January 2002

Every day is like jazz improvisational, though played by old, tarnished instruments, accompanied by the familiar, mighty voices of our personal narrative depicting in overlapping notes the many depths and heights of experience and emotion.
I can recount many instances when my unassailable belief in art and creativity saved me from complete despair when even religion couldn't. Religion is a messenger pigeon that lost its way, rebelled against its eventless route, delivering the most profound message by freeing itself into greater distances. And ideally, God wasn't enraged or offended, but delighted and himself unfettered from man's bondage, man's cumbersome and outdated Book of arrested beliefs.
But let us return to jazz and its numerous sumptuous rooms whose soft walls swell and sink as if breathing the human experience in an embrace of two sensual bodies- one of luck and instrumental coincidences, the other of destiny, life as musical prodigy. A place where our dreams assume form and color and one's personal history remains an experimental canvas, not a nostalgic hindrance. A space in which the body may forget its many ailments and imperfections and thus melt from underneath us so that for one vagrant beat in a lifetime of strict arrangements we may feel genuinely freed by our vulnerability and unencumbered by our pasts and phobias.
Jazz takes intimate risks, reinvents itself in the moment, assumes no single identity, is at once self-certain and nameless, teaching us to hear without concentrating on the physical act of listening, to feel without tempering ourselves and our emotional capacity, to move with the gravitational force of its sudden and uninhibited flirtations with tempo, and question our daily patterns of perfunctory attachments by instilling in our hearts' locks the resounding ivory keys of curiosity, not tone-deaf doubt.
Jazz, sultry or frivolous and unkempt, is the agoraphobic's defiant lure to rootless, fearless world travel, lifting like a flying carpet our many complacent, self-imposed bans, turning rigidity into wishbones, cutting with decisive brass sheers the numerous invisible steel threads of our self-censored indignation, granting vocabulary to our otherwise ineloquent struggles with fear and self-loathing, tearing us violently apart from our high-priced comforts.
Jazz accompanies us through all dull and vacuous moments, reminding us with drumming fingertips that sometimes it's better to forget and be forgotten than balefully remembered. Jazz is the night hallucinogen, the trailing visions of which possess more significance and symbolic truth than an entire city revealed at the toll of a merchant dawn. It is the one place ahead of time, above all rooftops, where your intolerance with logic, structure, discipline and practicality isn't your downfall, but a strength. It is the fire that catches you, carrying you unscathed through sub-temperature streets of human indifference. It is the tornado that builds instead, erects monuments and fosters community. It is a sentient savage. Light that dances gingerly on liquid surfaces. The diamond chandelier that would rather risk its grandeur than dangle in lightless limbo another night. It is the ocean that fell in love with a desert and spent eternity kissing sandy shores. It is a delicate cactus flower. An unmapped city. The trick in trickling raindrops that lull insatiable women. It is the whiskers that enable an unlucky cat's perfect high fall. It is the flightless bird's supreme daydream of limitless skies. It is a drag queen's flawless overture. The insomniac dawn. The square inside every circle. The texture of every fabric. The phantom hand that refuses to forget how it felt to touch his face.
Jazz is the many possible sounds of a single syllable. The dramatic pause of passion between night and day. The shrill play of island children. A buoyant anchor. Androgynous child who baffles even nature's nightly labels. The impossible wish that survives the sobering glare. The intoxicating hour that drinks of its own drunken moments. High precipice of a well-kept secret. It is the benign beast that swims gracefully in the clearwater channels of a child's wildest imaginings. An avalanche of a myriad coincidences. A last afternoon in Brazil. A single kiss that changed many lives. A dangerous confession. The rumbling sigh of a rogue iceberg. The sudden disappearance of borders. An erotic marriage of ideas and emotions. The telling whisper of a seashell. An unlikely smile. The glee of a heart that feels no longer broken.
Jazz is a rainforest that's protected by an unbreakable spell. It is an undiscovered species. A burning cathedral. The water well that one unassuming morning began to offer gold. A garden whose fragrant flowers move about freely. A poisonous snake and snake charmer. An affair in Marrakesh.
Live your life like jazz.
Thematic, cinematic escape. These words and escapist phrases are breadcrumb clues to my capture. New life in an oasis encampment, the high walls of which are fashioned out of bamboo poetry. Poetry that blindfolds me strategically with small, patient, rice paper kisses, instructing me in a language I've never heard in all my flights and past detentions, but to which, like narrow and intuitive escape, I naturally and silently respond. I comply because I know by now that it is better to adhere to figurative lashings than suffer life's literal and ineloquent blows.
Wet phrases like kisses have sealed my eyelids, which are superfluous anyway. Here, one sees every minute detail without eyes, by feeling, like Braille. Outside of here it is always the same unilateral scenario. I would rather be enslaved by rhapsody, identifying wholly with my captor.
It doesn't much matter who he is and what he looks like, where he comes from. What lasting, useful impressions and opinions can we observe and form with our senses that we cannot effortlessly gather from our own imagination, which revives significance far more effectively in life than life on the outside with all its conditional liberties? These small flights in confinement afford me more freedom and motion than high-speed departures on asphalt highways and actual bridges.
The earth of the diary is moist beneath my touch, cool, fecund, fragrant, smelling strongly of rich dualities, where perfectly measured doses of life blossom in the sun of erogenous reveries, the unsophisticated minutes of which dangle dangerously from garlands of desire, perversity, fantasy, their hooks piercing the flesh of my life outside the page. My persona emerges from the page perfumed by distractingly sensual language and playful riddles otherwise missing from my days.
Panther of poetry keeps black vigil, and I have yet to see my captor's face, but it doesn't matter. Anonymity survives long after blindfolds and masks have been removed. It also doesn't matter that I don't understand his language; our exchanges aren't verbal, philosophical, actual, intellectual. We communicate via ambient textures, imprints.
And while he has complete control over me he does not violate me. How can he? He is a figment with flickering limbs, vacuous veins that lack the pulse to engage an erection. He is here, but impotent. Inchoate. And yet, he is resourceful and excavates the mangled goad from ash-blanketed tombs of my farthest reaches, the deepest caverns of my insecurities and associations, urging me violently, rhythmically, marching me into vulnerability, a private, symbolic, rugged journey into the Amazons of my sexuality where the stifling, oppressive jungle heat is familiar and reminiscent of other numerous attempts at overcoming immense phobias, shyness, shame.
He may possess me but he would not exist without my compliance. He may march me but I navigate him. Without my will he would instantly perish. So, together, in neurotic partnership, we journey across the creative continent, in the pregnable soil of which our combined dreams may take root despite the impossibilities, sprouting new meaning, coloring the petals of stagnant ideas with significance, revealing who and what we truly are in this dark, sensual, and oftentimes disturbing maze of multicultural contradictions. I want to disown my Assyrian, Iranian, and American untruths.
I smoke lazily in this noon dream, in sagging blue jeans. Just as my body falls apart so too the walls of creativity, which began to peel and crack years ago, with resolute momentum crumble. But why should the words come at such a high price? Why should I have to live a certain way, take drugs, go into such darkness to fetch the words, and fight my way back with them stacked in my arms, pressed against my heart, some of them slipping and falling? Returning from the page to dizzying tariffs, taxed.
Again I've outgrown the womb and the umbilical cord warps round my throat as it did in my original birth, almost killing me. My mother cried when I was born- blue, shriveled, my body covered in a kind of vestigial hair. She was horrified by how ugly I was. They placed me in an incubator- the hair fell off, the wrinkles faded, life returned to my limbs. When they brought me to her my mother cried again, this time with joy. "You were the most beautiful baby. You had completely transformed. You had milky white skin, were plump, and had a beautiful head of curly hair."
This birth too is asphyxiating. Vehement cries of joy and grief collide in a wintry room where birth and death meet in a mutual moment, in an unlikely expanse of total intimacy, brushing against each other in a flash within centurial folds of which death becomes our lifelong friend.
My poor body, its twin lungs strain to fill with air, its back weighed with knotted tension, its small artist hands frozen and a bluish pink color, its statuesque head easily drained of blood each time I forget and stand up abruptly, dizzied in cumulus white flashes, so that I have to bend forward long enough for the blood to return to its rivulets.
Is it worth it to live a fast, short life that's bursting with creative impetus, though wrought with addiction, or is it better to trudge through the many prosaic days of a long healthy life that may or may not inspire, move, and open me further creatively, essentially, artistically?
This question daily unfolds its silk petals like an exotic flower whose sheer glory entices curiosity and further mystery, but the answer lies in its poisonous thorns that diligently guard its secrets. But what the flower doesn't seem to understand, though longstanding and well-equipped, is that my commitment to living, dying, and writing, though at times tentative, is obsessional. My need is single-minded, my urge to undergo unreality just to attain a single sonorous sentence is utterly illogical, far more venomous than any flower or animal. I may be weak, I may be mentally ill, I may be many ignoble things, but I have a volcanic core.
I'm not one to boyishly wrestle a magic, a mystery, or intimidate a revelation, bully a skittish poetic phrase, but I am vastly patient, sitting meditatively with the tenaciously rooted question whose distrusting eyes scrutinize my presence with nervous annoyance, knowing that in time the mystery and I will grow accustomed to each other's presence, forgetting our previous relationship, dropping our guard, and much to our surprise forming a brotherhood of quiet reverence in the many changing seasons of the garden of poison and poetry, drinking the same rain, suffering the same storms, basking in the thousand silk-strand rays of the same sun.
Living thus within the stone walls of the garden of my creative destiny, with total commitment to its every grass-blade moment, its every perennial lesson, its ever-changing color of every turning leaf, its every insatiable parasite and incurable plague, I will surely come to understand that the answers I brashly finagle out of the steel petals of life's obdurate silences do not exist in intimidating mathematical formulas or golden rhetoric, in exotic distances and coquettish horizons, but inside all daily tasks and exchanges, in commonplace and mundane events, in the varied lives of people we know, in otherwise unromantic happenings, and that creative inspiration and incentive do not have to be epic. Inspiration does not exist elsewhere but where your rootless feet happen to be planted at any given moment. And most profoundly, creativity remains the suspended embryo in the prolific womb of a writer's own courage and willingness to simply write.
My Everest fears of writing something dishonest, something unmoving, something burlesque and irresponsible, have successfully censored my dirigible hand even in the private confines of my own diary; not to mention, these seemingly insurmountable fears have smartly disarmed me in places and matters outside the page. It's obvious that the longer I wait for the perfect moment, the most favorable conditions to come sweep me to that productive haven of my unrealized potential, delivering me in a fairytale carriage lined with sumptuous fabrics, the more crippling this procrastinating will become, and I will discover that I have been all talk and no written word. The sooner I begin my perilous nosedive into shallow, immature attempts the sooner I may exorcise shallow, immature writing out of my body and being, and somewhere amidst the dead drafts and body bags of bad prose hear the delightful baby-talk beginnings of my nascent and original writing voice, and perhaps begin to heal emotionally as well.
I want the numerous flailing extremities of my imagination stretched and strengthened into many inhospitable and unmentionable directions. Focus the scratched lens of my pristine soul, despite alluring, destructive reflexes, onto picturesque reveries whose flighty lyrics I might lasso with this braided hunger for beauty despite the reality, and brand the disorderly words with the very embers of my unwavering belief in beauty, onto sumptuous pages bound by blood and semen's connective properties, into one triumphant but humble offering, defiantly to a disconnected world that on many occasions dismissed and severed me, but could not break or silence me.
A quiet evening at home, unable to imagine what it would be like to be on cold, crowded, city streets, all those unimpressive shining men, ingenuous only in mediocre doses. Listening to Swing Out Sister's Filth and Dreams, smoking a slender brown cigarette. Our fat stout Christmas tree tilts more and more to one side like a model who has tired of his pose. Been somewhat consumed by wistful reveries and memories of Tariq, in a secret way longing for his company, his rich voice, his bedroom eyes, his attention, a telephone call. But I fully accept our distant bond, even as he occupies my heart, a vaporous presence lacking flesh but retaining immense warmth, evoking immediacy. Am I supposed to deny this love for him that is autonomous? Am I also then to stop loving Iran, my childhood, my father, anything and anyone who is not in sight? It will not happen!
I've stopped taking the antidepressant and am sipping red wine. Sobriety is vital but only in small doses. What good is lucidity if it's uptight, restrained? I enjoy life's illusions, its intoxicating moments, mannerisms, mimes, and slinking movements.
The sky may darken. I refuse to.
A friend once observed that I have a gift for identifying with all people and things. She misinterpreted a fine curse against which I continue to rebel. Some choose, or can't help but breeze through this beautiful nightmare, but I can't seem to be able to avoid its stench and perfume permeating the silk robes of my myriad monothematic dreams of lavish love and laughter- ghostly aspects in wakefulness that help filter the harrowing glare of lackluster loneliness. I anticipate the music and mischief of the unconscious, living in a somnambulistic state. I want to be awake and live, avoiding the corrupting catapult and cadence of our mind's meander and march through the foggy marshes of wasteful sleep.
The wine issues claret warmth to the pallor of my dreams' frostbitten fingers.
Corinne Drewery of Swing Out Sister sings in a voice rich with many well-tailored textiles that possess edges with spirited tassels, delightful patterns, moving paisley, textures dyed by generous hands in shades of earth, rain, fire, diaphanous fabrics rippling like a universal flag in winds of unity, emotive folds within which lyrics are artfully punctuated, syllables granted motion and height. A voice that deftly guides the listener into shimmering depths devoid of emotional depressions, replete with sensations one typically encounters in recalling a dream in which he is thrown from great heights only to gingerly land into further dreams, exhilarated. A voice whose commanding range emboldens the charmed heart to take soulful flight into instrumental apexes where orchestral clouds collide, concocting melodic rainstorms, each individual drop a crystalline note arranged with mindfulness to artistic integrity, yet frivolous, playful. A voice like the fateful journey of an unmanned paintbrush sweeping across floating surfaces, each bristle made of nuances found in longing, curiosity, every mellifluous stroke discovering and coloring itself into existence. Corinne's long-armed singing reaches through the obdurate limits of space, the possessive borders of the material world, outsmarts the gravity police, melts gold, gallops, stands still but reverberates, illuminates the moment, kisses a melody with liquid lips, with silk chains captures mercurial secrets and with silk smile releases them into the night as simple truths, rearranging constellations. A voice that cuts its own veins, pouring life generously into gardens of harmony. Listening to Swing Out Sister is tantamount to hearing love.
So, here I am, Assyrian and queer in Marin of all places in the world, sipping water, Simon dozing and dark grey at my feet, Vanessa giving herself a pedicure, Ben writing with a wide-eyed face that's tonight distant and perplexed, while I balance on ropes between high words, occasionally taking a misstep that changes the face, the fate of every sentence, trying to comprehend the synergistic existence of these diplomatic contradictions that are the very waves, depths and surfaces, storms and calms, beasts and men, liquid rhythms despite which I continue to dream and drown in a love for syllables and escape.
In a fatal storm of dissipating certainties I survive only by seeking the shelter of love that's reflected in the fast flux of relationships, flash flood glimpses of hope, canopy of memories, nostalgia, the flavors, the lovers, laughter, conviction, joys whose abandoned palaces still ring with music and conversation, years when anything was still possible, simple pleasures, music, nature, manicured garden caresses violently washed by mudslides of forgetfulness.
I'm hoping that being presently suicidal is only symbolic of the death of my outdated attachments, ideals, opinions, insecurities- essential death we fear because death and change signal traumatic rebirths, effort, labor, requiring our undivided attention and presence of mind when we'd rather drown our concerns and duties in drink, drug, mate, work, hobby, obsession, in the great elsewhere of merriment, out bar windows.
I dreamt that Tariq was sexually vulgar, waving his penis crudely in my face, and I was outraged by his infidelity to Raymond.
It's obvious. I may have left Columbus that July, but my soul still basks in the sun of that long ago summer of first love. My elephant soul whose unfailing memory is a trunk full of romantic nights woven from the entanglement of our limbs sooner or later sobers from bubbly reveries and suffers a mammoth hangover. I recuperate at the bottom line. I love Tariq. Always will. Without expectations or reservations. Not because I am obsessed but because he touched my life with imperfect hands that to this day burn my skin with phantom strokes. I love him from the eye of every spontaneous storm, from the distant shores of every electric memory, with microscopic pangs that are larger than life.
I can still taste the streets we walked, sometimes a thousand miles apart, sometimes sharing a shadow. I can taste the sudden Midwestern thunderstorms that could rattle windows and telepathically set off car alarms, but failed to equal the pantomimic storms that were sparked by our disparate needs, wishes, joys, attraction and repulsion, love that was, love that was not.
I can still taste every square inch of our short-lived bedroom where lights from passing cars courted shadows across the ceiling, his long outline next to mine, his quiet breath, his pain that was as palpable and present as an instrument I never learned to play, let alone master, our clothes, the boxes, the books.
I can taste the Turkish coffee he made with cardamom on mornings when it didn't matter how I conducted my undomesticated, emotionally-animal self because his skin was warm and responsive, his kiss more immediate than my own lips, his hair so black where black and so white where white, and I could reach clumsily with my paw for the possibility that even a savage's dreams can come true.
I can taste the metallic surge on my tongue from fighting back tears of indignation that would have betrayed just how ill-prepared I was for his frequent departures from the bustling stations of my glass expectations.
I can taste his bitter silences, the sharp edges of which carved into my youthful illusions and ideals, leaving their jagged scars of knowledge that forced me to grow painful, bone-breaking inches.
I can taste the zeytun and the zoo, the ringing telephone and the dead branch that crashed just inches before me into a million splinters, the white sheets and the Cosmopolitans, the campus and the market, the laundromat and the moments chocked in cigarette smoke, his beautiful, erotic, human and humid body.
That summer had no gravity, language, or recognizable ending, and I continue to orbit inarticulately amidst the uncharted constellations of that intimate universe like a fatalistic satellite of limitless love, in the whisper of that seashell galaxy, an airborne particle roaming the intimate expanse of then, a past that shares a sun with now, with always, with Tariq.
Tariq and I are two grains of sand in a parsimonious hourglass others call God.
I stand without gender and attachment under an androgynous sky wishing that wars were waged with musical instruments instead of weapons, that conflicts were resolved by soldiers who fought not in battlefields, but in concert halls.
The page turns me.
Jackie looked stunning with her hair pulled tightly back. She reminded me of a Spanish dancer whose talent was to make others feel the center of attention. Mom also looked lovely and twice we slipped into the garage to smoke together. Her focus on me was overwhelming and when I turned to ash my cigarette out the side door I could feel the weight of her stare on my back. Whenever we're alone the air seems tinged with the tandem pulse of our biological connection, amniotic moments when I am acutely aware of my origins in her womb, and the immediacy of our cellular bond illuminates the futility of our many differences, and in that mutual moment I am nothing and no one else but my mother's son. Not a grown man forging his own way, but a pristine possibility forever originating from the molecular dreamscapes of her body's fecund depths.
Much to my relief everyone said I looked wonderful, not sickly, and indeed I felt handsome for the first time in a long while. With invisible down feathers I teased everyone- woman, man, relative, and friend. The questions I dreaded didn't have a chance in hell to be asked. I was the one asking all the questions, inquisitive, attentive.
My shyness tried to surface and lure me into quiet side-streets but I gracefully glided against the grinding gears of escape into circles, conversations, delightful one-on-one exchanges.
Aida is a stunning Serbian in her thirties. Tonight she wore a fitted knit dress that exposed her slender shoulders and high neck. She sat at my grandmother's immense dining table that was laden with numerous dishes, all of which Jackie had painstakingly prepared; a perfectionist's colorful feast. The chair next to Aida was empty and I took it despite my reserve and diffidence. She immediately acknowledged me with a socialite's enthusiasm. Sitting so close to her I could easily trace the length of her aquiline nose, which perfectly fitted her atypical face. We talked with great ease, which surprised me as we'd only met briefly once before. She said she loves living in San Francisco and spoke passionately of her zeal for cities, candidly confessed her disinterest in nature and rural living. I nodded as I listened, smiling in agreement that life in a city is a festival of unrehearsed experiences and time-bomb opportunities. She clasped her hands in the air before her and exclaimed, "I don't know, I love concrete!"
We talked about education, books, writing, and she seemed to possess the intelligence and sensitivity to appreciate my love for words. She was so authentically moved that she divulged her secret desire to someday tell her own story, searching the air with her inquisitive eyes for the right words, admitting that she regretted not having written about the war she lived through. She turned to me once more, her face interesting and captivating, and said, "I have a friend who is American but speaks my language. He insists I write and that he'll translate my work." She smiled warmly, an expression that trustingly revealed the true nature of this friendship, and added, "I would feel safe having him translate what I write because we know each other so well. He inspires me."
Aida's anesthesiologist cousin who seemed to be anesthetizing himself with successive glasses of red wine didn't share her angularity, but possessed his own roundness that was despite his cool edginess soft and to me handsome. The moment I stepped into the house I noticed him across the room, standing in the fluorescence of the kitchen, looking intently back at me. For those few and revealing seconds, when the door hadn't even closed behind me and I happened to look that way again, he was still surveying me. Upon introduction I was surprised to discover that this man, whose homoerotic glances would surreptitiously meet my own throughout the night, was the boyfriend of one of Jackie's girlfriends.
It was to remain unclear, all night as he avoided me, whether he desired me, resented me, or was simply shamefully fascinated by me. At any rate, his loyal glances made the already interesting evening all the more intriguing.
When Jackie brought in her famous Tiramisu, which I think she has finally perfected, I helped serve the guests. Aida's cousin, the homoerotic anesthesiologist, sat with an empty wineglass looking rather sheepish and mismatched with his girlfriend. I asked if he would care for a taste. He casually shrugged his broad shoulders, smiled shyly, and said he would. I handed him a plate, 'Sorry it's not a perfect slice.' "Oh, it's OK," he said politely, taking the dessert fork and napkin from me.
In the background of the party's quaint interactions Jackie played Arabic music; human relationships like optical illusions. Looking around me I was deeply struck with appreciation for having been rashly plucked from my birthplace and dropped in a nation where exiles from Iran, Serbia, and a young African American from Louisiana may come together as pieces of a new social structure.
Being back at the house that was for some formative years my home was at stolen moments nostalgic and jarring. But the many living memories were gracious and refrained from dominating me and diplomatically shared me with others.
Recently I stopped at St. James to visit my grandmother, who still at the age of seventy continues to work seven days a week at the business she started with the very nickles and dimes she saved working as a seamstress in Chicago- a city so giant, now frozen and blanketed by snow, now humid and stifling, that she admits it often confounded and terrified her; a divorced Christian immigrant from Iran, on her own, but determined. A complex woman who continues to demonstrate that ambition and integrity can exist harmoniously in one space and that a just person does not have to be victimized and crushed in an unjust world.
It was dark when I arrived at the rest home. She opened the door smiling. I tried to conceal my embarrassment for having fallen off the face of the earth, admittedly self-centered in my entanglements with my own petty problems and feelings. We gay men are impossibly immature and emotionally inept. Is it that we are childless, denied the humbling experience of loving someone else more than unsuccessfully struggling to love ourselves? Will we ever outgrow this myopic martyrdom, to which we are to extreme degrees committed, so that we can barely commit to one another?
My grandmother received me with welcoming blue eyes and led me to her private quarters, a familiar, warm space in which we used to meet and exchange our small discoveries, ideas, hopes and fears, eating together, drinking Turkish coffee and tea, laughing at ourselves when we weren't crying or fighting, where we blew out birthday candles and played card games. My resilient grandmother's world. Here we met on the beveled edge of our unique bond and talked about everything- past, present, uncertain future.
She placed her elbows on the tabletop, squinting ever so slightly, considered my face without attempting to mask her intentions, and made up her mind before promptly delivering her opinion, "I like your hair this short. Keep it at this length always. It suits you."
Her approval pleased me and I smiled, 'Really? You like it? You know, a friend cut it for me at home. I can save so much money by cutting my own hair.' I knew my frugality would please her.
I surveyed her as well, and said softly, 'You haven't lost the weight you promised to lose.'
She wrinkled her forehead, shook her blond head regretfully before speaking defiantly, "I'm never going to lose weight. This is how I am."
I suggested we weigh ourselves. Being a sport my grandmother led us to the scale in the bathroom. I registered a famished 155 pounds. She 185 pounds. Spontaneously we turned to the full-length mirror on the wall and standing side by side contemplated our polar reflection. We did not look remotely related. Silent reflection soon graduated to arbitrary chuckles, which in turn burst into outright fits of laughter until we were red in the face. I threw my arms around her just as genetic fate had thrown hers around us.
I don't want to kill myself. Instead I take street drugs and fall from other-worldly bridges that connect oceanic longings to earthly possibilities. Might the same potential that enabled us to crawl as infants, walk as toddlers, and eventually try to outrun our adult demons, afford us lyrical flight from the prosaic depths of reality, turning marble mores into quicksand and truly liberate us?
Tariq left a voicemail, having returned from a trip to the desert. We are like two diplomats from whom passion, like bandits, robbed diplomacy, pretense, punctuation, and perfection, leaving in their wake pandemonium of palpitations, that in a single pang contain more purity than a thousand preambles to a love that's approached with premeditated expectations and permanence.
Waiting out this overcast obsession that is winter itself. I think of summer drives to the Russian River, my arm hanging out the open window, on a paved road that softly roams lulling curves, through columnar trees that police the sun's vagrant rays that outsmart their stratified branches, filtering for a time in intermittent pools of warmth and light.
This winter my diary has been a paper ship steadily sailing contiguous oceans with superlunary waves of lyrical piracy. But it's also the sumptuous tent palace of a nomad who writes alone, without family or lovers. And yet, I always have the feeling that someone is here with me- a fellow traveler. Is it you?
Those who are many things at once fascinate me. A balance of multidimensional contrasts, not an imbalance of conflicts. I'm deeply drawn to the parable and the fable, allegory, Gibran hypnotics, Nin pyromania. I identify with the raw voice of writers who betray themselves with raspy transcendence and who aren't concerned with sounding pretty or looking good, but with immortalizing the moment without plot or formula, acknowledging the sexuality of words. The red leather pant leg of a sentence should move flirtatiously with erotic abandon.
Art remains the marrow that fills life's hollow skeleton of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. One needn't paint or write to be an artist in life; any person who transforms the lackluster hours of painful existence with love, compassion, selflessness, and is in this manner creative and courageous, is an artist. Every relationship his masterpiece, each exchange an opportunity to transform the mundane.
Jim, tall, striking gentleman in his sixties, is these days more gaunt than usual. He still manages to come into the restaurant for his Belgian waffle with orange butter, but foregoes his cup of coffee which he used to take black. Jim is dying. Gregarious, flirtatious, obviously once dashing Jim is dying and I regret not accepting over the years his many invitations for dinner and drinks.
It's vain but I feel beautiful again, vital, virile, naked even when clothed. Not hiding beneath pounds of self-consciousness. Yesterday I felt rebellious and dangerous, my thirst for freedom like live music. Without license and with alcohol on my breath I turned the engine, merged onto the highway, crossed the swaying bridge, over black ocean, through dark hills, my soul smoking. I passed through the tunnel and the fog like a thief, furtively entering the city of asphalt waves. Alone, rolling seductively in sheets of music, myself a single note in a score of many people, mostly men, shuffling bodies, bus stops, store fronts, taxis, swelling sidewalks.
I parked the car, grabbed my jacket, cigarettes, some money, and threw open the door, stood on the lightless street that dipped violently to the lights and bustle of Castro below, letting the lapping cold remind my expectant nerves that I am still alive, young, beautiful, and can expect further adventures and affairs. Casually, feeling present and flexible, intimate with my surroundings, I descended the falling street into the flux and fanfare of Castro on a Friday night.
Lights, concrete, flesh and sound intermingled drunkenly and nothing was at that hour inanimate. Every inch and crack of the sidewalk, upon which I relished the art of walking without destination, told a story, a secret, a lie, a joke. And willingly I believed every word, lapping up the vagrant, hustling phrases.
The clothes I wore brushed softly against my singing body. In darker storefront windows I glimpsed the gliding reflection of a striking image that fluidly moved alongside me, faithfully.
Men noticed me- some ostentatiously, others surreptitiously, some smiling back into my smiling eyes, others holding a prurient gaze. All were welcomed because what is more enjoyable than people-watching is being watched by people.
Women too responded to my sex and song, street sounds and heartbeats rhythmically aligned. Anticipation impudently bantered with urchin frivolity, laughter and chatter loitered in crowds like a band of rebellious teenagers who sought recognition, but wouldn't in a million years admit it. And although it did not rain, a river of coincidences flowed as plentifully as alcohol, desirous pools gathered and steamed, we were the thunder and the lightening, the hours sopped by torrential minutes.
It was impossible here, what with the ambush of flash downpours, to pause and think of war. I'm sure if you had mentioned war people would have looked at you as if you were mad.
Populated streets, many faces, smoking leisurely, strolling, flash flirting with time, space, vibrating sidewalks whose psychic reverberations chronicled the gay theatrics of city-smitten tourists and unimpressed locals alike, puzzle bits of overheard dialogue, the strangest echoes, flamboyant annunciations, overabundant exclamations, profanities, curious mumbles, another near-distant guffaw, neurotic taxis, streetcars vivified by electrical pangs and pulses, sparks showering the living street. Theater.
I reach deep into the panther's throat and extract the words, the spineless truths, piquant nuances, the greatest conflagrations in every innocuous ember, a passing exchange between transients that had a lasting impact, inscribing what survives, my elbows red and tender from pressing into the mattress for five consecutive hours, my right thumb throbbing from gripping the pen, middle knuckle chapped and cracked, burning, my back burning, my eyes burning. Feeble but fulfilled. Faint but fierce. Fetters and freedom. Fabric of fiction. Falconry of fables.
The artist lies when he speaks of creation because beneath the facade and gild of poetry he is ultimately destructive. Like a child he knocks down what he's built, out of curiosity? Control? And yet, isn't destruction prelude to creation, the root of creation? Isn't loss the liquid essence of life's certain flux? Aren't we perpetually losing one passing moment to another and another and so on? Don't we lose even the most authentic, ingenuous declarations that are exhaled with conviction and vehemence to the vacua of time as soon as they are expressed? Nothing stands still long enough to be considered viable.
Will a hope, though gravid with the heaviest words, buoyed by our most heartfelt assertions, prevail, take root and materialize, or be by mistimed turn of events unduly aborted? Does it matter? This death of unrealized dreams too remains an opportunity for greater dreams, more fortified, more lucid. One season's slow departure and inevitable transience permits another's imperious arrival. Here, nature's self-destructive instinct births cruel fairness.
All around him, in many things, the artist observes the natural balance of coexisting, contiguous contradictions, their tumultuous partnership. So, it seems, the artist doesn't lie when he creates and destroys, because he is in accord with nature. He is of nature. He depends on nature for the tools and vocabulary of his craft, while nature depends on him for its voice, its interpretation, its personification. He is its protector.
The artist is creation's draftsman and destruction's apprentice.
Queer, Palestinian, American, universally human Tariq. Being near him is akin to being shot through wind tunnels to overseas adventures and desires. I was out on the balcony when he arrived to pick me up. He stepped out of the clunker he bought for seven-hundred dollars onto the sunny street like he stepped out of my life, and the old unshakable exhilaration that's triggered at the very thought, mention, and sight of him shot flowers, shards of glass, and butterflies at my giddy heart.
We drove back to Oakland in the rattling old car, on open sunny highways and bridges, running a few errands along the way, catching up on each other's lives. We stopped at a farmers' market on a small side-street, strolling casually up and down the lane feeling quite like family- comfortable, familiar, sharing a history that is blurred by flashes of kisses, laughter, and letting go.
It was dark when we finally arrived at Tariq's apartment. He switched the light on and a furnitureless living room with a floor that was covered in stacks of loose papers was dramatically revealed. I set down the bags and stood in isles of papyrus towers, 'Tariq, you should take a picture of it. It's beautiful!' We spent the next two hours filing these papers, after which we prepared dinner as traditional Persian music played in the background. We lighted a candle, opened a bottle of red wine, sat down at the small table, and here in the light of the small flame Tariq and I were caressed by the moments' delicate touch, and we ate, sipped wine, talked lightly, paused comfortably, and laughed casually. The world beyond the apartment's door, insecure and uncertain, fell away completely. When I have my own home I will camouflage the front door as it remains an intrusive reminder that all departures are inevitable.
Around us hundreds of books, each like a living creature that was silent and unmoving but very much alive and breathing. After we'd eaten, organized Tariq's books, and cleaned the dishes, we decided it would be best that I spent the night. Tariq fetched me a pair of his pajamas which were faded and softened by years and while I changed into them he built for me a makeshift bed on the living room rug. "Is this OK?" he asked in a tone that was sincere and apologetic, his beautiful hazel eyes like pools into which I still secretly toss pennies, making whispered wishes.
It's embarrassing now to admit, but I had hoped that we'd sleep in his bed, Raymond being away in New York; as brothers, without sex. And I was inwardly, immaturely disappointed. But I know now, as I did then, settling into my flannel cocoon, that it was only appropriate that we sleep separately, and that anything else, no matter how platonic, would have been caricatural.
In the morning I slept in while Tariq quietly prepared breakfast. When I slowly awoke from a sleep that was deep and restful I remembered dreams of rocket ships blazing into distant stratospheres and enormous, rapacious sharks engaged in a feeding frenzy.
We spent the majority of the day going about our own tasks- Tariq preparing for a four-hour lecture and I reading passages from his books and writing. In the afternoon we took the BART into the city, ascended a broken escalator to the ground level, and on a bustling downtown corner parted ways. When I turned around Tariq was already swallowed up whole by the traffic.
The joy I felt all day was a sonorous stream that ebbed and slipped fluidly over the stones in my heart. Deep-seated and hushed, soft and whispering, it resonated throughout my bones, spreading like jolts of electricity to my teeth, skin, and hair, translating as sparks that leapt across great distances to touch others. By now I know that happiness, like the people we love, has a mind of its own, an agenda of its own, and in order to survive, flourish, and become stronger it has to live its own life, go to other people and places, experience life without us before returning, aged and hopefully wiser.
Yesterday I had an adventure in the city. Made friends along the way. Night was a concert hall out of doors. Life was jazz. Light was flirtation. The cold was our anchor that kept us from floating away into intoxicated skies. I feel revived.
Enough time has passed since my arrest to have gained some clarity.
After Tariq and I parted I felt acutely the luxury of being able to go anywhere I wished, be anyone I desired. The freedom in meeting strange new men, talking with them, flirting. At one bar Robert bought me a drink and we spent the rest of the night talking, laughing. We even took a taxi elsewhere to sing Karaoke. Our driver was a young, gregarious Russian who spoke broken English. Robert was pleasant and engaging the entire time and we sang many songs in the empty, out-of-the-way bar.
Midnight looks at me with closed eyes. I guess all that's left after all is said and done is to let the people I love forgive me so that I can be who I am with them, but a little changed. For the better, I hope.
It was a cold night with black eyes that were at war with time and tide. The waves whose darkest depths continue to drag our spirits through the muddiest truths brought us together again, and Jackie and I were positioned side by side on a sidewalk, hurrying to a theater in Mill Valley. Candid, patternless flickers revealed us in one breath old and young, revved and spent, broken and unbreakable. We saw the French film Amelie, enjoyed it and each other.
I don't make fervent wishes anymore; they make me. Like lava. Like humid summer minutes in the Midwest. Like music and blue talk across down pillows. I am sex in the brightest corner of the darkest howl. The wayward beacon of a remote lighthouse. The sharpest cliff. The most humorless drop. The most candid thrust. Sex in my movements and profile, shadow and wake. The coast that seduces a distant horizon. The shout in every tempered word. Sunflower. The light that fills a room in the morning after.
Sunshine was in me today and rays of light leaked and spilled out of my eyes onto tile, tables, catching customers by surprise, delighting, inspiring, making long-lost friends out of mere strangers. Earth no longer seems beneath higher beginnings, a flat, desert stretch and a prison to escape, but a destination in itself, a hard-earned privilege, a reward. My spirit, my soul, my being, my character move with the slow, assiduous rotations of planets and time, surviving the very magic of their dramatic inconsistencies, which seems to birth my difficult passage to peace, to heaven, which doesn't exist elsewhere or in the aftermath of our battered lives, but is at all times everywhere with us, even in our very own shadow. And my ego desires something virtually impossible- permanence of joy, joy's unlikely fidelity.
The many stoic columns and pillars that help me stand with humor in my heart against the humorless hours of life shake with desire for certainty, which is wanting, of course. The giddiness spreads like a rumor and I want it for everyone I know- my family, my orphaned friends. But to expect this kind of joy to survive all the colors of a life lived on the strings of a grand piano that someone left in the middle of a bustling intersection is dangerously foolish. It will be removed and destroyed.
With eyes of a heartbreaker I un-pave streets, avoiding susceptible hearts, seeking the strong. At a bar I ask someone if he'd like to get together for dinner some time. His eyes widen, "With you? Are you kidding me!?" Fiercely flattering.
I put on my favorite grey, pullover hooded shirt and slipped into the chilly residential street, strolling casually with my arms folded before me, past the always dark old house where the white standard poodle, like a ghost dog, sniffs about the overgrown hedge. Tonight the poodle and I startled each other, jumping like field mice in the dark, fast recovered, and continued about our business. I exchanged the usual pleasantries with the young man behind the counter at the charming tobacco shop on the corner, his smiling eyes dark but warm. Unable to contain my finger-tapping curiosity any longer, I said, 'I hope you don't mind me asking, but where are you from?' The young man with a flash of fingers on register keys met my eyes and without pause answered, "Iran." I smiled, 'I'm Assyrian, but I was born in Shiraz.'
The old man who always keeps a few feet away, always reticent but polite, stepped forward, pointed to the young man, and spoke for the first time, "He was born in Shiraz too!"
'Really? I was very small when we left Shiraz. We moved to Tabriz, then Tehran.'
In English and broken Farsi the three of us had a short but nostalgic exchange about a time and a place now dreamlike and unreal.
It is at times like these when it heavily dawn on me that Iran did not happen yesterday, but twenty years ago. That it was twenty years ago when I was a child who in the black of power outages shook with terror at the shrill scream of air raid drills and vagrant missiles striking in the near-distance. A child who huddled in a ball of chattering bones I could not for the life of me, no matter how fervently I believed in miracles and God, fold further and smaller in a chair with my mother, who carried on entertaining neighbors in the feeble light of a lone candle as if nothing were out of the ordinary, serving pastries and Turkish coffee, waiting for the house to stop rattling, waiting for the battery-operated radio to tell us it was now safe to blow out the candles, turn on the lights, eat a pastry, and stand as I would by the fascinating fish bowl and let my tired eyes swim with the always two and beloved goldfish, wondering: Was another child, elsewhere, one like me, hurt, maimed, orphaned, or killed tonight?
Compassion accompanied by the beginnings of a silent fascination with death- a Christian, adolescent, natural curiosity. Though war was long and pervasive childhood remained more profound and shaping, a beautiful right that was delicate, but almost impervious to the causalities of somber reality. Death was not at all times heralded by tanks and missiles, but transient goldfish, so many goldfish, and canaries. I did not know then, as I sneaked stray cats into the house, while I played with my beloved plastic animal figurines under crowded dining room tables where my imaginary jungle smelled of leather shoes, where I came to accept the existence of floral panties and runs in stockings as I did Jesus, war, and dying goldfish, that I would one day end up American, in San Francisco, this.
I was a philosophical child in a sub-table universe.
In Farsi I admitted, 'I miss Iran so much. I hope I see it one more time.'
The old man's eyes welled with tears, so I solemnly bid them farewell before the individual strands of our exiled experiences became further entangled in nostalgic tethers. Back outside, the American street now seemed so clean and contrived, lacking personality and the presence of children of color playing in the dirt that would prepare them for dirtier, more detrimental games yet ahead. With every certain step and breath I slowly returned to the new world, which I have a tendency to push away when it attempts to adopt me, suspicious of it as long as it continues to deny me citizenship. Perhaps it means well, I don't know. But at what cost? As long as I am compliant, obsequious? And as soon as I am myself, marred, imperfect, insubordinate, it will reject me? Sometimes, even after twenty years of being here, feeling at times even American here, having grown up here, loved and wept here, flown and crashed here, dreamed out loud without an accent here, I know that beyond a physical relationship I am no one here.
But enough of these copper fears that dent my tongue with flavorless imaginings for which the English language didn't bother to invent words.
I prefer the immediate textures of being in the moment, which my body translates in a language far superior to English, Assyrian, Farsi, or Japanese for that matter! A language far more delicate, complete, expressive, and honest, not enslaved by words that are only heard by inhospitable ears that ring and buzz with preoccupied indifference.

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?