Memoir

Pledge Dance, 1986: Trying to take a nice Greek girl to “Mexico” for the evening…

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Joining is important, especially when it comes to alliterative Border Bashes.

The other week I scribbled about how I felt a health care provider with Bob Jones University memorabilia all over his office wall might not provide me with the best care if he found out that I had the gay. Basically, I was stereotyping this poor guy; I had no way of knowing how he would react if he knew I was the gay. Of course, I had not felt comfortable telling him that fact. So, it’s pretty much a wash.

Then yesterday morning, I read about a “Bronx is Burning” themed rave thrown in some warehouse in the South Bronx that will soon be the site for luxury condos. The party featured flaming barrels and bullet-ridden cars. It featured celebrities like Naomi Campbell, Adrien Brody, and one of those Kardashians who’s actually a Jenner. And the biggest household name of all of the lot, cocaine. Needless to say, the social medias are hopping mad. And rightly so. How can people be so tone-deaf?

Which brings me to the esteemed 1986 Beta Border Bash. I went puerco entero in stereotyping the entire nation of Mexico. If I tried to pull this shit now, Gawker would be all over the story. I am certain our Charter would be pulled, and I would still be attending sensitivity seminars to this day.

In my defense, how I sort out my karma for that evening is the price I paid at the time. For a 19yr old addled in hormones, sexual orientation, and general addledness, it seemed like the entire universe was punishing me. Continue reading →

Stigmata by notecards

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stig·ma /ˈstiɡmə/ —from the Greek, a mark made with a pointed instrument.

I’ve been thinking about the ways in which people stigmatize people with mental illnesses a lot in the past few days. This is not because the idea got stuck on the Mobius Strip in my brain, and I can’t let go of it. Eh, who am I kidding? Of course that’s that reason. But at least I had a couple good catalysts.

First of all, a friend of mine in San Antonio was going on a Walkathon for NAMI, the National Alliance of Mental Illness, a group dedicated to fighting the stigma of mental illness. She’s a good person, and it was heartening to learn she was doing this.

The second reason was a flood of pictures on Facebook from a former friend’s birthday party. Each time a picture of a current beloved friend embracing this ex-friend came down my feed, and before I could delete it, I wanted to scream, “How could you betray me? Don’t you know how awful this [person]* was to me? I see your embrace of him as a rejection of me.” Then I would jump up and down, pointing and screaming at the computer, “J’accuse! J’accuse!”

[*Trust me, I came up with some pretty good, really descriptive, devastatingly cutting epithets for this person, but upon editing they all seemed as petty as him. So, I just reduced him to generic “person.” Trust me, if I could find something more boring I would.]

Luckily, I had the wherewithal all Sunday afternoon to practice my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. While the immediate response going through my head may be that these friends of mine must obviously hate me as much as this [person] hates on me, the more rational response is that people like a party; that they don’t know how this [person] rejected me overnight in the coldest manner possible; and that people can’t be expected to take my warped and crushed feelings into account every time they pose for a picture.

Yet, the stigma of people being assholes towards the mentally ill is not the most insidious kind of stigma. Trust me, I could write volumes on how this [person] (and his boyfriend) erased me from their lives because they thought a coping mechanism of mine –when stressed I find a quiet place to shadow box a wall, a very private action –was directed at them. Or I could write about how another ex-friend –God, I so want to name names here –shut me out of his life after I called him on the phone looking for a friendly voice to talk to during a period of heavy stress, saying that the had to cut me off because he was worried I was too much of a suicide risk. Or, heck, I could talk about the guy a bar last week who, after asking why I was wearing long pants on a warm night, got flustered when I answered him honestly: “My cargo shorts were covered in deadly Cheetos dust.”

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” he said as he backed away like I was stroking a king cobra.

No, the worst stigmatizers are the ones who think they are helping you. Continue reading →

This day in September: Five memories of my dad and the Twin Towers

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Just trying to add something positive to balance a negative day. September 11th doesn’t need any more maudlin.

I need to reclaim my memories of those buildings.

1…

I had just woken up and was engaged in my morning ritual of removing my stuffed animals from the grocery bags where they spent the night. This was serious business; the animals needed to bagged every night because if there was a fire, they could be evacuated with less fuss.

My dad stuck his head in my room. My eight-year-old self was slightly startled; he normally was on his way to the train by now. Was I in trouble for bagging my animals again? It was normally my mom who took issue with this completely normal and in no way morbid ritual.

His eyes were wide. “Hey Chris-popples, you need to see this!”

The use of the “-popples” suffix always meant fun was afoot.

We hurried down the stairs to the master bedroom. Our house on Long Island was a split-level. He pointed to the dresser. “Look at that!” The black and white Bradford television, the one that took an eternity to warm up, the one I got to watch when I was sick, the one with the necessary vertical hold knob, was tuned to the Today show.

Some dude was walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers!

I sat on the edge of the bed while watching the spectacle unfold in glorious black and white, breathing in the in smell of the English Leather that my dad slapped all over his face after he shaved.

The Twin Towers will always be monochrome and reek of that cologne you brought your dad for Father’s Day every year.

2…

My dad got to go to some sort of business-guy function in an upper floor of one of the Towers. He told me that the building was so tall, the rain was “falling” upwards. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. After all, this was the same man who spent the better part of my life trying to convince me that Suzanne Pleshette had a wooden leg. Continue reading →

Manners maketh the hump.

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People sometimes accuse me of being overly obsessed with manners. I have my reasons.

Table_SettingI was reminiscing the other night with my friend Chloe. Her birthday was the next day, and I brought up celebrating with her back in 2005. A bunch of us sat on grass next to the East River in Brooklyn, watched the sun go down over Lower Manhattan, and drank copious amounts of wine. I brought a bottle of Smoking Loon Viognier. That day Chloe was turning 23; I had turned 39 three months earlier.

I remarked how wonderful it was that I was able to become such long-term friends with someone so much younger than me. Well, the fact that she was dating and eventually married one of my best friends certainly helped. However, I would have gladly been friends with Chloe regardless of that. (Though that would have probably involved a 39yr old man hanging around the Pratt campus).

“I just wasn’t into the typical college bullshit,” she said.

“True. I remember telling someone I had found a 35yr old 22yr old friend.”

“Yeah, I didn’t do crap like fuck in front of my roommate.” Well, that was out of nowhere, but I understood.

It’s all about manners, and nothing says ill breeding like fucking in front of one’s college roommate. College is the first time many people are away from the manner-enforcing mommies, and sometimes they go insane with improper etiquette.

Manners exist for a reason.

During my first term at Wittenberg after transferring in, they existed for the very necessary reason that I needed to be able to walk into my dorm room or fall asleep without seeing my new roommate Sheldon and his girlfriend Denise having sex. Continue reading →

A necessary palate cleanse with groundhog and Klonopin

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Wherein some things are too close to write about, but you gotta write anyways…

klnohogIt’s odd, but in the middle of a panic attack, even the worst one in seventeen years, one is still capable of a lucid thought or two or three. A couple of weeks ago I was at a new psychiatrist’s office attempting to get my meds refilled. However, Dr. Bela Agabalyan thought I was an alcoholic whose only purpose for being in her office was to score Klonopin. You know, because the three-hour nap Klonopin brings on really gets a party going.

She refused to listen to me, even when I pointed out that I didn’t need the Klonopin refilled anyways, and could we please talk about my bipolars. “I see two diseases here: bipolar and excessive alcohol use!” she snapped. It should be pointed out that according to the info available to her I drank three times a week for a total of five drinks a week. I’m really not much of a drinker. My interaction with her proved that weird corollary that the more one says they don’t drink all that much, the more people think you have a flask of Beam strapped to your thigh.

Nothing is more frustrating than when people who are wrong don’t listen to me. And when you don’t listen to me, your reward is a panic attack. Usually, these consist of me storming out of a room in a huff, but I needed my meds. I was trapped. Trapped in a room with a stupid person gets you a doozy of a panic attack. I might even punch a wall (or in this case a Purell dispenser). Trap me in a room with stupid person the same day I receive the news that I’m wildly diabetic and a few days after my beloved stepmom dies, Katie bar the door.

Literally bar the door Katie, because I’m going to start beating my head into it. Which is what I did, well over a dozen times. Yet, even though I was having by what any standard was a psychotic break, I was still capable of some lucid thoughts…

  • This has got to look bad.
  • Why isn’t Dr. Bela Agabalyan telling me to stop? People always tell me to stop banging my head. What is her problem?
  • I’m lucky I don’t need the Klonopin filled because she’s never gonna fill that scrip now, is she?
  • I’m gonna get some good writing out of this.

That’s the solace I take out of whatever misfortune, real or manufactured, life hands me: I can always write about. The universe didn’t give me many gifts when it came to dealing with the world, but it gave me the ability to describe my feelings thru stringing together words and sentences in a pleasing manner, hopefully funny, that helps me understand what went on. And hopefully it helps others, too. Continue reading →

Looking at art with Ernie

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Co-visiting the Art Institute with my stepmom, who couldn’t make it for obvious reasons…

This past Tuesday, my stepmom Ernie passed away. I got the news as I was checking into a hotel in Chicago. A good friend of mine, Doug, was up there for an LGBT Law Conference, and I had decided to venture up there. I have been out of NYC for a while and really needed to see a friendly face from there. As there was honestly nothing to do at this point for her physical being, I decided to treat her soul to some art. I had wanted to visit the Art Institute, so I decided to devote part of my visit to her. This meant going to look at a lot of Impressionist paintings. Frankly, this was a lot more Impressionist paintings that I would look at on a normal visit; give me a nice Yves Klein Blue to stare at for an hour and I’m happy. Impressionism is a little heavy on the pastels for me, but I loved the woman. I can deal with pastels out of love. I learned a term when I was in Museum Studies: CO-VISITING is the notion that most people don’t visit a museum alone. There is not only a conversation going on between the viewer and the art; there is also a conversation between the viewer and his the person standing next to him. This was a great way to connect with Ernie. I flashed back to every Christmas when she would open the gift from her sister Nicole. They exchanged calendars every year, and it always seemed to be some sort of Impressionist calendar. I think they even gave each other the same one one year. Enjoy.

Art Institute as seen from walking from the Bean
“The Bay of Marseilles , seen from Estaque
detail, “Woman and Child at the Well” by Camille Pissaro
You can tell this is Pissaro by the agricultural themes and the text panel next to it.
details, “Water Lilies” by Claude Monet
I point out art.
She would’ve liked this Roman chicken mosaic.
The Chagall windows
detail, “Cafe Singer” by Edgar Degas
detail, “Acrobats at the Cirque Fernado” by Renoir
detail, “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” by George Seurat
Young couple looking at Seurat.

PANTS SHOULD NEVER BE INTERESTING!

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The fine workmanship!

The fine workmanship!

THROWBACK THURSDAY: PANTS EDITION

“I just wanted to remind you of the standards of dress expected of teaching assistants in the Communications Department.” That’s all the professor who ran the Introduction to Public Speaking course I taught a section of at the University of Michigan. That’s all she had to say. I knew to what she was referring.

And she wasn’t referring to my habit of teaching while wearing mismatched Converse Hi Tops on my feet.

It was the pants incident. I blame Jerry Garcia for the pants incident.

Early on in my final undergrad year at Wittenberg University, I blew the crotch out of my favorite pair of 501s. All throughout my life, the epicenter of pants failure has been the crotch. The combination of giant thighs and an ample berry farm (mostly Pick-Ur-Own, sadly) has proven too much for various bits of denim, khaki, and wool.

I am a sound believer in the notion that a person’s environment affects his or her actions. Wittenberg in 1987/88 was in the patchouli and pit sweat throes of Grateful Dead fandom and all the sartorial and aural crimes involved in that “lifestyle.” Continue reading →

Dear earthquakes… it’s over. Bye.

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May 3, 1974: Actors dodging rubble during filming of motion picture

(LA Times)

Certain aspects of your personality don’t mesh with certain aspects of my personality. I’m afraid I’m choosing to die in another form of natural disaster.
It's all a matter of where you stand.

It’s all a matter of where you stand.

A couple of days ago my Facebook feed was filled with several posts about an article in the New Yorker about a massive earthquake that’s due to strike the Pacific Northwest. The author says that it won’t be the Big One; it will be THE VERY BIG ONE.

Normally, I’d jump all over phrasing like that. Not today. Not for you, earthquakes.

The author goes to great, well-written lengths to explain the mechanisms behind such a Very Big One and how it will turn everything west of Interstate 5 into the infrastructural equivalent of a rotting cantaloupe filled with dead bodies instead of seeds.

But I didn’t need an education. I was already quite aware of the phrase “Cascadian Subduction Zone.”

And “liquefaction.”

And “ghost forest.”

And “inundation zone.”

I have been fascinated with disasters since I was a child –so much so that our neighbors gave me a coffee-table book called The World’s Greatest Disasters when I nine. I read and reread the book so many times that the book’s British origins helped fuel a lifelong Anglophilia in me. After all, what kid can resist reading that the debris following the Christmas Cyclone of 1974 in Darwin, Australia was “scattered higgledy–piggledy?”

When my mom dabbled in Community College when I was eleven or twelve, she would take me to the library when she studied. I was expected to amuse myself with the various AV materials available, and I found myself repeatedly watching one called San Francisco: The City That Waits to Die. In it, men in white lab coats placed a small toy house with a flag attached to it on a mass of wet sand, and then they shook the shake table. Every time I re-watched the film, the tiny house plunged downward until only the top of the flag could be seen. Our house at the time was on sandy soil and in imminent danger of liquefaction despite its location in Virginia Beach.

And to this day, if I wake up in a weird position on the bed, covered with pillows, I just lie there still, pretending what it’s like being covered in debris. Continue reading →

Did I ever tell you about that time I got punched in the face at a Lemonheads concert?

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Last evening my friend Mo Daviau, Girl Novelist extraordinaire, posted her feelings about a Spotify playlist called “Epic Indie of the ‘90s.” or something like that. Apparently, she hates The Lemonheads. She calls them the “most boring band” of the 90s, which she is free to do. I slammed Neutral Milk Hotel when I shared a post from Clickhole the other week, and we’re still friends. I hope.

Two things immediately sprung into my mind after reading her post:

ONE… Their version of “Mrs. Robinson” is easily in my Top 100 songs of all time. Whenever I get a chance to DJ, I throw it in. It is what one calls a “floorpacker.” Yes, I hang out with people who feel it’s appropriate to dance to The Lemonheads.

TWO… I got punched in the face at a Lemonheads concert back in ‘92. Continue reading →

Pride Thought 2015: Your Brick and Mortar Pride

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Photo by Stonewall Columbus

Photo by Stonewall Columbus

The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

–Justice Clarence Thomas (Yeah, I just quoted the second biggest judicial prick on the planet, and I realize that the above was surrounded by thought turds of the highest order. Please bear with me.)

STONEWALL NYC

IMG_1776

Copyright: ME

Yesterday as soon as the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges came down, my Facebook feed exploded into rainbows. Friends –the gay ones, the straight ones, and the ones whose whatever they do is none of my business –were busy expressing their approval. Rainbow filters got a work out, from profile pics to some idiot who decided the American Gladiators needed gayulating. As ton of my FB friends are gay guys who live in NYC, by far the most common setting for pictures was the street and park in front of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in the West Village.

But for all the pictures with the bar’s facade in the background, not a single one was taken on the inside.

Zero.

Earlier this week the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission declared the building that houses the Stonewall Inn an OFFICIAL LANDMARK™. Apparently, this is the first building to be designated as such for its role in the struggle for LGBT rights, even though I’m told Fraunces Tavern regularly featured men in wigs and made a killer appletini back in day. If you are reading this, and you are not aware of the significance of the Stonewall Inn, stop right now and look it up.

It is incredibly heartening that Stonewall Inn is being recognized for its importance. Civil rights never move forward in a slow, steady fashion. There are flashpoints, and these physical flashpoints need to be preserved. Tearing down the Stonewall building and putting up condos called The Lofts at Stonewall would, for me, be the equivalent of tearing down the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma and putting up Marty K’s Alabama River ZipLine Adventure in its place.

People need a physical place to rally and remember.

But don’t believe anyone who tells you that the bar called “Stonewall Inn” that has nested inside the building that held the bar involved with the Stonewall uprising has anything to do with pride. It may be a big part of PRIDE, but there is little pride inside. I do not hesitate to say that it is probably the shittiest gay bar in NYC. It’s cramped inside. Continue reading →