2000 Bucks to Get Screwed?

Must be common for some guys, but it was new to me: paying two thousand bucks to get screwed….

Actually, let’s put the record straight—I’ve never paid anyone anything to get screwed.

OK—drop the cheap humor. The work of today is recovering from the surgery of yesterday. I now have two screws—titanium, they are, and the surgeon said, “bones just love the stuff…”—in my left mandible.

Compare and contrast—started every exam question I ever took as a child. “Compare and contrast ancient Greek attitudes towards democracy with our own.” Why? What was the point?

But it stuck. And there I was, absorbing the fact that my bones love titanium (yeah, but what about the airport metal detectors?) when the surgeon began a somewhat lengthy and more-technical-than-I-wanted description of the procedure.

I noted one of the many plaques on the wall—the surgeon, I am happy to say, is a fellow of the American Academy of Osseointegration. (Just added that to the computer’s vocabulary!)

And it was new for me, too. ‘What would that be like,’ I woundered. (Wanted to write ‘wondered’ but going back to retype, I turned up again with ‘woundered’. Seems appropriate, somehow….) It’s wounderful—sorry, did it again—to think of all these oddball academies. Remember the German ornithologists with their passionate debate about the ‘near passerine’ status of the Motmot? Interesting to know how that would compare—and contrast—with the American Academy of Osseointegration.

Also interesting to compare and contrast—look, can we just call it ‘cc’ from now on? I’m still groggy from the anesthesia—the historical role of the surgeon / barber with our current tooth guys. “Do you like your smile?” the questionnaire asked.

No—why should I?

Two hundred years ago, the question would have been ridiculous. And maybe still is.

It was also interesting to cc Franny’s story with my own. As usual, we’re going parallel, here. She lost her mind, I lost mine. She battled for death, I battled for life. Six months before her death, she had a root canal. And there I was, yesterday, holding the same drug—Vicodin—that I had held so many times in Wisconsin. The pain wasn’t bad, but hell, I’m a druggy. Why wait? I chugged it down, and felt like a zombie. 

Right——no drugs for the non-suicidal brother, either….

Mostly, though, I am comparing and contrasting my own life, as it has changed in the last years. And speaking of zombies, is it too much a cliché to point out the effect of corporations and corporate life on the human psyche?

Right—I was never too into it. They used to give us stress balls——the little rubber spheres emblazoned with the corporate logo–Wal-Mart!—and its happy yellow face. This struck me as odd—the very thing causing you the stress is giving you a stress ball AND putting their name on it. The idea was to do to the company through the stress ball what you couldn’t in any other actual way.

Wanna smack that secretary? Have a stress ball, honey.

Well, everyone ignored them, of course. But Marc? No, he just couldn’t take it seriously. And when they presented everyone with a new and improvered  (woundering about that word?) version—a stress ball with a little elastic band—I was delighted. 

So there I was, doing my TBWA (should have been “coaching by walking around"—CBWA—but mine was “teaching by walking around”), and fiddling with my stress ball. “What are you doing with that thing,” the electronics buyer would say. He’s gotta sell sixty million dollars of gadgets a year. And was he roaming the aisles with a stress ball?

Hell no. He was glued to his computer screen, trying to figure out what happened to the thirty iPads that disappeared from the Guayama store.

“I’m relieving my stress,” I’d say.  

“Hunh?”

“I have a good deal of stress….”

This was not often taken seriously.

OK—it was NEVER taken seriously.

Marc—with stress? He sits in his office—far far away from anyone, especially his boss, and throws pencils at the students! What’s he got to be stressed about?

Good point, actually. There was only one of me—unlike the buyers, of whom there were many. My boss was a sweetheart. The students—most of them—loved me. What did I have to be stressed about?

I considered this this morning, as I walked past the bust stop where I used to sit…

At 5:30 in the morning.

Oh, and coming home at 6 PM, and racing for the toilet in the hotel next to the bus station. It could take 40 minutes for the yellow bus from Caguas to arrive. Then, it would take another hour to get home.

And of course I’d been drinking coffee all day….

Having talked all day, I would ache for silence. Raf could throw me into fits of irritation by asking perfectly bland questions.

“When do you want dinner?”

Answer in my mind—I WANT FUCKING DINNER WHEN IT GETS ON THE FUCKING TABLE, ASSHOLE!

Answer through my lips—“half an hour.”

Or, “Do you want Hollandaise sauce on the asparagus?”

NO YOU ARE NOT FUCKING MAKING HOLLANDAISE SAUCE BECAUSE YOU ALWAYS SPILL THE FUCKING FLOUR ON THE STOVE AND I AM TOO TIRED TO CLEAN THAT UP AND WASH THE FUCKING SAUCE BOAT.

“Great!”

So justified or not, it seems I did have stress—unrelieved by balls. Somehow it crept into us, despite all the motivational talks we got in the monthly meetings. Because yes, the company paid SERIOUS money to motivate us.

“Mejor, mejor, mejor” sang the ancient lady who had battled cancer and won and gone on to a wonderful (no wounderful for her!) new career of telling everyone how she had done it and how we could too! And how did she do it? Here she prompted the associates (read workers) to sing the answer—‘mejor, mejor, mejor!” We sang. Better, better, better! 

You can imagine the fun I had with THAT!

There was the guy you whirled around for no reason, put his finger on a button, and started to sing! (Odd, are all motivational speaker closet singers?) Oh yeah, and he ended up giving me a dollar bill. 

Why? 

There were thirty of us in the room, and he had finished telling the story about someone who had given HIM a dollar bill and told him he could do whatever he wanted in his life and now he was here in this room living his dream and it was time to pay it forward and so even though there were times when he really could have used that dollar bill he NEVER NEVER spent that dollar because the message was so important and life changing that…

“So why did you give it to me?” Of course I had to ask….

“There’s just something about you. You have the makings of a leader….”

The guy with the stress ball?

Well, the dollar got put under the laughing Buddha that sat on my desk and that in fact now sits on my desk. The Buddha and the dollar bill got packed away, as I got packed away, and delivered. As I have been delivered. For every day and in every way, I am getting…

mejor, mejor, mejor! 

Different Realities

The nice thing about having a shrink is that not only can you talk about yourself, you’re actually supposed to.

Which may be why I was freely kvetching, yesterday, as I sat (not lay) on the couch.

“I want my life now to go back to normal,” I said, or something of the sort.

Silence—all these guys know how to use silence. And a very effective technique it is, too. You find yourself blurting ANYTHING just to relieve the silence.

So I went on.

“First I went to Wisconsin for ten days in early May and that was nice…though not without challenges. Then I went to London for ten days and that was nice though cold. Then we came back and Taí was here and that was wonderful but…”

More silence. A Harvard degree he has, but he can’t talk?

“Things are subtly different when she’s here. Usually for the better. The house gets cleaner. Glasses left in the sink turn up washed in the drainer. I can crash early to bed and that’s perfectly fine—Raf will have someone to talk to. It’s better, but it’s not normal.”

I was pondering all this after my walk this morning, as I was reading the local rag—El Nuevo Día. Lead story—our local legislature is considering a ban on the cuidadores callejeros. Caretakers of the street, loosely….

…not that that helps.

OK—let me explain. For years, guys have worked the public streets, offering help in parallel parking and assurances that nothing will happen to their car. A minor protection scheme, and a good idea, really. You don’t want your car stolen, do you? Naturally, grateful citizens think to give a little something—a pesito or two—from time to time. And of course it’s logical that over the years these guys have staked out their territory—and fight fiercely anyone moving in on them. As well, with such a service, naturally a warm relationship develops between the street guys and the drivers (and / or parkers).

Churlish people allege that this has converted public parking into private parking for regulars. Oh, and also that anyone NOT offering that little pesito is gonna find his car badly scratched on return. Well, they were warned, right?

After all, their car wasn’t stolen….

This now makes perfect sense to me, though there was a time it didn’t. I had questions—silly questions—like “why can the governor call me up and invite me to the Three King’s Day party, but he can’t call to say the tsunami is coming?”

I learned, and explained it later to a friend.

“Webster,” I said, “there are when where what and how questions. But there are NO why questions….”

See?

But this didn’t come easily, this let’s-call-it relaxed way of thinking. Especially since by all appearances, the laws are greatly respected in Puerto Rico. No Estacione, Ley 40. No Fumar, Ley 160. I used to find it curious—were all the Puerto Ricans running around with law books, checking out and citing all these laws? Why didn’t I see people with them?

And why is the car right in front of the No Parking sign, or the guy smoking in front of the No Smoking sign?

I checked my words, not wanting to be the ugly American. But I did mention it to a friend, a Puerto Rican with the flag of the island tattooed on his neck….

“Puerto Ricans are the most LAWLESS people on earth,” he roared. “They will do anything—ANYTHING—for mamita. They will move heaven and earth for their friends. But they are completely clueless when acting toward a stranger!”

Note the pronoun “they” from the Puerto Rican tattooed gentleman….

“Now, AMERICANS—that’s different. Not one—ONE—American would park their car in a handicapped parking spot. But Puerto Ricans! Hah, they’ll run the lady down in her wheel chair, just to get her spot!”

He raged on. I feared his words might be incendiary.

“Absolutely,” a woman shouted from across the street—why risk life and limb when you can just raise your voice? “Beasts, absolute beasts—all of them!”

This no longer strikes me as strange.

Nor does it seem strange that the public streets have become private parking. After all, as one of the caretakers said, the government doesn’t give him food or a job. So he’s gotta do something, right?

Nor does it seem odd that one day the ACLU is terming our local police force as abusive and running amok (well, so did the US Department of Justice four years back) and the next day we’re worrying about the caretakers of the streets.

Nor is it terribly curious that anyone would be interested in what laws are being passed since…

…nobody enforces the laws anyway….

See?

Beethoven Quartet no. 15, 3d movement

It’s a curious thing how no one—at least I think—can write sensibly about the effect of hearing music psychologically and emotionally.

Think of it—we sit in a crowded concert hall, as the crashing last chords of Beethoven’s Fifth blast off into infinity (until the next time around). How to describe that elation?

Or we sit—as I once did—in a dark room in a large empty apartment and hear the slow “Amen” of one of the Monteverdi Vespers for theBlessed Virgin of 1610. I was suspended between faith and despair, and knew that somehow a question of life and going on was occurring. The tears flowed down my cheeks, I fought to stop the sound and the pain, and could not.

But who can write about it?

OK, I’m not all that well read. I should probably do some research. Tolstoy, I know, wrote a long short story based one theKreutzer Sonata—right, know the sonata, don’t know the short story. And others have tried, some of which I have read. And it always comes across flat, or forced, or sometimes just artificial.

Or worse, inflated.

And the better the music, the worse the writing tends to be….

So I should back away from making a larger fool of myself than I normally do. Because the piece that has haunted me, this last 6 weeks, has been one of the greatest of them all: Beethoven’s quartet number 15, third movement.

In German, it’s known as Heiliger Dankgesang, the words Beethoven inscribed on the manuscript. A holy hymn of thanksgiving, that would be, and Beethoven had every reason to be giving thanks—he had been severely ill, and feared that he was dying.

He recovered, and wrote perhaps the most haunting composition of his life.

It starts agonizingly slow—moving as if under water. Or perhaps floating—there’s an ethereal quality of suspension and immersion in some other dimension. And it’s modal—which means that it uses the one of the scales of Gregorian chant. And then, it breaks into a joyful, almost manic second section. Here it’s classical, ordered, as ornamented as a Versailles drawing room. “Strength regained,” writes Beethoven at this point in the manuscript, and indeed, there is all of the joy that attends recovery from a near fatal illness.

And then the slow section returns, though slightly altered.

The light breaks through again, as the second joyful section is repeated. 

And then comes the final—fifth—section, again slow as the first and third had been, again very similar thematically and harmonically. But now Beethoven introduces the theme that has been hiding in the prior two slow sections. And it’s here that words fail.

Not just for me. Apparently T. S. Eliot was obsessed as well. Some think that the Heiliger Dankgesang may have been the inspiration for the Four Quartets. At any rate, he wrote to Stephen Spender, “I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.” (Thanks, Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartet_No._15_(Beethoven)

Well, not having read the Four Quartets, I’ve no idea whether Eliot did. I can only tell you my own experience, as real as Winterreise was for me. A party had been announced on the third of May—the second anniversary of Franny’s death. Being a guest myself, I was spared the problem of who should be invited or not. It was a Morning Glory affair—put together by the people who had cared so lovingly for Franny for the two years or so when we could not.

So—back to the Acres, to the house that had seen her last days, as well as so many others. Eric kindly put off planting a garden and joined me there—the two of us, greatly more united than before, would face this together.

It takes some fortification, of course, to go into any house in which a parent has died—somehow, the Acres presented even more of a challenge. This was also the house where so many parties had been given, so many friends joyfully received and talked to, so many stories had been told. And Franny had been something of a party animal herself—unlike Jack, who liked smaller affair.

So Eric hit on the possibly questionable idea of buying the largest vat of bourbon ever to hit the market—it would easily have filled a Victorian hipbath….

Well, we were equal to that task….

And it may have been a good thing. For as always, Franny hit us, first thing on entering the house.

Silence—as prevailing and lingering as the wood smoke from the Norwegian smoke had been.

Well, silence is something we don’t do well—either in Puerto Rico or in the Newhouse family. We cast around for rescue.

Fortunately, the Zanas—as ever—proposed coming out a few days before the party and bringing us food and diversion. This was quickly agreed to.

And they brought the stories—of Jack sitting down to eat his Chinese food, closing his eyes, savoring, and saying, “hmmmmm….” The talk turned a bit metaphysical.

“You know,” said Bess, “it’s a curious thing—I always associate my mother with deer. And once, when my sister and I had been talking about her, after she died, I went to the window and told my sister ‘wouldn’t it be wild if I opened the curtain and there was a deer?’”

Don’t have to tell you, do I?

There wasn’t one deer…

Just fourteen or so. All grazing gently, moving without care or concern.

You can imagine Bess and her sister….

“Might not have worked in New York City,” I was about to say, when…

…we were jolted out of our seats by the smoke alarm. I tell you the explicable because it leads so well to the inexplicable. No one was smoking—of course!—no one was cooking. There was no fire of any kind, and no smoke in the house.

And those babies are LOUD! So I grabbed the thing from atop the beam supporting the roof—Norwegian American height does come in handy, despite banging my head on every Frank Lloyd Wright entrance I’ve visited (he made all his entrances just an inch of two above his own head, the arrogant bastard)—and took it outside, where a strong breeze was blowing.

Clearly, someone had her finger (note possessive adjective) on the “test” button. The alarm wouldn’t stop.

Not at all sure that it would work, I removed the battery. And you-know-who took her finger off the button….

A silence even greater than the night of our arrival fell.

So she was there, all right. Well, why not? It is her house.

Though about to be sold.

But it may be that she was ready, at last, to go on. When the night of the party arrived, the weather finally turned warm—it had been a week of cold, sullen, spiteful rain. But at last it was warm—warm enough for the shorts I had blithely packed.  Relief!

At 1:40 in the afternoon—two years to the minute from her death, Eric and I listened by ourselves to the Beethoven.

This is called emotional preparation.

Within seconds, each one of us was weeping silently, shaking or rocking in our individual chairs. At the end—after 17 minutes of the most wrenching music Beethoven could produce—we stood and hugged.

Yes, a bear hug.

One of Eric’s specials—now gratefully received.

And then the hosts arrived, all 16 of them. Their party was to start.  We two guests welcomed them at the door, and let them go to it.

Of course they brought the food—and what food it was! They brought poetry as well, and what poetry it was! And the evening grew dim—the classic Wisconsin sunset that I had known, two years ago, had been revived.

It seems that no Newhouse can NOT have the last word, the last story.

I moved to the speakers I had bought. And played the Heiliger Dankgesang. If she had spent eleven days fasting to her death, some of her dearest friends could spend 17 minutes reliving it.

And we did. The light fell—softly, gently—and at last the violist announced her noble theme. The others joined. It became unbearable, as Beethoven took the theme, expanded it, came to a climax, retreated, rethought, reworked, reconciled, and then….

…rejoiced.

“That was amazing,” said Eric, after the last guest had left.  “Wonder what an outsider would have thought of this event….”

And then, the porch light went out.

Why Go Back

I said I was done with the place—why go back?

Shouldn’t I be moving on? Getting to the next project? Why return?

The people. Who knows when I’ll see them again? If ever?

And they’re getting together, on May 3d, to celebrate (in both senses) Franny’s death. So shouldn’t I be there?

The place—there’s still something calling me. The wailing rock.  The cracks in the floor. The quality of green and light in a northern woods.

Or maybe it’s the stillness of a room still questioning—will she return? Is she truly gone for good?

Nah—think the room knows.

Maybe it’s me. For yes, the mourning seems about over. She has faded—despite my pulling her back as hard as I could (a book being a pretty hard tug)—and I felt her slip away a night or two ago. It was a sound—a grace note, actually—and there she was, released into the beyond. A tiny ping into eternity….

And I sort of want to see and talk about Iguanas…. What did they think? How did they feel about it? 

Writing it was weird. No, it didn’t feel lonely—but then again, there were some 200 people (all wearing ID badges) in my life at the time (or most of the time). But also, Franny was there, in a certain way—if only seeing her words on a computer screen. Or her memory (and mine) on a coffee cup.

But now is the time I feel alone. There’s nothing to do. The permissions have been submitted or granted. Like the house, I am empty—waiting for the next owner, the next occupant who will come, clean, rearrange…

…and settle into the orange chair next to the wood-burning stove.

On Dead Squirrels

Franny figured out, as best I could. Now, who in the hell is my father?

Easy enough—google him. Of course, you do have to add Wisconsin to the search list, because otherwise you get the REAL (to everybody except us) John Newhouse, also a writer.

And then, of course, you have to disregard LinkedIn, which will tell you about John Newhouse, Esq. Some sort of lawyer in New York….

(Come on, Johnny—who in the hell is an esquire in this family!)

Well, you come to page three, or screen three, or whatever it is, and then you get to the John Newhouse of the chase—that would be Jack. The father…

…I don’t know.

It appears that he left some stuff he wrote for Lee newspapers to the University of Montana. I remembered that—Eric was out there, at the time of the donation, and was a go-between (though I suppose if Johnny can be an esquire, Rick could be a liaison…) So you click on that—not the stuff, but the google link—and then you read about him.

Written in 2010, it’s mostly accurate. Sure, they get the date of death wrong (officially it’s May 18, 1993—I suspect it was May 17, 1993) but that’s hardly surprising. Actually, nobody is quite sure when he was born, either. It had been celebrated—as I recall—on the 20^th of April for years. But in his fifties, Jack discovered that his mother, years before, and gone to the County Clerk and filed an amendment, stating he was born on the 21^st. And she was dead…

Oh, and never told him.

Well, it’s a round-about way of knowing your father. Easier it was to call up Dave.

That’s Dave Nelson, a guy I don’t know. But Dave was an obliging sort, and sent me a picture.

And readers of this blog will know—that’s Link!

“The old boy himself,” as Dave called him.

But oddly enough, it may also be Jack. Because I peered at the photo, and thought, “geez, I bet Jack took that….”

And that started me off on a hunt through the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Turns out there are over three hundred images—most of which I’ve never seen.

Well, I knew that story, too. They’d been down at the State Journal all those years when Jack worked there, and then traveled home—in a cardboard box—when he retired. Then, when they moved to the Acres, Jack had to get rid of ‘em—no room. So he dumped them on the State Historical Society.

(Parenthetically—although I probably can’t use that word and enclose it in parentheses—an old lover asked me, seconds after learning my name for the first time, if I wasn’t John Newhouse’s son. “Yes,” I said, tired of again being John’s son, especially with a guy I had just had sex with. But it turned out that Gary knew Jack not from the Journal, or from meeting him, but from the collection….)

So there I was yesterday, wondering—is that Jack who took the photo of Link? Sure looks like it.

And what about Link? What the hell was he doing out there, shooting the damn squirrels?

Well, Dave had an answer for that.

“He was probably manic depressive,” he said. “At least that’s what his son thinks….”

The son being Dave’s link to the…Link family….

(sorry!)

Well, that makes sense. Some of that conduct—one thinks of the morning visits and the Hershey bars—was off the mark behaviorally. But what a wonderful face—craggy and individual and fearless. A guy with a gun. A man with a mission.

And looking at the photo, one sees the bird feeder in the background. Was that old bastard luring the squirrels to their death? Did he prefer birds to squirrels? Too damn cheap to give some bird seed to what were (are) rodents? And we know how Link felt about them!

And am I the only one who feels—maybe—that it’s a shame, our current view of mania? I’ve almost been there, you know, but got the hell away before I plunged—or was plunged—into it. It’s living life on the lip of the volcano—an image from Robertson Davies—that moment before the plunge.

And Link—was that where he was? Always a step from madness, and sometimes over it and in it?

And Jack, observing, recording—and sending me a picture through the decades….

…and through a stranger.

The letters from Link would arrive—“John Newhouse, a scribe” they would be headed. The air temperature and atmospheric pressure would be stated. “Karl Paul Link, rattor,” they would conclude.

They came for years, they stopped. Both guys are dead….

And oddly fragrant.

Yeyo!

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

…have to write.

Or does it.

What I mean is…

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

I don’t know anything about writing.

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

OK, so maybe I have one thing right.

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

And yes, dammit, that’s a word.

Why couldn’t the book have stayed closed?

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

Is that too much to ask?

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

Ignore me….

Ahhhhh!

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

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

Oh, I am to write.

Every day.

And keep a journal.

And not pretend that the two are the same.

No blook for HER, you see!

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

Which is maybe where it should be.

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

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

Suck it in!

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

Don’t ever wanna do it again.

How wayward, how willful I am!

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

Notice the shift in tone?

Not very well done.

MONGA!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With good Nordic types, one probes for symptoms.

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

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

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

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

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

He presented with a headache.

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

This is clinically unheard of.

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

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

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

Right….

And me?  Now? In the present?

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

And have not been productive.

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

…then

I’m gonna be a ditch digger!

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

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

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

What? 

Kleenex?

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

We also don’t believe in paper towels.

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

Now as I was saying….

If the world doesn’t hear…

And guess what?

The world couldn’t care LESS about Marc Newhouse.

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

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

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

And the younger generation?

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

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

NO NO!

Gotta sit down and right!

Damn, that’s write.

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

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

And can I please go to bed????

Normal

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

…normal!

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

And in the process, time has vanished or warped.

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

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

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

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

While listening to Bach…

Coming home, organizing the day, starting to write.

None of the feared events in the anticipated dread occurred.

I’m not wasting time.

I’m not being unproductive.

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

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

Person is gone….

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

And now, I’m somewhere else. 

There is such joy in it. 

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

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

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

And knowing that I know how to do things. 

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

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

She’s apologetic.

I reassure her.

And when will that request be granted?

“Today?”

That will be fine.

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

Most of it I will do.

Some I won’t.

Steps on the stairs—Raf.

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

He will cook.

I will do the dishes.

And go to bed…

…and rest.

HQ 76

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…not convincing.

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

Didn’t it get better for me?

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

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

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

OK—so what about It Gets Better?

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

What did I do?

I went to the library and checked it out.

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

So I read…

…and read…

…and read some more.

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

Meaning I wasn’t actually having sex.

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

Or so it appeared.

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

But I couldn’t get there.

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

The answer was never “none.” 

The average was 4 to 5 times.

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

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

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

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

So what was the issue?

What was my issue?

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

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

The apartment with one bedroom.

…and one bed.

He looked at me, grasped the situation…

…and I waited for the question.

Which didn’t come.

We locked eyes instead….

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

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

It was fascinating, it was compelling, and…

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

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

But somehow I did, or am.

It never stops, you see.  

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

Yeah, I had done it. 

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

But how had I done it?

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

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

Junk Mail

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

Why would I buy a book about RickyMartin? 

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

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

Maybe she had….

So we agreed that we had to talk.

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

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

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

Now where was I?     

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

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

“Yeah, two months ago….”

Oh.

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

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

“A lizard!” said Ruthie.

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

Or maybe they had.

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

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

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

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

Jack would do it.

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

That’s why I bought the book.

Gotta find out something about the man….

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

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

Twitter.

WHAT!

No. 

I mean, NO!

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

But what to say?

Well, here goes….

Dear Ricky,

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

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

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

That was snide.

I’m sorry.

We do it all at our own rate.

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

And in opposite directions.

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

You’re famous, I’m not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can cheat the nursing home.

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

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

Who knows anything about me?

Sincerely,

Marc Newhouse

Jack woulda done it better….