November 1998

Like a valise forgotten at the airport I let go of Chicago and everyone there, return to Marin, folding my wings in having landed amidst the wreckage.
Jackie and I seem to miss each other every morning and every evening. I have yet to see her. It's probably for the best since I have not forgiven her for her part in that awful scene on that horrid afternoon, which I cannot simply type out and discard.
I am still angry with her, though I accept my own mistakes in the relationship.
Although I am deathly afraid of moving out on my own I know I must!
All my life security has wavered and depended on external sources- family, friends, the myth of formal education. The idea of self-reliance is novel to me, unimaginable. Am I immature without the responsibility of wife or husband, and children? Does the homosexual remain forever childlike and selfish without familial intervention? Is a bachelor destined to be rootless, perhaps even loveless and lonely?
I am in the yard shedding skin…
My recent excursions to L.A. and Chicago have reminded me just how much I love my family and how negligent I have been. But I am here again and promise to remain in the present, where my family lives. I refuse to reel again drunkenly in distant distractions, always running out of the house as if it's aflame. These are bonds I have to reestablish.
Tonight I have lived out the most erotic and perhaps most dangerous exchange of my life. I feel emboldened, cocky, having had unprotected sex with a total stranger on a San Francisco sidewalk!
Is this a game now? To see how far I can go?
What am I thinking?
I'm not.
I'm feeling.
I'm reading Braille, by fire, out in the world, against the most harrowing of admonitions.
Feeling my way about the silken contours of a hot stranger's body as he penetrates me on the city street…
This morning I am not panicked but baffled. Shocked at what I am capable of. My life seems to be in disarray, a mess of a mystery. My own actions remain petulant and confounding.
What am I thinking?
I continue to love life, not because I have illusions about myself but because I have great faith that no matter what the outcome of my actions I will continue barreling through life as the survivor that I am!
What am I thinking? Really? I think last night was totally erotic and arousing, dangerous, and unthinking. Brilliant. Everything else, no matter how life-threatening is secondary, unavoidable. Unimportant. I want to live out my life, fully, without fear, without blame. I want to live as fearlessly as I want to write! No matter what. No matter who…
I live my life with dignity, even while fucking in the gutter. Why shouldn't I?
I will not apologize, nor allow cold, hard reality dismember me of my sexuality.
No more emotional self-mutilation in the aftermath of sex!!!
I know I am not special and that nothing protects me from disease and death. But I am not one to be stopped either. I remain resilient, brilliant, and refuse to relinquish my love and lust for living… even in death…
I stand in the yard and think to myself, who am I? What sort of a person gives himself so willingly and anonymously, so easily and casually to a nameless stranger?
And the answer is easy, someone like me- loving, intelligent, generous, and human…
I spent six hours one evening in San Francisco talking fluidly to a young man named Greg. We talked about life and love, relationships and the impossibility of these things, even finishing each other's sentences. We laughed a great deal at ourselves. We even left the bar and had dinner at a nearby restaurant. When I picked up the check Greg smiled and said he had not expected to have such a magical time when he decided to go for drinks after work. His dark eyes shined with innocence. I noticed tragedies tangled in his long sweeping lashes. His smile was boyish and wistful. Even the craters in his skin were endearing.
I find something tragic about us gay men, a quiet mistrust bestowed us not by genetics or experience, but by something so much older and less palpable. Something like life, time, an absence of God or a model by which we may fashion our lives…
When Greg and I parted with a hug and a handshake I knew that this is a time of deep-impact insights and meteor-revelations, explosive births and bright blinding deaths.
I am loving everyone and maybe not perfectly or wholeheartedly, demonstratively and diligently, but I am loving nonetheless, even if in the privacy of my skyscraper heart.
And maybe I will never master my own life, my fate, but I will age knowing that I have felt each moment pass over my skin like kisses from life- warm, accepting kisses, even in the darkest and coldest of times.
Living in the synapses even at the risk of being electrocuted… or better yet, electrified!
I am so grateful for all that I am given despite all that is taken from me daily.
I regret crying when Jackie and I rowed. I would not want to seem like I was emotionally blackmailing her.
Brenda, a regular at the restaurant, asks what I've been up to.
'Oh, not much. Just trying to figure out where I belong in this world and what my purpose is.'
"Sounds serious," she comments smilingly.
And I realize that I have been all too serious lately- for the last twenty-four years in fact!
Sitting here alone with the house all to myself, the street empty beyond the windows that were washed by a tumultuous afternoon rainstorm, I can't decide how to approach writing about my "street affair". What writing voice, opinion, or mood shall I take? I feel so many ways about the experience itself and my actions. I feel equally regretful and erotically proud. But we know by now that the two are deeply tied at the root. A single tree of two poisonous fruit.
And yet, in this an-erotical age, I am motivated to salvage only the mysticism of the encounter, not the scientific mediocrity of what remains of eroticism in the last days of the twentieth century.
Facts: I was drunk. I was horny. I was alone in the city and perhaps lonely. I was in an evanescent world, in a dangerous mood.
I go to the city for its lights and sounds, its faces and colors, the drink and the costumes. I go there because I can, because I am. I go to the city for the mirrors without reflection. I go for the deceptions. In San Francisco I am always offered a drink, a smile, a wink, a complement, a new mood, a different name.
He seemed to be my age. Good looking.
We passed each other on the street where our eyes met amidst the haze. I'd already been walking for a while. Cruising the asphalt wave.
I turned and followed him and for three blocks he turned back intermittently to check if I was still there. He was eating a slice of pizza from a paper plate. And yet there was so much fiction in the air that the very buildings we passed might have been constructed out of paper. An origami city…
We turned up one of the darker side streets off of 18th, where the mysterious stranger paused under a massive branch of a tree that grew onto the sidewalk from the shadowy grounds of a local church. And turned to me.
I stood before him.
He only said, "Hey." And we kissed.
No conversation. No drinks. No foolish romance. No days spent awaiting the phantom call. No superfluous flirtation. No drunken exchanges of warm words and coquettish glances. No smart retorts. No wispy gestures. No intellectual tangos. No excursions into the woods. No sightseeing. Just hunger. My own hunger for what freedom I can never have without feeling as though I am laying my life on the murderous line… for a moment or two stroking our erections on a street that slanted so severely I kept losing my balance and had to tug at his penis to keep from falling over.
For those moments the earth moved beneath our feet, our jeans rolled down to our ankles. I turned away from him so that his erection could slip between my legs where he moved in and out, in… and out… as if fucking.
'Do you have a condom?' I whispered.
"No. Do you?"
'No…'
And yet despite all my fears, all my paranoia, or maybe because of them and my desire to outsmart them, we continued.
We continued even as a car passed on the dark street, or when a pedestrian strolled quietly by, putting away our erections momentarily, shuffling our feet impatiently, then resuming.
He spit on his fingers and wet the tip of his penis, which was substantial. But I placed my hand against his pelvis and prevented him from penetrating, and heard him breathe into my naked ear, felt him exhale upon my neck.
There we were on the street, against the world. Not hidden in an alley or doorway, a shoddy bathroom stall or motel room, but on the sidewalk, with the cars and the people. Clothed and fucking.
We did not bother exchanging names or making any names up. We had no identity, no ulterior motives, no dowries or illusions. We were autonomous.
'Don't come in me,' I forewarned him.
He promised he wouldn't.
He held onto my hipbones and pulled me closer. I kept watch as the occasional headlights of a passing car lighted the sidewalk where we embraced. The homes across the street seemed to sigh.
Suddenly the young stranger pulled away and stood next to me, and in the darkness I saw quick white flashes falling onto the concrete. Immediately I too came.
Nothing else was said.
But what he did next still baffles and pleases me in the most small and intricate of ways. When he had zipped up his pants he searched in the dark for something- keys, I thought to myself. He bent down and picked up this thing he had taken time to find. It was the paper plate, which he carried away with him as he faded into the darkness, up the hill.
A man who does not litter…
Driving home on Golden Gate and through Marin's dark hills, and as the city faded in and out of view in all the car's mirrors, I startled myself by letting out a long, anguished, animalistic bellow that aptly drained me of all air, hope, and vision. I cried with the indignation of a creature whose sexuality had long been taken from him, an endangered creature who'd never once taken pleasure in sex. And never had a chance.
I want to write more, and act out less.
When loneliness leads, the dance is dangerous.
I feel magic anticipation always my preoccupation because in that charged moment before the disappointment and the outcome there is great beauty perfection celestial possibility imagination is better than real life the book the poem the image on film the grace of art are far more enchanting captivating than the coarseness the abrasiveness of everyday human living the decisions that shred the heart the responsibilities that limit the spirit the deadlines the expectations the demands the financial shortcomings…
I want to live in the soft-textured soul of a select dream. I want to love there, sing there, write there. May I? May I do that and be happy?
Winter within these pages.
I don't do well in winter.
Mood swings exhaust me.
The highs drain me of air at such unimaginable elevations, a shortness of breath. Spots in the air.
The lowest of lows drag me; burn me against the hot earth.
How did I end up on this non-stop roller coaster, my life?
Winter in these pages.
Do you feel the chill when you turn the page?
Each moment I try to conquer the god-doubt.
And the moral of this story, of any story, and of every story is to respect oneself through every nameless experience of the body, every passionate whim of the spirit, and every inevitable mistake of the soul. And to learn. And to move, move, move freely forth.
Because life is difficult.
Because life is amazing.
Because life remains unpredictable no matter how soulfully we try to intuit the future.
Because life is lonely. Unforgiving.
Magical.
Precious.
Provocative.
And we are nothing but fallible.
Not even intelligence can save us from despair.
I am in desperate pain and the doctors refer me to the specialists, the specialists refer me to the witch doctors, the witch doctors refer me to the gods, and the gods are not there. So I turn to chance, give it my anguish, my incurable loneliness- this phantom cell that travels surreptitiously through my organs, mutating constantly, outsmarting any possible antidote!
There is no cure.
Only distraction.
And this pain of being human. This wonderful curse of being emotionally awake, and sentient.
I look at the men on the street with envy. Older, straight men, who from a distance, seem immune to sensitivity. Strong. Untouched by the mysteries of life. Normal. At ease and at home in their roles. And I want this immunity they possess.
I feel I may explode with desire that is at its pique in my being. What strange changes take place beneath my skin? I am no longer a person but a reaction, a product of electric mayhem. Nothing else seems to matter. The chemicals have been released, unleashed like demons in my bloodstream. I am no longer the same. Again I change. Again a new face. New movements. Foreign gestures that belong to someone else, somewhere else. I fight this chemical, electrical, planetary, gravitational influence.
The reading at A Different Light went well. There was immediate interaction between the audience and me. I was immediately connecting, reaching, laughing with them. I felt so close to each person and read to every one individually. I felt present in my voice, which danced diaphanously and resonantly across the room. I could almost see my voice. I felt so at home up there, reading, reaching.
When I looked into the faces in the room I happened upon eyes that received me intently, and smiles, and emotion, and identification.
I made them laugh.
And I laughed with them.
After the reading everyone mingled. I received two different offers for publication in queer anthologies. A young woman patted me on the arm and asked my name and said she was deeply touched by my work, hoping to purchase my book someday.
Shammi's girlfriend, Laura, looking regal and slender approached me and smiled warmly. "You have such a stage presence, Emil." And we chatted for a short while.
What if I were to say no to every expectation of me, what if I were to break every single rule, and traverse the broken bridge of being someone's son, someone's nephew, someone's perfect friend, to a freedom I could not have imagined? And what if I survived this escape from falsehood, from education, work, saving money, protected sex? Would I self-destruct eventually?
Ahimsa leaves messages on the answering machine in deep earth tones. His voice damages the tape with its weight and richness.
I walked with Anna and friends on muddy trails amidst misty hills to a pebble beach enclosed by high cliffs. Waves crashed violently against the massive rocks like death, war, and rebirth. This was a scene out of a fantasy novel where at any moment serpents might rise from the undertow and uncoil against the gray sky and nebulous horizon and the dizzying cliffs with jagged edges, the hissing foam and salty gale, the mystery and height of nature.
I was the only guy at a friend's baby shower and had a lovely time, but driving home I began to feel ever more distant and disconnected from everything conventional and acceptable. The evening had seemed to mock my most recent, freakish, even clownish experiences with sex, school, writing, and living my way.
My heart, though, continues to sing and to write poems. Meanwhile, my brain remains the surveillance device- critical, annihilating spontaneity, sanctioning the heart that is generous.
I am reminded of life in Iran during the war when we were forced to cover the windows of our home with black garbage bags, tape, and tinfoil in order to keep the light from pouring into the streets, the entire city of Tehran kept dark and whispering, hidden away from enemy jets we heard in the distant sky, roaring somewhere beyond the shroud of fear and darkness. We hid our light because we feared for our lives, and could hear the bombs exploding just outside the city, close enough to shake the windows, the fish bowl, the furniture, and our bones…
And so there is always a war. That's nothing new. But this war is not covered by any of the major news channels. It is the war of every human being, a solitary war- a private battle of the heart and the mind; the spirit neutral, disengaged, almost numb.
This is when I catch myself weeping in the car, in the shower and the steam, mourning quietly the death of something, of someone I no longer recognize.