What the Hell is This?

Hello again, folks. Miss me? My writing has lately been interrupted by my pressing need to drink liberal amounts of white wine and watch the entire series of Six Feet Under. I’ve made it all the way to Season Five by now. Somehow being able to laugh about Ruth Fisher’s anal-retentiveness and cry with Nate or David about their various traumas and griefs — set against the backdrop of the Fisher funeral home’s constant stream of deaths — is helping me stay human, stay sane, maybe even stay alive. If I said it before, I’ll say it again: god (or goddess, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster) bless Alan Ball. As Leonard the medicine man observed to Ed Chigliak on another one of my favorite shows of all time, Northern Exposure, movies are “white medicine,” our Westernized equivalent of the native healing story. And Ball’s series is like an ongoing movie. In other words, it’s my medicine.

**

I emailed an apology to Sam last week, for unintentionally contributing to his stress before he left. Doc had urged me not to do so, emphatic that I was not at fault, but right now what I need from Doc is an apology that has not been forthcoming. Sometimes you just have to bite the damn bullet and say you’re sorry. I realized I needed to trust my own intuition on this. Maybe I’m done with external guides.

After over ten years of therapy, I left therapy, with, I imagine, a greater awareness of my issues, and perhaps a greater ability to cope — but no life-altering changes. Now, after three years of coaching, I think it’s time to terminate (even if Doc and I patch things up, which we will, eventually), because while I’ve acquired a few more useful tools (e.g. Doc’s much-touted Voice Dialogue), I’m still mired in much of the same stuck-ness regarding work, money, goals, and (dare I say?) dreams.

“No one really understands what causes change,” says my girlfriend Jeannie, who holds a Master’s in counseling. I grew up with stories of miraculous conversions, and responded to the altar call more than once; in college, I met strident objectivists, fervent Hegelians, and condescending nihilists; within my more recent yoga circle, acolytes gushed about the life-changing wisdom and practices of Yogi Bhajan or Swami Kaleshwar; and Doc was always giving me some new binaural CD to alter my brainwaves. Everyone thought they had the answer, the secret to making life make sense and work for them, and they wanted me to see the light, too. But at the end of the day, watching certain behaviors and struggles continue, regardless of held beliefs to the contrary, I would wonder: what really rewrites our scripts?

What impresses me most about the past few months, regarding my brief but powerful encounter with Sam, is that a profound change occurred in my basic makeup — the kind of change that one can spend years in counseling and not have happen. Internal obstacles that had stood like imposing concrete walls for a lifetime collapsed as if made of poorly glued toothpicks. Big love, it seems, can effect big change. It was love for my atheist best friend, after all, that was pivotal in collapsing my fundamentalist faith in high school — because if everything the “Christians” told me was true, then everything she thought or felt was illegitimate, and not to be trusted.

Sometimes a relationship forces a sort of ultimatum, where you have to choose between a dearly beloved person and your attachment to a certain way of believing or being. Just ask any formerly homophobic PFLAG parent.

**

But speaking of PFLAG, I’ve become a tormented paranoid in the absence of any new information about Sam, coupled with the offhand tidbits and speculations I hear from other people.

I hadn’t mentioned it before, but Rob, Sam’s buddy, prefers men. A number of people assumed that Sam was gay because of their close association. And I did sometimes wonder if Rob harbored feelings for Sam, especially given the truly weird and uncomfortable dynamic between the three of us. But sometime after a conversation with a mutual friend from work, who had thought Sam had been planning to go to Las Vegas for some kind of Hunter S. Thompson adventure, and who had believed him to be questioning his sexuality, I started going slightly crazy with jealous, fear-riddled doubts about nearly everything I believed to be true. Did Sam and Rob have a “thing,” unbeknownst to me? Did Sam really go to the middle east, or did he just not want to tell me where he was actually going? Was the conversation he had with Rob in front of me, about what to tell people regarding his job, staged for my sake?

Rob and I have never related very well, as you know, but over the past six months I’ve watched him transform from a gangly kid with bony knees and nerd glasses into a suave, handsome, vaguely Machiavellian character (now a supervisor), with a hip, flattering wardrobe in just the right color palette. It’s as if he finally got that queer eye for the queer guy. He’s growing his beard out until Sam comes back — which does not reassure me that he isn’t in love with my erstwhile boyfriend — and currently looks kind of like a redheaded Charlton Heston in his Ben-Hur galley-slave incarnation. (Maybe I’m guilty of gross stereotyping, but I do take small comfort in the fact that Sam’s wardrobe consisted entirely of jeans and T-shirts, without any regard to what colors might flatter him.) It does make me wonder for whom Rob made himself so pretty.

It would certainly be ironic, and a rather sad commentary on “straight” guys, wouldn’t it, if the man who ruined me for other men turned out to be not that into women. One of the major differences with Sam was that I never felt the least bit objectified or depersonalized: he always seemed to be making love to me, as a person, and not just playing and getting off with a handy female body (eyes slightly glazed over). In my doubt-ridden moments, of course, I wonder if that meant he liked me so much personally that he made an exception for me. That it was all just an experiment, and one he decided to end without telling me. (Then again, I seem to remember Sam grabbing my broad German-frau booty on more than one occasion, as if he really liked it.)

So I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything to any of these speculations. Oftentimes when one latches onto a specific hypothesis, the mind starts to fill in the blanks, and suddenly the circumstances and facts seem to support it. In other words, we find what we’re looking for. And I’m definitely more inclined to believe something is true if it makes me feel bad.

It makes me feel bad, to think about Sam being secretly involved with Rob. Cold, and somehow not good enough. Afraid that he lied to me. And very, very foolish.

**

The other part of that hypothetical scenario is just as disturbing, because it thrusts Sam more deeply into a world I was actually happy to see him leave. Having to give him up completely was a little easier if I could frame his departure as something he needed to do for the sake of his own physical and mental well-being. Of late I’ve been listening to trip-hop band Massive Attack, notably this early hit –

Midnight rockers, city slickers
Gunmen and maniacs
All are featured on the freak show
And I can’t do nothin’ ‘bout that, no, no
But if you hurt what’s mine
I’ll sure as hell retaliate

You can free the world, you can free my mind
Just as long as my baby’s safe from harm tonight

I love that chorus precisely because it seems to be saying: go ahead, be rebels, be revolutionaries, insist on expanding my mind like Timothy Leary, just don’t let anything bad happen to my baby. Which is pretty much where I’m at. But more on that presently.

I do realize that no American can be entirely safe from harm hanging out in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a different kind of gambling than the kind Sam ostensibly left behind. He was so annoyed when his friends got upset and cried about his voluntary “deployment”…I wasn’t the only one whose fretting for his safety inspired his wrath. He might have been overwhelmed by his own mixed emotions, and unable to deal with all of ours. Maybe it’s difficult for a lifelong outsider to cope with a sudden explosion of concern. “He probably has problems receiving,” was Doc’s comment.

I hope he was telling us the truth, at least, about where he was going. In an earlier post I know I speculated about whether he had gone back to his parents’ home to “fade away” — one of my more dire scenarios — but I have a dozen of them. In some versions, he’s losing his life, in others just his mind (my counselor girlfriend started musing about schizophrenia), and in still others he just wants to get away from me, that crazy, needy woman who cried when she couldn’t reach him on the phone for a couple of days. Sam was a pleaser who took care of people; maybe he didn’t have the heart to tell me he wanted to break up with me.

I hate that I’m not sure, now, where he is. I hate that I’m obsessing about all these crazy-making things. In the end, I know Sam has to attend to his necessities, whatever they may be, and they may be legion, and take up most of his time, but I also know I deserve some kind of communication — even if it’s just a breakup fuck-you emailed from an all-male Libertarian meth compound in Reno. We briefly shared a reality, a private universe — what was for me, at times, a kind of paradise — which has since been assailed by every manner and variety of doubt imaginable. The darkest part about living in perennial uncertainty, depending upon neither Jesus nor Ayn Rand nor Swami Kaleshwar to tell you what’s what, is that you can start to doubt your own judgment, even your own experience.

And my only partner in this particular experience has vanished, leaving me to my freakouts and conspiracy theories.

**

On a different note, I was remembering calling Rick one Sunday afternoon in May to find out if he wanted to meet that evening. He told me he’d spent Saturday night out drinking with Sam. Apropos of nothing, he asked if I was religious at all, and mentioned that Sam was Catholic. “I’m not really into self-improvement,” he joked, “like a lot of the other people at work.” He seemed reluctant to make plans with me that night. I caught the unexpected vibe that he wanted to nudge me toward Sam, as if he thought the two of us would be more compatible than he and I were. (I even wondered if he knew something I didn’t, e.g. that Sam had taken notice of me.) I was vaguely irritated by this unspoken intimation, thinking at the time that I had no interest in Sam, and every interest in Rick. But of course Rick turned out to be right. He and Sam would become buddies, Rick would get sent back to jail…and the rest you know.

**

There’s another phrase my mother would love: Rick would get sent back to jail. I once noted, during the days of Rick, that I’ve had better luck, sexually and otherwise, with men who are current or former users of illegal substances. For many people, certainly the mainstream of society, this signals a serious character flaw or psychological dysfunction on my part as well as theirs. I would have judged myself harshly for this too, during my first two or three decades, having been effectively programmed by my parents, Ronald Reagan, and After School Specials to fear and loathe non-FDA-approved mind-altering chemicals and the freaks who supposedly ingested them.

Use always equals addiction, and addiction is always equated with personal weakness, a lack of the ability to cope with life that the “well-adjusted” and responsible citizenry allegedly have. But as you may have noticed, I no longer buy that we live and act in a vacuum where we can triumphantly master the universe through our personal will (as much as that goes against our national mythology). As you may have noticed, I find the cultural frameworks around us deeply dysfunctional themselves. Both James Baldwin and Jiddu Krishnamurti, men whose writings I turn to like a compass (maybe there’s at least a couple of guides I trust) pointed out that there’s nothing particularly healthy about being well-adjusted in a sick society. Maybe it’s not so incongruous that Buddhist master and Shambhala founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a raging alcoholic.

**

Statistics can be interesting. Two-thirds of attendees at Alcoholics Anonymous are men. An extensive American study found that over one third of the male population has been dependent on alcohol or drugs at some stage of their lives. The figure for women was exactly half that. Alcohol and drug abuse were strongly associated with an increased suicide rate in men.

From this I do not conclude that men are somehow weaker than women, any more than I conclude that higher incarceration rates indicate moral inferiority among minorities. I believe instead that this is merely indicative of what both my own personal observations and independent studies (about addiction, Western culture, and men) have led me to conclude: that males of the species possessing any sensitivity or impulse toward authenticity whatsoever simply cannot “adjust” to Western patriarchal capitalist culture and its demands without explicit damage to their mental and emotional well-being. Damage that, given no opportunity to heal (or even be acknowledged), often leads them to seek release, escape, or at least some form of anaesthesia. This subject could be a thesis in itself, but I’m not going to make one of this post. (Suggested reading: The Hazards of Being Male by Herb Goldberg, anything by Warren Farrell,  Stiffed by Susan Faludi…not to mention my oft-quoted Carol Gilligan favorite.)

I don’t recoil from things like drug addiction or attempted suicide as if they were contagious diseases or shameful personal failings. I actually consider them to be symptoms of a sick society. Much like the inordinate rate of depression in American women.

**

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz…

Those are, of course, the opening lines to Allen Ginsberg’s notorious paroxysm of a poem, “Howl,” his heaving tribute to the Beat generation.

My favorite minds of my own generation, like Damien Moreau and Tony DeRocca, were great admirers of William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg’s lifetime friend (and onetime lover) and the Beat least palatable to the general public, who wrote bannable book after bannable book.

These days, for Sam and the intelligent rebels of his generation, old Bill seems to have been replaced by the more contemporary Hunter S. Thompson, but the two men had more than a few things in common. Both were vociferously pro-drug, pro-gun, and anti-government; both yearned for a return to a (somewhat romanticized) frontier society; both were known for the anarchic subjectivity of their hallucinatory prose: Burroughs for his autobiographical “routines” featuring alter ego William Lee, and Thompson for his “gonzo” journalism that inserted him into the story as a central character. Both found the values and modus operandi of the American system corrupt and destructive to human beings. “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,” said Burroughs, “the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.”  “In a nation run by swine,” wrote Thompson, “all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.”

Academic David Savran wrote an interesting book (another for the reading list) ten years ago called Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. He has quite a bit to say about Burroughs and the Beats, and the effect of this postwar consumer culture on white guys in general (who are supposed to be the powerful ones), most of which is too dense and layered to go into here. He quotes Norman Mailer, who (in his essay “The White Negro”) talks about the (Beat) hipster as “postmodernist subject,” “the fragmented, decentered, ephemeral subject of late capitalism” — a male essentially stripped of history, continuity, meaning, or identity, and basically lost in the supermarket, so to speak (to borrow from a band Sam and I both like).

Analyzing “Howl,” Savran asserts quite graphically that “the ‘best minds,’ having introjected the god (‘Moloch,’ or American industrial capitalism), attempt to exorcise him by allowing themselves masochistically to be penetrated, adulterated, maddened, befouled — in short, feminized — by various sharp metallic objects, drugs, poisons, and cocks. Grisly variations upon the subjects of postwar commodity culture, they are sickened and destroyed by that which they compulsively and helplessly consume.”

I’d agree with Savran that mind-altering substances can “feminize” men, in a sense,  but not in the masochistic and unnecessarily degrading way he (and perhaps Ginsberg) seems to mean here. Breaking down boundaries and inhibitions, drugs allow for a fuller range of emotion, perception, sense, color…almost exactly the opposite of that “flattening of voice” that Carol Gilligan watched happen in young boys as they became socialized for elementary school. Drugs not only bring relief from pain, but they can also, at least temporarily, open up shut-down capacities and faculties and enable a richer experience, a whole other spectrum of aliveness.

**

I am thinking again of Tony, that self-proclaimed hermit who wrote like a belligerent and even misogynistic version of the rock critic Lester Bangs — with a lot of sound and fury — but in person he came across as fragile, as if he might dissolve like spun sugar if you handled him too hard. He was a disturbing sort of handsome, intense and bony, with long, grey-streaked curls, and always seemed to be watching me with smoldering dark eyes. For a long time I averted my gaze uncomfortably from those smoldering dark eyes. But when I finally turned mine his way, he literally, visibly flinched, as if my focused attention physically hurt him. He would eventually push me away with violent protestations.

It was for Tony’s sake, for Damien’s sake, for Sonny’s and unknowingly for Sam’s sake that I tackled my independent studies in sociology, as well as for my own. These were highly intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive men, after all; it didn’t make sufficient sense to me to conclude that their affinity for chemicals and my affinity for them just meant that we were all similarly pathological (compared to some normative and faceless John Q. Public) and leave it at that. Maybe we are all misfits in a system where “fitting in” is its own kind of pathological. Of course there’s always a choice involved, but it’s naive to say that the alternative to being high is preferable to being high. Maybe one can’t blame society for all of one’s ills, but neither can one take personal responsibility for everything that’s wrong with our collective picture.

The 12-step Serenity Prayer says it all, actually, when it invokes one’s deity of choice to “grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” It recognizes that we are neither the masters of the universe nor its hapless pawns; we are fumbling along somewhere in between.

And god help us.

**

The wallpaper on my laptop is a photo of Sam, my only photo of Sam, but it wasn’t taken by me or by anyone I know.  It’s an arty black-and-white shot that somehow wound up being appropriated from one of Sam’s former Internet presences (he wiped out all online Sammage because of thefts like this) and is for sale on a stock photo site. In the shot, his head is down, his brow propped against one wrist; he looks like a man at the end of his rope. So far it’s been used in print ads about addiction and mental illness, and has even made an appearance on a national TV talk show. It seems oddly appropriate that Sam’s image has been turned into a public signifier for stigmatized, tormented outsiders. I feel a pang every time I see it.

Sam’s retreat into silence may forever be a mystery to me, I may wonder ever after what was really going on with this young man who made me so very happy so very briefly, but regardless, he will always be the man who changed me. Sam changed me, in ways that no book, no counselor, no guide, no religion, no system, no theory, no practice, and no drug — prescribed or otherwise — has ever done.

I will always love him for that.

Now if I could just go on without him.