...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