that there may be something called depressive realism. Why can’t I tell you? The Internet, feeling bored, stepped out for a cigarette.

So depressive realism is the theory, and you know what? Life really does suck, and even if you’re not among the four thousand people in Nepal who are—presumably—buried under ruble, well…guess what? You’re still going to succumb to one of those deadly conditions predicated on your horrible lifestyle, sicken, and then die, leaving sorrow and grief behind you. And normal people get on with their lives and eat breakfast and teach their classes and go about their lives, but Marc? Not today, since I got obsessed with seeing a wailing Nepalese woman keening in front of the rubble that is now her house—and I only had to watch that seven or eight times before it occurred to me: The woman was half a world away, and my watching the video was doing nobody any good. So—either send some money or not, but move on!

Move on, of course, meant the local paper, which is worrying itself about 85 people arrested for prostitution. This, of course, actually proves the point about depressive realism, since what was I, depressed, worrying about? Well, from my warped / non-warped point of view, the sexual peccadilloes of 85 people are relatively unimportant, since we have until the end of the week to cough up some unthinkable sum to our creditors, and the government obviously doesn’t have the money, since it says it’s broke and will have to close in three months. Sorry, guys, but does it take little Marc to point that out?

Right, then it was time for Facebook, which I was dreading, since the marginal possibility that anybody would post anything interesting was completely surpassed by the probability that I would be presented with change of profile pictures, pray for Nepal messages, and—certainly my favorite for someone who had to force feed himself breakfast—pictures of meals relished and devoured.

OK, so then it was on to YouTube, where I looked for—hold onto your chairs, folks—videos of depression. But I had seen the BBC video, and Andrew Solomon as well, but the thing about Solomon is that he’s stiletto-sharp and very funny, and so I went along all very happily until 17:35, when the video stuck and I spent several minutes looking at the little ball spin. In fact, I probably spent a good 17:35 minutes watching the little ball spin when it eventually dawned on me: First of all, great metaphor for depression! Second, hit the refresh button. And guess what? The computer gulped, remembered what it had been saying, and went right back to it!

This, if nothing else, told me: Depression is also a cognitive disorder, since would it have taken that 17 minutes for a non-depressed man to have made that realization? Don’t think so.

So now Solomon is talking about the stigmatization of depression, which is a little crazy, since we’re all taking bucketsful of antidepressants, so it’s sort of like sex: We all do it, but nobody talks about it.

Of course, there’s another stigmatization going on, since my brother—who has failed pretty badly as father, brother and son and feels great about it, thanks!—recommended a book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, by Robert Whittaker, and here, courtesy of Amazon, is a brief summary:

Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals.

 

Do I have to tell you? Simple explanation: Antidepressants change the brain nueroreceptor system radically, and patients who take them for acute episodes experience greater relapses more frequently than patients who don’t take treatment. And eventually, you end up “hooked” on the antidepressants.

Yes—apologies to Dr. Whittaker for the way over-simplification.

Well, I had read this in the months past and gotten annoyed—not with the psychiatrists who had given me these terrible drugs, but with Whittaker, since what was the message I heard? Chin up, take it like a man, stop whining and go on!

Of course, the other message is, “Get angry, get even, and sue that Harvard-educated bastard doctor who gave me the pills that pulled me out of a depression so that—on most days—I could write, teach, and even get out of bed!”

Well, I’m in this state since I announced to that doctor that my libido had flat-lined, which meant that I would have been completely happy living like a Catholic priest, since celibacy was as easy nowadays as singing in the shower. I am, however, married….

So on Saturday I had decreased my dosage of Lexapro 20 mg PO QD to Lexapro 10 mg PO QD. Sunday, I felt OK, though I did have a fight with Montalvo, who suggested that it was anal to object to his:

1. Missing the opera and

2. Arriving an hour and a half late to the dinner he had invited himself to

I had made it, three days—well, two, actually—since I knew what I had to do. So I took the extra 10 mg, waited the hour before it took effect. Then I got out of bed and sat down to write this.

Like Solomon, I have all these questions about depression and treatments and all the rest. Oddly enough, Lady is felled too, and is lying in bed, recuperating from a surgery on her ankle. So we are both sick, right?

I wish I knew. I suspect I will take the Lexapro 20 mg again tomorrow, and that I’ll feel better, and maybe even teach my class. Who knows, maybe I’ll even be strong enough for Plaza las Américas! 

What do I know?

I would ten times rather be Lady at the moment than myself.