December 2001

Vanessa's twenty-three-year-old lover seems to have moved in with us. He is sweet and vulnerable and lost. On a couple occasions I have found trickles of blood on the toilet seat and a discarded needle in the waste basket.
Will I write with total candor about some of my mischief or will shame censor me? Will I admit that I have done the drug for two nights without so much as ten minutes of sleep, but that I have enjoyed every hour, even been to work and an AA meeting like this?
All my hearts beat with engine hope, revved by rosewater reveries. A rainstorm has pummeled us for days, soliciting asphalt, buses, pedestrians, dirt and desire. Light from streetlamps mixes easily with transient shadows that reflect our own human fragility. A deep-seated sense of unrest boils and bubbles just beneath every breath. Constant implosions. A vast oceanic need for something, someone, a connection, a lasting distraction, a thing more profound and superior than this constant questioning on a broken carousel of Whens, Whys, and impossible Hows. Life is a precious seed we plant in the secret garden of our deepest desires; it grows into a magnificent tree that ultimately teeters and falls on us, crushing our greatest dreams.
Rain and the absent touch, misty windows to foggy recollections of a summer that was unapologetically drunk. The unstoppable, inescapable passage of time and experiences only half-digested. A guitar image of a lover in a white dress shirt, missing buttons revealing a bare-chested memory that lingers on fingertips. He taught your taciturn heart to drum erotic rhapsodies, but you betrayed him when in his absence you beat someone else's amorous drum. Repercussions. So, you half live and half die in a rain that has more dignity in falling than you do in standing erect, but alone.
2 a.m. I'm on the drug for the third day and exhausted. Last night I went to dinner at Claude's in Sausalito where I met Claude's sweet Chilean partner. I want to write about the night, the beautiful multimillion-dollar house in the hills, the others who were in attendance, the topics of conversation, but it is not presently humanly possible.
It still rains. I smoke and wait.
I envy laughing customers their money, their freedom, their privilege, and have to remind myself that they too must endure losses, worries, disease, and instabilities. Again I thought about leaving, about going back to Chicago, Modesto, or that place that receives us upon death. But I can't break my family's heart that way. Also I'm too curious.
While in search of rippling light I fell into a dried up well where I remain listening for the echoes, waiting for the flood of light that may lift and carry me out of here. There is no purpose to my existence right now. Every breath is wasted. Every waking moment a reminder that I have failed to make something of myself. I just don't know what it is I am to do, to be, in this lifetime. Wayward dreams. Desert dreams.
Night. Whose venom injects me with a winter of depression, whose rattle reverberates with colorless thoughts I cannot shake or escape.
How is a violin to express its anguish in the petulant hands of a buoyant fiddler? How is a fragrant flower to be appreciated when it reeks of the stink of life? Summer, where are you?
All the while the clock ticks with the hands of desire for laughter, for company, a drug, a drink, a lover, a friend. Some thirsts will not be quenched with water, but ebbing time, fluid experience, oceanic distance. I move through the days with a heart that listens to streets, to faces, to storms and memories for melodic notes, a pulse. There is music everywhere. Even in silence.
On the drug, traipsing through a field of knee-high words. I don't want to be a survivor. Survival is not convenient, pretty, easy, but a war with no tangible enemies, and you step on many toes along the way- some of which are your own.
What was I hoping to accomplish by rubbing each sacred moment with alcohol, the vapors of which traveled with me into the next morning that was crisp, but foggy? Like dreams the drunk scenes would come haphazardly to surface and I'd cringe at some indecent thing I did with a stranger whose face was a puzzle of missing pieces, or an embarrassing thing I might have said to someone I love. And yet, sobriety is just as hard, just as messy and painful. Not the urge to drink; there is no physical urge. Just an emotional dependence.
To strangers I am a perfect angel. To family I am something entirely different.
It's nearly 4 a.m. What would I do if I did not write? Is paper the padded walls against which all writers fling their entirety, pound their fears, joys, complaints and dreams?
Vanessa is sewing. I love the sound of the sewing machine. Ben is writing. He is a raw and talented writer. His poems are full stomachs, brimming, exploding with sound, color, sex. Outside the page he is very much a boy- playful, bright-eyed, energetic, angry, dissatisfied, lost, rebellious, well-meaning. He writes in a season of rain, its rivers overflowing. Each poem is long, mature without restrictions. I encourage him to read his work in public. He wants to be an actor, but he lacks the discipline.
Life does not end when we have ceased dreaming. We are to reinvent ourselves at any age, at all crossroads.
December sneaks into my room where I dream and he knows I dream of his kiss. He wakes me. Life returns to every hair, to every muscle, to each wish. My eyes adjust to the massive outline of him. He is the kind who bites and I am the kind to be bitten. We are inside night's black breath. His controlled nip explores the ache of my shoulder, senses the subtle shiver of my neck, tastes the inch and contour of my surrender. I have waited for months and my impatience is a forest of hungry wolves. He does not say a word. Only a hand, fingers, hundreds of them, hot, cold, gripping, holding my black horse desire down. Down pillow. Down I go to the zenith of his groin, struggling against his coy and flirt, fighting his slow and wait. Tonight I am not feeling tender, but violent and beeline. I seek his erection, its heat, its pulse, its trickle and lulling flavor. He turns, opens one thigh. I begin to suckle, breathing in his distinct flavor, his marble, wood, concrete musk. December becomes tropical and begins to moan, a song that reverberates through his chest, down his torso, across his erection into me. We hum together. Night swings wildly from the naked branches of the Pleasure Tree. I revel like the blind who are for a moment granted the precious glimpse, but in their haste are blinded by the sun. Where has he been all these months? With whom has he traveled? With whom has he eaten, taken drugs, laughed, danced, fucked, and rested? What adventures has he amassed in the palm of his enormous hand that now circles my buttocks, lingers, lifts, and lands like a whip? Were the many strangers he encountered kind to him or were they weak and envious? I crawl up the mattress, offer myself to him, to his direction, his vigor. When will he fill me? Isn't December the dimly-lighted space of desire, lust, fetish, where perversion may color our bodies with feverish brushstrokes of fantasy, fear, hopes, ropes, sloppy kisses and bruises of vehemence? There are many Decembers in one lifetime. This one turns me on my stomach, embraces me, melts and swells into me, sinks into my moment. We are like two eventful nights meeting when the day that was to separate us never showed. Two tall, vast, deep nights so drunk that they toss their diamond stars to the poet wind and watch in welded embrace for new, yet undiscovered constellations. He peels me. Feels me from the inside out. My body is a sentient memory that stretches more with each recollection as it is created, in the moment, in detail, in technicolor, in silk, in semen, in sighs. Every joint in my body loses sense of direction and I breathe in the pillow, every thread. His lips rap sighs into my ear where music will never sound the same, and nothing more will ring true. This is what the pain of life and love should be- warm, safe, sweet-scented like a twilight garden blooming in winter, where all things, the good seed and the bad, are cherished, grown, pleasurable like landscapes painted in colors with no names. To this pain I give my every sick strategy. When will he release me? The golden question explodes into cheap ceramic fragments even before I've had a chance to utter it. Now I understand.
My wish is a universal flower larger than this garden I dream in; its scarlet petals close at nightfall around me, enveloping me as though I'm a parasite. No one mentioned that the generous flower is poisonous and carnivorous. It consumes me when I want to possess it; the consumption reflected in mirrors, puddles, storefront windows, when I get off the phone with my mother, when everyone else goes home and I want more, but my exiled heart is so parched, desperate, vulnerable, so delusional that even drinking sand becomes an option. When will I accept things as they are instead of always seeking to be transformed in one way or another- drinking, drugs, exercise, writing, friendship, sex? I speak of living honestly, courageously, with the will to change, to flower, to overcome, and yet I replace one weakness with another, switching addictions. I'm almost thirty, not twenty! Feeling acutely resigned to mere ghosts of greater things, without true ambition, real skills, a direction, or much of anything.
On the drug. In the city. Open. At Cafe Flore. San Francisco could not be more glorious. I could write five pages about it, but I'll be kind and spare you. This morning I stepped out of bed missing the ocean, knowing that things will never be in order, that life will never be only lovely, only right, only kind. Moe was just here. He saw me from across Market Street and joined me for an hour. We talked about our lives, friends, lovers, and antidepressants, among other things.
I've been missing classes. I'm incapable of doing the right thing. It's like forcing a rock to float on water. I sink. It's impossible. I'm impossible. And yet, I'm always going on about possibility, expansiveness, openness. Do I wear this philosophy as a flower on my lapel for others to see, but not in my heart for me to live by and believe?
No regrets. No complaining. No whining. No dwelling in the empty courtyard where remnants of last night's festivities blow in a musicless wind.
I want to write a story called The Cactus Coat.
Is it telling that Claude, high above on a Sausalito hill, successful and wealthy, gives me a copy of The Persian Boy?
Jackie and Tariq have called and left messages.
Young, beautiful, desperate, loveless. What are we in search of with every bated breath? The wounds are deep and we must face that they may never heal, at least not in this lifetime. The day touches me with gloved hand. In my soul I call for Tariq, my family- Come rescue me! Come for me and take me to the sun. Take me home. My heart is dirty with ache. I hang by one thread for spring. Streetlamp-hope.
Almost 6 p.m. In the city. At dinner alone. Sitting by a window watching people, cars, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree in a window across the street. Anonymous. Lost in the din. Public solitude. I enjoy the contradictions, don't you? Looking for something with blindfolds on. Each person has his own signature walk. Some dance as they walk, others sing, some shout, some whisper secrets, some ask for something, others suggest.
Last Sunday I knew I would run into Stephen, and when Tracy and I were walking up 18th Street he passed us on the ascending sidewalk. We did not stop and chat, only smiled and exchanged greetings like strangers. Tracy proceeded to vent a long list of unpleasant adjectives, which made me laugh heartily. As for myself? I did not feel much of anything, no longing, no resentment, nothing.
Christy was not in court today. The usual DA was there- a confident woman of color whose poise and strength I'm attracted to. I observed her with great fascination. Her ease, her professional curtness, the way she dexterously flipped through mountains of files, her occasional humor and sarcasm.
I'm at Cafe Flore, writing at a small square table on the patio. A certain bleach-blond young man leaves the cafe but keeps turning back as he crosses Market Street to see if I'm looking. I do not encourage him. And yet what is this nameless desire evading three languages, dodging Assyrian, Farsi, and English? I let the symphonic streets define me, however off the mark these dissonant avenues may be.
Museum search for self.
Identity airbag.
Spirit crash!
In a vacuum. A bubble. A phase? A Moroccan courtyard. By a fountain making enormous wishes, puffing hashish. In a perfume cloud. A red earth sandstorm. Kaleidoscope reveries. Flowing without direction, free of dimensions. Rippling mirrors. Resting on the sandpaper tongue of a Sunday in December. Swimming against the blue ebb. Now relaxing my trillion cells, carried into jade green oceanic tides. My diaphanous fins surrendering to the depths of a motherless universe. Arriving violently at stranger-still shores. Violins and caravans. Loping horses whose golden hooves race against screaming pastures. Trees that bear diamond fruits the shape of sea stars. Blue soil. A handwritten letter. My father's tender touch. Being rescued from this dry dark well. Making the most of each dry dark hour.
Went to Heba's housewarming party in Oakland. Everyone was there, including Tariq. I was in a quiet mood. Watched others. Smiled at them. Had no appetite to eat. Listened. Wandered. Bilal was there and flirted with me and others. We went outside to smoke. He made me laugh. Sometimes I laughed at him- the silly, blatant, flirtatious things he says. We sat on steps. He asked what I look for in men. I humored him, 'What anyone looks for: honesty, trust, commitment, respect for individuality, space.' He was aggressive. I'm not attracted to him but aroused by his interest in me. Yet, it's so hard to take him seriously. I was too high to engage in any serious talk with anyone. Tariq and I could only smile sweetly at each other, touch lightly but tenderly in passing. We are close when we are alone, comfortable when it's only the two of us. Or, maybe we just don't have anything in common anymore. Maybe I've lost the basic ability to relate to anyone. Anyone at all... But it's midnight and I'm tired and this is no time to consider tender matters. It was a nice, warm evening spent with people who love me. Let us leave it at that.
Now the window is open and in creeps the guilty breeze. The city whispers and tries to tempt me into its rolling fog and nebulous, capricious streets. It breathes deeply and its wet streets swell and sink like asphalt waves, extending a massive arm that hangs from rust-colored cables across a dark bay, offering breathtaking delights and dangerous views and asking nothing in return. At first. But the bay is filled with cobalt-colored wine, the intoxicating fumes of which permeate the fog and impregnate the lonely heart with silly ideas of companionship and bravado. A lighthouse winks. The hopeful heart sinks. It is best to be drunk than soberly disappointed here, anywhere. Each building stands in silence and waits, pretending not to see. Traffic lights change for no one at all. The minutes turn into stone for looking back. Shadows tempt interpretation. The placid earth may shake at any given moment, pull from under me, and free itself of my desperate appointments with desire.
Why am I such a damn fool? Even at 28 clinging to the parched nipple of idealism, convincing myself the nourishing milk will come. Funny, since I was never breastfed to begin with. From the start I bonded with the bottle! This is who I am. This is how it is.
I observe the elderly with wonder. How did they do it? What reward encouraged them to continue to crawl across the ever-thinning years? How can they stand the slow and deteriorating body and mind, dilapidating like scaffolding of bone- losing comrades, wives, husbands, children, faculties? What is their motivation, their golden secret? I wait for centuries, breath held, for spring to come to the pebble shore of black planet, champagne waves foaming and rabid, blanketing grotesque beasts that have gathered having picked up the scent and vibrations of dying dreams.
Firas brought the argeelah to the party last night, unpacked it from a black satchel, assembled it ceremoniously, expertly stoked the coals, then packed it with anise tobacco. We sat on stout divans in a crowded circle and passed the argeelah, inhaling the smooth aromatic smoke, letting it out savoringly, soon feeling the strange and subtle buzz- smiling, talking, nodding, agreeing. Longing. So many poetic and exotic names. So many beautiful faces. Intense young men and women with colorful opinions and buxom perspectives regarding politics, sexuality, gender, history. In the end, no matter how well-traveled and educated, no one is right, no one is spared doubt, disappointment, and the sorcery of change. But I listened. Each one of us a hapless raft in a vast sea of tumult, of deep blue depths and candid mirroring surfaces, rippling distortions, liquid ribbons of perspective, undertow of promises, truths with filmy scales slipping from desperate emotional clutches. Each one of us adrift, salt stinging our eyes, caked onto our eardrums, trapped in our nostrils, obstructing and enhancing our senses simultaneously. If we were truly knowledgeable we'd know that the limitless sea is actually a street puddle after a storm. Amniotic pool of coincidences, ephemeral triumphs, due deaths, happenstance.
Everything I live and write, too, is mere shavings, shards, remnants of once living and greater matter that like autumn leaves are carried away and brought back by careless, rootless, whistling winds- winds that gather momentum and appetite and grow steadily into tornadoes with a bulbous eye that can magnify, mesmerize. We live, love, buy, sell, cheat, contribute, struggle and flourish in the storm structure, and those of us who can't cope within the ever changing microclimates become self-medicating nomads, misfits. In an empire anchored by wealth we are forced to scramble in blinding sandstorms for our few and featherweight possessions, crawling against the abrasive desert floor for coins that roll and slip into the hot sand, their value falling even as we strive. Everyone I know is taxed and struggling. I envy no one.
I feel destructive, relishing being lost, this kidnapping of the self from the mundane, no longer cowering under the weight of expectations, happy to pay the price for freedom from slavish codependency on approval. I seduce life because life is my captor. Intoxication.
Last night when we were huddled in the argeelah circle an upbeat Arabic song came on and I tapped my foot in time, swaying to the music. Across the circle I heard someone else rapping in unison with me. When I looked through the cloud of smoke and sound, chatter and laughter, I saw that it was Tariq. This was our sweet synchronicity I missed, the one we shared in writing to each other, but lacked in person, in flesh. I smiled at him, but he was turned to someone else, deep in rapport, his arm around Raymond's shoulder. I was immediately struck by the symbolic moment, severed from the party by the reminder that my love for Tariq- sometimes familial, sometimes erotic- remains my own secret, a private room into which he does not follow. Perhaps Tariq has his own room on the same floor and wishes me there and I too do not show...
This diary is my handcrafted legacy for the incredible children I will never have. And yet, at every meeting Assyrian, Iranian, Arab lesbians snuggle up to me and proclaim that I am the only candidate for fathering their babies. But would I knowingly perpetuate this dissonant gene into precious new beings who deserve more than these limitations, these character flaws I can't surpass, these demons against which I remain helpless? Demons I've learned to tolerate and commune with, and who will outlive me, and who will surely be surreptitiously transferred intravenously to the innocent offspring. I refuse to accept that a child must fight for its sense of peace and purpose from inception to extinction in a world that is challenging enough, without me contributing my disease, my depression, my addiction.
War in an albino winter that injects my swarthy spirit with pallor, reawakening the immigrant fear that I had for a moment in time, in the intoxicating hullabaloo, blissfully forgotten. This is no way to live and it certainly is no way to die. This "civilized" society brutalizes its blessed homosexual youth who once dreamt with all his being of loving and healing others, but was systematically emotionally dismembered, and became a fragmented adult haunted by painful recollections, the pain of which he learned to numb and self-medicate with excess- drugs, alcohol, food, exercise, emotion, work, art, sex.
Laws that do not protect our civil rights are the unproclaimed wardens of these prison yards we know as our neighborhoods, communities, churches, schools, families. The Land of the Free belongs to heterosexuals, while the rest of us continue tripping down a maze of streets once rumored to have been paved with gold, drunk on the potion distilled by their bigotry.
It is sexy when a man who is otherwise self-certain and unbending admits he's been wrong without excuses and justifications.
It is sexy when his hair has begun to grey but he remains at heart youthful, enthusiastic, and is every day still fascinated, delighted, and shocked by life.
It is sexy when he wears a dress shirt casually.
It is sexy when he stumbles in public and laughs at himself authentically, does not take himself seriously.
It is sexy when someone cuts him off in traffic but he is too immersed in the music to notice the petty violation.
It is sexy when he is polite and well-mannered, treats others with respect.
It is sexy when he doesn't waver whether he is happy, outraged, under the weather, exhausted, sleeping, cursing, reading non-fiction with his legs crossed, telling a dirty joke and breaking the ice, making mistakes, paying the bill when his dining companion has stepped away from the table.
It is sexy when he doesn't stop kissing you as he lowers you into his bed.
It is sexy when he fucks you and does not sulk and become distant afterward.
It is sexy when he isn't threatened by your beauty and brilliance.
It is sexy when he isn't alarmed by your confession and complexity.
It is sexy when he doesn't pretend to understand you.
It is sexy when he knows the value of things, material and otherwise, but isn't cheap and thinks it's amusing when you accidentally spill red wine on his favorite shirt and kisses you laughingly.
It is sexy when he doesn't pretend and yet has a rich imagination.
It is sexy when he hates poetry, dreads the opera, can't stand pretentious restaurants, while his closest friends are accomplished artists.
It is sexy when a man sends his mother a package, enclosing a handwritten note.
It is sexy when he is physically striking, exercises, eats well, and stays fit but isn't vain.
It is sexy when he walks into a room and heads turn but he remains oblivious to his own magnetism.
It is sexy when a man has overcome his resentment for a father who was stern, distant, even absent.
It is sexy when a man is balding gracefully.
It is sexy when he gets drunk once in a blue moon without hurting or humiliating himself or others, and in the morning, at breakfast, he is still glowing with appreciation for a night spent well with friends old and new.
It is sexy when a man compliments his elderly neighbor on her new hairdo and stops to listen to her humorous tale of an afternoon at the salon.
It is sexy when he interjects profanities into an otherwise articulate conversation while avoiding being entirely cerebral and entirely crude.
It is sexy when he is masculine and brawny but isn't solely defined by his size, strength, or manhood, but surprises those he meets with an impeccable flair for relating to people of all walks of life with unwavering sensitivity and intelligent curiosity.
It is sexy when a man battles philosophical doubt and insecurity without being self-absorbed, but apt to foster his many relationships in the hopes of exchanging experiences and gaining some perspective and insight.
It is sexy when a man who has a PhD in mathematics can dance.
It is sexy when a man who is otherwise reticent opens up in a poetic and refreshing way.
It is sexy when a man who was told he couldn't, through honorable means, does.
It is sexy when a man who doesn't smoke doesn't judge those who do.
It is sexy when a man insists you stay in your car with the doors locked until he gets there to change your flat, and says something funny and comforting before he hangs up.
It is sexy when a man who is otherwise protective promises somewhat reluctantly to be civil to your despotic father at a family function and despite many provocations keeps his word, not to mention is the most charming and winning date.
It is sexy when a man is passionate about something and speaks with enthusiasm and abandon, gesticulating descriptively, his handsome face animated and vehement, and you find yourself wholly engaged and immersed.
It is sexy when he pays the toll for the stranger in the car behind him.
It is sexy when a man is in fact right, but at that very raw moment doesn't say "I told you so", but looks like he wishes he were wrong, taking you into his arms and soon has you looking toward the future...
5:20 a.m. The day has begun without the last truly ending and I enjoy this connection, this continuance of time without the interruption of sleep. I find some of the recent entries, their poetic, weightless quality somewhat surprising. Frightening even. If it were fiction I were experimenting with in this almost-Gothic, fantastic style then I would not be so unsettled, but pleased. But to air my experiences and sensibilities in such a deliberate fashion, relying heavily on smoke and mirrors, symbols, worries me that I might be moving farther away from the reality of my experience into other out-of-reach places- fitting for fiction, not for a grown man divulging himself, his experience. I worry that what I reveal here in symbolic, whimsical terms will influence my thinking and reactions to happenings in the cold light of day. That I am gaining distance, not intimacy with my life.
But isn't the entire point of this diary to nurture and evolve my writing voice? Didn't I want freedom from the exhausted Is, Mes, and Mys of writing, to arrive at a place more colorful, more interesting, more entertaining, more imaginative? I can't be fearful if I'm to write, write anything. Truth. Lies. Fiction. Autobiography. In all these rooms it is my responsibility to adapt, to invent and be in turn invented.
7:00 a.m. The sun coyly rises and perhaps this is the fateful morning when the warming air will thaw the suspended secret that might decode the one and true purpose of my presence here. Morning in the empire of hope. Noon the gatekeeper. Afternoon the cathedral of faith. Evening the thief of hearts. Night a wilderness of reflections. Emotions like wild animals vying for thinning resources in the conduits we clutter with addictions, mistakes, responses fashioned by fear when really we meant well. The lies we tell ourselves become the legs with which we approach life and acquaint ourselves with others.
Arrogant to believe that we make wishes when really, if you were to examine the underside of a leaf in autumn, if you were to live long enough in the wild and sleep under the stars, you'd know that it is wishes that make us; make us excited to get out of bed in the morning, tolerate the emptiness of life, experiment, take risks, remain with certain lovers, divorce, attend church, socialize with people we can't stand, do courageous things, be kind.
It is wishes that raise us as ghostly nannies our beloved mothers cannot see or fathom. It is wishes that change us, sometimes for the better. It is wishes we carry with us long after we have forgotten where it is we are going. If only wishes had shape, a name, a place, and were tangible. If only they had a sound, a voice, a bell around their vaporous neck. But they remain the elusive captains of our movements, gestures, actions.
The God of our childhood disowned our dreams because their desire was fulsome, material, carnal, faithless, selfish.
Overindulgent reveries sever us from God, family, life, and we come to feel rejected by them, our unerasable pain the size of a city, but it is we who choose to live in a dream, surrounded by wishes like stone walls. And yet, we have to be curious, imaginative, rebellious, independent if we are to survive and flourish and return to God, to family, to life. Whole.
11:05 a.m. In the city. In the sun. Afraid to look back at the preceding pages, which would require me to press my body against the words and feel with my nakedness the many strange textures of that foreign landscape. Afraid that I would be disheartened by headstones in places where I expected statues.
Now a sense of peace for the tenacious flower that refused to accept its fate and abide by the laws of nature, surviving a brutal winter, defying the seasons, but was too exhausted and brutalized to feel exuberant, letting go at last its frayed petals like a final breath, a defeated sigh, withering to a final place of surrender and serenity. I let go again of the things I hold on to, drop my seeds of idealism and expectation to which I clung frantically. At least for now this is where I rest my disappointment and caress it; for these few rootless moments when I am sitting leisurely in the sun, in San Francisco, with December, cars and conversations, hills and streets, forgetting my fears, my mistakes, the pain of my loved ones, without the urgency to look ahead or glance behind in a futile search for reasons, explanations, causes, and excuses.
I want to write a short story about an old maid who finds purpose in tending to a thousand houseplants, all of which she knows by name, and a young man who searches for his purpose in a thousand lovers, none of whom he knows by name.
It's time to leave this winter oasis where for a brief time I was able to evade the swooping guillotine hands of the tyrant clock that mechanically and numerically reminds us that we are late, that we are behind, that we have been lazy, fearful, hesitant, procrastinating, now hasty, never timely, never free to live life on our own terms, in our own natural rhythm, at our own personal pace.
2:20 p.m. My past is drunk with amorous recollections.
2:00 a.m. In Iran I have a cousin, a grown man in his forties, who is a heroin addict. His name is Wallace. He has struggled with the drug for many years. I can't imagine what it must be like for a heroin addict in a country like Iran. I remember he was a handsome Assyrian, with dirty-blond hair, light eyes, and golden skin. I think of him now. Does he think of me? Does he imagine where I am and what mischief I'm up to, that we are in this destructive fashion similar? Staggering to even contemplate the many years and kilometers that have estranged us, superimposing memories and dreams, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy, which is ultimately irrelevant because the love I felt for my family and the love I feel for my roots in Iran cannot be tampered with, altered, or confused.
It can be strange to suddenly and without warning become, at any given moment and place, acutely aware of that other world in which I came into existence and lived the first ten years of my life, eating those foods, speaking those languages, dreaming there of here, then snapping back into reality, into San Francisco, in a rambunctious crowd of gay men, dressed in Western trends, dancing, dreaming, writing in English, realizing that Iran was nearly two decades ago, and all this time my spirit has been tangled in intricate conduits of changes and adjustments, cultural resistances and rebellion against tradition.
I can't help but feel that my immigration to the States as a child, though epic and traumatic, was a thrilling carnival ride in comparison to the sacrifices and losses my parents suffered. May the God they so devoutly trusted across the borders and through harrowing years bless them always and lavishly reward them in this lifetime, as well as in the afterlife they still believe in. And may they in turn forgive me for failing them in so many profound ways, causing them heartache in the process of living my own life on my terms, according to my destiny, the nature of which contradicts and disappoints their beliefs. May they know in their loving hearts, despite their stubborn cultural and religious convictions, that I never intended to hurt and challenge them so profoundly, and that all the years of yelling, cursing and fighting I have forgotten, choosing only to remember the sweet echos of laughter, tender feel of kisses, an embrace, and love that was in the early years expansive and unconditional.
4 a.m. Experimental hours pass in a silent living room that's dimly-lit and offers a sense of peace, though it is common knowledge that peace in human terms is light that fades, flower that withers, fruit that spoils, parent who dies, cathedral that crumbles. I have not slept in two days and know exhaustion and depression lurk beneath the high. I don't think that I'm surreptitiously punishing myself, but am out of curiosity and a dangerous sense of adventure seeking in the many overlapping hours some small lead to the borderless outskirts of the life I was destined to live, but missed. I search the many cities of night, the streets of which are paved with asphalt wishes, its denizens vaporous and mist, in the hopes of discovering my true name and place in a society of shadows. There are pivotal moments in time when for a single second the earth stands still beneath my nomadic step and my feet sink into the sand and I am detained by arid doubts, erroneously believing in the fear that grips me in the eternal flash, imagination my only escape. Fatigued and restless I begin to burn from the inside with a growing inferno of powerless indignation, asking the desert that stretches out from my shackled feet into limitless horizons: How can someone so tender, thoughtful, honest, young, full of desire and wonder, beautiful and exotic, go unnoticed and unloved for so many years? Why should all this enthusiasm go untapped and wasted to years the hinges of which are now rusted shut by bottomless tears of loneliness, shed in silent shame?
A thousand hours later the halted second passes and the earth again starts, tripping me back into wild parties, streets framed by gay bars, restaurants, cafes, into the revolving-door-embrace of many men- some sweet and intelligent, others indifferent and tactless, all players in a nameless sport in which the heart is the ball.
5 a.m. You must always remember, no matter how unheard, isolated and alone you may feel in your grief which is yours to do with what you will and unique, that in truth you are not alone, that someone, something somewhere, without even being aware of it, helps you carry the weight that threatens to crush you; but it won't, it can't, because sorrow is nothing but an insecure bully on the schoolyard of countless hopeful and powerful emotions. Pain is nothing but talk, bark. Fear is nothing but cardboard. Doubt is a defenseless worm pretending to be a snake. Addiction is a squirt gun. Insecurity an actor. Be careful not to make a shark out of a goldfish in an attack of vulnerability. Take responsibility and accept that in most instances it is you who holds yourself back and scapegoats others. And why do you routinely forget that love does not bite? And who the fuck says you can't make the same mistake twice? Be a mistake factory and take pride in your product.
6 a.m. Smoking cigarettes, listening to music. Eyes sore. Hand exhausted. Buttocks numb. Shadows deep. Others sleep. I write, rarely pausing, afraid that something will be missed. The more I write the more lines between which to rummage for a rare jewel, a poignant cliche, a one-syllable delight. Anything but a return to life outside these pages where temperatures drop, joints ache, telephones do not ring, where doubt is doubt and neither worm or snake. Now the recycling truck and jarring sound of glass bottles breaking. What is the sound of hearts breaking? And how heartbreaking it would be to hear these...
And yet, shouldn't every heart break at least once in a lifetime with love, not death, hence educated, enriched, empowered?
May all hearts be fortunate enough to be broken by love and not by death.
May all lips be kissed with tenderness before they have the chance to complain about the absence of romance.
7 a.m. I don't regret being seduced by and staying awake with this new companion, who for a brief time inspired me, dominated me, was a temporary and illegal distraction. I refuse to crash in the aftermath of this sordid fling and will see him off without attachments and remorse. The shirtless night whose black body was tattooed with diamond constellations slipped away while I made my trek through dreams whose shadows made their last destination these otherwise pale, dimensionless pages, and suddenly it's light outside and I'm lying naked amidst striped sheets, alone and restless. What might the day drag in? A sense of wonder or the depletion of senses and limbs?
When it's still dark and the restaurant is empty of conversation, dissonance, and laughter and the only sound is that of droning fans, I am heavy hearted, going about perfunctory tasks that I've performed a thousand times before with tarnished chains around my ankles, forced to return to empty, dusty rooms whose empty windows reflect festive images of a melodic time passed with loved ones. I miss Tariq, become entangled in a vortex of sweeter recollections and cobwebs from which dangle echos, wishes, desires out of reach. It has rained for days and I dream of rooms flooded with music and friends, candles and food.
May I, when all charm, hope and will is washed from the canvas of my daily life like paint, revealing a fake, be left with just one thing, nothing more, nothing incredible, but sweet and fierce courage. Courage like tattered shoes that carry the winded traveler across hot coals of time, age, experience. Courage like a tarnished mirror that won't lie just to cater to a reflection's fragile ego. Courage like a present independent of blunders of the past, far above rooftops of an impossible future. Courage tender and resilient, unmarred, blank, inexperienced and animalistic with instinct. Courage dirty and fecund, powerful mother-soil that gives birth even as it decomposes death, timeless as a masterpiece housed in a universal museum of basic human needs, emotions, and rights.
Now Khaled- turned on, turned up, passionate call of flesh and spirit, a voice the shape of longing, color of sex, texture of timelessness. Arabic music is rare soil in which my immigrant and rootless desires may burrow and forget their restless, childless seeds, stupidly, and drunkenly call immediacy of the dream Home. Arabic is the cousin-language I cannot understand, but fathom with my identity. Listening to Khaled is like an assignation with a distant relative at midnight in the fantasy-courtyard, by jazz-fountain, taboo-touching, erotic-kissing. We are swarthy kissing cousins whose dark embrace melts into night's breath, swelling and sinking in rhythm, camouflaged, intrepid, but devoid of perversity, lies, falsehood, and shame.
His stratified voice is a towering monument that's nightly erected to honor a range of emotions that communicate successes and losses that transcend religion, race, class, gender, language, and intellect, reaching all sentient cells of a body. Khaled's voice is a beacon that traverses the sky despite immobilizing borders. Listen to Arabic music and you'll be instantly educated on the basic temperament of the general Arabic population, easily recognizing a very human people concerned, like yourself, with the same essential needs, fears, and hopes. Where you expect evil, ill-will, savagery, tumult and terrorism, you'll be delightfully disappointed to find poetry, music, mathematics, astronomy.
The politicians with all their hammering words and sophistries miss to nail the one ubiquitous truth.
In the realm of conflict, in the world today, it is hard to imagine compassion having any clout when imagination is in fact the seed of change. Imagination is the maverick sperm whose destination isn't the coveted egg but the impossible moon. It is the hopeful hand that reaches out of stark reality, traversing darkness and logic, stumping limitations, defying miles and minutes, caressing the sweet, expressive face of an impressionable future. Imagination shapes the malleable mud of human experience with fingers whose unspoiled nerves thirst for unlimited possibilities.
It is imagination that rescues me from wives' tales and staid tradition, rendering me wide-eyed angel and perverse, carving out a path through the darkness I forget to fear; a path to my place in the world at large and purpose. Imagination offers her body that lactates with liquid white heat, introducing revolutionary ideas, enabling me to love, laugh, fuck, rebel, and return, having redefined my world, unlike my Assyrian elders who continue to cleanse dead-end streets of their insufficient beliefs with tears of asphyxiation and banned evolution.
It is imagination that imparts my lackluster life with gloss and immunity from daily trauma, impregnating my animal pelt belly with people, culture, music, ideas, fantastic things and danger, enabling me to connect with others in a wily and voluptuous world. It is she who turns midnight into black panther singing Arabic, whose own belly dances with butterflies and anticipation, grunting profoundly, grunting symbolically.
The holes in my life are everywhere and all-the-time, but my dream is tenacious and supreme, pouring its wine into every crack, pushing its affect across the sober face of footloose youth.
I am for the thousandth time certain that I have to go to the panther and the poem to see, to touch, to smell and taste the wildness of the creative moment. And although I do not know how I'll ever escape this well, this valley, my birthplace, I am sure to make something of it- something beautiful. But, should I succeed in getting out in one piece will it be as cursed defector or cherished son, daughter, sister?
Being human is so many things: A bustling city. A vast wilderness. A filling opera house. Saxophone echo. A discarded love letter. An abandoned violin on a park bench. A whispered name. A war that's called off. A fat cat napping. Stranger's electric smile. A graffiti wish made against concrete odds. Saffron streets. A summer in New York, in love. Yoga on a rooftop. A soft dress. A sea of flowers. Live music. Sex between jazz and rain. An unforgettable character in a captivating novel. Earth without man. A circle of friends. A ring of fire. Moonlight and iridescent desire. Dreams of flight. A perfect autumn leaf. Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. Thunderstorms. Open windows. Night like a fluttering black cape.
Still searching for a sand grain of hope in a sandstorm of illusions.
Last night I attended Laura's Christmas party at her new home in Oakland, high on the drug, in a jocular and easy mood. I drank water and smoked outside with others, holding brief vague conversations that were genuine nonetheless. The intoxication permitted me the distance and safety of detachment. The first thing Tariq said to me as I sat smoking with Heba in the yard was, "You look so glamorous sitting like that smoking."
'But don't I always look glamorous?' I stood up and kissed and hugged him.
As always there were many faces, many kisses, many glances and playful winks across rooms, communicative smiles. Mostly I remained a quiet observer, listening from the modest summit of a faraway sand dune, retreating without notice to my desert haven. I hoped no one noticed my departure and underlying sorrow, which I wore like a cloak sewn out of a diaphanous fabric.
In the kitchen Arwyn, a young, warm, black lesbian writer, and I leaned on either side of a granite island discussing at length our struggle with coming to terms with our creative proclivity while trying to remain practical in a world that requires sobriety, work, relationships; fitting writing and practical living into a space the size of a needle's point. Arwyn sipped from a bottle of beer, her hair in short dreads, her eyes smiling long after her mouth ceased to.
Belal was there and as always he tried seducing me with his eyes, with his flattery, with his obtuse charm, with his all, and as always failed to impress me. Even Tariq noticed Belal's relentless pursuit and made light of it. We made funny faces at each other behind Belal's back and laughed. But I humor Belal finding his advances, which are often harmless and only rarely offensive, entertaining and only minutely irritating.
In the yard Belal took a long drag of his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, exhaled, and said, "I need a nice boy. A nice Assyrian boy."
I held my cigarette in the light, dramatically turning it between my fingers, surveying it as though I'd never seen one before, and after a beat said casually, 'I know a couple. I'll introduce you.'
Although this was meant to create laughter and promptly shift the subject, Belal leaned forward in his seat and said seductively, "I want you!"
I, too, leaned forward and met his gaze, 'You can't handle me, Belal.'
"Why?" he shrugged in a way that only Arab men do, poetically, roughly.
'Because. Because even though I'm honest, loving, and a good person and would never intentionally hurt you, I am also crazy.'
"Everyone's crazy. So what?"
'Yes. But I wear my craziness very much on my sleeve.'
Tariq and I never found our chance to really talk and neither of us initiated finding a quiet corner even if for a brief time. Maybe neither of us wants this anymore. Only once, in the bustling kitchen, did we for a few moments connect. He asked how I was. I answered succinctly that I was fine. He said that he'd been to Modesto to see Frederick and Anita the day before.
'How is she? In person I mean. I talked to her recently by phone.'
"Yes. You'd spoken to her just before we arrived."
Had she revealed my secret, my confession of drug use? Tariq was now rinsing a dish in the sink and I couldn't read his face. He didn't say more about this and we were pulled into other parts of the house.
I wouldn't be angry with Anita for telling Tariq. They have equal places in my life and in my heart; what Anita knows Tariq may know. But if he were privy wouldn't he have discreetly confronted me about it?
Anyway, it's now suddenly 6 a.m. and I have to be at work soon. I haven't slept a wink. My thumb is tender from pressing into the pen for so many hours. This is crazy, this new relationship and dependency. I feel I have crossed the fine invisible line that lies between experimentation and habitual use. The fascination is still there and this worries me. Isn't it best to crash land now and suffer a few bruises and scratches, broken bones even, than crash and burn later, choking on the ashes of I-should-haves? Of course, I toke the fragile glass pipe as we speak.
6:15 p.m. Languid evening like a heavy cover pulled by light's departure over our impudent eyes, bringing a twilight sense of peace, ease. Like a sleeping cat the weeping of night streets is soundless, one only hears the stopping cars, the pedestrian talk, whispering stars, the high-heeled walk. Glassphalt cavalcade of lonely hearts serenades the genderless city, a concrete garden through which the paved curves that lead to many destinations may be feminine, but they are not final. Formidable phallic structures are architectural scarecrows. Languid evening ages quickly into restless night and twilight peace yields submissively to sequined clamor that dances on a concrete stage, inside vanity's golden cage.
Night so dark, so cold, so trite, so cliche. On the flying carpet of hope, a wish, a thousand dreams. In a starless sky painted a passionless black. I put on my coat and head for the water, a fistful of pebble dreams. I skip the dream-pebbles against the hard surface where I've never been able to live and thrive. At least, maybe, the smallest dreams of my stone heart may cause the smallest ripples. Hard surfaces the deep blue fathoms of which contain everything we were, what we said, how we lived, and where we thought we were going. Are you here with me? Will you somehow let it be known that you too are here, reaching from the depths of your own ocean?

November 2001

Vanessa and I didn't make it to the meeting. Instead, we studied, I waxed my eyebrows and Vanessa's lip hair while her cats, Pipsqueak and Simon, watched. Later Vanessa came down the stairs wearing makeup and a new hairstyle. No, she wasn't going anywhere, she was in pajamas. Now she's on the coffee table again, dancing into the mirror. She slips out of an elegant black dress and gyrates in incongruous grandma panties. We are in hysterics!
Vanessa is beautiful. My little ex-stripper, future nurse with beautiful sea-blue eyes. That same beautiful little girl in seventies black and white photographs who would end up being molested by an uncle, becoming a drug addict, remaining generous and fragile, sometimes surprisingly profound, sometimes shockingly shallow and free. All she asks is to be loved, accepted. It's hard not to fall in love with her, even pity her. I feel immense affinity with women to whom life has been unkind.
I take erotic pictures of her.
Light would not recognize itself without the presence of darkness. In turn, light gives darkness purpose.
After yoga in San Rafael I rush to an AA meeting in Mill Valley. "You didn't call for dinner on Tuesday," Claude admonished soberly. I apologized but made no excuses. We drank hot tea during break and again he handed me a white envelope with newspaper clippings about Iran and what is happening there.
Tariq says I'm a fatalist.
My garden is empty, but I still manage to imagine better days, in the future, enriched by experience, brimming with humor, older, stronger, all of this far behind me, when I am safe in this country, in this world, if such a thing is at all even possible.
The city is sunny and beautiful, and yet somewhere missiles fire, people die, children are orphaned.
Disconnected. The candles help, the music, the cats who seem to be masters at being in the moment- lounging, cleaning themselves, wrestling, being startled by something and quickly recovering. Disappointment, grief, fear. I can't focus. I can't study.
The man who delivers the bread to the restaurant greets me in the morning with, "Hello handsome!"
A woman at one of my tables asks what ethnicity I am, "You should be a model."
Another woman and her daughter write on the bottom of their bill, "Emil, you are a fox!"
They make me smile.
Just to clarify I am neither drinking nor drugging. It rains. I light candles, make green tea. The heater runs, the vents sigh. My love is not yet in my life. He is elsewhere in the world. Is he even living? The marriage I still secretly dream of is impossible and unreal. I do not talk about it with others. And if he does appear in whatever shape or form will I recognize him or reject him?
Joan and Jill are Sunday regulars at Half Day and over the years we've become somewhat close. They are in their fifties and lesbian. They've even invited me to their parties, which I've never been able to attend, always telephoning to thank them. Today they asked how I am and I said that I've had a lot on my mind. They both echoed that they could tell. Jill, straightforward and optimistic, asked in her fading Australian accent if it had to do with love, a man. I smiled, 'I wish that's all it was!'
The next time I stopped at their table I mentioned the nature of my worries. Joan, who was an attorney for forty years and a retired judge, advised me to get a good lawyer.
'I have one. It's just that I'm not aggressive enough with him...'
Jill casually shrugged her shoulders, "You have to learn to be!"
Joan spoke warmly, "You're like me, you're sensitive. They," she referred to the world at large, "are not. And you get hurt all the time. I understand."
The restaurant was bustling and I was pulled away again. When I returned some minutes later Joan told me about her struggle with cancer and the many dark months she spent in bed, ultimately finding the will to live. She added, "We should get together for lunch. And we should make an appointment with your lawyer and go see him together!"
Jill chimed in, "Joan can ask the right questions. She'll help you darling."
This is the journey. My personal journey through night and rain. And at this very moment everything seems OK, nothing's terribly wrong. Life is even perfect. Rain is rain. Night is night. Joy is joy. There is no other meaning to things. Everything is a process and will be dealt with in time, and it doesn't matter that I wasn't street-smart enough, aggressive enough, bold enough. All this is more about accepting my true nature than it is about how unforgiving life and people can be. It is about being wholly who I am, no matter how naive, immature, unsophisticated, and trusting. The world is massive and all wishes are swallowed whole. The horizon chuckles. Men are made of glass. Laws plastic. Tonight I accept that this lifetime has been about a meaningless series of mistakes, flaws and imperfections. It is merely a practice run. And that I am quite average at it, sometimes even below average.
Perhaps my sole duty is actually to err repeatedly and suffer consequences, that all I need is to be imperfect in life, continue to make mistakes, fall, break, hurt, lose, and not struggle. How simple. How natural. How obvious.
How liberating! To say the wrong things. To hesitate. To run away. To break promises. To avoid. To evade. To trust the wrong people. To dream. To not do or be anything great in life. To only slip quietly by, unnoticed, average, mundane. To do it all wrong!
Rain isn't the only thing falling tonight. The mask cracks. The eternal dam leaks. The veil falls.
I'm almost afraid to stop writing, to leave here and return to the room, to the actual world that is inarticulate, shapeless. The world in which we are pulled in many directions but offered few destinations.
I want my life to be more than this scrambling about trying to get things in order, something more than cleaning up after myself. I want to help others.
If the sky can, so can I. If the leaf can, so can I. If the street can, so can I. If the night can, so can I. Go on...
I am dissonance and the inchoate truth. Now I am flute. Piano. Drum. Pan. Spoon. Jazz. Forgetting the textbooks, the phone calls, the fax, the deadline, the panic, the worry, the mystery.
I live in train stations, about to depart to better places, a new destination. But in truth there is no train. In reality, beyond the smoke and mirrors, there is no escaping the self.
The train and the station are a dream, a wish, beginnings without a past, without ties to the past, its consequences, places, and people.
Last night Vanessa came home with Ben, the young man in his early twenties with whom she is living a double life. We talked briefly before I headed upstairs to bed. Minutes later Vanessa barged into my room, flipped on the light switch, hopped into bed with me, and kissed me on the cheek. "What's wrong? Do you like my new sweatshirt?"
I chuckled, 'I just need these months to go by. And yes, I like your sweatshirt.'
"You can borrow it!"
The lights had been dimmed in the studio. Something about stretching in unison with others, separated only by mats, like little islands, and the music, brought tears to my eyes, but no one saw me crying.
I've lost another ten pounds. I am now underweight at 160. I feel nauseous and dizzy. Every inch hurts as the heavy air of living presses against my skin.
Streets were wet, though it was not raining. Light reflected off the wet asphalt. There were buses, pedestrians, bars. I walked alone, taking the scene in with my senses, moving with the people- individuals, pairs, groups; all interesting to me, fascinating. A disheveled young man approached me. He had vacant blue eyes, a built chest that was exposed. He asked, "Do you know a bar where there are older men?"
He was like a lost little boy searching for his father, any father, not to love, but to sustain him. I was sober, in control, invulnerable. I lit a cigarette, looked up and down Castro, 'There's a place up that way on the corner. I've never been there, but I've walked past. It's an older men's bar.'
The young stranger looked down at his attire, frowned, and said, "But look at me. I'm in sweats and a tank top."
'All the bars here are casual. You'll be fine,' I tried to console him.
"Is there a spot where people drive around and pick up guys?"
'I'm sure there are, but I wouldn't know anything about that. Are you looking for a sugar daddy?'
He looked me in the eye, "Yeah."
Was he homeless? Was he high? My heart filled with sadness.
'Good luck.'
We parted ways.
I had come to the Castro to escape Marin's quietude and bask in the happenings of the city. I'd been to a bar and ordered carbonated water, people-watching. Now as I headed to my car I saw Nabeel- the Assyrian with whom I'd had that terrible date a couple of years ago. I was prepared to ignore him, but he noticed me.
'Hi Nabeel. Dakheet?'
His goatee had grayed considerably, his light eyes were deceptively innocent. We chatted a bit.
"You look thin," he observed.
'I am,' was all I could think to say.
As he talked about his life I searched his face for something real and I saw a mistake, a lover, a brother, a troubled man.
'Well, I have to go.'
"Where are you going?"
'Home. Take care of yourself,' and I touched his leather sleeve, pressed lightly, and smiled. He smiled sweetly back at me and for a moment I imagined that we could sit somewhere together, have a drink, and talk earnestly.
How is it that I can be so violently hurled into complete darkness and silence from a scene of love and celebration? I shut down and swallow my complaints, questions, pain, sorrow, even my moments of joy. I want to die. Disappear. Everything will be all right, I tell myself.
I sleep too much. I don't eat. When I stand I become dizzy. I want to drop out of school, work, life. Darkness in all my thoughts. Fear. Complete anxiety. Tears.
A customer shares her concern, "I gotta tell you, you're getting too skinny."
I don't want to die. There's so much still in me- so much life, curiosity, potential, creativity.
It excites me to think of all that's possible yet, to imagine the life that awaits me on the other side of this storm, this mountain. I finally acknowledge my depression and make an appointment to meet with a doctor, holding on to the hope that my life will one day make sense, and that I will find my place, my purpose.
This morning I popped my first antidepressant. All of it had become too much and I lethargic, confused, but being my own friend, advocate, caregiver I had to do something about the frequent thoughts of suicide, which snuck daily into the warm, colorful folds of my imagination. Looking back I know that I have blindly existed in a thirteen-year marriage to depression. I continue. I begin.