letter to mother

Dear Mother, 

I came out to you 2 years ago in a letter I had written, on the night I took the Admissions Test. I had been rehearsing what to write for several months; where to begin, how to introduce the topic, in which part of the letter it would be. When the night finally came to write it out, however, I put aside my scratch paper and just let the words flow. It felt like pumping water out of a well: a few spurts of forcefulness, a few spurts of ease, and gravitational physicality in between. But I completed it in a few hours and mailed it to you the next day. 

I cried as I wrote, and little balls of tears rolled down my cheeks, splashed across the length of legal pad paper and bounced off, momentarily, in the shape of an embossed water crown. They must be wrinkled now, those edges, if you look at them carefully. But you can spare yourself that inspection and do more important things with your time.

In that letter, I remember, I asked you, specifically, not to internalize the nature of my identity as something you and Daddy did 'wrong' and requested you not to look at my sexuality as your fault -as anyone's fault. I realize that this can be hard, especially when I see kids in the playground with their wrists clamped gently around their parents' silk finger-tops, that raising a child screams responsibility and requires exposure, often inadvertently, to a catalog of social pathogens, unfavorable circumstances and contestable situations. I realize that the product of parenthood morphs into a human formula, and that along the way faults and responsibilities and feelings of ownership for deviance cannot be avoided. But I still hoped that you would understand that my being queer has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with you, even while the rest of society, the radical feminists, the academics and the politicians included, hypothesize and argue back and forth between the unknown effusions of nature and nurture into the funnel of the developing brain. 

If nature wins, there is then a political legitimacy, a social hands-off: it wasn't me, it was the DNA, and if nurture wins then there is cause for dystopia, silent support for social cleansing, for territorial eugenics on behalf of the social conservatives to reinstate the "natural order" of things, bolstered by Biblical kingdom, unforgiving theology and the cataclysm of Darwinian fitness. If we have a conjunction of both elements spilling into the foundation of sexuality, into the moot point of the histology of desire, what tug-o-war man will play to politicize human rights, uphold equality labels and make profits from a psychological quandary, I cannot even imagine. But as long as the answer -if you believe in a concrete scientific agenda, that is -remains contested, suffice it to say that the twinings of my inner erotic, emotions and aesthetics have origins in me, and in me alone, the frazzled territory to which you gave birth, and does not involve you. At all.

Towards the end of the letter I wrote "please call me if you want to talk about it." But you never did, neither of you, and it made me very sad, tacit and extremely embarrassed about myself. The reason I wanted you to call was not that there was anything new to add or particular to deny but that I wanted to explain to you the nature of my life in a society you have never seen. The nature of my life beyond boundaries you have constructed based on pop culture and Hollywood and contrast it against the sawdust of grievances that corrugate and spark anger in your own neighborhood. I wanted to tell you that I am happy overall, that I found myself on the edge of an enormous breakdown and that I picked myself up and found the support to waddle through days as a first-time queer. They never talked about us, people like me, through all the years in Catholic school, where the boys locked eyes, kissed at night and gave blowjobs to each other behind grease-capsuled food stalls. The revelation of my tendencies, the awakening of senses, therefore, came utterly unprecedented, wrapped in a confusion, in a hasty metastasis of self-loathing and second-guessing and in a cancerous aversion that I didn't know how to make sense of.

I sometimes wonder how you reacted when you first read my letter. Maybe you were in the living room, your arms rested against the coffee table, gazing at the fish tank and sweating through your temples. Or maybe you were by my nightstand, staring at the piano, adjusting your frames and blowing your nose. Or maybe you were at the kitchen table, frothing your coffee, rattling some ice cubes by the swooshing of the record player. Maybe you bawled, maybe you whimpered, maybe you smiled and knew this was coming. Or maybe you froze in the middle of the backyard, while the honey breeze of sweet mangoes clucked at your ears. Maybe it really didn't matter to you, because I had been on my own for seven years by then, and we had drifted apart like 2 melting icebergs in the middle of our own realities. We had forsaken, mutually, the status of mother and son, on the ream of a violent disagreement and on the turn of the century, became 2 private individuals on a facade of business -caring sometimes, chatting sometimes and existing beyond accountability. Despite how broken we are, I thought I should let you know because this has become fundamental to who I am and if you thought of the vignettes of a once-upon-a-time son, you should know that your child wants to love boys, passionately. It would complete the emotional portrait of your Midwestern lovechild, who spent half of middle school cross-dressing in a closet, masturbated to Hustler at the age of eleven, had role playing fetishes with Joey the mechanic and yearned to be fucked by a gaggle of gays at the 2 am raves in Towbridge Court. 

Your picture of me is of my era of morality, studious, principled, and intoxicatingly religious. But the chunk of me that I wanted to show you in my letter is that of the national criminal, who breathes heavily, the aroma of sunshine, prances around fields of honeysuckles and bees, dreams of a husband, a reformed Semitic and jangles his mind with the politics of identity. I am also a human, you know, just like any other person, capable of loving and smiling and singing, and breathing and learning and educating. But a difference remains in the commodity that is me -the difference that you may have guessed, scrolling through hours and hours of Internet logs or periodic screen pop-ups sprouting from viral fenestrations in the memory chip of your computer, that that typified the nature of my violence, my menacing yearnings, the cavernous outcome of my dangerous desires.

You are probably shaken, feel uprooted and think that you have failed your responsibility, whatever that may entail, as a dutiful mother. Perhaps, you want to protect me, with words and love, and cradle me to silence as I whimper, seismically, at the peninsula of injustices. You want to hug me and kiss me and re-tell me the stories about the big bad world. You want to be by my side and touch my cheeks and talk about doctoring, the riskiness of bare sex and the untimely death of Melanie Gerschel. And I will sit and listen in silence, as the phonetics of your words needle my ears, and stir within me a pantheon of thoughts, lickerish and severe, an hippodrome of burning animals, raunchy temptations and sadomasochism, stimulating the tentacles of underground sexuality -only to wake up on a Sunday morning to a buffet of drugs, hallucinations and self-pity. I admire and respect your ability to protect, to love like a lover and bark like a father. But the way we dealt with our ideological flora, the variegations and nit-picky microfilaments, de-magnetized our stances a long time ago. We are threadbare in our present time, you in your concrete pink in a pit of poverty and me in a cubicle, woven with starlights, chandeliers and hope.

Do you know how it feels to be an identity criminal? No, you don't. But I do, because I love boys, sweet harmless boys. I am a criminal in the land where I breathed my first, learned to walk and said your name for the very first time. I have no rights, I have no say, I have no audacity to show my love because I am a delinquent, an uncharismatic wrongdoer in the panoply of culture. If I were to reveal, even a tiny sliver of my affection, I could, in theory, be handcuffed away, confined in a cell with the vortex of laws -and why? Because my fundamental rights do not matter. Because yet again, my desire constitutes a minority, alien, unnatural compared to everyone else's. They say -but it is only the conservatives who think that way, to which I say, but does that change the fact that I am still a criminal? You talk about liberalism, about outrage to tradition -well, then show it! Show it to me! Scream at my face you are welcome here as much as I am! Howl at my senses you can love whoever you want and we will not jail you, we will not victimize you, we will not burn the reputation of your family! I feel homeless at home, and severely bruised. And when you write to me and say "come back home and serve your people" I scoff out loud and clasp my hands so hard that my thumb nails bleed. My vessels burn with the anger in my blood, the shame! the outrage! They say, give it some time, the wheels are already turning, but there is no going back for me; no energy or desire left in me to fight relentlessly. I have ceded responsibility. Call me a cop-out, call me weak. Maybe I am, and regretfully so, but I will leave the pall bearing to other heady activists. Feeling homeless at home -it makes me choke.

I have a lover now. A curious doctor-to-be, from Burlington, Vermont -a historian, a philanthropist with a wide-open window. You will probably never accept a husband for me, ever, even though you responded to my letter saying "I don't really care. Do whatever makes you happy." So we never talk about it or even come close to questionable territory. The politics of my identity, however, does not end with the bigoted jurisdiction of your paralyzing subcontinent. Even in the cavity of the dangerously civilized, across the permeating sands of the wild far West, on the plateau of the corporate and the cafeteria of the powerful, matrimony is a contest. 

A few months ago, they said history was made. You probably read about it in the daily Telegraph or heard about it on the radio, while driving to work. The agents of law decided to redefine marriage, sloughing off the part about a man and woman exclusively. This winnowed into Americans a crisp odor of justice and raised among them a thunderous cheer. But when you break it does to the basics along state lines, the legitimacy shudders and the confusion of identity politics is put in place. Think about a situation like this where my lover and I marry in New York, and make our home on Central Park West, with Dora our child and us as dads. If we go to Indiana to visit Marsha Eckstein or Cayla Schwartzberg, our relationship becomes illegitimate and Dora has no legitimate parents. But if we drive away to Illinois to visit Beverly at school, we are "married" again and Dora has parents. Can you imagine how confusing and unfair this must be for a child born into non-traditional families, growing up in a society that chooses to make gashes and poke holes like this in queer people's lives? No one has and ever will question your marriage. Not like you are in a mother-now-friend-next situation, but I hope that the laws change and that my lover and I and little Dora can live like anybody else -as humans first and then as gays. 

Suffice it to say that I am a little confused by some of the social mores of my adopted home. When I heard opportunity and freedom, the bedrocks of this land, I had imagined a utopia in a civic society of progressive minds, and the liberty of enjoying the celebration of identity. But that, I realize, was the voice of my naivete and I have learned to adapt to the eyes of judgment, the reality of a nation, that prides itself a Gargantuan, the developmental magnate, the power pool of humanity. What meaning is there in a "developed" land that still contests its humans rights? That, to me, defeats the foremost tenets of being a developed welfare. It feels like insidious advertising, like a marketing lure -come here, and be free, as we squeeze out your rights of an alien identity, as an immigrant, a gay and a man of color.

Despite all this, I am happy overall. I have a place that I call home on 82nd Street and Park Avenue. I have a lover who brings me joy, immense happiness and comfort. And I am happy that the politics of this land made me challenge establishments, practice everyday anarchism and question what is existing. I attribute a lot to my liberal arts education, for which I am forever grateful. But how do I answer a boy from your globe who envisions only happiness when he thinks about America? He expects freedom, acceptance and the glamor of identity. He finds an outlet in the history of this land -I can run away from my criminal reality and seek asylum in America. What do I tell such a boy who asks -I want to breathe, can I come to you? I do not know yet, but I will think about it. But let this be known to you and to everyone else that no child is born criminal, your society makes him one. 

Hope you are doing well.

Sincerely,

T.

my letter to Marsha Eckstein

Marsha,

I saw someone in the 73rd Street Deli last night, who looked just like you; or I should say the way I remember you looking three years ago. I froze for a second and panicked, probably, wondering if I should say Hello. I did not, however; knowing that if you were in New York City from Livingston, Illinois, you would've probably made a phone call or let me know that you were here.

But we've been in touch, and that's important. We chatted via text messages at first and then moved to e-mails. From time to time, you sent me letters, postcards and greeting cards that I read out loud, smiled gleefully and stuck to my yellow plasterboard wall with lime green push pins. I've wanted to write back, for almost 3 years now, but every time I sat down at my cherry-maple desk I either felt lazy, or didn't know how to begin or just couldn't translate my thoughts into words. So I gave up, each time, and walked away, feeling heavyhearted and sincerely defeated, and played card games with Billie Jean in her apartment on Hastings Road. Or went to the Opera with Stanton and Alexa or the Koch Theater with Mary Jane and Martin Pillsbury.

You have been extremely particular about keeping me updated on your whereabouts, your sing-a-long's, your countryside Mad Libs and the deep, dark truths of your inner womanhood. Your stories of desire, of heart break, of insecurities and embarrassments -you have told me without reins. Your lust for life, your tingling genitals, the vapor on your breasts and the thunderous, noisy bellowing of you rain-washed vagina -you have conveyed through alliterations of words. I could sit down and make pencil sketches of the pivot points of your emotions, like a Ferris wheel in a rubber fulcrum or a wooden swing in air ballet, and scribble around the graphing sheet in severe disarray. You are everywhere at once, and then maturely collected, pocketed into a tungsten bulb, and smashed into pieces. And then you are a nothingness, you are a nobody, a theoretical non-existence. How does this happen Marsha Eckstein? Tell me, why does this happen? You are in my mind, a lot of the time, while I'm working, or swimming in the ocean or biking past Grand Central terminal. A lot of the time, when I'm reading Homer or creating art or simply walking across Central Park. It is, as if, you are bare-exposed; naked in my eye of personal knowledge and uncovered from a sheaf of deadly monograms. You wanted love, you craved to be wanted, for years and years on end, even at the cost of jobs, professions and quasi-relationships. But if there is one thing I have never told you before, is that I cannot love you. 

You may, again, wonder why that is. You may, again, feel crushed like a candlewick, ridiculed and humiliated, despite the manner of your endeavors. You may feel cheated and violated at the revenue of circumstance -but I cannot love you. Why not? You will ask. I have given everything, said everything, done everything I possibly could -and yet, why are you not satisfied? You may say. The answer lies not in what you have or have not done -but in the fact that I have found love in my inner queer. An inner queer that gets projected onto the calligraphy of my desire, the faculty of my sexual prowess. It is a category, a denomination and a delineation that I have struggled with, and battled with since my age of eleven. And experimented and pretended and miraculously succeeded even, though only for a short while, to live in a cage of facetiousness. To live in a cage of theater gongs, to reside in a lie and to make promises without meaning them. Lisa Weinberg was a former, the one I knew would be my friendly wife, without the passion for romance, or the art of lovemaking. She was a friendly lover, an ex-corporate, transactional in the nature of our conversations and kissing. To be a token, scared of the single life, holding hands and wrestling, internally, the calling of lesbians and the queers.

The reason I am writing this to you today, this little sliver of my thought chronology, is that I want you to find love in a man who can love you back in the way you deserve. You are central to the development of hormonal adults, in your job and at your church, and the outcome of your perseverance and keen concern will be the epigram to success of many many people. I want you to smile, and be happy in life, flutter and float like a bird in the sky, cheer and scream to the heavens that you believe, holding hands, tapping shoulders and kissing under the canopy of eternal sunshine. With your lover on your neck, a ring on your hand and a marble of motherhood perched on your bed, you will be wonderful and invigorating and the answer to a prayer.

Let us sit and discuss, come September, Marsha Eckstein. Till then, farewell.

Best, 

T.

Ash Wednesday

Hey there, Lucille,

How are things going with you, ex-neighbor? Did everything go as planned with the move? Damian and I walked by your building the other night when it was about to start snowing and peeked through the glass double doors. Gosh, it's so beautiful Lucille and oh my god, the doorman's so sexy. I actually waited in front of the entryway for about 5 minutes, pretending to discuss Sudanese politics with Sherine Levinsky on the phone, and totally checked him out, ha ha. You're living the dream, my little pumpkin. So many people fantasize, for years, of having a Fifth Avenue address and I'm so happy for you that your hard work is paying off. Perhaps five years down the line, you'll be a Society lady, tip-toeing across Manhattan in your Weitzman heels, decorating your home with Tiffany crystals and polishing your face in unreal charades. Or maybe you'll be the small-town Lucille, the Lucille I know -happy and satisfied with small things in life, appreciative of simplicity and quintessentially poise.

You know, my grandma, Jocelyn Horowitz, used to live in the penthouse of your building and was there for 32 years. After Lenny died of cardiac arrest, and her affair with the massuer, Eli Margolin, ended, she moved across the country and resettled in San Diego, in a lovely beach home in La Jolla Village. Maybe you, Eric, Aaron, Melanie and I can plan a little vacation there this summer.

I ran into Tom and Patricia this morning at the Peacefood Cafe on 82nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Remember Tom and Patricia Abberton from Perry Hall? We chatted for a bit about his material engineering courses at Columbia, Patricia's new job at Morgan Stanley and the Dave Eggers title I was reading called What Is The What. I was slightly taken aback when I first spotted them at the opposite edge of the counter top because I never would've thought they were religious or the church-going type. There they were, standing by the scone rack, chattering away and smiling occasionally, with 2 ashen thumb strokes chalked across their foreheads; one vertical, one horizontal, intersecting as a cross. It looked freshly done, but the tail ends were already narrowing with the sweat and their unusual hair-fixation tic. I presume they stopped by St Gregory's for the morning service, but then again I don't particularly keep track of their day-to-day whereabouts.

Just before they were about to head out Tom asked, "So, you giving up anything for Lent?" I laughed a little and said, "No, ha ha. I'm not Christian or religious for that matter. What about you guys?" Patricia said she was giving up desserts and Tom said cigarettes -both of which sounded reasonable. In the middle of the conversation, I glanced at the wall clock by the espresso counter and it was already 9:30 am. I needed to hurry up to be able to reach work on time. The M66 crosstown bus ride takes about 32 minutes and then there's a 14 minute walk. I paid for my coffee and bag of muffins, shook their hands and said, "Happy Ash Wednesday guys and also Happy Easter if I don't see you before that." They wished me Happy Easter as well. I slung the messenger bag over my shoulder, draped my scarf around my neck in a Parisian knot and stumbled my way out to the 79th Street subway.

One of the things I never told you about when we were at Goldman together was that I went to a Catholic school, kindergarten through 12th grade. It was of the Jesuit order, a burnt down theater space converted to a school building in 1863, educating boys, only, for years on end. St. Ignatius Collegiate School had a reputation for upholding strict traditions, churning out dedicated and respectable Catholics and helping students become 'mature, spiritually-oriented men of character.' They believed that 'the Catholic school is a learning community animated by the Divine Spirit of Love and Freedom, and living the Gospel values. It shares Christ's concern for the liberation and fullness of life of all peoples, especially of those in greatest need.' They admitted, however, a fair number of non-Catholics every year, true to their Educational Policy which stated "young people of any religious family find scope within their own cultural milieu to reflect on their lives in the light of their faith and to develop not only in knowledge and skills but also in wisdom which is the fruit of reflection on life and its lessons." I was one of them.

I didn't really care much about Jesuit values, attending weekly catechism or knowing anything about Catholicism till about 9th grade. I was raised Hindu till a certain age, then asked to choose what I wanted to believe. My beliefs collapsed shortly after, and I became an agnostic, and continued to be one for a very long time. During my phase of agnosticism, I had made a lot of really close friends, many of them Catholics. We kept religion out of our day to day conversations, our day to day lives. Whenever they needed to go for Mass, or confessions or other religious commitments, they would politely excuse themselves and slip away. I would stand in the hallway, the one close to the playground, and gaze at my reflection on the green polished tiles and look up to see them walk towards the stained glass corridors, smiling and laughing, chirping and beaming, and dissolve into the distance. They all looked very happy, like genuinely happy, apparently sincere, and soon embraced a culture that helped them feel worthy and re-congeal as a united entity. I, on the other hand, felt really left out; unwelcome to the brotherhood of Catholic boys, which had come to be such a defining part of their lives. I knew very well that I wasn't one of them, blaming it on my unfortunate fate, but shortly after, I knew that I wanted to be, really badly.

I could've bonded more with my non-Catholic friends, or attempted to anyway, and do random activities perhaps, like talk about agnosticism or cute college boys, discuss soccer, cricket or neighborhood chess clubs, but I didn't and I don't know why. I guess the reason was that I felt really root-less as a non-Catholic in a Catholic school, a lot of the time. I felt like a misfit, constantly, and started to become dissatisfied with my surroundings. I felt unusually cornered in an otherwise welcoming environment that scrunched me into a darkening tunnel space. This fear, or stance, or whatever else you want to call it, was probably something I constructed entirely in my own head, cared about too much and dramatized without any concrete bases. But the desire that I had to become part of the "Catholic boys club" was overbearing and strong, compressed like a metal spring ready to stretch, roll out its arms and pounce and leap in a quizzical release, crashing to an end in the midst of a calm whorl of silence.

On the morning of Ash Wednesday, back when I was 15, I walked up to Malcolm George after Biology class and said, "Hey man, what's going on after school today? Aaron, Josephine, Kartik and I are going to The Dandelions to hang out. Do you think you, Crystal and Sebastian can make it?" Apology clouded the rim of his eyes. His pupils narrowed and became shamefully dark. He shook my hand, patted my back and said, "I'm sorry man, we have to attend evening Mass today at St Paul's and then have a registry meeting for Easter services. You guys should go ahead and have fun." My jaws made a violent twitch, and hatred pierced me unflaggingly. I was pissed, I was angry and I took it really personally. Why were my plans, my invitations, pushed around, always, behind stupid and meaningless religious commitments? When I think about that time now, I realize how silly and immature and irrational I used to be, but when you're a heady 15 year old agnostic, who has completely unfounded personal theories about agnosticism and religion, there's very little that you can justify without having your hormones do the talking. You don't understand why they choose Jesus over your dinner invite, and even if you did, you choose not to understand it. But that incident came to serve as my ultimate tipping point, and I knew exactly what the solution was going to be. I was going to be Catholic.

I showed up to mass next day in school, much to everyone's surprise, wearing a crisp white poplin shirt, tailored white pants, a dark blue and white striped tie, and my Buddy Holly-style brown plastic frames. I gelled my hair to a side part, sprayed cologne and wore deodorant and carried with me a mini-Bible that I found in the library 2 hours prior. I sat in the last row of the entire chapel and heard murmurs of "What's he doing here?" spread across the pews; first like ripples of water waves, then like a Mexican wave and finally fleeting like wildfire. I had done some homework the night before: looked up 'How to be a Catholic' on catholic.org, drank wine from a plastic goblet, read about the Eucharist and memorized the Apostle's creed. When the choir started singing and the priest walked down the aisle, I will admit, however, that I felt very nervous. What if I got caught? What if they punished me? And then I thought, the priest has never met me, he doesn't know who I am, I could very well be the new kid in school, or even a new Catholic;  no one would want to see a baptism certificate in the middle of Mass. I must have looked really confused or nervous, however, because someone to my right nudged me a few times and asked me if I was doing okay. I said I was, and that I was just taking it all in.

The hymns were easy to follow. I didn't know the words by heart but I had the book open in front of me. One of the things you probably don't know or care about is that Christmas carols and hymns, in general, have a very simple, predictable melodic structure. They all follow the very basic principles of music theory, without altering any of cadences, and the verses just keep repeating the same tune over and over. I couldn't sing them well, I shall admit, but I could easily hum them and predict how the songs would end. An astonishing number of people around me had them memorized, and had a very forgiving and sincere look on their faces when they sang. Their eyes were squeezed to a rolling crease, lips gently parted, head slightly tilted, and breaths like riots spiraled the sanctuary. When it was time for the Eucharist, I did not hesitate one bit to get up and stand in line. I looked around, saw what others were doing, and when my turn came, I said Amen, the priest slid a wafer on to my tongue, we both bowed and then I left to go back to my spot. For the first time, in a while, I felt good and happy, sprinkled with this sense of inexplicable accomplishment. A sense of belonging had overtaken me that morning, and I left the chapel, content and satisfied, with a wide smile on my face. 

I told Malcolm, in the following few weeks, that I was gradually starting to see why he was so forthright about his religious commitments. Sometimes he would say, "You want to attend Mass tonight with Carrie and Christina and then hang out for a bit at Flurys?" I would smile and say yes. And this went on for a while -for almost 2 years. I was the new Catholic in the parish, who regularly confessed, learned all the hymns and dedicatedly prayed. I prayed every single day, can you imagine Lucille? Sometimes even multiple times a day. For courage, power and strength like Loretta Bradner had asked me to do. Daddy would drop me off at the church on Sunday mornings with the notion that I was playing the piano for the services. Of course I had lied to him. He was thrilled that I was getting more musical exposure and I was overjoyed with my new clout, my Catholic brothers and sisters, and the novelty of it all. I was not a minority anymore -can you picture this, Lucille? I had a straight face, was apparently devout and restlessly religious. 

Things finally went downhill after 2 things happened. Malcolm left St Ignatius because his family was relocating to a different continent, a different country, a different city. They ended up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. New opportunities, both fiscal and social, lured the George's to the Southern Belt. We lost touch after a few weeks of his leaving; I'm sure he found new friends, some real Catholics and a vast new space to adventure and explore. Tracy Swanson, from the Regent's Society, mentioned last Thursday that he's an administrative assistant, now, in the department of Geophysics at Remington, and has been for the past 3 years. His leaving, however, had really pinched my intentions. Why am I doing this? I often asked myself. Was it because I was in love with someone who would never know or never care? Because I wanted to do things to be around all the time, and enjoy the company? That was probably a large part of it, but then there was another thing. My prayers had turned extremely material-driven. It was like I was testing God every day -if you exist somewhere out there and are listening to my prayers, then you will make me get an A in the quiz tomorrow. Or it would be about winning a prize, getting money or a new sweater as a gift. The longer this didn't happen the angrier I became, and the angrier I became the more I prayed for immediate gratification of things. Where my logic ran away, or my rational edge, I do not know. But I felt annoyed, all the time Lucille; I felt completely betrayed and defeated by a God that I tried to believe in. So when Ash Wednesday came around, in 11th grade, and Anthony Mendonca asked me if I wanted to attend service, I peered into his face, completely crestfallen, and said, "I'm done." 

You know, Lucille, I realize that the entire phase was an outcome of infatuation, of wanting attention and being completely irrational. And I realize, very well, that religion is not about rewards, prayers are not about gifts, and confessions are not about being the trendy thing to do. I mishandled religion to gain personal favors, and I do not know what the retribution is. Isn't it interesting that I believe in retribution without being religious or spiritual? But what I do know is that because of the 2 years, I cannot look at religion, think about it or believe in it, the way others can. There's a stain, a serpentine trail of squalor and filth that rains in my brain, every time I think about it. And I cannot get over it, just as yet. Maybe someday, in the distant future, the metal cast of atrocious lies, will wince away from my inner self, and then I will come out a better person. 

This has become a lot longer than I had intended to be and I'm sorry about that. Stay in touch, my little pumpkin and tell Edna Weinglass I said hello. 

Yours,
T. 

fetishizing

I had been thinking about writing to you for a long time, Rosemary, and am finally getting down to it. it's been really hectic here, you know; trying to plan for Cecile's college visits, setting up my new business, buying a car and looking into osteopathic schools for a potential career in primary care. I've been learning more and more about osteopathy, and the psycho-somatic aspect of it is really latching on to my interest. It's amazing how my interests have changed over the years; there was music first, then women's studies, then radio voiceovers, then pediatrics, media and sex-work. i've been passionate, however, about giving care. about providing care. the concept, how my tongue feels when i say providing care, the psychology and the drive, throughout, has really been strong, even though it has surfaced back and forth, like frozen balloons, in a steady stream of my biography. my focus has shifted from kids, specifically, to under-served minorities; the piece of my identity that i forget sometimes and i am okay with that. i'm sure you'll get updates from me in the future, but i did want to let you know that I'm doing more policy work in the fall.

I was sitting in my apartment last week on 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue, reading My Dangerous Desires by a Leftist ex-hooker Amber Hollibaugh, when someone named Robert chatted me up online.

"Hey, how's it going Tom?"

"Going well, how're you man?"I responded.

"Fine fine. Just chilling in my hotel room on 54th/Lex. What're you upto?"

I didn't reply till about 5 minutes later. I was in the middle of reading about Hollibaugh's views on the butch/femme dichotomy and forgot to check my phone.

"Reading a book about queer women. Ha." I replied.

There was a 2 minute pause. I read ahead, sipping piping hot coffee from a tangerine-striped mug; occasionally staring at the print of Roy Lichtenstein's Kiss V hanging on the wall across from me. 

"Cool. Are you looking?" read the next message.

"Not to hook up, no. Just looking for friends. Sorry. How are things in the hotel stud?" I asked.

"I'm horny man. I wanna be used as a human toilet. Like right now. Wanna come over?"

I was a little baffled. What exactly is a "human toilet"? What does this guy want me to do? I was confused and curious at the same time, perhaps slightly taken aback.

"Well, Rob, I mean...what exactly do you want me to do?" I asked. 

"You should just use me like you use a toilet. Ya know, like piss on me, or make me drink your piss. Also, don't shower, please. I want to lick your ass. Make me lick your ass, like you would use toilet paper. Do whatever man...spit on me, abuse me, whatever gets you off." 

I didn't know what to say. I just said, "Okay."

He wrote back thirty seconds later. "I can leave the door open. You can come, tie me up, slap my face and go from there. I wanna be your pig, man. Bring friends along if you know anyone in the 'hood. You up for it?"

No, I wasn't up for it. But I wanted to know more about what he had in mind. I wanted to know who this person was, his background, etc. 

"Maybe in two hours. I'm a little busy right now. Where are you visiting from?" I asked.

"From Silver Lake, LA. You a local here?"

"Yea." 

"Oh cool cool. By the way man, this has got to be discreet. I'm a professional in private equity in a big-name company and know people all around. Gotta keep it between us, you okay with that man?"

"Of course. No worries." I replied. 

There was another minute long silence. I didn't know how to react. I was entertained and confused and surprised and piqued at the same time. it made me grin. just another example of Aristotelian metaphysics, of man as a rational animal? of man the logical, the moral, the professional human being? or maybe this is man the animal? the subconscious, the unconscious desires of the dirty and filthy, the wild and the uninhibited, sprouting through the soil of propriety and reasonableness? what happened to the conventional morality, the compact set of rules that govern what men and women are allowed to desire, allowed to express? I thought of man as a coin; a two-faced entity, one surface on top, and another on the bottom. Sometimes when you flip it, or spin it on its diametric axis, you see both sides in spurts, in momentary glimpses, till you settle on seeing one side. and then, an external stimulus, will switch it back, or make it twirl, or dance in air and re-settle. new mood, alternate side, but still the same, within.

"So when are you coming man? I have a 13 inch dildo in my suitcase. You can beat up my hole with it." he wrote.

I didn't respond. I wasn't going to any more. 

Five minutes later. "I'm getting a group together with 3 other guys. They're all gonna use me, spit and piss on me, and use me like a total bitch. You wanna join dude?" 

No response.

"Well I guess not. Delete my face pic please. Don't want anyone to know. Also if you want to use me, let me know. I'm free tomorrow AM as well."

I deleted Robert's face picture. I wasn't interested in meeting up anyway, and I wanted to respect his desire to be anonymous. But my point is this, Rosemary Stevens. There are so many Roberts out there, who cannot express their desires, their fantasies of sex, their urges and wants and innermost wishes because they're afraid of being judged. they're afraid of being improper, being caught in a media hyperbole which could cause professional damage, bore a hole through public identity, and cost a toll on social rubrics. desires out of conventional mores cannot be discussed or described unless you find refuge in a sexualized sub-category, unless you're part of this other "culture" that all the new academics come out to study, and theorize about and criticize and rip apart. i thought, again, of all the men who told me they feel like "human ash trays", or the ones who get turned on by licking boot polish, or the 40 year olds who like to drink breast milk for fun, or snort cocaine and draw rings on their nipples. i thought of all the men who told me about how they get turned on thinking about sprinkling pepper in someone's asshole, or making someone gag on a beer can or getting their penises stretched with retractors. things that can only be talked about in private circles, desires that are never taken seriously, cravings that are looked at through the lens of absurdity. this is the sad existence of fetishizing, the side of humans that cannot be explained through nature or nurture or a combination of both, the origins of desire, the theories of attractions. that's just absurd, is always the reaction, as we sit on this buoy of normalcy, hiding behind shades, the spectrum of monstrosity. running away from the deepest voice of the pathway to pro-creation. 

I'll write another letter to you sometime next month. till then, be good. and know that I'm thinking about you.

T.

february fourteenth

a photo-series of February fourteenth. imagine, behind the lights, two souls dancing, shaking heads, gripping hands, wishing well, speaking about loving, and whistling in the wind...

and the lights went out...

on a shower

i happen to have a weirdly vivid mental image of what a man ought to look like when he showers thoroughly. i try to live up to it, as much as i can. sometimes i am successful, which makes me proud and happy and cheerfully overjoyed, but at other times i am not and it can be dissatisfying and seriously unsettling beyond words can explain. today, however, i was determined to have a picture-perfect thorough shower. so after i finished reading The UnAmericans, an NPR-recommended title that E gave me for Valentine's Day, i walked over to the bathroom sink, took off my clothes, flossed my teeth, examined an itchy red spot just chilling near my left nipple, pinched around my lower belly to detect any unfamiliar ounce of fat that may have made its way to my abdominal stucco during the weekend's binge-eating spree, manicured my scruff, made a U-turn to the bath tub and pulled the plastic shower handle to let the water flow. it took me seventy two seconds to adjust the temperature, while standing by the bath tub, leaning down, and wetting my finger tips periodically. the pivoting back and forth, between sizzling hot and bone-chilling cold takes away, typically, a good deal of my patience. especially with unfamiliar showers, figuring out the mechanics of getting the perfect temperature is nothing short of a mental marathon, a brain sweat that manifests itself through after-shower erraticism, temporary bipolarity and awfully bad mood swings.

with the right temperature in check, i hung the bath towel on the hook above the edge of the tub, and inched into the shower: right toe first, then right heel, then left foot, then calves, torso and finally, head. i flinched, immediately, when the spray of water beads touched my torso, but after a minute of getting used to, stood directly under the shower head. i got wet, in a matter of minutes, and it felt exceptionally good. the sight and sounds of falling water are quite remarkable, if you ask me, and you should take a moment to observe if you haven't done so already. sometimes, they look like concrete mercury dollops or pellets of Rogaska crystals clinking in the steam, or like copper crowns swirling in the heat, making a constant shh sound, and whistling down the strings of gravitational water veins. and at other times, they look like little pearl drops forming and disappearing, clanging and thrumming along the way of the riser rail, before crashing at the base with exhaustive thuds. then they pool around the base of the feet, chirp a little, like grasshoppers in a pageant, lilt and sway in a strong physical tension and wiggle down the bare-open rubber gasket of the shower drain.

after about three minutes of standing under the pouring shower head, i took a dime-size dab of shampoo in my palms, added a splash of water, lathered it slightly and applied it at the crown of my hair followed by my hairline. a strong aroma of caramel and honey curled up in waves, and sweetened every corner of the room. i scrubbed my hair and scalp, gently at first and then really vigorously, to make bubbles. small to medium-sized macro-spheres to micro-spheroids, transparent and prismatic, round and plump-looking bubbles, revolving in nano-orbits, and giggling at each other like little children in a yellow bus, with tummy tickles and cartoons. the ecology of bubbles, the frequency, the magnitude, etc. all add to my vision of a thorough shower. i don't know why, and i don't know how, but it's an integral part of my showering scheme. the same happens with body soap, or body butter, as i use it to rub and scrape my skin vigorously, lathering up to the extent of the frothiness of histrionic mythological floods, and feel a new sensation of cleanliness nibbling at my skin tips and tickling at my sweat glands. There is this re-dawning of freshness, that is hard to explain. this feeling that someone has used a squeegee in whopping arc-radii, and cleansed every milli-pore of skin to twinkling specklessness. i feel calm, re-energized and light.

i had a lot of thoughts when i was in the shower today. various topics, various concerns, impressions, cravings and ideas. i thought about the fact that i haven't spoken to my parents in over six months since falling out over being distracted, wasting my life, and Eli Reisman. i thought about what my life would be like if i went into mainstream design writing, ten years from now or even twenty. and then there was Mary McCarthy's Libby MacAusland and the disheartened likes of Evelyn McHale sipping champagne at the Carnegie Institute, flummoxed by the appearance of Giacomo Puccini. somewhere in the middle of it all, there were thoughts about Bikram yoga, about red lentils, Naples and rainbows. and finally, that recurring thought about belonging, about fitting right in, about the profile of a minority. the fear of otherness and living as a category dishearten me sometimes. but i suck it all in, when the beans spill, and think about the positive side. the relentless pursuit of assimilation, to be just another one of those, to be a part of the mainstream, has its own status of non-scrutiny, its own stamp of consolation. to be a part of the ocean, to refine a niche, to blend into a majority growth wing, has its own array of rewards. Sarah Hellerstein asked me the other day, while i was waiting for the bus in front of the Juilliard School, why do people forget their roots? the way they evolved? i didn't bat an eyelid and blurted out because sometimes those roots evoke images of horror, sadness and disappointment. sometimes, and only sometimes, temporarily forgetting those roots gives a chance to begin, to re-form, to re-discover from scratch. the tailoring and laundering of identity politics, of stitching together and rehashing a dominant persona, sound easier in theory than done. and i have struggled with it a lot, and given it less and less thought over the years. sometimes all it takes for the complaints to trickle back down is a run-of-the-mill comment. don't get me wrong, i am not wallowing in depression. neither am i sitting here, ripping hairs with a glum face. it was merely a thought, and it has passed.

sometimes i want to scream, sprinkling colors of sounds all around me. sometimes i want to cry, with patterns and cuboids, stenciled on my face. sometimes i want to breathe in the melody of Bach, the rollicking of Brahms and the rockiness of Liszt. i want to learn how to Salsa, sing Rusalka, own a tuxedo and make a basket. i want to run to the mountains, eat vanilla beans, roast coffee and read. how the mind wanders, speaks, dances and spins, in the simple space of a shower cubicle is absolutely fascinating to me. where poets have composed, and lyricists have imagined, and scientists have dreamed of ambitious discoveries. in splashes of water, percussing on the body, in stains of bubbles, melting away, in the innocence of steam hissing at the ears, the washing away, the deep-cleansing, the therapeutics of water works is a critter of wonder. and shall remain unexplained. 

Diana's valentine letter

Diana,

it's been almost a year since we last saw each other at the Cindy Sherman exhibit up on the 6th floor in the MoMA. You were too busy prepping for New York Fashion Week, i remember, with your lacquered nails and bouffant hair, or was it a crown braid? i complimented you on your breast augmentation surgery, your black Tafetta dress from Coco Chanel, and your McQueen ankle-wraps; ah, how beautiful you looked! i wasn't sure, however, if i should call you Diana or Leonard or something else. if you have a preference, please let me know. i did not mean to offend. 

i heard from Henriette, who i bumped into the other day at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle first and then again at the Minskoff Theater on 45th Street by Broadway, that Susan isn't doing very well. i can imagine how difficult it must be for you -this change, this new identity, this new life, the stares you must get and the slew of explanations you are expected to provide. but Diana, if i can help in any way, please please don't hesitate to contact me. i'm here for you and your well-being is important to me. forget the nasty things they wrote about you on The Sophian; i've always disliked that group from Smith anyway. you deserve much better, and i know you will get out of this slump. 

well, the reason i'm writing this letter to you today is that i wanted to let you know that i have been seeing someone for the past nine months. we met, shortly after Stacy and i broke up in San Francisco, at a library. it was kind of a weird encounter really; awkward and strange at first, but it glided into place within minutes! finding someone to love all over again, to rebuild a faith, to rebuild confidence and assurances is always really really hard. every time you're tossed away because there's someone else who's better than you, you tell yourself this is it. i want to lead the single life right now, drama-free, care-free. and things will eventually fall in place, if they're meant to be. and then the reality of your solitude hits you, the sporadic nature of your new found conviction bears its fangs, and it slowly depresses you, as it slithers through your veins, diffuses through your mind, perfuses and effuses through your moods and hypnotizes your satiety into a vacillating feeling of comfort and emptiness. you feel dizzyingly numb, you feel uncharacteristically hopeless; to a point, where you start questioning the worthiness of your self, the value of your contribution to this gimmick of existence. am i deserving of happiness? you ask yourself. and knowing the rhetorical nature of your depressive quandary, you feel displaced, like a swollen pendulum bob, swinging on the apices of emotional extremes, dissatisfied at once, ecstatic at once, spiraling in a rut of neurotic outbursts in between. 

loneliness had become my dependable aphrodisiac. i had a love-hate relationship with it; mostly because it gave me the independence i always wanted, but pinched me to tears from time to time. when you are lonely, you have a lot of time on your hands and more often than not, find yourself mulling over personal histories, memories, day dreams and promises. it feels as if you're going through a catalog, a sheaf of paper, a bundle of circumstances, and re-living bygone moments. and you tell yourself that you were tired, utterly exhausted, of being the appendage, the second option, the could-have-been. and when that point comes at the pinnacle of your recollections, you recoil into a state of quiescence, where you exist without living. you survive without feeling. you continue without meaning. and then you learn to love this new existence, to live in the new reality, leading the cues to a complete makeover.

your mind begins to bark, slowly, at sounds of silence. it becomes a juxtaposition of the empty slots of a crossword puzzle; like the blank checkers of a scrabble board, filled and re-filled with alphabets of consolation. time and time again, you develop this strong companionship with your inner loneliness, a voice only you can hear, a voice that only makes sense to you. after you slide downhill, so easily, so smoothly on the course of negativity, it now becomes a new defense against accusation of carelessness, a new weapon, a new instrument of body politics. but you see the positive side of loneliness; the independence that comes with the lack of accountability and the focus on the self. for a while, you learn to live that non-committed life, the altruistic one, but then a craving engulfs you so suddenly, that you don't know what to do. this rousing voice unfurls within you, like an awakening tendril of a garden pea, and says, i want to be held, i want to be loved and i want to be wanted.

i was ready, both mentally and physically, before i met E in the library. you know, it felt a little awkward at first, a little forced and queasy; but we broke the shell within a minute. we shook hands, exchanged greetings, and smiled, for a while. who knew you could read so much from a simple smile? or maybe i had just forgotten what smiles meant anymore. but we ended up at a restaurant on 105 Street and Broadway, pouring liquor, clicking nails, brushing our legs under the table in gentle bumps and smooth glides. it was easy, despite the nervousness, to speak out again, to put myself out there again, to someone who would listen. and over the course of nine months, Diana, we have grown so much together, literally. with someone who has an open heart, an edge of crisp, a magnetism so smooth, you feel nourished when you enter to live a life together. i feel that with E, despite my occasional discomfiture. never in my life have i felt so loved, so cleansed, so beautifully held, and so richly infused with emotions not involving harrowing negativities, as i have in these months. the genuineness of a bound chemistry, seethed in trust, simmered in a spectrum of romantic notes, oozes in me a distinctive calm. like a powerful propeller, un-mechanizing the thrust of routine existence; it helps with a social evolution, even a personal revolution of turning over, of un-becoming and re-becoming a better person. 

my pride does remain in the identity of a sex radical, and this point has caused a lot of altercation between the two of us. i am a proponent of sexual exploration, even in the midst of a conventional tie, learning and experiencing ways and cravings of the human body, the human mind. there is love, and there is lust. the two intersect in the caricature of a Venn diagram, but their identities do not meld. and neither does mine -in my role as a practical anarchist, in using my body to test the limits of sexuality. i have no shame, and i do not blush at the ideology of body-selling. i have no judgment reserved for the hoochies and hustlers. through breaking the limits of operational elastics, the normative dicta of institutional morality, i take pride in myself, in, what i consider, extreme liberalism. the cross roads of love and lust is not clear-cut, and the quest to self is highly unwarranted. we need a middle ground, Diana, and we will work towards it. with E, talking is easy; and conversation flows. everything feels so natural, and so delicately together, that i sit and tell myself -i'm glad the hollowness ended. 

i hope that sometime in the future you will get to meet E, the person who brings so much contentment in my daily life. that gift of thought, that gift of desire, that gift of being wanted -oh how enriching it is, i cannot explain in words. to think about, in moments of silence, that someone else is thinking about you, is the greatest gift i could ever have.

i hope you have a wonderful valentine's day, Diana. i'll stop by Cheryl's tomorrow night to drop off a few envelopes and tell her you said hello.

all the best, T. 

dear janet

dear janet,

how are you, little plum? i left off, in my last letter to you, at the point when i went to the holiday market in Union Square and drifted off to Berry Park later, on the collar of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, only to be depressed at the sight of shrewd circus-goers vandalizing a car, a porch and a by-lane. i got on the L, hurriedly, came to Manhattan shortly after, and took the 6 back up to the Upper East Side. safe in the clasp of my neighborhood, i went to bed feeling absolutely naked; deprived, somehow, of the energy to revolt. i am a wuss, perhaps, but i felt terrible inside of me.

i am curious what you are doing right now, as i sit on my bed, by a column of lights, listening to my table fan mumbling by the door. maybe you are singing, or writing some poetry, or dancing on ice or having an orgasm. or thinking about cock, about being a hoochie, about Darla's appendicitis or Warby Parker. maybe you are showering, or wringing your thongs, or sewing your socks, or pinching your nipples, or yawning or burping or drinking coffee. i can only keep guessing, but i really want to know. i have to find a way, perhaps, to peek into your daily life and keep myself restrained, like a prisoner of reality, in a carton of milk. but i need to be sensitive, considerate and aptly articulate as your ex-affiliate of sorts, drawn by the strings of etiquette, conscience and logic. if i over-step, or if i go too far, i hope that you will bring that to my immediate attention.

come to think of it, i have been here for almost 2 years now. almost 2 years. i guess it is not considered, by most people, a very long stretch of time, but it feels almost like a century has gone by. maybe because my city has a curiously high rate of turnover, with flopping businesses and flailing commerce, moments simply whiz by. memories parachute from the present to the past in a matter of days, or even hours, leaving me wondering about the subtleties of transactions, advertising and marketing. it is as if the city molts, every trimester, like a cicada in despair, or a mischievous snake, and dons a brand new look. reasonably fresh, temptingly smooth, and passively electric; soulful and blue, tingling and cool, prickly and prim, like that muslin feel of fresh-out-of-water. ready to begin, to re-ignite and to re-inflame a second throe of adventure. 

it is winter time, little plum, and so far it has been quite severe. Hercules and Janus, the polar storms of January, have swept away a lot of lives, of trees and humans alike. my heart folds in pieces, like pleats of a skirt, when i hear the beggars roar in pain, and chatter their teeth, violently and uncontrollably, to generate body warmth and vigor. one 47 year old, the other day, was standing at the corner of 96th Street and Broadway, and seizing almost, was pulsating and yowling with every thrust of wind. it pinned on to him, like a wave of needles, like a hurricane of claws, like a symphony of blades, burrowing through his eyes, his ears, feet and thighs. i ran up to him, gave him my knit hat, and asked, are you okay? in the dimness of the streetlight, i saw his eyes roll, several times, after which he flung it away. why would you want to help a man, like me, live on like this? i did not know what he meant by that. i was trying to be nice, to be compassionate, but i felt completely and utterly dismissed. are you sure, you don't need it? i asked, hoping he'd reconsider. he shook his head, lifelessly and aimlessly, and squeezed the words out of his lips, repeating it twice. this city has defeated me, completely.

it snowed that night after i got back home, untied my shoes and doffed my coat. a warm aroma of spice lingered in the air, where pie had been baked an hour before. i poured myself a glass of wine, clipped my nails and sat by the window with a book in hand. it was sizzling inside, intensely overheated, to a point where i could almost hear layers of my skin crackle and crunch in the immensity of heat. i re-set the thermostat to 70 degrees, turned on a podcast on relaxation meditation and passed out in a matter of 7 minutes. before i slept, alone in bed, i thought about the homeless man again. where is this man? what is he possibly doing right now? did the police find him a shelter? give him some food to eat? may be they did, may be they didn't. it is possible that i will never know. he has escaped, perhaps, the embarrassment of defeat. a well-deserving man, greater than a disposable.

the next morning, around 7, i jolted out of bed and walked to the park to catch a glimpse of a still, January dawn. and what can i say, little plum? it was, indeed, the wonderland of my childhood fantasies. brilliantly white, dazzling and shimmering in the soft rays of the morning sun. my erotic city, my New York, lay curtained and shrouded in a veil of snow. so energized, so rejuvenated, i could cling on to the flecks of water, kiss the lips of dreaming cones, and play with birds by the reservoir with the passion of the maestros, the old geniuses of art, the linearity of babies, forever. the frozen lake, so delicately slick, lay bubbling and cradling in the temperate winds. a soft thrumming of marathon runners rose and fell, like doppler beads, in an abrupt emptiness. the trees in the colonnade, terse and glib, held hands, and kissed, and swayed to the winding melodies of La Boheme, wriggling and fiddling through vibraphones from the one solitary physicians home, snarling in wonderment at The Eldorado in the Upper West Side. i felt so enriched, i felt so full, i felt so emotional that i needed to pace myself, to make sure i was breathing. i was living, as if, in the interior of a snow globe, at once in vacuum as in winds, watching a race of twinkling gems, falling and fighting, ripping the brains of anti-gravity and dancing with the centers of a billion galaxies.

all of this made me miss you so much. i really wanted to, needed to, share my joy with someone at that moment. at that very moment. anyone, would do. anyone. but no one was around. and that made me sad. it made me think of the time when you visited me. in my second-floor apartment at the heart of the West Village. and how we trundled down Jane Street, by the Lilac Chocolatiers, by the wine shop on 43, swiveling with chirps and fluffy giggles of new-age couples holding hands. remember that time on Hudson Street? when you spotted Aaron Liebowitz, your high school crush, kissing a tranny in front of Pet Portraits? and how you laughed for ten minutes, your face turning red the same shade as in stop signs, puffing like strawberries, swelling, uncontrollably, like dough on a humid day? and then we walked to Minerva, saw Earp Dunnington and Cayla Epstein, drank three bottles of wine, ate olives and artichokes and talked about life? in the silence of mid-day my city slept like a baby, while we trekked through lanes and by-lanes of the historic neighborhood. we waved and smiled at Hawthorns and Ginkgoes, nestling to the sides of expansive homes, and ran home, chasing bikes and squirrels at the pinch of afternoon. with a cherry wine sky, at the cusp of dusk, we made love by the pane of the Western glass, pushed against the softness of my aluminum windows. rattling and tittering, squealing and moaning, we came at the end, together, our hearts united, our minds spinning with the dizziness of violent orgasm. we got dinner after, at Extra Virgin, on the east side of West 4th Street, and relaxed in the evening, as night came spinning down. bringing along a tea-gown of fresh, awakening stars, tinkling and glittering against the spire of the Empire State. 

i am in love, janet. in love with a city that dreams with me, holds my eyes and breathes with me. cries with me and sings for me at times of loss, and sadness. while he is away, studying to be a doctor, and my heart seethes with clumps of ringing memories, my city brings me joy, leads me forward and gives me a chance to reinvent myself.

i hope you are well, janet. send Harry my wishes. i love you both. 

T

my encounter with w lieberman

my workplace, a picturesque hospital from the era of Roland Flint and Irene Glascock, has a curious basement cafeteria. it is moderately populated during breakfast, intensely busy during lunch, surprisingly jittery during dinner and frighteningly vacant over the weekend. the workers are mostly Hispanic; strong, olive and supple. there are a quarter Haitians, a speck of White and a granule of African-American men and women, all lobbying for low blood pressure diets. obesity is not uncommon, unfortunately, among the staff, especially in the section of French Fries and Cheese. And the staple is fried plantain, Cheesecake yogurt, spinach pizza and soda.

the families of patients who visit this earthy, low-hum cafeteria always have an array of peculiar expressions. tied to sorrow and worry, a lot of the times, they forget to smile, forget to breathe and forget to eat -as dust and globular microbes settle on the crusts of soup, pie and meat loaves. the Jews sit in the North corner, the Arabs in the left and every one else is in between -flat, unsound and peculiarly dazed. perhaps they worry about a loved one dying, a non-fatal accident, a cousin's childbirth or colon cancer. or maybe they think about stealing food, homelessness or the irony of prayers. i smile at a few of them as i carry my tray across the unsettled, peach-colored lobby area, ringing with the sounds of climatic catastrophes, CNN fables or who wants to be a millionaire? but they never smile back, or open their lips or make any sign of eye contact.

i walk out through the set of double doors in the south side of the cafeteria, balancing my lunch box on my right calloused palm and holding a bottle of Fiji water on my left by the white, corrugated cap and take a sharp right to the docking site. the walls of the hallway are a pale shade of yellow -somewhere between Aureolin and straw-colored if i had to take a guess -and covered with palm smears, coffee stains and wet outlines of muddy shoes. they look like butterfly wing prints, or pineapple skin or a congealment of miniature moons that no one has bothered to clean in seven years. the hallway itself is about 500 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide and at the edge of 400 feet there is a sign jutting out that says medical physics.

on the left hand side, before the docking entrance, are two rectangular, spacious rooms. the doors to these rooms are sometimes latched, sometimes pad-locked and sometimes left open for transport. i noticed a pair of sky blue stretchers by one of the doors last Tuesday but did not bother to wait around and investigate what was going on. i was already running late for a Strategic Planning meeting for the College and being even a minute later would result in Rosemary Silverstein, our associate consultant, going up in arms about punctuality, unprofessionalism and faulty HR hiring policies. Diana Rosenthal and Heather McRae, the Dean's assistants, would riffle through a long line of courtesies, incredulity of the GOPs tax policies and giggle, cheekily, until another ten minutes had passed. everyone would collect themselves from a maverick of emotional hangings and then proceed with the agenda for the meeting.

today, however, there is a small body bag lying on a stretcher in front of the first door, completely unattended to despite something being inside of it. i spot it from a distance and begin to slow down as i approach it from a hundred feet away. a mild musty smell darts through my nose,wafts through the entirety of my facial cage and tingles my brain with a violent swoosh. i tiptoe forward, and move closer to the body bag. my adrenaline alarm pulsates the outer coats of my circulatory system, making me hyperventilate and roughens my skin with goosebumps. five feet away, and i finally spot an ID card lying on the floor.

name: w lieberman

age: 3 years

cause: neuroblastoma

time of death: 12:34 pm 

my mind goes spinning across the table of a hundred questions, doubts, remorse and shock. is that a boy or is it a girl? what is the pattern of its current disintegration -the effects of rigor mortis, the banquet of flies, maggots and burrowing spirochetes? what is the father doing? is the mother alive? did it have a pastor or Rabbi at the time of shocks? did the nurse cry?

i fall into a daze of alien existentialism. as if shuttling on a plunger between a wide parallel macrocosm and a white, fenestrated micro-cosmos. as if living through the eyepiece of a wide-eyed telescope; burrowing and slithering at 100X magnification on the brim of a crystal jar. as if hauling, in exhaustion, in a game of tug of war between the past and present, distance and proximity, impact and dismissal, knocking on the bell jar of slipping time. i am transfixed within the mesh of a silk cocoon, writhing and playing with chaotic pendulums, snapping my wrists and drumming the beads of molten seeds. i am paralyzed in place, pinched with forks of brazen stones, cold and vacant in the slant of daylight. i am gripped with fear, gnarled with hate and spun with words of reckless grievances. what am i to say, to the empty souls of flesh cubicles? what am i to say to an orphaned jewelry box, motionless and staunch behind the moonwalk of zippers? what am i to do in the world agape, running away from a dead history - frivolous and lunatic in the situation of times? 

i give it a moment, and walk away. through the docking site, till the end and take the elevator to the third floor. back into my own reality, in the queerness of my office space. my mind separated from my body.

for Schwartzberg

do you remember, Cayla Schwartzberg, when we first met at your second floor duplex apartment on the 21st of September? you probably do not. but i do. vividly, serenely and rather embarrassingly. you were wearing a black and creme, crisply fluidic A Line dress, a sequined belt with mildew-colored plaits vanishing down your waistline, a starched ribbon turban stretched across an uneven semi-circle of your anterior head cavity, and retro stackable turquoise rings on your index and middle fingers. the laced bow-tie of your bra was giving your upper breast a supple firmness and pushing your nipples up to the crown of your trimmed collar-bone, giggling playfully through the air barrels of your poplin-tulle fabric. you greeted me with a smile, a cigarette breath and a bouquet of hyperbolic enthusiasm; a general rise in emotive atoms, sprinting through an autumn air, colliding and elasticizing, swaying and lulling to the low trebles of Ella's gramophone discography. i stepped on the threshold, scrubbed the sole of my chain-leather opal Zanotti's vigorously, against the erotic bristles of your Magritte doormat, and proceeded down your hallway.

it was tremendously white, as far as i can remember. you had painted the door moldings a burnt gold and tattooed on them the anatomy of fireflies. you had lampshades of raisin, spatulas of ivory and chandeliers of tallow wax, dandelions and aluminum. bottles of cognac and Spanish wine hung from the ceilings, upside down, with cracked necks, acrobatic lips and breathless apnea. posters of Lolita, Marx, missionaries and pornography lay squatting on your bedroom walls, peering over the mythology book of Aphrodite, sleeping across your window ledge. a condom wrapper by the sofa-set lay diddling in the air, laughing at the aroma of searing spices. it was disturbingly black, julienned across the tip and shriveled with creases of phenomenal age. the topology of the Americas remained squarely displayed across the beige plywood wall of your dining room, and photo-prints and postcards hung disproportionately near the curling curves of the ceiling. you lifted two wine glasses from the kitchen counter-top, the excessive thinness of the stems projecting an illusion of dramatized fragility, and poured copious bundles of Pinot Noir into each of them. the sounds of the trickle amplified along the curvatures of transparent wind columns, resonating and gurgling in the interiors of my ear. a platter of Brie, walnuts, figs and cloves, paralyzed and footless on the teak-wood of the table, joined our smiles in awkward company, in a shawl of contemporariness, frivolity and friendliness.

you introduced yourself as a distinguished photographer, a blossoming linguist, a careful interpreter and a Dali aficionado with an obsession with neck-ties from Attolini and Harry Rosen. you are twenty two, with mocha-colored hair and a smattering of Tuxedo Red lipstick. you giggle at consonants, laugh with your head tilted fifty degrees to the air, gawk at vowels and lisp like the hiss of a neonatal chameleon tumbling and burning in respiratory distress. your fingers are soft, your lashes are brittle, and the shape of your waist is frighteningly similar to the keepsake of an ancient Egyptian cremation urn. your mother was a revolutionary phenomenon of the 80s, erupting in activism, rioting like the Teamsters, and reshaping the grounds of working class literati. you know less than little, however, about Ira Schwartzberg, your dead father, who walked away from your mother's kiss when your were the size of a marble pod, boiling in the age of lonely gestation. you are an immigrant, a second-class citizen, a subject of comedy, modeled like a tumor; a supplement, lacerated, displaced for an extra. despite the politics of an uncompromising government, who disregard your status at the cost of talent, you have managed to stage an act of happiness without a trace of doubt. in your first letter of our correspondence you wrote, i have never lived in a small town, and i feel depressed. and i traveled from Back Bay to your rural residence to provide a formal introduction, relieve your awkwardness, and provide a means for careful assimilation. 

from the very first time we met and carelessly flirted, we became an odd sensation in the binoculars of our neighborhood. we aided in the gentrification of an orchard-town, driving past the city hall, down the intersections on Marcy Avenue, and opening at the northern edge a new pastry shop named Mayefsky and Maldonado's. we talked about sunshine, laughed like parrots, danced like peacocks and dreamed like clouds, aspiring for entrepreneurship, success and education. one Saturday night you said to me, can we fuck, please? i need it badly. i refused. the next Tuesday morning you requested again. i laughed it off, oh come on! i'm not feeling it. and this cycle of lies, these packets of hush-hush excuses kept piling up, one on top of the other, leaning over, gripping under, shaking violently in the humiliation of a bawdy discomfort. the following Saturday you walked into my room, peach colored and virgin, put down a pile of books on the mahogany breasts of my corner table and said, i'm not letting you go if you don't do it tonight. i'm telling...telling you, i will go mad. and sensing your tone of flamboyant desperation, sensing the frankness of your sexual request, sensing the ease with which the words erupted, you broke into silence. and then you cried. and broke into a fit of amazing hysteria, convulsing violently in the middle of piercing ululations. you held my hand, tightly, as the candle by the bed-stand vanished into air, and demanded an explanation for my useless behavior. for the leading on, for the merry rides, for the songs of love we spilled across, for the nights after nights of dizzying words, reading poetry, cooking, clinking Bordeaux stems in vortical shades. what was the meaning of assistance in the holocaust of a heart break? what was the purpose of bed-shares if it meant absolutely nothing? the time, the effort, the collusion and bending, the tripping and gripping, the showiness and sacrifice -for what?

but i never got a chance to tell you, two years running, that none of that was for you to blame. none of my dispassionate front-twirling, hand-swinging and theater act had anything do with a rejection of you. it was me. it is me, Cayla Schwartzberg. it is that i loved solitude, Aaron Keisel, on the foothold of denial, the strawberry tutus of the jewel ballerinas, Brody Saltzman from a night at St Regis, Garvey Einhorn from the polyester store, and above all, the diary of Warhol. you were the palette of breath, in our small town charade, buckling and bending the physiology of time. for this, and the love of man, i welcome you again into my temple of paint, the masquerade of hens and the philosophy of kings.