Out There

She’s a nice kid, and she’s very good to me, as they all are. I give her two dollars and she gives me change and excellent coffee, which is a fair deal. Or I give her more money and she brings me food, and I sit and munch and feel that there are people around me. I need that—an empty house can be menacing when the husband leaves for work, and you remember a life that got shredded on a Friday morning two years ago.

So I like Nicole, and Nicole, it turns out, likes guns. I know this because I had printed a copy of the list of 33,050 randomly generated names and was showing it to her and Sebastián, her coworker. Sebastián is in my camp, Nicole is not.

Her father is an armed guard, and there are guns all over the house. Well, no—she says that her father keeps his guns in a safe at all times, except for the gun he keeps in his bedside table. And he taught her gun safety from an early age, even before she got a gun license at age thirteen. Keep your safety on at all times, he told her. Point your gun at the ground always, he advised.

The problem, said Nicole, is irresponsible people, not guns. She and her father are responsible people. And her father tells her repeatedly, “I hope you never have to use a gun, but I want you to know how in case you do.”

I told her—your dad’s a responsible guy. And at some point I began to see the difference between the gun people and the gun control people. I think I see it now, why there’s this gulf between us. Simply put, the gun people are living in and with fear, with the possibility of danger and violence. The rest of us are not.

Even on an island where crime is rampant and violent crime no less, it never occurs to me to be afraid. I did the trot this morning, greeting my neighbors, walking briskly towards a stranger. Did I think for a moment that he was anyone else but a guy getting exercise like me? Did it cross my mind—it’s just him and me. What if he’s packing?

Nah, I was too busy listening to Bach. 

But for some people, the possibility of danger and violence is real—so real that these people literally and figuratively arm themselves. And they regard the rest of us with a mix of incredulity and derision—can we really be so stupid about the world around us? Hey, it’s not always pretty, the stuff that goes down….

No, it’s not. But I have lived over half a century—more than half my life—and never been in a situation where I needed a gun.

I have been, however, in many situations or more precisely states where it would have hugely inadvisable to have a gun. There’s a reason for the term “murderous rage,” and I might not have seen dawn, those days when I was deeply depressed, if there had been a pistol in the nightstand as I rolled sleeplessly around in bed.

Taí writes an E-mail with some advice her friend gave to her. Get a bulletproof vest and wear it visibly, she says. And goes on to say—she’s a little uneasy too. There are a lot of nuts out there, as well as a lot of guns. And if a murder can happen at a public square at midnight—as it did a month ago, and no one has yet been arrested—it can just as easily happen in broad daylight.

The logic of this goes by me, since anyone who wanted to kill me could simply shoot me between the eyes. Or better, from behind me, at the base of my cerebral cavity. But that’s not my real fear.

My fear is of having to deal with the anger and scorn of people who feel threatened, who see me as an enemy, and who are in the mood and mindset to fight, not take flight. By good luck, I’m a tall guy, which has served me well. Nobody pushes me around.

Be honest—I hate fights. I hate raised voices and widened eyes and the chin thrust belligerently out. Even now, my stomach churns a bit, thinking about it. There are people who thrive on conflict—I do not.

So why do it? Why not sit home and write the letters and make the calls and post on Facebook? Why put myself out there, when I am so much not an “out there” kind of guy?

Maybe the answer is somewhere in the document below.

The bound copy of the list of 33,050 names

Plus ça change...

Well, well—time to dust off the high school French, which I did by consulting, as always, Wikipedia. So here it is: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or I suppose I could tax my brains a bit and figure out who said—in Latin—that there is nothing new under the sun.

Certainly not the Caribbean sun, shining so brightly on tourists and dropping conveniently away when it’s time to do what we do very well down here.

Smuggling.

Here’s how it works. We send up the drugs. You send down the guns.

That white powder that isn’t talc but is occasionally mixed with it has to come through somewhere. It used to be Mexico, but then things got a little hot up there. So the game changed to Puerto Rico, which famously, in the words of an early 20^th century US Supreme Court decision, is not the United States but “pertains” to the United States. (Anybody up there who can explain that, please give me a call. Been wondering for years….) In other words, no customs. If you can get the drugs in, you can send them in any aircraft, cargo container, or package through the US mail or FedEx.

So the drug traffickers have recreated the Middle Passage, though in this case it’s South America to the Caribbean, not Africa, and now it drugs, not slaves. But don’t imagine that it was Sam Walton who dreamed up logistics, though he did further it a bit. Nobody loves an empty ship.

And here, I take a deep breath and concede—maybe—a point to the NRA. “Outlaw guns and then only the outlaws will have guns!” they cry. (Nice turn of phrase, hunh? Great little marketing slogan….) Because Puerto Rico has probably the strictest laws in the nation about guns.

For one thing, they’re not considered a right. But let the Orlando Sentinel tell the story:

Buying a gun legally in Puerto Rico takes six to 18 months to complete paperwork and convince a police board that the applicant needs a gun. Puerto Rico does not consider gun ownership a right, said Edgardo Nieves, Rossello's spokesman.

By comparison, Florida residents only need to turn to a flea market, gun show or their newspaper's classified advertising section to buy without restriction.

And happily for everyone but the victims, it’s quite profitable. You buy a gun from Craig’s List for three hundred bucks, and you can sell it for three or four times as much on the streets of San Juan.

Well, with a deal like that, everybody wants in, right? So you’ve got your own little business started and established—a punto that is selling cocaine and heroin and god knows whatever else. And then some punk decides to move in on your territory. You gonna let that happen?

Fortunately, there are people who can help you. Sure, it costs, but money is not a problem. This is a business expense.

Now there used to be a little honor—the hit man killed in the punto, not stores or restaurants, or anywhere they could find the intended victim. So if you weren’t suicidal, you stayed away from the puntos. Now, if you’re not suicidal you stay home.

Two points. I may not be ready to concede the logic of “only the outlaws will have guns” to the NRA. It may be if the rest of the nation had our strict gun laws, there wouldn’t be the price difference that makes trafficking them into Puerto Rico so attractive. It might also be that there would be far fewer guns in the fifty states.

Second point—I read yesterday about the Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They are a significant group of 800 mayors; the mayors of Clairon, Clarks Summit, and Felton—to name three towns in Pennsylvania—have all signed a pledge. They’re gonna fight illegal guns, which make up the vast majority of weapons in Puerto Rico.

Well, we have a new mayor in San Juan, a lady who is busy trying to come up with the 800 million dollars that she needs to run the city. That’s daunting.

But what about the old mayor? The guy that put up all the signs announcing the projects that never got the money to get done? He’d been around for 12 years; in that time, why hadn’t he signed on? The group, by the way, is headed by the mayors of New York City and Boston. So they found the time…..

I’ve written about two of the three ingredients in this explosive stew. Here’s the third…

…money.

An Inhabited Life

It’s well past obsession and most of the way into electronic stalking, this interest I have in Martha Argerich. It started out with seeing her play, which is a riveting experience. Here’s the conductor Antonio Pappano:

“It’s impossible to separate the person from the musician – she is music. First of all, what a dynamo! Despite all the energy and mercuriality she has in her playing she manages to get every nuance along the way – which very few pianists can do.

You can’t put her in a cage, you can’t put her in a box, she’s a free spirit. She has such class, such old-world elegance, it’s from another era, almost…  just wonderful!” says conductor Antonio Pappano.

True enough. What Pappano doesn’t comment on is her technique, for which the adjective of choice among commentators is “prodigious.” And she admits it: her natural preference is for a faster, rather than slower, tempo. To see her play a section of octaves in the Tchaikovsky Concerto is akin to watching a landscape from a speeding train. It almost makes you queasy.

She wears no makeup since her trademark hair usually ends up covering her face, anyway, so why bother? Nor is she entirely sure of her nationality, since she rarely returns to her land of birth, Argentina, and has lived in Europe most of her life. Her English is excellent, as is her French, Spanish, Italian, and German.

She arrives to study with Gulda at age fourteen; Peron made it possible by appointing Argerich’s parents to the Argentine Embassy in Vienna. At age sixteen, she has won two major competitions, and is travelling alone and performing in Europe. Here’s her description of the time.

When I was seventeen I lived like a forty-year old. I wanted to have the life of a young student, other people of my age were free, had fun, had no stage fright. I found that my life was sad. I’d travel a lot, on my own. I was very shy, I still am because I think that you stay shy. Today, it’s true, I have friends everywhere, and they look after me,” she smiles. 

Catch that reference to stage fright? Here’s the New York Times on the subject.

Like other legendary performers, including the cellist Pablo Casals and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, Ms. Argerich has suffered from stage fright. “Sometimes I was in terrible panics,” she says ruefully. “I’d imagine the worst things, imagine a full hall. It’s terrible.” Her knees would tremble so forcibly, she says, that her feet would inadvertently bang on the floor, and she suffered chills and runny noses.

It’s hard to believe, looking at her, that she has anything but supreme confidence and nerves. And really, Argerich on her worst day would be way ahead of most concert pianists. But the anxiety and loneliness got so bad that she stopped her career when she was 19 or 20, went to New York, and, in the words of the Times, “spent a few years watching late-night television.”

She decided in midcareer that she really preferred making music with others, so she turned to chamber music, at which she excels. And she is not a lady who tells all, who reveals all. There’s a mystery about her, there are curtains firmly drawn in her life. She stated once that she wasn’t “lucky” in the marriage department, and that was that.

She surprises. No, she doesn’t enjoy playing, she’s working too hard, it’s not fun any more. She doesn’t know what she thinks about the second movement of the Ravel, and then corrects herself: she enjoys it if she’s hearing, not playing, the music. Her head, when she speaks, is so often bent to her right, as if she is pondering something. The eyes drift up as she considers her response. At times she answers the question instantly, at other times she pauses, thinks, ruminates. And always, she ends each response with a smile that lights her face better than a spotlight.

She is intense, private, and very intelligent. She’s a bit removed, distanced from herself and life. One senses—she has given more joy to others than she has herself received. And she has worked very hard to do so.

Has she lived? Or has she rather been inhabited by that prodigious technique, that enormous talent, that driving and driven demon that pushes her—nose running and knees trembling—onto the stage so many nights? 

Not Enough

There was a time when women had two paths to follow in life and no, you couldn’t choose both. You could go to the university, eye the male goods carefully, become engaged and then get married. You were then a wife and mother until the day you died, barring unforeseen events in life— divorce or death. The other choice was to become a “professional woman”—a name I still find funny—and that meant that, well, dear… you were doing the best you could. You couldn’t find a man. You might not even like men, and therefore…well, let’s just say no more, right?

“It was perfectly fine,” said Franny, when I asked her about it all. “Really, if you didn’t know there was an alternative, you just went along and never gave it a thought. It was only in the sixties, when women started protesting, that it got hard…”

Eric remembers a different story, when Franny was out chasing ambulances, remembering her days as a crime reporter. What was she going to do all day, since the kids were all in school?

I tell you this because I am, in part, in the same boat. There was a time when coming out as a gay man was sufficiently big, sufficiently challenging and risky that that was all you thought about. You hoped your friends and family would be OK. You also hoped that your career wouldn’t suffer and that thugs wouldn’t bash you as you left the bar going to your car.

What you didn’t think about was kids—they didn’t enter the equation. But yesterday I passed Hola magazine in CVS, and who’s on the cover? Elton John, his husband, and their two kids.

The world has changed, for some of us at least. Women can now have careers and babies; gay men can have kids. Which may be why I, after several scotches, left the party late that December night to steal away and cry. I had been watching Quique, Raf’s and my nephew, holding his four-year old daughter. It was a natural thing for him, parenthood, but a strange and wonderful world for me. One that I’ll never know.

And one that I wish I knew, and had lived in.

“I just feel additional,” I’m telling Jeanne. She had been hurt that I seemed distant, remote, more the Marc Newhouse Show than Marc. And it’s true—look, is any uncle important? Mine weren’t—one of them (sorry, Brian, if you’re reading this) was a religious fanatic, the other innocuous and married to a seriously stupid woman, and the third was a pederast. Right, the avuncular experience may not have been an F, but it was definitely below average.

When Franny was there, I was something. I was a son, which was a connection that was primal and primary. When she wasn’t there, I was just a brother or an uncle—which felt like, well, not much. I was the spear-carrier in Aida—decorative, but nobody’s gonna ask me to sing.

“I totally get that,” says Jeanne soothingly. It’s ten AM, I’ve left the house to go sit under the microwave towers for better reception, people are passing me on the street, and I am…

…bawling my eyes out for the children I never had.

She’s gone from being hurt and angry to understanding the situation. As do I. Somehow, the love that John and Jeanne can give me—and my nephew and nieces as well—wasn’t the love I wanted. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a little girl who automatically grabs daddy’s hand to be pulled into a lap. It’s automatic, now, for Quique. He barely notices the child on his lap; I can’t take my eyes off her.

So we’re better, Jeanne and I, and I come home exhausted. What I should have done was go and cry—it’s better out than in. Instead I busied myself with a post, and then checked on Facebook. Where there was a message from a guy—Meek Mill. “I want a gay daddy,” he writes.

I think of Sonia: “the Puerto Rico gods are never subtle….”

OK, check out Meek Mill by going to Google. And yup, he’s there and he’s a…

Hip-hop singer!

Well, it’s true, that old cliché, about not getting to pick your family. So I steeled myself, I who had been listening to Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) that morning, to listen to Meek Mill. I devoted ten minutes to the task.

Sorry, Meek, but it was a YouTube clip that was best listened to with the mute button on. Every line ended either with “niggah” or “bitch.” It was music to accompany a riot.

Right—and why would a guy who apparently is well known in the hip-hop world want an aging, classical musician for an uncle?

Well, I didn’t know. Do I take it seriously? The clip had over a million hits, and the Facebook page had thousands of followers. Hey, I reasoned, maybe it’s legit! Maybe he’ll tweet about Iguanas—or even read it!—and then I’ll have a zillion sales and can retire to Cuba! Or we can do a cross-over album! Fame, fortune, stalkers and paparazzi! Wow!

One terrible thing about me is that I always assume that things are what they appear. A hip-hop performer in Philadelphia wants a gay daddy? No problem—I’m on my way to the airport.

It’s for this reason that I have doña Taí. She’s much more realistic, and has checked out Meek. And no, it’s not a hip-hop artist but a kid in Ghana who idolizes the real Meek and whose Facebook page has three prominent characteristics:

1.     Atrocious spelling

2.     Copious mention of weed

3.     Pictures of the guy with staggering amounts of cash

A kid who “worked” at Western Union but now, apparently, doesn’t and who is now my Facebook friend and gonna be my son!

Hmmmmmmm…….

Taí!!!!

Help!

Two Phelps and a Geek

Some days it’s a challenge, a daily blog. Is anybody reading? Is it worth it? And what to write about, today?

It happened, though, that Mr. Fernández announced the topic last night at the computer.

“Wow—two of Phelps’s kids have left the church!”

“WHAT!”

“Yeah, and they’ve issued an apology and been excommunicated or whatever from the church.”

OK, if you’re gay or Jewish or Chinese or even just sane, you do what I did: click off the iPad Sudoku and pop over to the computer. No, not because of any tendency of Mr. Fernández to lie—there’s just some stuff you’ve got to see.

For the benefit of anybody who’s been living in a salt mine for the last twenty years, the “Reverend” Phelps has been traveling the country for the last two decades protesting at fallen soldiers’ funerals, since God hates fags, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s revenge or curse on the United States for being Godless and endorsing homosexuality.

This, practicing the understating for which I am famed, raised eyebrows of all of America and a good part of the world.  

They certainly practice no discrimination in who they hate. Actually, I’ll do it the opposite way, since compiling the hate list would wear the skin off my fingers. Here, then, is the one group they love.

The Phelps family!

Who make up the Westboro Baptist Church, which carries surprising weight for a congregation of forty (most named—guess what—Phelps! One thinks of Mark Twain, out in Utah, discovering that nine of ten Mormons were named Smith….) Well, if you stand outside a Matt Shepard’s funeral with a sign like the one below, you’ll get attention.

So much attention, in fact, that a British filmmaker, making a documentary, titled his work “The Most Hated Family in America.”

And one not unfamiliar with courtrooms. In fact, they sailed into the biggest court in the nation—you know, the one in Washington DC with the big steps—and came out an 8 to 1 victor. Oh, and Chief Justice Roberts wrote the decision favoring Phelps, saying that sure, it wasn’t pretty, but Phelps had every right to stand outside the funeral of Matthew A. Snyder and hold up signs like the one above. The father, feeling that the funeral had been trashed—gee, so many people with thin skins!—had taken Phelps to court.

Alito, the one dissenter, wrote:

Justice Samuel Alito, the lone dissenter, said Snyder wanted only to "bury his son in peace". Instead, Alito said, the protesters "brutally attacked" Matthew Snyder to attract public attention." Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case," he said.  (Note—gotta give some money to Wikipedia….)

Well, you know where I weigh in, of course. Look closely at the photo, and you’ll see the little child’s head beaming out against the American flag. And I think that’s child abuse—warping and twisting a loving child into a hate and attention-oops-that’s notoriety-seeking maniac.

But—steering hard here back to the head of the post—the two daughters of Phelps say no. Here’s what one of the wrote in her blog, medium.com:

We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.

Gonna have to think about that. As are the two sisters, Megan and Grace, who, according to The Guardian, are in hiding—at least nobody knows where they are.

I think of them, “trying to figure it out,” as they write in their blog, as they love the family that has cut them off, as they ponder the hurt and pain they have caused so many victims of their “well-intentioned” family. Nobody knows where they are, maybe even they themselves.

I know where I am—in front of my computer with my husband twenty feet away. I’m writing for my blog that from time to time addresses LGBT issues. On National Coming Out Day, I came out to my brother, who was slightly puzzled. I explained—having come out to everyone years ago, I had decided to start the whole over again.

I also know where Keith Orr is—somewhere in Ann Arbor, Michigan—probably working at his bookstore / café. And Keith was the guy who first thought up the most effective way of dealing with the Phelps family. Quick on his feet, Keith heard that his business was going to be picketed on 17 Feb 2001. Instead of a counter demonstration—which just gives Phelps more publicity—Keith sent off an email, asking people to spread the word and join the campaign.

Campaign?

Yup—donate what you can for every minute that the Phelps family pickets the café. The money—over 6000 dollars—went to the Washtenaw Rainbow Action Project, and yes, Sharp Reader, it’s exactly what you think.

Oh, and where was Keith? Inside with the hundred people of so who had donated, and who were having a party and counting minutes.

A curious thing—Keith inside with a hundred people, the Phelps outside with four adults and two small children. February in Michigan can be many things, but warm it is almost never. They were standing alone outside in freezing cold weather, their feet cold and wet, the wind whipping snow into their faces.

They had a message of hate; they were alone and isolated. Keith was warm, at a party, surrounded by support and love.

And Grace and Megan—one of whom ran the website godhatesfags.com—where are they now?

Cut off from their family. Alone, confused, wondering what they’ve done, and perhaps afraid.

Time for confession. I call him Keith, but he’s not. Not to me, or the handful of characters who made up a musical clique at West High in the 70’s.

Great work, Geek!

Question Time

It seems to be my destiny to have a callus on my thumb. For years, it was the left thumb, and the callus was the result of playing the cello for three or four hours every day. This week, it’s the right thumb, and it came about when I decided to compile a list of 33.050 randomly generated names, representing the 33,050 genuine (and nameless, officially speaking…) people who in 2010 died as a result of a gunshot wound.

There was a time about ten years ago when I was a computer idiot—in fact, I had a theory that my own electric-magnetic field collided with any electronic device, especially computers. The moment, it seemed, I tried to use one, it crashed, almost always fatally. So it was a big event, the day I announced to Mr. Fernández and doña Taí that I had done a copy / paste. Their eyes rolled like a drunken sailor at sea.

Well, on a Mac laptop, the only or at least the best way to copy / paste is with the thumb. And the list, which took over ten hours to create, took massive copy / pasting.

So what did I learn from the experience?

Here goes, in random order:

·    The list is in size 12 font (20 for the state), single space and occupies 724 pages.

·    California has the most gun deaths—slightly above Texas, which has, however, ten million more people.

·    There’s a huge range in mortality rate—lowest is Hawaii at 3.3, the highest in the fifty states (hear something coming up?) is Arizona at 20.3.

·    Puerto Rico lo hace mejor is the official tourist slogan assures us, but if we do it better, we don’t do it the best. Yes, with a gun mortality rate of 24.3, we’re pretty high. But unbelievably, the US Virgin Islands has a gun mortality rate of 59.7.

“Why are you doing this,” asked John with genuine curiosity.

And it is bizarre. Look, it is statistically more dangerous to send your kid to sleep over in a friend’s house if the parents have a swimming pool as opposed to a gun. Death by gunshot is about number fifteen on the list of leading causes of death—more people die of pneumonia that gunshot, so why aren’t I out protesting against Staph aureus? As well, there are more suicides by gunshot than homicides—though death is death, no matter who pulls the trigger.

And though the attention always goes to the crazy people with semiautomatic weapons, the reality is that most deaths by gunshot occur by handguns—the very weapons that we are earnestly (and ineffectively) reassuring the NRA we would never, never even THINK about banning.

So why spend all this time and energy—reading thirty thousand names in public?

Is it that guns are such a potently masculine symbol? Am I still, at the age of 56, dealing with being a man?

Or is it the randomness of the act? But wait, most victims know their assailant, and anyway a Staph infection is also random.

If we were going to be honest, we would be forced to admit—seeking a ban on semiautomatic weapons probably isn’t going to do much good. Every gun fanatic has gotten his hands on one or more now, and it’s the handgun that kills more often. So really we should be talking about increasing mental health funding and figuring out a way to reduce handgun deaths.

“So why are you doing this,” asked my brother. And here’s my question—at the end of reading 30,000 names, will I have found the answer?

Disobedient Flowers

I’m horrified to admit that it’s now past noon, and I haven’t written anything.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that yes, I was up by seven, I did the trot, and I’ve been pondering Robert Schumann and Emily Dickinson.

February is always a wrenching time for me, even if I have spent it, these last two decades, in a warm place. And it may be that a Wisconsin childhood will always trump a tropical adulthood. February—darkness. February—change.

And I am facing two potential losses, and starting to grieve for both. Which may be why the final movement of a—for me—unknown piece of Schumann hit me so deeply.

‘How often,’ you think, ‘can Schumann repeat that theme? And why, far from being bored, do I want to hear it again?’

Part of it is the modulation, the shifting from one key to another. Part of it is also the feeling that this is really a folksong, something Mother sings to Baby. A lullaby, really.

It’s marked langsam, the German word for “think glaciers as you play it.” And helpfully, Schumann indicates that it should be melancholic.

Yeah? There’s more blood on the page than ink, and it’s clear—they’re putting the sheets on Robert’s bed in the madhouse. Many people argue that Schumann’s music, in this last decade of his life, shows signs of his mental illness, rapidly cycling between manic elation and haunting grief. And there’s a bit of that in this piece—themes so poignant that you almost feel embarrassed to hear them: they seem to reveal so much so painfully. And yet the third movement is a joy—as playful as a dog chasing a Frisbee on the first day of spring.

So it’s another wonder, another discovery. As was another newcomer, the Master letters of Dickinson. Oddly, they’re from the same decade as the Schumann; the three letters were written between 1858 and 1862.

Time to confess—I don’t do poetry very well. A lot of it goes over my head. More often, it just goes through my head, and seems to stick as well as spaghetti thrown at the fridge. My mother could read Walter de la Mare; I cannot. I get to something like the following and think, ‘so?’   

“We wake and whisper awhile,

But, the day gone by,

Silence and sleep like fields

Of amaranth lie.''

My eyes glaze; my mind is fogged with poetic numbness.

But faithful to my commitment to the mid-nineteenth century, I soldiered through the Dickinson Master letters. And though I ordinarily like Dickinson a lot—seems like a safe thing to say—these letters completely stump me.

Had she been eating too many morning glory seeds? Was a Chinaman smoking opium under her window?

Nor am I alone. Here’s a guy smarter than I:

For nearly twenty years I’ve taught Dickinson and the Master Letters in my early American literature course, always hoping to come closer to the source of the mystery. Instead, just the opposite has happened. The mystery has deepened. The more I study them, the more we hash them out in class, the longer the shadows grow and deepen over their meaning.

That’s Nicholas Rombes, about whom I know nothing. But he has puzzled over lines like the following for 20 years, so he must think it’s worth it….

You ask me what my flowers said—then they were disobedient—I gave them messages—

Gotta be something I get from Jack. Write it simple, write it short. And if, after twenty years of puzzling you’re farther from the shore of understanding, isn’t it time to jump ship? Go on to another poet, and hope for better luck and lucidity?

At the end of his life, Schumann feared that he would hurt his wife. I understand rage and madness, how brooding anger and despair can flash—a match in the rum factory—at a look, a raised eyebrow, the turning of a back. I’ll listen, in these dark days within, to the Schumann again.

But twenty years of wondering about Emily’s disobedient flowers?

Catch you around!

Somebody Always Gets Hurt

Well, we don’t know because it hasn’t been, and almost can’t be, studied. So it’s either three or four or eight times higher—the suicide rate for gay kids versus straight kids.

Correction—there have been studies; that’s where I get these pretty far apart statistics. But it’s hard to say. A sensitive, sweet kid gets bullied, doesn’t have anyone to talk to, feels alone and helpless. He takes Dad’s shotgun and blasts the back of his head away. OK—was he gay? Or a sensitive, sweet, straight kid?

The death certificate will have his age, parents’ names, cause and date of death. But the sexual orientation? Even if known, it won’t be there.

So it’s a fuzzy area. “The Suicide Prevention Resource Center,” says Wikipedia, “synthesized these studies and estimated that between 30 and 40% of LGBT youth, depending on age and sex groups, have attempted suicide.”

That’s a shocking figure, if true. And I wonder, is it easier for gay kids now than it was in my youth, forty years ago? Then, the topic of homosexuality was almost as off the map as it was in Victorian times. It was taboo, it wasn’t discussed, it was unseen and invisible. In a sense, it was easier to pass.

Though it’s just occurred to me—the word “fag” was very frequently in and out of the mouths of a lot of my classmates. Was it directed at me? I think not. But the message was clear—keep your wrists ramrod tight, don’t move your ass, books get carried at the hip, not the chest. Pass, and try not to think about it.

Because thinking about it lead to dread. My worst fear, in those days, was of my wedding day since—as we all were then—I was on a societal conveyer belt. I would graduate from college, find a nice girl, and marry. And I knew that the morning I woke up and faced having to get married would be the worst day of my life. How would I get through it, or more—would I get through it?

Today, I think it’s harder for gay kids. In high school, I was just a nerd, a cellist, not a jock but not gay. You know, just weird. Today, I think kids are more aware, if not any less cruel. There’s gay everywhere….

Well, I’m thinking all this because of Josué, a killer flutist and sensitive, insightful man. Whom I met when he was still driving around with a Bible in the back of his car—his parents were deeply religious and it would kill them, he assured me, if they knew. Don’t know if they ever did know, or to what extent they accepted, but he’s gone on, moved on, done well professionally and personally. And he’s speaking out, which I totally like, on Facebook.

It gives me no pleasure to announce that a Tennessee state senator—a guy by the name of Stacey Campfield (I’m tempted to note that that “Stacey” is just a bit, well, faggy, but I won’t. Anything to shore up the high moral ground!)

OK—where was I? Right, this guy—who claims that AIDS originated when one guy screwed a monkey (sorry about these digressions, but who could resist?)

Try again, Marc. State senator Stacey Campfield has proposed legislation that would require school officials to notify parents of any child who has identified him or herself as gay. Oh, or even questioned.

(Whew—third time’s the lucky one!)

Yeah?

Marc—“I think I might be gay…”

School nurse reaches for the phone.

Nurse—“Mrs. Newhouse?”

OK—what’s the rationale? Homosexuality is dangerous to a person, says Campfield. Implicit is the belief that, gotten in time, nipped in the bud, and treated with that expert technique of conversion / reversion / inquisition therapy, that young life might still be saved!

Those, of course, would be the caring parents. The uncaring parents?

Well, the ACLU article that Josué posted mentions several facts. Forty percent of homeless LGBT youths have been kicked out of their homes by their parents.

Something I feared, actually. Don’t think it would have happened, but it would have seared Jack’s heart. Look, who he ended up being wasn’t where he started—is it ever? When John lived “in sin” with Jeanne a year before their marriage, Jack’s world fell down. It was nothing religious. It was just that Jeanne “had no self-respect”—could any woman do such a thing and have?—and that wasn’t the woman for John. Franny found Jack crying one day at the bottom of the basement stairs. “I used to put a mattress down here when he was a baby so if Johnny fell, well, it would cushion the fall. But now there’s nothing I can do to protect him….”

The possibility of exposure, the fear of the police coming through the front door of the Pirate Ship—an old bar where the Overture Center now is—as you squiggled out the bathroom window…all of that is still going on for a lot of kids.

Two of whom, says the ACLU, were picked up by police when they were found in a car with condoms and beer. So the cops dragged them in for underage drinking, and chose to do a little corrective therapy by lecturing on the Bible. Oh, and telling the kids that they’d better go right home and fess up to their parents.

Remember the start of this post?

Right—one of the kids, Marcus Wayman, had another idea. He got the keys to his dad’s gun cabinet (and don’t get me started…) and blew his brains onto the wall behind him.

Well, the mom took the cops to court—good for her—and got a settlement for 100,000 bucks. So now we know the price of a gay youth! The ACLU says:

If even one LGBT teen in Tennessee dies as result of this shortsighted, mean-spirited, and quite possibly unconstitutional bill, his or her blood will be on Stacey Campfield’s hands.

Totally agree. In the study adduced by the ACLU, 46% of homeless LGBT run away because of family rejection and 43% are forced out because of family rejection. On the streets, these kids are vulnerable to everything from prostitution to AIDS to suicide.

For many of us, families are the cradle for violence and abuse. It’s the first law of family dynamics: somebody always gets hurt.

Tax 'Em

He was in a lot of pain, he was suffering posttraumatic stress disorder, he was with a minor celebrity—Chris Kyle, a navy SEAL who was an expert marksman: Kyle had killed 160 Iraqis and then came home to write a bestseller about it. Oh, and also to champion the cause of returning veterans, and, Sunday, reach out to one of them, Eddie Ray Routh. So what did Eddie Ray—the man in pain, the guy suffering PTSD—do? He killed Kyle and another guy.

It’s a story that breaks the heart. Routh spent four years in the Marines, though the story in CNN says it’s “unclear” whether he saw combat. But do you get PTSD if you’re cleaning latrines in a base in Austria? Never heard of that….

Kyle was an outspoken opponent of gun control, says the story, and had set up a security company, Craft International, which had the motto, “Despite what your momma told you, violence does solve problems.”

Maybe so. It’s an irony that I am so ardently for gun control, because well, take a look at the following chart….

OK—cancel that. After thirty minutes of fruitless searching, I realize that I hadn’t saved it, and could no longer remember where I had found it. So here’s what it looked like: all fifty states ranked in order by red versus blue and incidence of gun mortality. And no surprise, virtually all the red states were at the top of the list. Meaning, as an ardently blue guy, that I should just stand by and let everyone down there in the red states kill each other. Problema—Resuelto! as our old governor used to say. Problem—Fixed!

Well, it’s tempting to say, “live by the gun, die by the gun.” Except that Kyle leaves behind a couple of kids. Oh, and speaking of kids—the little-five year old who was abducted by the crazy guy in the tornado shelter is free. Crazy guy is dead; the kid is seemingly OK.

Or maybe not. You know, there are a couple of points here.

Let me tell you about one of the most enchanting moments I’ve ever spent in an art museum. It was in the seventies, I was in the Art Institute of Chicago, in a room filled with Monet haystacks. That’s nice, you think, but what’s the point?

I was completely alone. There was no guard, no security, no Plexiglas—nothing between me and those gorgeous canvasses.

Those days are gone, but that’s not my point. Here it is: the billions of dollars we now spend searching for fluids of more than three ounces in my luggage or protecting art from maniacs or—for that matter—dealing with a lunatic for six days who has abducted a five year old kid…that money? It’s wasted.

It doesn’t add anything to our economy, not in real, substantial terms. Teaching a kid to read adds some value—he will possibly go on and discover the cure for cancer. Putting an armed guard in a school is a waste of resources. I’ve lived in a time when the only people in school were the kids, the teachers, principal and a nurse.

Second point?

I got laid off a year and a half ago. It produced a number of effects, not the least of which was insomnia. So what did I do, at 3AM when I woke up?

Have a drink!

Had to get back to sleep, right? There’s only one problem. If you do that, you are potentially drinking for two-thirds of the day, since of course you will wait until five to declare the sun over the yardarm. So when I strolled into my shrink’s office at 8AM for that first visit he smelled alcohol on my breath.

So I learned that, and a lot of other stuff. But getting laid off is less stressful than having your husband or father die. It’s less stressful than having a crazy guy abduct you or your son. There’s huge pain here, which is either going to go on and cause more pain, or going to take a lot of time and money to clean up.

And who should bear the cost?

You know my answer. We took on cigarettes, and made Big Tobacco pay (partially) the bill. I’m mixed on that—at least in theory people should be able to quit. There is some element of choice, and therefore personal responsibility here. But sitting in a movie theater, or a kindergarten classroom, or strolling through a mall?

There are 300 million guns in the United States. And each one should be registered, and their owners pay a fearsome tax annually for the damage they are capable of doing.

Claude Monet, Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun), 1891, oil on canvas, 25 3/4" x 36 1/4". (Metropolitan Museum of  Art, New York).

Knew I had it somewhere....