July 1997

High-rises. Humidity. Elevators. Doormen. Chicago.
Anais.

There is a faint voice inside my head, a whisper in a carnival telling me I will not return to live in Chicago for many years to come.
I have been working part time at the interior design firm where I was employed before moving to California. Joanne, one of the designers, and I have been truly enjoying our reunion. She calls me into her office, smiles, and confesses, "You don't know how happy I am that you're here. I really think that occasionally I need doses of Emil just to make it through the day."
We laugh amidst the floor plans and fabric swatches, tassels and sketches.
She looks beautiful sitting at her desk- highlighted hair, clear blue eyes, her skin slightly tanned, her body petite, clothes tastefully tailored.
She asks questions about my life without making me feel like an oddity. She seems to care, is genuinely curious. It is a pleasure to answer her.
I tell her that I have loved men since childhood.
Her eyes widen, "You knew at the age of ten?"
'Oh, I knew at seven, six, even four. I didn't know what sex was but I knew I wanted to be held by men, touched by them.'
"It must've been hard to be so young and aware."
'It really wasn't. It wasn't until I was older that being gay seemed unbearable at times. I rather enjoyed dreaming about men as a child. It made me happy and made my heart race. It was my own secret, and I knew to keep it to myself.'
Joanne leans back and places her high-healed feet on top of her desk, sighs, and says, "It's so good to laugh with you."
'So, this is all about you, isn't it?' I joke.
Again, laughter.
Joanne, it is I who needs doses of you in my life…
I only have one hope today: that I am not too rash in dropping people simply because they fail to serve the purpose I assign them.
Outside it is windy. The sky is turning into ominous grays and hapless whites. Light is leaving me.

I believe in human and sexual liberation, not in deceit and betrayal. If honesty is square let's have a block party!

Woke up knowing I will return to California next week, not next month as scheduled. I just have this feeling that I'm needed there, that the inception of my future in Marin requires my attention and presence. I feel it, no matter how sad the idea of leaving here may make me, no matter how emphatically friends might insist otherwise. There's nothing more left here for me.

At moments drama catches up and I'm inclined to envision a hasty and mysterious departure, without proper goodbyes. A flamboyant departure. Have I not changed since childhood? My crime is not wanting to be loved, but wanting proof of love. I want to be missed, adored. By leaving early I get to survey and gauge the reactions of my friends and family, rate their dismay. I suppose in many ways I am as dysfunctional as ever! I just like being the one who comes and goes. Anxious to begin my new life without lofty expectations.

Years have passed but I hear the familiar voices of women I have known, admired, and at times even despised. My aunt Suzie and Lena chatter over nuts, raisins, tea, and coffee in the living room. If this were a tournament my aunt would win the windbag trophy, hands down! The woman is relentless. In one breath she can disclose private details of a dozen Assyrian families. Sometimes behind her back I make Lena giggle by making funny faces. This particular aunt has always fascinated me for all the horrid stories my mother has told me about her over the years; meanspirited things aunt Suzie has said and done, insensitive, malevolent things.
Although, from what I have come to learn about mother's anger and resentments over the last couple of years, I can't help but question just how much of those terrible stories is feigned by mom's own despair.
On more than one occasion I have questioned my mother, asked why she never defended herself, or stood up to dad's sister's supposed maltreatments. I don't ask to imply it were mother's own fault that she was not received kindly into her in-laws' household. I ask out of my own sense of indignation for my mother, toward my father's family who are known to be loud, rough.
But I should know better by now. Mother would have been treated even worse had she stood up to them. A young bride in an Assyrian family, especially in Iran, is expected, is taught to remain favorable, meek, and quiet.
Now years later, a continent removed, I am instantly filled with conflicting feelings of respect and resentment whenever I have occasion to see, or in this instance to hear, my aunt Suzie.
In Iran, at our school, she was the infamous teacher every child feared. Her reputation preceded her whether you were in her class or not. I even remember one particular afternoon on a playground in Tehran when two boys from an upper class taunted me; all I had to say was that Mrs. Suzie so-and-so was my aunt. I was promptly left alone.

I still don't know who I am. My ability to relate and identify with all people makes me many people. I see myself as child, as woman, as man, black, straight, gay. My intentions remain nebulous, though I like people to be comfortable around me. And if I sense that they are not, my own mood is easily thrown- so much so that I have to work diligently to restore the equilibrium of others. I have this unyielding need to be angelic. It is to compensate for all the mischief I feel on the inside, all the homoerotic desire, the poetry with which I think. There is a little devil inside me who is prone to feelings of lofty superiority toward others. He's quick to dismiss his contemporaries as uncultured, socially ungraceful, frivolous. He slips easily into a state of pettiness, envy, and disenchantment with others. He can drink himself into utter belligerence. He will secretly desire a "taken" man. And he will agree with anyone on anything just to be polite. He will put on many masks, cast any spell, speak the language of the moment, become anyone at the drop of a hat in order to please and to be liked. Yet, depending on his mood he can be none of these things!
Those who cannot accommodate my sincerity can expect a free performance.
This is why I cannot yet love and be loved. For if you were my lover who would you be loving, really? Until I find myself in this kaleidoscope of seamless costumes I will have to forego every invitation to love.

I walked into the living room to find Lena's hands on my father's crotch. She pulled, tugged, and twisted. I exited the room tickled. She later approached me and said slowly in Assyrian, and sincerely, "I hope you don't think I was doing something inappropriate. I was only trying to fix his zipper." I broke into unmanageable laughter!

In desperate need of a journal session. Mission: to ground my spirit after what feels like days of foolish debauchery. Spent the past two nights at Brandon's. Now it's Saturday and I'm home at my father's. Exhausted. Unsettled. Showered. Shaved. Relishing being alone. Do I "act" so much with others that leaving my friends becomes a holiday? Interaction for me is hard, hard work. I move, function, and reveal my personality with effort and with caution. Often I am self-conscious. I live on a stage, and it seems that all eyes are on me, but when I muster up the courage to look about, ready to meet another's gaze, I find there is no audience. Everyone is preoccupied with his or her own movements, gestures, thoughts, and life.
My need for stage light is not as chronic as it once was. It's leaving me- this spotlight.

What am I supposed to do? Shut off? Learn to live without feeling? Just go through the motions? I'd rather suffer with the ability to perceive, to feel too much than to not feel at all. Having emotions does not emasculate a man; it enables him to live fully through every mediocre moment.
I want to go home to California.
I want to sleep in my own bed.
I want to be alone, to read, and to write.
Rodney has called again from Modesto. He says innocently that he loves me and misses me. It is as a sister that I receive such tender utterances. I've grown to adore Rodney over time, to understand him, and to ignore his crassness. His vulgarity is just an act, his queeniness is just one more mask. We all wear them. I know the better Rodney, the polite, caring, little Assyrian boy with big endearing eyes.

It hits me that my family is a part of a collective history, that of Assyrian immigrants from Iran, and that for thousands of years Assyrians have lived without a home, in borrowed countries. Perhaps the Iran-Iraq war was the last straw for the Assyrians who immigrated to the States to better their lives, and their children's chances at becoming something more than young soldiers at war. Our parents hoped we would become lawyers, doctors, dentists, or computer engineers, and some of us did.
I did not. Instead I am gay and an artist. I've lived with the guilt of having failed my family for years now. After all the gigantic sacrifices they made…
Life has always demanded of me a pliability of character. In Iran we interacted with other Assyrian children and schoolmates, as well as Iranian, Armenian, Turkish. Before the revolution even Italian children and some American. Here in the States I struggled to become "American" and to learn the language, pick up on the humor, dress like my peers, look American. Once in the States we moved about in search of a final destination. Amidst the exhaustive search there was my parents' loveless marriage, the fights, the awful exchanges in the car, in the kitchen, in the morning, at night. This is how I learned to act, to improvise, to relate, to survive. In Chicago I further developed as a teenager and as a burgeoning artist. This has been my experience, our history as a broken family. This is the gist of it, and tonight I look forward to the rest of my life with a strength that is not my own, but that of a restless equine.
So I set about destroying old sketchpads, notebooks, letters, postcards, notes between Maggie and me from high school, useless memorabilia I have kept in boxes out of nostalgia, a sentimental loyalty. I am ready to move forth, traveling lightly.

This is extremely discouraging- the English language is not mine. Sure I'm fluent, but as an adult living in the States I feel I've fallen behind. I could be a better writer, have more of a command on the language. Worse still, I am forgetting Farsi and Assyrian, my first two languages that have been taken from me by time and disuse. But I will continue to strive. I will read and look up words I do not understand, use them in my writing. I may even misuse them and sound pedantic, but mark my words journal and mysterious reader, I will write and write well!
If only I could express myself more truthfully, all the sorrow I encompass would be satisfied, not wasted. My neuroticism would become art, poetry. I have to keep my veins open to the flow of emotions, no matter how ugly or embarrassing those emotions. I have to study the people in my life carefully, study their features, their personality, their character, their beliefs. Find myself in them. I suppose in this sense ignorance is not my nemesis, but my incentive.

Novato, California. Chicago seems so far away. I am at Casa De Maria, the rest home my grandmother owns and runs with the help of my aunt Jackie and my mother. I have set the table for dinner. In the meantime I write. Mom-Suzie shares many memories of people I have never met, but come from. She delights me with proverbs she cites in Turkish, Farsi, Armenian, even Arabic- languages she picked up as a girl in the village where she was born. She has beautiful blue eyes, high cheekbones, light hair. She's a simple woman with a complex faith in a Christian God whom she says has never failed her no matter what her many painful losses in life. She has "dreams" occasionally. Telling dreams which she shares with us in the mornings with a serious countenance.
I am ready to tackle yet one more change in my residence.

Registered by telephone for classes at College of Marin. Suddenly I am living here. What happened? Quickly I shift gears. There's no time for sentimentality. Great changes always force me to be brave and face my own inelegance.

My aunt Jackie - seven years my senior, beautiful, at times solemn but otherwise hilarious- trusts me with her heartaches and confides in me. She talks about her disappointment with her own sister- my mother. She confesses that mother has made this transition difficult for her, and her eyes now fill with tears and shine in the evening light. I feel trusted, though these talks pain me deeply because I want peace for all of us and feel responsible for my own mother's actions and reactions. Am I finally an adult now that my aunt has shared her heartaches with me?
Am I to juggle personalities again? Juggle mother, Jackie, Mom-Suzie? I've had enough practice juggling in this life-circus of so many disparate personalities. Every morning I will apply my makeup, my diaphanous mask, I will slip on my thousand costumes and move through the moments as an acrobat. And I know I will falter, fail, and break. Become the caged, trained tiger whose fangs have been filed, whose claws have been removed, whose roar has been severed into a whisper in a diary… this habitat of my roar, cage of my voice.
Somewhere upstairs a door creaks open.
Is it homophobia?
Crossing Bay Bridge- silver and immense, two-leveled and alive- I suddenly feel lucky, understanding that there is always space for improvement, a bridge inside made of steel, fireproof. Sometimes I think I ought to be more ambitious, clever, shrewd concerning money and formal education. But I'm not. I'm simple in my material needs. Even naïve, childlike. Sometimes shy. Timid. And I don't want to spend my life regretting my nature, my character, wishing to be something else, someone else, somewhere else. Perhaps this is the life I was meant to live all along. My own.
I think tonight gratitude is a good note on which to end this entry…

Carmel was breathtaking. I love the Pacific. Bought a Kahlil Gibran book in Monterey where I dreamed of a life in a modest windblown home by the ocean, writing, painting, walking on the beach with a beloved lover. He may not appear in my imagination or in here much anymore, but he is there in the shadows of my heart. Intelligent and beautiful. Passing through San Francisco on our return I knew that I love distance, because distance allows me to love better. I thought of my love for my father, and for Lena. Dearest Lena. Her tender and warm smile, her efforts in that small burning kitchen in the summer, her foods too spicy.

Visited College of Marin, the Indian Valley campus. What a charming atmosphere. I felt like I was walking through a forest preserve. Buildings tucked behind tall aromatic trees. Rustic wooden bridges crossed streams and creeks.
My affair with figments continues. I have an orgasm that is long and pleasurable, reverberating through all my bodies as though I were many women.
I have another disturbing shark dream. It is through the lens of a camera, a documentary, real, too real. There is violence, death, bloodied waters, loss, grief.
My grandmother keeps coming into the room and interrupting by counseling me as to how I ought to conduct my life. She urges me to pursue a lucrative career, to focus only on financial security, nothing else. Although this kind of advice deeply frustrates me because it does not at all speak to the artist I really am and what I want out of life, I listen and try to understand that her gesture is loving, and that she acts out of genuine concern.
After all, Mom-Suzie does not own two homes and a business because she came from money. Everything she has accomplished in her own life arrives from her unbelievable strength, being industrious, and a staggering work ethic. In spite of her many trials and tribulations in life- an early upbringing in a village in Iran, being poor, being married to an abusive alcoholic husband for thirty years, divorcing, emigrating to Chicago, working there as a seamstress, saving, putting her two younger children through college, and finally opening up the rest home in Marin- she has remained deeply loyal to her Christian faith. Her obstinate faith in God, as well as her unyielding devotion to the church, have instilled a firm sense of responsibility and religious conviction in everything she does, and in every aspect of her existence.
My grandmother signifies for me all that the human spirit, no matter how broken, can overcome and accomplish. She was always ahead of her time, facing adversity without fear, redefining her gender role even as she moved beyond the barriers without betraying her loyalty to God. The forces and the hardships against which she has continuously prevailed would have certainly broken me a hundred times over! This is no exaggeration.
I am emboldened by her resilience.
In the late afternoon Mom-Suzie and I took a stroll through a nearby neighborhood in the foothills. Occasionally we passed a ranch where horses lazily grazed. We commented on homes with perfect landscaping, immaculate, quiet as the light began to fade. Mom-Suzie, having grown up and worked in her father's grove, identified the fruit trees we happened upon. Soon she became wistful with desire for a better life, a slower life, and admitted being tired from working at the rest home, taking care of six elderly residents.
Slowly the sky darkened into spectacular shades of pink, twilight I had only seen in majestic paintings in art books. The air cooled suddenly, and we decided to head back.
It becomes harder and harder to read the works of others. It takes all self-restraint to keep from throwing a book across the room! I can't help but compare my own ignorance and lack of literary grace to others' proficiency of language. If language is not my sport maybe I ought to stop competing.
I must run. Jackie and I are having wine.

The house where we now live is a charming four bedroom with a fireplace. It's very American. From the outside the windows possess decorative shudders. The interior is warm and clean. My favorite part of the house is the back yard. I imagine that on warmer evenings I will spend much of my time filling these pages at the picnic bench that is out there, surrounded by flowers and the ivy that creeps up the wooden trellis. A tidy forest where a lone apple tree scatters its sour green apples all about the lawn. Steppingstones create an uneven path through this scene in the back of which resides an old decorative wooden bridge. Beneath this bridge a stream of blue rocks runs without sound.
From here, in the near distance, there is a hill that is completely immersed in trees of various shades of green. In the late afternoon light flocks of black crows circle this hill.
Casa De Maria is a mere five-minute drive from here. This too is a charming Northern California home with a vegetable garden in the back and rose bushes in the front. Geraniums line the front walkway to the door. A huge crabapple tree keeps watch at the front gate, flinging little red apples onto the sidewalk at innocent passersby, some of whom stop and ask my grandmother for permission to pick the apples. In her delightful accent Mom-Suzie tells them of course they can, and even helps them. Casa De Maria, for all intents and purposes, resembles a residential home as it once was. The only conspicuous addition is a wheelchair ramp in the back of the house. Here, my favorite feature is the slanted ceiling in the living room where the elderly residents rest their canes and walkers to watch "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune", soap operas and the news.
There's a fly dying in this room, in which he's been trapped for two days now. Today he is altogether unable to fly. Even crawling is laborious for him. He is disoriented and weak. Wish he were homophobia!

The fly has ceased struggling. He is dead. But homophobia lives…