The Pope Moves Tepidly...

OK—this is the headline:

And here’s the lead:

In a dramatic shift in tone, a Vatican document said on Monday that homosexuals had "gifts and qualities to offer" and asked if Catholicism could accept gays and recognize positive aspects of same-sex couples.

“Dramatic?” “Shake Up?”

Boys? My Latin is rusty, but here’s the English version:

In a dramatic shift in tone, Pope Francis issued an official apology for the two centuries in which the Church has condemned homosexuality as—in the words of his predecessor, Pope Alumnus Benedict XVI—“intrinsically disordered.” He acknowledged that the Church’s position had caused “untold misery and suffering” for millions of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people, and had led to ostracism from their families, their communities, and their church. He deeply regretted those whom the church had rejected, and saluted those who had spoken up and pressed for change. In addition, he directed that the clause within so many Church contracts stating that the signee would obey church teachings be immediately voided. 

Guess what? That took me all of ten minutes to write, though I spent three of those kissing Lady and chatting in the kitchen.

Ten minutes—wait, it really took a lifetime, as I realized when I mentioned parenthetically to Sergio, whom I barely know, that I was gay.

“It’s really good that you can come out and be honest with yourself, ‘cause I know so many men who can’t….”

Here, Sergio echoed Jorge, who confided once, “you know, Marc, I swear: every man on the island is bisexual. I go out and before I reach the street corner….”

Sergio went on to say that his gay friends were—often—more loyal than his closeted friends, because hiding takes so much energy. It’s the archeology of fear: the first stratum is rejection by the family (yes, it still happens, and may be happening more, since kids are coming out earlier and earlier, and since gay has gone from being utterly taboo to being on the front page of the New York Times.) Digging deeper and deeper, you uncover the various strata: the fear of losing your job, the fear of being seen at a gay parade, the fear that your friends will reject you, and ultimately…

…the fear of yourself.

So let’s run back over to the Vatican and reread that statement: here are the two components:

1. homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer
2. could Catholics recognize positive aspects of same-sex couples?

The first implies that though most of the—sorry—fruit is rotten, we could cut around it and find something edible. So that takes us back about 40 years, when every woman knew that her hairdresser—whom she just adored—was…well, that way. Hairdressers yes, but CEO of a major corporation? I went looking for one through the fields of Google, and only now discovered that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, got outed by “accident” by CNBC last June. My point? In every press release announcing a promotion, the last paragraph throws in a line that runs something like this, “Tim Cook is married to Rebecca Walters, a criminal lawyer, and has three children.” So however far we’ve come, we’ve still got a lot of guys out there who need to go farther.

Now then, could Catholics recognize positive aspects of same-sex marriages? Isn’t it curious, that phrasing—is the Catholic Church polling its members? Is it pleading? It seems a variant of the old let’s-pity-those-homosexuals-who-are-sick-and-doomed-to-lead-lives-of desperate-loneliness…. And what are the positive aspects? That those two boys will bring a fabulous quiche to your brunch? That with the two Lesbians on your softball team, you’ll knock the other team out of the ballpark?

As Frank Bruni so ably pointed out, the Catholic Church is obsessed with being gay, and most particularly, being openly gay and—gasp—getting married. Because we’ve all been reading cases in the last year of Catholic schools having no problem welcoming a gay teacher’s live-in lover of thirty years to faculty parties, but what happens when the couple ties the knot? Well, let’s hope that the teacher is independently wealthy, and just doing that teaching gig for fun.

You know, there’s a point in which parents of kids who have come out make—and I say this sincerely—a big step by just asking how the child’s partner is. For parents have to come out too, and who’s to know which coming out is more difficult? At least I was in charge of my life; I could call the shots. But my mother? Wondering if I would be another Mathew Sheppard? Would I find a good partner? Would I die never having been loved? She may have had the worst of it: I had the auxiliary verb “will,” she the more terrifying world of “would.”

Right—so the baby step of acknowledging a relation is small, but it’s a step. But the Catholic Church? Why is it that I’m so reluctant to believe that this amounts to nothing more than a mealy-mouthed attempt to appear less homophobic than they are?

And my last question—why do we all need to see this new pope as a wonderful change, a man who is breathing new air into the church, who will shake it up and regenerate it and finally, finally let us sit at the table?

My answer?

Richard Dawkins, if I recall correctly, once theorized that our need for religion is linked to the biological programming of children bonding to and obeying their parents. True? Who knows?

But I think that all the gay Catholics who welcome this new pope are doing what all the gay teachers were doing when they brought their partners to the faculty parties: they’re accepting scraps from the table. But what will happen when gay people really demand a place at the table: as priests, as parents, as pope?

Do you see a place setting there?

I don’t…. 

     

Storm Anxiety

Only my granite devotion to serving you, Dear Reader, has forced me from the task urged upon me by the governor, the head of the National Meteorological Service, and various officials charged with protecting my person and property. Even now, the governor is speaking—or trying to, since even the people who voted for him admit: he’s just slightly better than W in the speaking department. So what’s up?

Right—for those whose geography of the Caribbean has faded a bit, the four islands south of Florida are (from left to right) Cuba, Jamaica (south of Cuba), Hispaniola, and finally Puerto Rico. OK—so what is that menacing thing, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Puerto Rico to destroy?

Enter Tropical Storm Gonzalo, which formed last week, and which will arrive in 12 to 24 hours. Conversely, maybe it will not arrive, but slide 50 to 100 miles or so to the east of us. No one knows, of course, but every local channel has been obsessed with the storm since yesterday. And what guy would pass up the chance to look governorly and to issue statements urging us to maintain ourselves in a state of calm but acute awareness as the atmospheric phenomenon approaches? Oh, and under no circumstances should you LOWER YOUR GUARD!

The effect of the constant iteration—as well as seeing photos like the one above—tends neither to produce calm or awareness. Because I have no idea what the photo above is actually measuring: wind? Water vapor? Dust particles?

The point of the picture is to stir up anxiety, because what doesn’t the picture tell you? Well, the storm is barely a category one, most of the rain is expected to fall in the ocean, and anyway, there’s a big mountain—el Yunque—on the east coast, which will deflect the hurricane. So for all of us in the San Juan area? Consider closing your windows!

I’ve lived here for almost twenty-five years, and how many “alerts” or “warnings” have I experienced? Estimate—probably sixty or seventy. Right, so how many hurricanes?

Maybe two, only one of which qualified—since my definition of a hurricane is that you’re sitting in the dark, listening to a sound I cannot define. It’s actually a combination of sounds: the howling upper winds, thunder, the sounds of things being wrenched off buildings, the sound of things slamming into buildings—yours included—and the worst, for me, the sound of the doors first rattling, then shaking, then violently pounding. The demonic force wants in….

And if it did? If some killer hurricane with winds of 165 miles per hour came directly at our house—an atmospheric drone, perhaps—and the contents of our house—all the painting, plates, chairs, ornamental objects—became the most lethal flying objects?

Raf and I have it figured out: we’d leave, and then sit in the staircase leading to the second and third floor—boring but perfectly safe….

The hurricane presents a series of paradoxes. Most people fear the wind, but by far the greatest damage is the water. Most people dread the storm, but the worst period is afterward, when people up in the mountains are cut off for weeks, when you haven’t taken a hot shower in days, when you may have to wait months before your electricity agrees to come back, all the while watching your neighbor across the street—connected to a different line—drinking ice cold beer and watching his 60-inch flat screen.

The storm will be hyped, the shelters will be opened, and people living—often illegally—in the flood plains will come trooping in. This is a problem, since we are a gregarious bunch, and who wouldn’t like to hang all day, chatting with your friends and neighbors, complaining about the inefficiency, and accepting three free meals a day! The problem, one social worker told me, was not to get the people into the shelters, but to get them out.

Add to this the fact that today is Columbus Day, which some people are celebrating—OK observing—OK, getting the day off. So now we’ll have a really long weekend!

The penultimate paradox? The hurricanes that don’t come inflict almost more damage than those that do. Because if you have bought into the hysteria, fought for the last bottle of water, snatched the last can of salchichas—chicken sausages, and quite tasty they are—from your neighbor’s hands, and endured the annoyance of waiting for twenty minutes in line to pay for all of this, well, how would you feel when it only rained for ten minutes, and the wind never picked up?

You should be relieved. But you’ve been on high alert for two or three days—and now what? While all of this nonsense was going on, did anyone cover you at work? Answer your emails?

And everybody will be in the same position, which means even if you do manage to enter your job with a smile on your face, it will be eroded by 10AM.

But if the storm comes and you lose your roof? Well, no work for you, since you are waiting for FEMA to come and chatting with your neighbors and drinking cold beer because he has a generator and the trade off is that you’ll have his noise and he’ll give you cold beer. Then FEMA will eventually drift by, you’ll get the blue tarp for your roof, as well as, eventually, a check. Which means that you now have the down payment for a new car: autos sale went through the roof after the last hurricane.

Finally, the hurricane restores the inherent nature of the people here. A student once told me that after Hurricane Georges, all the neighbors got together, cooked on gas stoves together, shared food and stories, laughed, and enjoyed whatever breeze came by. The stars—rarely seen in Puerto Rico—were blazing brightly, since the entire island was dark. And so they passed several weeks, until one night—BAM all the lights came back on! People cheered, and everybody headed back home, eager to be in air conditioning and watching TV.

But my student?

She was at her window, looking at her neighbors—most of whom she hadn’t known well before the storm—in their homes, and wishing…

…they would all come back out again!     

          

Wal-Mart Daze

OK—somebody up there figure this out: I knew my mother for over 50 years, was extremely close to her, and had her die in my arms. I worked for Wal-Mart for ten years, learned from it, laughed at it, bought into it, and then they laid me off. So about what do I dream more?

Wal-Mart!

Today, it was a waking dream: I was back working at the Home Office, which wasn’t the Home Office—you know how it is in dreams…

…oooops, sorry. I know that nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams, and a close second is hearing about people’s therapy sessions. So here’s the gist: neither Raf and I have had a vacation for a year, since we have an ancient cat—who happens to be Raf’s favorite—and we have gotten it through our heads that only Raf can feed it. So we have stayed, coping with major construction on the street outside, dealing with the water flowing into our apartment from the apartment upstairs. (Sharp Readers will remember that the situation was only addressed by men rappelling down the side of our building, cutting / pulling / plastering and most fun of all, jumping into our apartment, appearing when least expected as I was writing, and then requiring to be let out, since our level of cat-paranoia dictates that no one is to be trusted not to let the cat out. This I get from my mother, whose friends used to forestall the inevitable and say to her, “don’t let the cat out….”)

“It seems lie it’s been a long year of doing nothing but stamping out fires,” said my shrink—damn, said I wasn’t gonna do that—and it occurred to me, it had.

“Look at it this way,” said Lady, who was trying to insert some perspective into my life, because my new response to the annoying response from healthy people to my continuous—or is it constant or more likely, is it both—whining about the Chikungunya is to say, “well, at least it isn’t Ebola!”

So what do I say?

“I booked my flight to Nigeria next Tuesday.”

In fact, that’s what my shrink—dammit, stop walking into my blog—was about to tell me, when I cut him off. And he did raise his eyes a bit when I told him about the Nigeria bit. So then we decided to compare the symptoms of depression with the symptoms of Chikungunya—and couldn’t there be like a speed-dial or speed-type for that annoying word—but it would take to long. Besides, I had realized: Chikungunya is the marriage—at least for me—of severe depression and arthritis.

“Well, is your life better than it was five years ago?” persisted Lady.

Yes.

Because today is the second Friday of the month, I’m almost certain that this was taking place at 8AM in the Home Office: the monthly meeting, which would have started off with the cheers for the four formats—Wal-Mart, Sam’s, Amigo grocery store, and Super-Ahorros (a hybrid between grocery store and convenience store). Next the sales, followed by Corporate Affairs, followed by a talk by someone-in-the-community-doing-something-important, followed by the inevitable motivational speech. And before and after each of these things? The speaker would shout: ¿Como te sientes? Or “how do you feel?”

A roared answer: “Super-bien, ohh, ahh, ayi—YES!

It was a rite of passage for beginning employees, who tended to stumble out of the auditorium, rubbing their eyes, and reaching for their cell phones, to call back that recruiter and discuss alternative opportunities.

You could buy in or buy out of all this enforced silliness, and I chose to buy in, principally since nobody knew—least of all me—what in the world I was doing, so nobody bothered me. But for those people who had bosses and bigger bosses and then the mega-bosses? It was brutal: I once asked the electronics buyer how he coped with having to sell 60 million bucks in sales per year? His answer? You don’t think about it—you go day by day, battling the Distribution Center—howling about your high inventory levels—the store managers—cutting expenses by having no one in the Electronics Department on Saturday afternoon, and especially cringing at the sight of your boss, reliably coming at you with reports in hand. Because you might sell 60 million bucks, but what about your margin? And in fact, margin was the least of it: Wal-Mart had found a way to measure everything, and busily put the buyer’s assistant at work to produce the reports that would kill you daily, weekly, monthly, and culminate in your performance evaluation.

This was a cumbersome affair that started—sadistically—with the “self-evaluation.” So it was sort of like the confessional followed by the inquisition. Nobody but me took it as anything but deadly serious: the more neurotic among us would spend at least two weeks preparing the thing. But after two evaluations, I learned two things: unless I brought Sam Walton back from the grave, in his prime, and willing to fly his private plane to every Wal-Mart in the country, I would never get anything except an “Performing as Expected”—read “average”—evaluation. The second thing? My supervisor—an excellent woman, by the way—would always have to find some thing wrong. Wait—it was never couched like that, it was an opportunity, or an area for development, or some such nonsense.

“Marc should more fully integrate with different departments of the company, in order to strategize and incorporate synergies between his role in the company and the departments to which he offers services.”

The boss would explain all this, and I would nod, all the while wondering, ‘hey should we go to the beach this weekend? Or maybe get together with Sonia….’

Then, having absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do, I would be asked for feedback, which was crucial / vital, because this whole affair was not a professional crucifixion, but rather an opportunity to grow professionally. So I would nod sagely, agree profoundly, thank them—I sorry to say—fulsomely, and then be present with a letter from the director of the department thanking me for my hard work, urging me to do more of it, and—in the last line that was the first line everybody read—tell me what my raise would be.

But guess what? The next we would review that “goal” about which I had done nothing, and wow! Had I improved!

My response to all this?

Well, I certainly wasn’t going to say that I was an “average” employee, so I gave myself marks that were just under the highest number—five, as I remember. This I did twenty minutes before the deadline to hand the thing in. Why waste time?

Only later did the director of finance confide—the raises were figured out before the evaluations were done. In short, the whole thing was pretty much a farce, at least in financial terms.

So Lady, do I miss it?

No.

Nor do I miss what Wal-Mart did to its customers, who were so desperate to get a cheap—as you can see in the video below—TV that they would have run over their grandmother to get to it.

The other thing I don’t miss?

Smiling until your jaw hurt.

Oh—and as you can see in the other video—pretending that our only interest was to get up in the morning and think up new, splendid ways to help the community.

“The best day of working at Wal-Mart is the day you leave it,” I said to the director of Human Resources on the day they officially terminated me. But I did not mean it harshly. Nor did she take it that way.

“It can be,” she replied.

Know what?

Think it was!         

Leafless but Friendful In Old San Juan

When did my world disappear?

I remember it dimly—I had energy, I walked three miles a day, sometimes I even threw myself in the ocean for five minutes before I went home and did my day.

Now? Well, I spoke two hours ago with my shrink, since I had missed an appointment that I swear was for 3PM and the receptionist swears was at 1PM. So two hours ago, you could have had the unique experience of seeing a middle-aged gringo sobbing in the streets—OK, a sidewalk—of Old San Juan as he talked to his shrink and implored, nay begged, nay pleaded with all the demented passion of a junkie craving a fix for his shrink to give him…

…papaya leaves!

“How far in the disease are you,” asked my shrink, and the disease? Chikungunya, and if you don’t know it, consider yourself blessed. Because in my case, it’s not the pain, it’s not the stiffness, it’s massive depression accompanied by a complete lack of emotional resilience.

Consider that—after a rocky start—my mood was quite good: I had seen Lady, the owner of the café, and she had given me—free!—coffee, since I had invented a new  drink. The couplet, or double espresso—yes, all the coffees have poetic names (the single espresso is the Haiku)—was obviously not going to cut it. So I told Lady, “make me a quatrain!”

Lady knew just what to do—she often does—and came back with a mugful (can’t believe the computer allowed that! And doesn’t the apparent word “mugful” look like it should be a place somewhere in Saudi Arabia? Or is it just me? Or is it the chikungunya?) of espresso. So she sat down, and remarked that she was feeling happy, and wondered how long it could last.

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world,”—and thank you, W. B., and were you having the Chikungunya, too?—and that’s when Simon comes in. Who’s Simon? A former employee, whom everyone suspected had his hands in the—wait, Legal just told me I can’t say it, but it rhymes with “hill”—so Lady confronted him, and he admitted it. Then she fired him, but he’s a poet and his girlfriend is six months pregnant with twins, and Simon is jobless—so where is he to go? Back to the Poet’s Passage, where Lady kisses him, and hugs the girlfriend, and pats the babies through however many layers of clothes and human tissue. See? We can overcome these little unpleasantnesses here at the Passage.

“Oh, by the way, excellent placement of the painting,” I tell Lady.

Painting? It’s actually more like a drop cloth used in five or six paint jobs, all involving shades of the color white, that someone decided to put on a stretcher. And if you look on it too long, that’s where you’ll be, too.

“We have a problem with this painting,” said Lady, after we had unearthed it in the Great Water Rationing That Never Was Crisis. We had both glanced at it, and were gasping and covering our eyes—“nobody can stand it!”

Her solution?

Hang it in the men’s room!

So then it’s time to go talk to Sunshine, working at the café and now serving me quatrains, and who is most importantly living next to a papaya tree, the leaves of which are haunting my days and upsetting my nights. Because according to Ayurvedic medicine, boiling up some crushed papaya leaves will shoot my platelet count through the hoops and I’ll win the game.

Well, That’s what Montalvo said, three months ago, and I had gone back to the papaya tree from which Montalvo had purloined the leaves and guess what? The tree is the same size, but the leaves—which in Montalvo’s day had been waist high—were now in Marc’s day tiptoe high. Since I am 6’3”, I have an evolutionary advantage over everybody else—should I inseminate someone just to pass the genetic material? Pity to have it go to waste.

Sunshine—true to his name—however, has a fear of both the dark and snakes, and since he lives way up in the hills, he has to leave for work at insane hours. Actually, he leaves early just to avoid the morning rush hour, comes into the café, and snoozes on the couch.

So Sunshine is leafless, as am I, but he does tell me that his neighbor just signed a contract to sell iguana meat to—Legal, again—but it’s a chain of Chinese restaurants. Oh, and that his neighbor also catches mongooses—mongeese?—and sells them to the Santería people. Apparently, the mongooses are so nasty that the going price is 400 bucks.

“Yuck, I wouldn’t do it,” said Lady, after I had proposed going up to the hills and catching a few mongooses, as well as scoring some papaya leaves, “they’re vicious,” meaning the animal, not the leaves….

…though come to think of it, the taste of that extract….

So now it’s an hour later, and guess what? Naïa, the 12-year old daughter of Lady who deserted us all to go to some bogus school, has come back to the café, so now we get the news that Naïa has refused to be a fairy in the school dance so now she’ll be a judge. Oh, and that her English teacher is Miss Kniffen…

“Clearly an alias,” I tell her, “and I don’t like that school at all. And speaking of fairies, I didn’t see a single straight boy, that day I went there. In fact, one kid was so blatant that I patted him on the back and said, ‘excellent choice of sexual orientation!’”

“You did not,” says Naïa, who treats me with all seriousness I deserve. “And mom, I want a mongoose, a snake, and the Jungle Stick Insect.”

Well, Lady is good with the snake, having had a boa as a kid, but any further negotiation is impossible, since Lady gets the text that Norma, is going into the…

“…Marc, what do you call the thing where they fly?”

“The Air Force,” I tell here.

Well, we all knew she would, so what was the big deal? Lady predicted the date!

“Great,” I tell her, “so how long before I’m done with the chikungunya?”

She ponders this, and stares for half a minute, analyzing my energy.

Answer—18 more days. Oh, and that I’ll give it to someone else, since the disease will have to go somewhere, of course. Anybody can see that!

“Marc, please, please—don’t give it to me,” she pleads, and I promise her—I’d never do that. So she drifts off, and that’s when I realize…

…we have a problem…

She’s the only person in town who doesn’t have the disease!