Assassin's Screed

I'm a gamer. Ever since my cousins introduced me to the magnificence of that heart-pounding game known as Pong in 1974, I've been hooked. We'd sit for hours watching that slow-moving white dot float methodically from one side to the other across that black screen. Too young for pinball, I grew up as part of the Arcade Generation---those noisy hangouts with coin operated masterpieces that transported millions of us into the world of killer space insects while playing Galaga, or bouncing on cubes escaping coiled snakes in Q*bert. And then came Ms. Pac-Man---the baddest bitch in the room. She was the original cash money ho', what with all the currency she took from me and all the angry faces when my crew and I would walk into that arcade in the mall and run my hands on the top of the machine to find that sweet-spot:  the reset button. (I often popped that lever and watched the other boys' faces melt as the game went dark only to power it back on with their high scores completely obliterated. Such fun).  But my favorite game, however, was Gyruss.  I discovered Gyruss in the back of the Busy Bee convenience store across the street from my alma mater, Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC.  My friend Terence and I would play that game for days on end.  It had a left-handed dial joystick and you had to battle your way through spaceships and space mines in order to reach the different planets in our solar system.  Starting with Neptune, you blasted invaders to the beat of a suped-up version of Bach's Toccata und Fuge in D Minor, a sure precursor to the techno mixes of 20 years later. Many players of Gyruss, then and now, suspect it is impossible to actually reach Earth. Yet it is possible, and occurs at level 25.  My high score of 979,250 remained unbeaten until a kid with a fifty-cent Tropical Fantasy fruit punch hit the reset button; it erased my high score forever.

The arrival of the PlayStation brought home gaming RPGs (role playing games) to the masses.  I played Final Fantasy VII until the timer stopped after 99 hours.  I think my ex still wakes up with cold sweats from the constant, jarring, and unchanging fight music plunging like an ice pick through his brain. I was so emotionally connected to that game that when Sephiroth killed my beloved Aerith I actually mourned her death. I still remember the shock I felt watching him impale her. Now that I'm a grandpa of video gaming I choose games for substance and complexity rather than loud volume.  I like to play RPGs that carry some meaning for me. I choose them like a sommelier looks for a fine wine. Infamous 1 & 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, Mass Effect 1-3 and Assassin's Creed.

So, allow me to draw an allegorical point between real life and video games.  Amidst killing the baddies and puzzle-solving in the game Assassin's Creed, you have the opportunity to climb to the top of large towers during different points in the game. Climbing these towers gives you a tactical advantage as you can see across massive swaths of digital landscape. It also gives you an opportunity to blindly jump into what the game calls a "Leap of Faith"; from improbable heights onto impossibly small haystacks. Recently, a close cousin (who is like a sister to me) came to me with great concern. She deeply hated her job and wanted to change her career. I told her sometimes in life you have to take a leap of faith. Sometimes you just have to walk up to your fear. Climb to the very peak of it. And jump. 

As human beings we are conditioned to stay in our comfort zone, even if that zone is filled with dissatisfaction and dysfunction.  From childhood we're programmed to soldier on with stiff upper lips and our heads held high even though unhappiness and petulance tend to abound in this oasis of such misery. It's the enemy we know. Why strike out in the feral darkness of the unknown when you can hang out in the light of shame, guilt and anger that you experience everyday. At least in the light, you know the hurt you're going to get. You'd say, "I can anticipate the anger at working a dead end job. I can anticipate the fussy lover, the bitter mother, the adolescent acting father, the stupid boss." All of these things culminate to assault us with wretched intentions. Since we've surrendered so long ago we often allow the foot soldiers of despair march over us. With their familiar boots and recognizable gazes we allow these feelings of fatalism to stomp our souls as if this doom is part of our nature. Why change? If you transition out of this zone, who's to say it won't be worse?  You probably sit there and enumerate everything that is wrong with your present life and how each step of the way could be worse than the last. Murphy's Law is your mantra. Repeated with deference like a prayer each day of your life. But what if your salvation is through a thicket filled with something that scares you? What if the fear you fear the most is the fear you need to move forward? What if you accept the fact that life will be hard. That there will be grief and pain. And that it isn't fair. That the truth is ugly and grim and--once faced head on--far less powerful and penetrating than we thought it would be. What if we climb that tower and just jump?  Down into the depths of it...Our unrelenting fear. 

So when my cousin came to me with her fears I told her that sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. A leap off that tower of pain and just hope that something, anything will be there to provide you a soft landing. Oftentimes facing that fear is the leap of faith. As soon as my cousin put in her notice within an hour another opportunity came her way:  a phone call offering her the start of the career she wanted with a salary twice as much as she was making.  Now, sometimes things don't come so quickly. But through it all you must remember that feeling of unrequited joy and fearlessness of your childhood gamer and jump. 

My cousin jumped. And she is doing something she loves.  That, in and of itself, is the most valuable high score.

Jason is Tresha's father and Ferren is Tresha's daughter

I stared at the child-like scrawling handwritten note on the upstairs credenza. I don't think she tried to hide it from me. After all it was just there beside the door to her room. A note detailing how far my mother's condition had travelled. A simple bit of information detailing intimate knowledge of her life that she could no longer hold in her brain. The Jason of the note is my brother. Her oldest son. Tresha is his daughter. And Ferren is his granddauther. Straightforward you would think. My mother only had two sons and two grands and four great grands. Surely eight names and relationships should not prove to be so ponderous that she would have to document them. But here it was in front of my eyes.

I tell people that my vision of Alzheimer's is like magic. Not the fun legerdemain of rabbits in top hats or sawing pretty assistants in half. No, this magic is menacing. It is trickery. It is illusion. Imagine yourself sitting in a chair. Watching television talking to your son. The sun is out and your dog is sitting by your feet. Then you blink your eyes and suddenly its night. And there's a person sitting in front of you asking you questions you are at odds to answer. Then another blink and the dog is back by your feet and your long dead mother is sitting in front of you and its 1967 all over again. Blink. You're back sitting in your recliner watching television and your son is telling you things he's said you've said but you have no idea what he's talking about.

Blink.

Dementia is like a reducing math problem. You start out as a child with a massive black board. It is empty. Pristine. You're given a piece of chalk. And told to write. So you set forth and start your math. You start out with the number One. That singular number that is your life. To that equation you add friends, husbands, children, education, careers, houses, bills, dramas, churches, artistic expressions, travels, illnesses, beauty and death. As you near the other end of the board you look over the totality of your life and you see this mesmerizing array of  calculus. Sprawling across the ether. Your life rich and dense. A massive equation that started way down there and through lush experiences has delivered you to this point in your elderly life. But then something goes wrong. A mechanism that's out of sync. A leaky pipe you can't find. Soon parts of those equations start disappearing. Not enough at first to mess up the math but just enough to make you look at it differently. A repeated question, a lost item, a missed bill payment. That's all the signals you or your loved ones get. Not that a blaring tornado siren would stop the onslaught of what is to come. And then the reduction starts in earnest. You stand-by helplessly as the numbers disappear as if its been written for a scene from a thriller. A montage of images from the hero's life slowly erasing from his mind. Then as the up-tempo music builds the random numbers on the blackboard start blinking out in rapid succession. Reducing and reducing counting down to the hero's doom. The evil villain off to the side handwringing and laughing maniacally.

Soon there are only a few scraps from which your loved one can pull their life together. So that's what she does. It doesn't matter if those memories are discordant with reality. Sometimes my mother thinks I'm her mother; which I guess is a complement to me. At least its somebody she feels safe around. Sometimes she thinks I'm my step-father and sometimes still she questions me as if we've never met. What many people don't know about Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases that cause dementia is that the sufferer's brain literally is eaten away. As much like science fiction as that may sound to witness it or worse to live through it is a daunting maze of sublime heartache. Haunting nostalgia and the bittersweet realization that the little bit your loved one was holding onto today may not be there tomorrow. You both are dangling from an ever shrinking ledge. Down below you see the swirling morass of obsession and delusion. The brain is like a battery and dementia is like corrossion. It simply decomposes the mind. Once the connections are gone they will never return. It renders even the most mundane chores insurmountable. To watch my mother, a well-educated former entrepreneur who ran several successful businesses over the course of her life, struggle through a monthly bank statement or a recipe or instructions presses me to find the beauty in caregiving. The constant barrage of the same questions fired rapidly always within minutes of each other and often during times when I am trying to do something else would try the most saintly of patience. This fierce woman becoming more childlike and fragile by the day. But unlike a child who learns that fire is bad once my mother forgets, that lesson will never return. Ever. She will never know that again. So the vigil becomes more dire as her behavior is framed by this memory reduction. I can't blink because if I do all the household trashcans may be laid-out in a straight line on the front walk. Blink and the phone is ringing and she's trying to answer the TV remote.

Blink.

But I have to say that so far it doesn't feel like a burden. Stressful but not a burden. Through pain and hardship I have been driven, bullwhipped I would even say into this inclement harbor. Docked to my mother at the end of her life. But somehow I think this is where I'm suppose to be. This seems right. This is the hour of the most important time of my life. To taste and touch every moment of this. To be here now in this place. More for her than me but it feels like I'm getting more out of the experience that she is. Savoring it no matter how painful. Because just around the corner there maybe a wonderful horizon. To float on those stories of her youth; like the time she snuck away from home at fourteen to go to a party and ended up talking to a boy at a local beer hall. Or the one where she married her first husband a second time (after a tumultuous divorce) when he swept into town and took her to Brooklyn where he promptly locked her in his apartment for three days while he went on a drinking binge. I can see her now escaping that apartment in her 1954 black and white Ford Skyliner driving all the way from New York to North Carolina non-stop. And how about the time when she was six and her mother became the first black person to have a play produced at the Carolina Theater in downtown Winston-Salem. In Wake Up Chillin' there was a scene in a cemetery. The children were to talk to their ancestors. Because of budget restraints none of the child actors which included my mother practiced in costume. Opening night the children were onstage ready for the emotional climax of the play when the adults came out covered in white sheets. Of course this sent her and all of her young cast mates screaming up the aisles in fright! They thought real ghosts were after them. These are the bright spots of the day when the steely grasp of the disease releases her. And I'm here to tell that story. We often ask God "Why me?" I know I have. But I think I've been given my answer. Why me? Who else but me. Because Gwen is my mother and I am her son.

The power of fright compels you

As a child, my overactive imagination led me to believe that every horror movie made in the seventies somehow resembled my parent's house.  Looking into the backyard out of our kitchen window at night (it always had to be after dark), I saw the gentle rustle of the red and gold leaves of autumn as sinister precursors to zombies or hockey-masked madmen lumbering from the woods all set to chase me.  The awkward upbeat synthesizer heard during the movie Halloween strummed my ears as the leaves blew.  Coming back from my cousin's house across the field seemed like the longest and scariest fifty yards ever.  My mother would turn on the side porch lights and dining room lamp for me. Like a lonely pilgrim, I would sojourn through the trees following that single porch light as if it were an all-seeing unblinking eye of a cyclops and the illuminated floor-to-ceiling windows of the dining room was like the maw of Satan ready to suck me down to Tarturus.  108 Ocean Avenue---The house portrayed in The Amityville Horror---had nothing on my house. For many years, well into mid-adolescence, I just knew I was going to be possessed by a demon. For, you see, the interior of that infamous Georgetown townhouse where two priests fought the devil over a little girl's soul looked identical to our upstairs. To get to my room you had to run up a curved flight of stairs, take a hard right and down a hallway. I envisioned my bed bobbing and thumping while I writhed in fear and pain; my mother rushing to my aide only to have the door slam in her face leaving a huge crack streaking down the middle.

Halloween has always been a special time for me, maybe because I was so frightened of it.  Through years of attending church I was taught to fiercely avoid the dark side (or maybe I just have a stunning propensity to believe in just about any evil). Now, unlike my mother who was terrified of slasher movies---her rationale was that a maniac could actually stab you or impale you whereas the supernatural was kind of silly---I was completely transfixed by the otherworldly.  Bumps in the night heard after my parents were sound asleep kept me awake even as late in life as....oh what the hell, I'll admit it---last week.  I think I was attracted to the mere theatricality of evil.  Satan knew how to put on a real show (at least in the movies and on TV).  Knives and axes were so banal; crucifixes and talismans were my thing.  I believed in augurs and omens. Voices in the dark, demon seeds, daughters of Satan and Burnt Offerings. Oh how I wanted telekinetic powers.

Yet, on the other hand, I should have been a preacher instead. When I was five-years-old I insisted that being a minster was my calling. I wasn't so much interested in the administrative pastoring of running a church, but more of the fire and brimstone church-as-performance-art.  I would pull up a folding chair and have my parents dress in their Sunday best and have them sit on the living room sofa and shout at the top of my lungs. I remember my mother wearing her emerald green maxi-dress and her white T-Bar heels sitting beside my father in his suit and tie-clip. I would wag my finger and threaten all the depths of hell on them if they did not repent.  I was very concerned with saving souls in those days.  Growing up Baptist, when you were baptized the minister would make you hold your nose and submerge your entire body. We had a metal tub that sat in our backyard that had over a few days of autumn rain had filled with water. Well, I decided one day to save the soul of our sinful cat. My mother watched in horror as she washed dishes me taking our cat in my arms. Raising him high above my head I would shout, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, I baptize you!"  SPLASH!  I pounded the cat down into the water. I don't know who my mother thought she was saving, me or the cat, but by the time she pried the terrified creature from my grip I was scratched and bloodied. Nonetheless, I was satisfied our little tabby was now going to heaven upon its death.

But like most who are called to preach, I too was not without flaw.  My sin to confess was based in selfishness.  My mother had set out a tray of goodies for the trick-or-treaters on the cool fall night in 1970; a night that held such promise for the children of the neighborhood who had been dreaming of candy and cookie booty since the beginning of the school year. I had persuaded my mother to let me give out the candies. So we sat in the front room eagerly anticipating the first ghoul or Snoopy.  Now, I don't remember this event, but it has been told to me many times:  The doorbell rang and she said I jumped up and ran down the hallway. She heard me open the front door, then the children's lithe voices, a hissing sound and then the door slam loudly shut. She thought nothing of it until the next set of tricksters appeared. The doorbell chimed. I again jumped up, ran down the hallway. She heard me open the front door then children's lithe voices, a hissing sound, and then the door slam loudly shut.  After a few more instances of this behavior my mother decided to investigate. She said to my father that the next time kids come to the door she would shadow me to see what was going on.

DING DONG.

I jumped up and ran down the hallway. She stealthily followed me and pressed her body up against the door jamb leading into the foyer. There, she observed me running from the kitchen with a can of bug spray. I rushed the door, threw it open and when the children screamed Trick-or-Treat! I sprayed them generously before slamming the door in their faces.  I then ran back to the kitchen to hide my child-repellent for the next group and returned and pocketed their allotment of candy. What can I say?  As an only child, I never liked to share, neither candy nor the spotlight.  Maybe that explains the cause of my nighttime fear.  Or maybe one of those kids put a curse on me. It was the south and haints and roots were boutiful. That's malarky, of course. I'm older now and way more intelligent. There's no such thing as demons.

THUMP! THUMP!

What was that? Did...did you hear that? ...Mother?

Mitt Romney will never be captain of the Enterprise

As an author, I rarely take a stand publicly for or against any particular topic. To all my personal and facebook/twitter friends, however, I am quite vocal with my viewpoints. So with great reticence I will forge into the U.S. presidential election of 2012 here.  After watching the second presidential debate I made a realization:  Mitt Romney will never captain a starship.  To explain, let's probe into an area of which I am very comfortable: science fiction.

Oftentimes in reading and writing science fiction we see two vastly different futures for humankind. One is Utopian; that paradise where Big Bird has succeeded in educating the masses and where gender, ethnicity, creed and sexuality have no meaning; a place of civil discourse, natural fabrics and food replicators; and where all ideas are new and all materials are recycled. Here, there will be no need for "binders" filled with "suitable" female candidates because, in Utopian society, women would rule entire galaxies. In this future, science has conquered global warming and diplomacy has brought peace to the Middle East. It is a place where class warfare and monetary greed have fallen into disuse and ill-repute. Religion is less about dogma and demagoguery than the meaningful coexistence of different doctrines. Finally, this future, like Star Trek, sees the ability of humanity to unite and rejoice in the peaceful exploration of space.

The second is Dystopian. This is a vision of the future where greed and avarice have crushed humanity creating a hot house-affected earth filled with the rich few lording over the hungry masses.  Places where privatized for-profit RoboCop police forces vent drugs onto the street so they can charge cash-strapped cities ever more money to clean them up; a future where mankind has destroyed itself and eradicated thousands of years of intelligent discourse by telling its citizens that women's bodies can flush away rape sperm if the attack was "legitimate," or that dinosaurs and Jesus existed at the same time; adulterers and fornicators who hate gay marriage willingly forfeit domain over our planet to some damn dirty apes.  In this Dystopian society, domed cities emerge and are inhabited by beautiful and spoiled children who play without guilt until they reach the age of 30 while being forced into the worst retirement plan ever. Ultimately, they are killed.  And just like Romney's reinvention of Medicare, the citizens of Logan's Run will take their chances on health premiums of the "Carousel" and all will die a spectacular death.--- And you thought his voucherization plan was bad. This is the future Governor Romney is peddling.  A world where the wealthy succeed at the expense of the masses.  A world where 47% of the population work like Troglytes in the zenite mines of Ardana, suffering without healthcare and succumbing to the poisonous gas emanating from the very caves they work because regulatory safeguards and unions no longer exist.  Here, Mitt and his fellow elites float ethereally in the cloud city of Stratos, remarkably oblivious to the hardships of their fellow Ardanans below. In the overheated and exhausted future of the city in Soylent Green, bulldozers scrape up hundreds of people, cart them off and ground them into food---an operation wholly-owned and operated by Bain Capital (apparently without the knowledge of its absentee CEO, Mitt Romney). Only people with offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands and dancing horses (because all other pets will be eaten) can afford red meat, or soap, or air conditioning, or even water. That small wavering voice you hear is that of Michael Jones, the black man in the audience at the second 2012 presidential debate who expressed his disappointment with the president.  There, Mr. Jones indicated that he wasn't optimistic about voting for Mr. Obama again. But now he is screaming and reaching out to you as he's being lifted into the meat grinder.

"It's the middle class! Romney's 5-point plan is made out of the middle class!! He turning us into food! Tell everybody! Romney's 5-point plan is....PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS!"

Now, there's a reason you don't see conservatives in the utopian version of the future:  It is because humanity has grown so wise in 300 years that we no longer need to fear each other. There are no guns and Trayvon Martin would still be alive. People, for the most part, work for the good of the universe. Thus, business is left in the hands of the sexist Ferengi who survive on greed and profit and are reviled by most species in the Star Trek universe. There's no sexism. If you thought James T. Kirk was a badass you need to meet Captain Kathryn Janeway, the ass kicking Hillary Clinton of the Delta Quadrant. There's no homophobia because, in many races, there's no gender. Here, love is love. Outward appearances often have nothing to do with the person (or symbiotic host) that you've fallen in love with. There's no racism.  Lieutenant Uhura was not only a beautiful black woman and an awesome communications officer, but she was actually fourth—YES—FOURTH in command of the USS Enterprise. Similarly, immigration reform is unnecessary. Mr. Spock proved you don't need a green card (but green blood helps) to be a valued member of the ship's crew. He was a bi-racial illegal alien (actually bi-special) who left home and crossed that cultural border from Vulcan to Earth.  He received a free education at Starfleet Academy and went on to become the most beloved character in the Star Trek mythology. Luckily, for him, Sheriff Arpaio never patrolled the Neutral Zone. So, here, in our utopian vision, there are no Tea Party candidates claiming they have some special knowledge over constitutional rights that they know nothing about because there will only be one law:  The Prime Directive. This directive states that we should never interfere with anybody else's world. In other words, stay the eff out of folks' bedrooms and away from their wombs.

In the future, Mitt Romney will be like the alien that held Captain Kirk and his crew hostage by claiming to be the Greek God Apollo; a lonely bitter relic yearning for the days when he was a titan of industry and lusting for those times when he was important because of all the non-humanitarian wealth he amassed. He will be bitter and angry because his profit-over-people ideals will have been swept away for a greater purpose. He will violently hold onto the notion that only the gods (or rich people—which is synonymous in Mr. Romney's mind) can provide bounty to the lowly worshipers of his materialistic edicts. And when the future finally shatters his temple of greed and profit he will be a broken-hearted god bereft of money and followers begging us to pay attention to he and his clan of One-Percenters. That's when our future selves will wonder in amusement how one---so tiny in perspective and resignation---got to be so powerful. Then they will remember that odd little thing that separated us so many years ago. Capitalism. What an archaic system that was.

As the episode ends we see standing in the corner quietly waiting his turn to repeat his lines, for he ultimately is a false player on life's stage:  Mitt Romney. And he's wearing a red shirt. Not a good sign for a prosperous future.

Buggery

I don't like bugs, though not entomophobically (yes, I looked up that word and, contrary to popular belief, I just don't insert large fancy words into my text to be priggish—well, maybe sometimes, I suppose).  I just have your regular run-of-the-mill distaste for insects.  I grew up in the South and admit that I love the romantic serenade of the native 17-year cicada on warm humid nights; that dulcet chirp heard just beyond the tree line as I sat on my mother's side porch. The sound is magnificent—as long as you keep the monstrous insects away from me. What I truly dislike are those pesky bugs that chase you from the room or seemingly fly into your face just for fun. Those carpenter bees and dirt daubers. Those creepy crawlers and winged-dooglers. Insects whose names could only be more sinister if conjured up by Boris Karloff himself.  Those are the ones that make me leap in horror. Of course, I've never done well with creatures with half a dozen legs or more. I was afraid of them as a youngster. I was afraid. I was very afraid watching the remake of The Fly. To this day I can't look at the E.G. Marshall segment of Creepshow.  Thirty years later, I continue to have nightmares thinking of his body being engulfed by insects. #wakesupscreaming

Upon signing the lease of my first New York City apartment (a decent fourth-floor walkup in the Bronx), I kept hearing the voice of Florence Johnston, the Jefferson's maid, sass her famous line "In my building the roaches are so big that when you step on them the crunch drowns out the television!" Unfortunately, I had the displeasure of meeting one of those roaches. I was coming out of the bathroom heading into the living room when I saw my partner's eye widen to the size of Rhode Island. I knew immediately it was some massive insect he had spied, so I literally jumped several feet almost landing on the coffee table. He didn't have to say anything; the blaze of his telescoping eyes told it all.  So I looked over my shoulder and squealed. There, affixed to the ceiling above where my head had just been, was the largest, longest, fattest, menacing cockroach ever recorded on earth. I grabbed a broom and he grabbed the Raid.  As we jockeyed for the best position to make a speedy exit we kept bandying "You spray it and I'll hit it!" and "You hit it and I'll spray!" animated back-and-forth Chip 'n' Dale style.  I finally pushed him forward.  Gripping the can of Raid, he pressed the actuator.

"Sssssssssssss!" A white mist filled the space in front of the bathroom. I was ready with the broom when....  dear Christ Almighty the monster took flight!

I think I blacked out—one of those blind flight-or-fight rages, perhaps. The next thing I remember, I was standing in the kitchen with a jaggedly broken broom handle. We had killed the ginormous roach, but a framed wall photo, several items on a shelf and a lamp on the bedroom nightstand were all collateral damage. Apparently, I started smashing the bug violently and didn't stop until I snapped the poor broom in two. I was told that the dead husk of the creature flew upwards and I charged into the kitchen shrieking in terror. Thankfully, that was the last roach I had to battle in my twenty-year residence in New York City.

However, in May of this year, I returned to North Carolina to take care of my mother who happens to have dementia. That's when the current onslaught began:  the hordes of Insectus Attackio!  For the past few months I've been assaulted by crickets, silverfish, grasshoppers, centipedes, granddaddy long-legs, ants, gnats, flies!  And then, after all that, there came the most merciless and unrelenting soldier of them all:  The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug!—a grotesque brown-armored behemoth that landed on our shores in the belly of a Chinese cargo ship several years ago. With no predators in North America, this beast has reproduced by the gazillions.  Up and down the eastern seaboard homeowners have waged a war with this creature as it relentlessly invades and infests dwellings and other structures. The stink bug is almost like some CGI creation of David Cronenburg. They have no mouths and they resist insecticide. Every time I looked around they were buzzing and dive-bombing towards me in my bedroom.  But I was no simple neophyte just arriving from the big city; I was armed with Google and an eco-friendly idea that there must be something, somewhere in nature, to at least repel these pests.  So with a spray bottle of garlic water, mint and dried chrysanthemum leaves, along with the help of a vacuum cleaner, duct-tape and caulk, I was prepared for battle.

"To fight the bug, we must understand the bug!" Sky Marshall Tehat Meru's rallying cry in Starship Troopers urged me on toward the fray.

Are you ready to rummmmmmmmmmbbbbbbblllllllllllleeeeeee!!!!!!!!!

Now on to tonight's main event.

In this corner.... wearing all-slimmerizing-black by Ralph Lauren, Daaaaarrrryl T Sturgis!  "Ahhhhhhhr" (insert cheers from the crowd).  And in this corner.....wearing a stench-emitting-exoskeleton, the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug! (Booooooo!!! Hiiiiissss!!!).  -- I would tell you to throw tomatoes but the evil little ass-hats eat them and love them.

You can't really battle away stink bugs. Like other insects, in order to beat them you have to prevent them from entering your home altogether. Thus, I was in the process of sealing the windows, especially the area around my mother's bedroom air conditioner.  She had noticed a few bugs at the top of her drapes (the little buggers love to hide in the folds of curtains), so I retrieved the vacuum and headed up the ladder. I was poised with the hose in hand ready to suction the bugs to their doom, when my mother—who's starting to become less coordinated because of her progressing disease—decided she wanted to help.  So what does she do?  She runs over, grabs the curtain and starts flapping it.  I'm now teetering on the top of a ladder with vacuum in hand and a flying squadron of stink bugs escaping the curtains. My field of vision was obscured by the buzzing gross little devils.  I'm pretty sure I yelled like Tippi Hedren in that famous scene from Hitchcock's classic, The Birds—where the sadistic director forced her to endure over 40 takes of real birds scratching and pecking at her. I swatted and flailed my arms.  My startled mother fell backwards onto the bed (thankfully), but in doing so, she brought the curtains down on top of me. Now I was trapped in lavender-colored cotton, a corner of which the vacuum clumsily sucked in. My mother goes on the offensive and starts stepping on the bugs to crush them. She didn't realize that the reason they're called "stink bugs" is because when smashed they emit a terribly foul odor.

Trying to untangle myself and, as if in some scary scene from Poltergeist, I'm shouting over the roar of the vacuum cleaner,  "Don't crush them! They'll stink! The smell will attract more bugs!"

"Whatcha say?!  Can't hear you!!!" she shouted while intensifying her stomping.

"DON'T CRUSH THEM!" I yelled over the continuing noise of the vacuum.

"PUT THEM IN A CUP?!?!"

"NO!! I SAID DON'T CRUSH THEM!"

"YOU WANT SOME?!" she yelled quizzically. "YOU WANT THE BUGS IN A CUP?!?!"

Sigh. I had enough. I threw the curtain off of me and tried to power off the vacuum with my toe to no avail.  I asked her to toss me a black plastic trash bag and I stuffed the curtain, vacuum cleaner and bugs all into it. I yanked the cord from the wall, tied it around the bag and stormed out into the night towards the trash bin cursing along the way. I waited a few minutes to allow the rage and repulsion to burn off.  I dusted myself off and quivered at the thought that some of those bugs probably found their way into my pants.  I went back in the house. My mother was now sitting comfortably in the den in her recliner watching television, volume up, as usual, to 161 decibels.  Maury was shouting from the screen "You ARE the father!" with ear-shattering cheers and catcalls from his audience.  I looked at her, feeling like a dejected warrior.

"Mama, I'm sorry. I seemed to not be able to keep the stink bugs out the house," I said with puppy dog eyes.

She sipped her glass of cold Pepsi and looked at me curiously. "What stink bugs?"

"Exactly," I chuckled.

Oh crap. There's one now on the ceiling! Dammit, the vacuum's in the trash bin. Where's a good broom when you need it?

...Or death?

I was speaking with my dearest friend today and he was feeling some kind of way. He was bereft of invention. He said that his life had grinded to a standstill. He said that something needed to happen. Some "life event" to move him from a place of inertia. Something sublime. Something that would alter the path of his life and project him on his journey. He felt he needed to find his passion. His calling. I asked him, "What if that event never comes?" What if life doesn't deliver this Highlander-style reckoning? What if it's a long-winding downward sloping path that meanders along creating only shades of change? We often count these touchstones in life like notches on a belt or like lines drawn on the door jamb of life. Each higher line shows how we've grown in such areas as confidence or wealth--benchmarks we can refer to easily. I was here when I graduated from college, met my first boyfriend, lost my virginity and buried my father. And I was here when I got my first job. The occasional big ticket items that propel us to astounding achievement were clearly delineated.

But what if life was more like a wheel where events radiated outward from your core, blurring together in the whirling spin of your existence? Now the events seem mundane. Routine. Joyless. We long for that moment of sublime surrender when the universe gives us the slightest push and leads us into Oprahdom or Tyler Perryhood. We sit in our present looking back at the achievements of our past hoping to see those mounts in our future. But what if it's not those meteors that propel us forward or sideways or anyways? What if it's the tiny everyday rudimentary loose-ends that are the planks of the bridges we need to cross; the gulf of space and time? We often miss these tiny things.

Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all. It was difficult to judge. --William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, 

We've grown accustomed to Laws of Attractions and Oprah screaming "You and you and you are going to Australiaaaaaaaaaaa!" We live our lives by these grand moments. We sit, quoting my mother, "on the stool of Do Nothing" because we wait for something. When did we turn the bridal of our fate over to television personalities and thought gurus? In my novella, George Apocrypha, the main character contemplates suicide. That self-murder is undone by a trio of angels that explain to him, "There is no life in death. Life is for the living."  And it truly is.

My mother is 86-years-old and in the hateful throes of dementia. But she never felt sorry for herself. She has a disease but she is not the disease. Every morning when I cook her breakfast or when we go out to eat she asks me (yes, repeatedly over and over and over again), "How did you sleep?"  I'd reply that I slept fine (even though I didn't and rarely ever do). I'd then return the question.  She would answer, "Oh I slept fine." Then she would grunt as she lowers herself into her recliner exhaling a sing-songish "Whoooo." After flopping into the chair I'd hand her her plate. "What's wrong?" I ask.

"Old, stiff, worn-out and tired." she says, "But it's good to be alive. Some people didn't make through the night...Bet they wished they had aching bones this morning." Then she would chuckle.

Silly old goose I would think. Must everything be measured against the response  "...or death?" Do I have to constantly thank God for my injurious plight?  I'd better be glad for my dead end job because the alternative is "...or death?"  I'd better be glad I have to work a full-time job, shuttle between two distant states every week and take care of my ill mother full-time because, otherwise, I could be...dead!  Who came up with this notion of "...or death?"  Must day-to-day life be that extreme? Isn't there some valve we can switch on that will pour good tidings on us?  I've visualized wealth and have experienced happiness. But the universe can be parsimonious bitch. It's always been stingy with my blessings. So I would look at my mother in annoyance and shake my head. I'd better be thankful for these morsels because death is lurking right around the corner to sully the situation.

Now if you've ever read my past blogs, you know I can turn complaining into an Olympic sport. Just take a look at this rant. It would be wonderful if all of us were born beautiful. I have a friend who is the same age as me. He has the body of Adonis. He touches a weight and his body seems to swell to six-pack muscularity. It would be wonderful to be born lucky. I have another friend who somehow is miraculously saved from bad things happening at the last minute. During the recession of 2008-09 I was working two part-time jobs just to make ends meet. My friend was laid off with a sweet severance package even before his unemployment kicked in. I was struggling working seven-days-a-week and he didn't work for two years. He went on trips, paid his rent, bought clothes. And, literally, just as his unemployment was about to run out, he found a job.  Similarly, it would be wonderful to be born rich or attain riches. Yes, I have a friend who hit the lottery and now lives in a doorman building in the gentrified Hell's Kitchen (renamed Clinton) on Manhattan's west side. So through all of this I had to be happy "...or death?"

But after being with my mother for a few weeks, I began to realize that maybe she was on to something. Maybe the simple act of inhaling and exhaling is a rapturous event. With each breath we take it means that there is one more breath to live. One more exhale to change our lives. One more second to make a difference. So, instead of living our lives with a wish list of grand events, we should be living it à la minute. Making it up as we go along. Maybe we should take the time to live in the moment. If not enjoying our creaking bones at least acknowledge that the alternative could be worse. Sometimes it's not the august fires that shine the brightest, but the culmination of embers that spark a forest inferno. So I told my fretting friend that he should enjoy life; that instead of looking for the next bellwether moment he should generate his own events. Sometimes just the act of getting up out of bed (despite your body being weary and your mind  faltering) is a much-needed victory. 

After dinnertime, one of my mother's favorite pastimes is to play the piano and to get her dog Ricky to sing along with her. She moans in her old lady voice and he howls like a coyote. Both of them knowing that life doesn't get any better than that very moment.

Powers and Gore

I can't believe Gore Vidal is dead. I can still hear the voice of my best friend from college. Dr. Terence Powers. He had called to discuss the impending release of Palimpsest (pronounced pal-imp-sest), the new memoir by Gore Vidal. Terence had been born in Lumberton, NC and had what I called a confident Southern accent. He spoke with the cadence of a southern aristocrat. Free flowing and without a lilt. He eschewed the warbling patterns of Scarlet O'Hara or Whitley Gilbert, with their elongated vowels and roller-coaster pronunciations; he preferred to sound like a great Carolinian statesman with every syllable a perfect inflection of who he thought he should be. He should have been Gore Vidal.

Gore Vidal came from money. Or rather I should say he came from class. There is a difference. Though my friend Terence was born necessitous he, like most of his brothers and sisters, achieved a certain bourgeoisie. Many of whom received advanced academic degrees. Terence, like Gore, knew the difference between class and money. Vidal's father was an over-achiever. An Olympic athlete, Secretary of Commerce under President Roosevelt and the founder of not one but three airlines (Eastern and TWA along with Northeast) who married a colorful socialite who performed periodically on Broadway. These two stars beget Eugene Luther Gore Vidal an attention-seeking prat who happened to be an exceptionally talented writer. He was at times an acrimonious observer of American society and politics. Just like my friend Terence.

Gore Vidal, because he was born into a weathered upper class (he is Al Gore's distant cousin and his mother was later married to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' step-father), was able to say the most stinging things about rich people and was allowed to get away with it. His loose morals and acerbic wit came from the freedom of people who are ritually indulged. His life's work slanted toward draining the sucre from an imperial ruling class that he deemed unworthy and indolent. He was both a sexual and social pioneer and pariah. And he relished both adjectives.

My first encounter with Mr. Vidal came in the form of a cheap book bought from a street vendor in downtown Charlotte when I was but a freshman in college at Johnson C. Smith University. A rough looking black man that had laid his wares out on a dusty blanket, old used paperback books, scratched records, a bicycle wheel, dirty-faced dolls, cheap jewelry all neatly arranged as if they were precious trinkets. I saw a copy of Myra Brekinridge and bought it for fifty cents. At the age of nineteen this book was a wonder. My own sexuality was swilling around in the muck and mire of confusion, religion and curiosity. It burst open as I turned the pages which Mr. Vidal filled with a head-tripping mix of feminism, camp and gay rape. Vidal was a master at manipulating the reader into being shocked. He didn't sugar-coat anything. The climax came when the main character revealed her true self--by standing on a boardroom table and hoisting her skirt to reveal a manufactured vagina--to her old decrepit Uncle.

"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess. The new woman whose astonishing history started with a surgeon's scalpel, and will end... who-knows-where. Just as Eve was born from Adam's rib, so Myron died to give birth to Myra. Did Myron take his own life, you will ask? Yes, and no, is my answer. Beyond that, my lips are sealed. Let it suffice for me to say that Myron is... with me, and that I am the fulfillment of all his dreams. Who is Myra Breckinridge? What is she? Myra Breckinridge is a dish, and don't you ever forget it, you motherfuckers - as the children say nowadays."

Myra had been born Myron. But what were these words written here? Rough trade? Transexual? Homosexual? The horror this book must have caused to the right in 1968. The horror it did cause me a dubious church boy in 1984.

After reading this book and explaining it to Terence, he and I rented the movie. From then till now our elicit love affair with Vidal rallied on. We consumed all things Gore. I read Myron the sequel to Myra Brekinridge, he read The Second American Revolution and we shared Kalki. We saw Suddenly Last Summer and Caligula on VHS. And we were both there like screaming bobbysoxers in March of 1986 when Dress Grey, the NBC mini-series about murder and homosexuality on the campus of an all-boys military school debuted. Alec Baldwin never looked younger and neither have I.

Gore Vidal was a sexual maverick but his poking of the bear (the evils of the great American empire) was where he made his most hated enemies. He survived with a sort of immunity syndrome. The ability to leach away at the falsehoods of our consumerist society from the ports he group up in. Nestled amongst the gilded vipers of Newport and Manhattan. He was pedigreed in liberal politics with supporters like Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, yet he took Democrats to task on many issues. Famously accusing President Roosevelt of purposely provoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to raise the country out of the Great Depression. He ran for office several times. His now famous quote as the co-chairman of the People's Party during the early 1970s rings especially true today:

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-fairecapitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently…and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

In recent times Mr. Vidal's politics seemingly became more cynical. Here's what he had to say about Senator Barak Obama when he was running for president:

Jennifer Bardi: A colleague met Obama when he was running for the Senate and she handed him some literature. She was a lobbyist for humanists and he said without any embarrassment, “oh, my mother was a humanist!” A few weeks later I read an interview in which he said his mother was a Christian.
Gore Vidal: And if your colleague’s pamphlet had said she was a fascist he’d have said, “Oh, my mother was a fascist!” I know what happens when people run for office. 


When the interviewer asked if he even liked the senator and future president, in classic Vidal style he simple said "Hail Obama!" 

TP + QC 4-eva, at a party ca. 1995

I will miss Gore Vidal and with his death comes a full-stop to not only his life but a great friendship. My good friend Terence Powers died in 2009. A great loss for me, a eulogy I needed put on paper but never did. With Vidal's death I think it's time I tell the world how great of an influence Terence was on my life. His quirky intellectualism, his rapacious wit and awkward anti-social behavior. A spiritual misanthrope is what I use to accuse him of being. Terence, like Gore, was a star-fucker and the two eventually met at a party in Washington, DC shortly after Terence had been repatriated from six years in Paris and two in Istanbul. At this party Terence met Twyla Tharp and another memoirist with whom he would remain friends until death: Quentin Crisp. Now the circle is complete. The two greats, Gore and Terence, are together in death though neither believed in heaven. They were there during many years of self-exploration of my sexuality, creativity and political awakening. Prodding me to dig deeper and think grander. Terence and I wrote poems together during our college years, poems that startled and lambasted the Christian establishment of our small Presbyterian historically black college. Our most controversial poem which almost got us kicked out of school started with these two lines:

Jesus was seen in a bar drinking a Tom Collins
As scarlet lingerie whispered into the room

Old Gore would have been proud of that one. The poem was all about temptation not of Jesus but of how organized religion had perverted us into thinking sex and alcohol were a bad thing. Especially together. As you can tell we, all three, battled the greatest enemy of the writer and that is his ego. This leads into my favorite quote of Gore Vidal. It's not "Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." 

No my favorite quote is: "Write something, even if it's just a suicide note."

How pompous to think that anyone would want to read my words. Even upon my death. How arrogant. But in the end that's why I loved them both. Two queens voguing to the delight and fright of  the twisted circus of the American polity. The House of Pomposity and Arroganza! The Wonder Twins Powers and Gore.
Rest in peace my friends 


 More reading of Vidal's work can be found here

Clusterf*ck

How does a rare medical condition, a skunk attack and magic tie in together? By the end of this post you will find out.

I must admit that I always wanted to be rare and special. When I was eight-years-old my mother and I travelled to Rome and I met the then-pontiff, Pope Paul VI. Well, the meeting was not exactly intimate. He presided over a mass of thousands at the Vatican. I still remember him standing on that tiny little balcony waving to the ardor of the throng. Upon returning to home to America, I would grab my cape and staff, head out into the front yard and stand on my invisible ledge pretending each blade of grass was an adoring congregant. Ahhhhhhhhrrrr! The cheers of the crowd was defining. I was blessing them surely as the Pope had blessed me---blessed me to be special.

Life is not without irony.

Shortly after that trip, I started experiencing something that would define my youth (actually my life):  a medical condition that fulfilled my wish of being rare.  It took me 29 years before I even knew what I was suffering from had a name and that there were others like me.  Hortons Headache---or its more common name, cluster headache---is a 1-in-1,000 condition (or roughly one-tenth of one percent of the population), whereby those who suffer from it often describe it as a curse. All my life I had been prodded, x-rayed, MRI'd, had blood drawn, screened over and over to no relief. I was told it could be mini-strokes, meningitis, cancer.  All sorts of scary things. The true diagnosis was far crueler and more fitting of my personality. It was Greek in nature; Promethean, to be specific...

The myth of Prometheus is powerful.  After defying the gods by giving human beings fire, Prometheus was punished by Zeus. His judgment was exacting and horrific in scale. Prometheus was chained to a rock. Each morning, an eagle would descend to eat his organs and leave him bleeding, racked with pain and left for dead. Then, miraculously overnight, his organs would grow back only for the eagle to return the next morning. This went on for eternity.

So what does all this mishegas have to do with me? Cluster headaches are like a Promethean judgment. Everyday, at the same time, I get a headache---the most powerful, intense white-hot, suicide-tempting pain you'd ever experience. It's akin to a thief that steals your sanity and happiness. When that hour approaches you feel dread and doom. It's like torture. The few women who suffer from cluster headaches (males statistically make up the majority) say that child-bearing is less painful.

My clusters, like all clusters, are unilateral, meaning they only affect one side of the head, and, in my case, they occur on the right side. Unlike a migraine, clusters are a shock-and-awe type of pain. They start out rapture-quick and within 5-10 minutes they are at its peak, becoming an unbearable ordeal. Imagine a drill that starts boring above and slightly to the left of your right eye. And imagine this drill is blisteringly hot. Now, imagine it drilling through your skull and brain before exiting out of the back of your head near your right ear. Then come the tears. Your right eye (and only your right eye) starts to weep. Your right nostril then begins to stuff-up like you have a cold.  We're not done.  Accompanying this pain is the sensation of electricity shooting through your head. Imagine little bolts of lightning shooting from the drill. Now envision, as each bolt pops, you feel the sensation of an ice pick pierce the spot just where the lightning bolts struck. With each stab of the "ice pick" you feel as if your nervous system is shattering. Now, my friends:  imagine that is the starting point of the headache and the pain only intensifies from there. I moan, groan, rock and pace. I toggle between begging God for release and cursing him for giving me this pain. I roll and roll and wonder "why me Lord?" Why give this to me? It hurts so bad that I've beaten myself in the head with my own fists. I've used telephone receivers. In college, I used text books. I even once bit myself to distract, albeit momentarily, from the pain. Luckily, in my case, the headache lasts only 45 minutes and then it's gone almost as quickly as it came; a brief destructive tornado then the sun is back shining. By the time it's over I'm usually exhausted.

Cluster headaches are cyclical. They hit you regularly from about 2 weeks (like mine usually do) till about 2 months, then they dissapear. They won't return for weeks or even years if one is lucky. They usually start around age 20 and subside around age 50.  I've had them since I was 8---right after I wanted to be "special" after being blessed by the Pope.  Although they have seemed to taper off over the years, I am, unfortunately, still a life-long sufferer. My last bout was in 2008. This new cycle has lasted 86 days. Zeus, you sly devil: you goaded me into thinking I was safe.

Now for the skunk. Since moving back to the South to take care of my mother (who has dementia), these clusters have been attacking me as if I don't have enough on my plate. If you've ever been the sole caretaker of a person with dementia, you would agree that I need every ounce of strength and stamina imaginable. So waking up several times a night with intense pain is not conducive for the daily caregiving routine. My mother has developed a strange, inexplicable habit of putting our dog, Ricky, a playful adolescent chihuahua mix, out on the side porch in the middle of the night. Last Wednesday she followed this routine. It was 1 a.m. and I was asleep. The cluster hit. The dog was outside barking excitedly. There was a strange creature visibly lurking in the woods behind our house, just beyond the treeline. The stage was set for pure disaster.

I stumbled downstairs, still in awesome pain. I opened the side door and unleashed barking Ricky to let him back in.  He raced off into the darkness instead.  Dammit! I don't need this. I hear barks, growls, a struggle. I yell for Ricky to heel. Oh god, I hope he wasn't bitten by a racoon. They have rabies. He appears from the bushes and happily charges back up the steps. As he runs past me it hits. It hits. A SKUNK!!

"Shit!" I rasp.

I turn and chase him through the house and finally corral him into the garage. I run back upstairs to my home office and immediately jump on the Internet. I begin googling skunk+dog+clean to quickly learn what to do. Now my head is pounding, I'm tearing at the computer and the smell of skunk is rising to the upper floors. My mother pops out of her bedroom clutching the front of her robe and bleats "What in the world is that smell?!"  I shout while in my cluster pain, "The dog got skunked Ma!"

Moments later she's at her door again, clutching her robe once more. "What in the world is that smell?!?" Again, I shout, "The dog got skunked!"  A few more minutes, she comes back a third time: "What in the world is that smell?!"  Just like a cuckoo clock this goes on for several more minutes. So, gathering the googled information I needed,  I dashed to the car (which now smells like skunk too thanks to my temporarily locking the dog in the garage). Driving a little too fast and holding the side of my head cursing every deity I can think of, I venture into Wal-Mart. I grabbed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and some baking soda and I'm forced to wait behind a family dressed in camo buying an assortment of processed lunch meats, soda, chips and beer. Mother, father, daugher and arm-baby all dressed for combat at 1:30 a.m. for some unknown reason. The man looked to be my age but had no discernible teeth and his daughter had a dirty t-shirt over her army trousers that read "I'm a Princess."

Yes you are.  But I digress.

Finally, back home, I'm out in the dark yard in my underwear washing my skunked dog in 95-degree late-night heat, all with a cluster headache. And my mother, every few minutes, has now descended to the garage level, completely forgetting the entire skunk debacle of just 30 minutes prior. She opens the door, "Oh you're washing the dog? That's nice."

Three minutes later, "Oh you're washing the dog? That's nice."

Three minutes later, "Oh you're washing the dog? That's nice."

Three minutes later, "Oh you're washing the dog? That's nice."

But here's where the magic happened. In the midst of all this stress I'm hit with an epiphany:  Maybe the rare things that I thought were burdens are actually tiny little blessings. Maybe if I just laugh it won't seem so insurmountable. Maybe the Pope really DID bless me (and not curse me as I've always thought)---to have these experiences surrounded by people and pets that I love. That no matter how dire the straits may be, there's always a sun to appear after the hurricane. So there I sat; in my drawers covered with skunk-smelling doggie bath water, a horrifically scary headache yet I was laughing my ass off. I have been laughing ever since. Sure, my headaches are still kicking my ass. Sure, it's still stressful looking after my dimentia-laden mother. But that night was the funniest thing that has happened to me in a long time. And it made me realize how rarely special I really am.

The stone throwing spring of Mrs. Roman

Tami Roman needn't apologize nor be ashamed of her behavior. We should be of ours.

It was over 100 degrees when I arrived in Charlotte late Friday night---a slow moving, exhaustive heat, Southern and gothic like those of my lazy, hazy childhood.  The city of Charlotte simmered under the humidity of late June's heat. The skyscrapers wavered in the distance as if they were involved in some kind of wobbly calisthenics, shimmering in the waning sunlight.  I was attending the opening of America I Am at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts+Culture where Tavis Smiley was the special guest. The spectacular exhibit chronicles centuries of Africans' accomplishments and tragedies in the western hemisphere, localizing on those of us in America. The exhibit is laid out in a coherent fashion that takes you from the chains shackled to African legs 400 years ago to the flight suits worn by modern African American astronauts who soared over the earth today. It's emotional and powerful.

After a few visits to the bar, I made a startlingly realization. My friend Sharon, who invited me, works for the Gantt and had assembled a dazzling array of guests which included artists, politicians, clergy, scientists, celebrities and business professionals---most of them black and many of whom were women; "bougie" women dressed in designer fashions evoking big city styles alongside "mother earth girls" in their natural fabrics and unprocessed hair filled the space with laughter and conversation and not a bottle of Cliquot was thrown in any direction. How is this possible that so many women of color can assemble in tight, climate-controlled spaces and not end up punching, kicking, screaming or cussing? By the end of the night they were dancing, happily together, under the languid cobalt of the evening's sky. Their voices and movements were raised to the heavens as they were each celebrating their sultry black-womaness. But this isn't possible. Black women fight every chance they get. VH1 and its hosts of Battling Negresses have proven that. Black women are incapable of peaceful discourse. Bravo sparked a cottage industry on the notion that black women can cuss and slap at the same time. Look at The Bad Girls Club. Or check your email inbox where someone has probably forwarded you a link from worldstahiphop.com, showcasing where young black women have spilled out onto the streets of Chicago, Memphis, Spartanburg, South Carolina and Kosciusko, Mississippi fighting like pit bulls in a ring inside malls, parking lots, Dairy Queens, etc.  Hell, last week I was even forwarded a video of two young women fighting in a church. 

Where has this ill-manner and discomposure come from? We can't say it's manufactured. It's been boilng under the surface for some time, maybe due to, among other reasons, the anger of isolation and invisibility that black women experience. I discussed the rampant desexualization (as well as over-sexualization) of black women at the hands of Hollywood here. The sassy black woman telling-it-like-it-is has been part of cinema and television even before Jim Crow fell. These tropes usually constitute the neck-rolling sista-cum-greek chorus of the white protagonist, telling her "Girl you betta' go afta' that man," or "Oh no you di'idn't!" But for the most part, these stereotypical women were never violent. But in the last few years that sass has turned into bash. Now comes another daughter of Sheba and she's ready to tho' dubs.

There has always been a certain cachet in the black community when it comes to violence. Many resolve issues and conflicts with fisticuffs.  Bitch!, inferred and inflicted in any fashion you may choose, has become the mot du jour compliment of this decade. This goes way beyond Omarosa's haranguing on the first season of the Apprentice. Black women now seem to want to fight everybody. Random men on the subway. Cashiers at McDonalds. Bus drivers. Each other. The list goes on and on. Have we so undervalued our women that now the spotlight has shone upon them as spectacle?  Is participation in life only acquired by verbal and physical assault?  Spartacus in Christian Loubitin battling Crixus in giant glittery earrings? YouTube, Vimeo and cellphones all record and regurgitate bad behavior to the cheers of a legion of online fans. To use an obvious pun, these videos have generated millions of hits. Literally. 

Tanisha has her own spin-off show after popping off asses on Bad Girls Club. And who can forget the oh so quotable "Bitch you’re a non-motherfucking factor!" We laud and applaud these women as if they are the millennial role models of our worlds. Gone is the courage of Harriet Tubman and Daisy Bates; the righteous anger of Angela Davis and Ruby Dee; the odds-defying accomplishments of Mildred Loving and Marian Wright Edelman. It has now been replaced with the preening, cattiness of bourgeois hellions who don't fight for freedom but fight for ratings.  Every woman has a right to be who she wants to be. If that's a scrapping diva then so be it. My fear is that this behavior has already slipped into the realm of acceptable behavior by many young people. And yes young white women fight too. Just look at any given episode of Maury or Jerry Springer. There's nothing wrong with a good girl fight. It has been a staple of melodrama since Clare Booth Luce's The Women. Who can forget Diahann Carroll's Dominique Devereux's "Thank You" slap-to-the-face of Alexis heard round the world in the now famous episode of Dynasty. This is not that kind of stylized choreography. It has a  sense of doom and tension a raised humidity when two women of color go on the attack. The mob goes wild in the arena. Others may laugh but all I see is that awful Battle Royal scene from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. 

But why must this be for so many black women? We all know the cultural phenomenon of male black-on-black violence. In my short story, Hands of Fire (included in my soon-to-be-released collection of short stories entitled Thirteen Days of May), the protagonist, a teenage boy, comes to terms with his homosexuality and muses about the violence that black men inflict on each other.

I sat dumbfounded when we were sitting in the living room of Juney’s house. My father and his father talking over “the problem."  My father suggested that we fight. Juney and me. The bully’s father, gushing with pride, said "yes" to the whole thing. Has the world gone crazy?! These are adults?! They’re supposed to be rational. But I had to remember:  reason had no hold on a black man’s mind when his son had just been called a faggot. Maybe it’s the legacy of slavery that caused our violence. We were emasculated and stripped of all semblances of humanity. The only thing we had [left] was our fists and our dicks. We could not raise those fists to massah so we brought them down on each other. The future they gave us was, if you didn’t fuck, you were queer. If you didn't fight, you were queer. Well, I could not debate the anthropological ramification of slavery now; I was 'bout to get my ass kicked by the biggest bully in the neighborhood.

But such, typically, has been in the domain of men and maleness. It was the generalization that black men won't/don't/can't strive for the best that was the underpinning to our nation's post-segregation racism. But these female fight clubs, a.k.a. reality shows, have brought something ugly to the fore---a  piston of anger and rage pummeling many of our young women. I think Ms. Roman's apology and her later talk on the legacy she leaves behind bear the fruit of how to stop this problem. America will consume both the good and bad of us individually. What we must do is to learn how to separate reality from reality tv, and educate our daughters that the consequences to bad public behavior is not your own 15 minutes of fame, but rather a lifetime of potential hurt and rejection. To use that inner strength and  power to not just say what's on your mind but to say what's right is a trait that many want but few exercise.

For you, my reality show battle-cats and wannabes, remember that your legacy should not become a 'funny-but-sad' clip on Talk Soup or Tosh.0.  You should leave not a bloody nose, but an open heart.  And for all of us opening that email right now with the subject line: FW: Hood Fights in the CHITOWN Big Girls on Deck, let us not perpetuate, instigate, celebrate or participate in our young womens'  embarrassing regression. The producers at Bravo, VH1 and Oxygen need no help doing that themselves.

Here Upon the Vast Millennium

I wrote this poem in 1999 shortly after my step-father's death and before the New Year. I was melancholy because I felt that many of the goals I had set myself had gone unmet. This was just a glimmer of hope I had for the coming not only new year, new century but new millennium. I wonder if I've gotten any farther.

The Millennium approaches
and I feel pressure upon me
from empty hands that
idle and hurt.
The whispers of dry mouths
thirsting for fruit.

The Earth sits in ink
with amber shining upon it.
Yet her tears splash on dust
and not a drop to spare.

There are gods of many lands
but there a few faithful,
our brother's conscription at hand.
We sleep and it shows approval.

The Millennium is here
and those hands now must move.
Pitiful refugees, malleable charity.
Let us give forth fruit for our people.
Brothers and sisters are we all.
And a thousand years is not long.

And you thought Eric Northman was the hottest vampire in the south

It’s the story of Eric Peterson, a shy seventeen-year-old, very accomplished All-State clarinetist who falls madly in love with Marquis LeBlanc---a dashingly handsome stranger. They meet while taking a creative writing course at Loyola University. Selected as writing partners, Eric and Marquis exchange stories and poetry. Like most teenage boys, Eric has no control over his libido and wants nothing more than to lose his virginity to the man he’s fallen in love with. Marquis wants nothing more than to love and protect the young man he has become so enamoured with. He is shocked that after so many years of being alone he has developed such intense feelings for another person. He’s also keeping a dark and dangerous secret: Marquis is a 200-year-old vampire.

Image of Emeralds and Chocolate was a relatively nimble and enjoyable read. Eric is a circumspect youngster living in New Orleans whose tentative nature comes from his distinct hair (naturally red-colored dreadlocks) and from him being teased as a chubby child. “Look, it’s porky Ronald McDonald.” Children used to taunt him. He is, as most teenage boys are, overly horny with a “winky” that has a mind of its own. He takes college prep courses at Loyola University where he is also a campus tour guide. He is asked to give a special night time tour to Marquis, and, from that page to the last, he is smitten. Eric and Marquis also take part in a creative writing class where, as a part of their assignment, they have to exchange writings. Eric chooses poetry; Marquis chooses to write a short story.

We read both Eric's and Marquis’ work. Interestingly enough, Marquis’ short story--unbeknownst to Eric--is a chronology of Marquis' life. I actually found the short story-within-a-story much more interesting than the main plotline of the book. Told from Marquis’ first person perspective, we see him grow from a child (whose original name was Emanuel) born into slavery in 1800, into a hellishly handsome field hand sold from plantation to plantation. Johnson skillfully uses Louisiana to his greatest advantage creating a romanticized mythology of the region's great history and topography. When he describes Marquis and his lover Jeremiah bathing alongside the other male slaves in the muddy waters of the Mississippi River you can feel the humidity of their sensuality on your skin creating a breathless scene of taboo beauty. The tale of Mr. LeBlanc's life in a voodoo-laden pre-civil war landscape was lush and rich with legend.

I thought the use of modern colloquialism often hurt the prose since it was set in the 19th century, with some of the descriptions coming off as a bit puerile “…Jeremiah’s back was covered with scars from numerous beatings…while his buttocks looked like two giant chocolate melons.” I liked his version of what can easily be seen as retreaded vampire lore–as well as the ease of these characters with their sexual nature. We often don’t explore gay male sexuality contemporaneously let alone under the moon of the antebellum South. The author handled love and lovemaking between two men as well as the grotesqueries inflicted on slaves by the hands of both Massa and overseer with an unobtrusive matter-of-fact style. (We often see the result of female rape during this time period but male and child rape is rarely examined.)

This story-within-a-story was told with such depth and heartache; it truly is the heart of the book. Once Marquis is turned into a vampire by an evil plantation owner the story gets a bit dicey, however. There’s some contrived carnage and revenge while we find out that all vampires have unique super-powers (like being able to turn objects into gold, or becoming a human torch, or the ability to shoot ice out of one's hands). There’s also a subplot with messianic overtones that took something away from the angst of the characters. At times the author lost control of his story and it felt its most insincere when trying to be relevant historically, like, for example, when Marquis meets a young Barack Obama on the beach in Hawaii in 1968.

Back in the present, Eric is embroiled in a rivalry with another student named Amber over who should be picked to play as the first chair clarinet in the school’s holiday orchestral performance. When it was finally revealed why Amber kept getting the first prize, I was shocked---and not in a good way. This was definitely the weakest part of the story. I almost felt like Mr. Johnson was going for obvious melodrama instead of the solid storytelling that was evident in other parts of the book. Though Eric was the main character, I thought his story lacked completion and I was a bit unfulfilled at the end of the book's journey.

Mr. Johnson is a strong novelist. And when he writes with his heart's conviction I see greatness in his work. His descriptive powers are formidable when setting a scene although it sometimes appears he has an obsession with complexion. He makes sure we all know the many hues the African American characters come in by telling us this one is mocha-honey and that one is caramel-butterscotch. I think his depiction of the vampire Sophia is the most perfect in the book. “Sophia had long auburn hair, hazel eyes and a splash of freckles on both cheeks.” When his writing leaves room for the reader’s imagination it makes for a more delicious experience.

Image of Emeralds and Chocolate is a good work of fiction and I have recommended it to just about everyone. I see a bright future for Mr. Johnson who I think will soon join the ranks of great speculative fiction authors such as Brandon Massey, Nalo Hopkinson and LA Banks. Bravo.