May 31, part two: why... (5 minutes)

...did I let that security guard intimidate me?
...didn't I remember to take Dillon's harness?
...did I call Johnny today?
...am I such a liar?
...did I let my whiteness and his blackness come up for me, make me act different?
...can't I let it go?
...is it still with me?
...aren't I meditating?
...am I not finished with my novel?
...am I whining?
...didn't I feel more inclined to be generous?
...do I beat myself up so much?
...ask why?
...am I in chronic pain?
...am I here?
...is that man's face stuck in my head?
...why am I such a racist?
...can't I do better?
...shouldn't I learn from this experience?
...do I feel threatened?
...was it so hard not to lose my cool?
...did I think I was cool at all?
...am I so beat?
...am I such a sugar addict?
...shouldn't I be proud of myself?
...not?

May 31, part one: village (10 minutes)

Rice Village Houston, sitting outside of a Thai restaurant, waiting for two orders of pad thai -- one mild, one spicy; one shrimp, one veggie -- to take back to the hospital for John and myself.

Back in Houston again, blah, blah, blah.

I needed to kill some extra time so I went into the five-and-dime store. A pixie of a little woman sparkled and cooed and asked me if she could help me. I was looking for a wooden fruit juicer, had found the glass and plastic ones. She was so upset that she didn't have them. "Nope," she said after surveying the general area briefly, "we haven't seen any of those for at least a couple of years."

One wants to buy something when visiting a five-and-dime. There are so many trinkets, gadgets, knick-knacks, crap, useful stuff, it's all thrown in together. I walked up and down the crowded aisles and left with a book of Mad Libs! Something to do with John later perhaps.

I don't love Houston but I do love the Village. Or I did. The old Village. Back when I lived here -- almost twenty years ago now! -- I wanted so badly to work in the Village. Eventually I did. My seriously self-hating boyfriend Billy worked at a patisserie, was friends with the manager of the Half-Price Books, which was where I got a job. Marcie worked a door or two away from me at a fancy girl shop, but I didn't know Marcie all that well then, or not right then or something. I kind of dropped all of my old friends when I hooked up with Jo, got married.

Funny, Marcie married Joe's son Jason's ex-girlfriend Monica's brother Jeff. That was kind of how Marcie and I got reacquainted.

Well, we never lost contact completely. We used to write each other beautiful, elaborate notes. Letters. Hers came from all over the world, mine came from the Heights.

May 30: stiff (20 minutes)

I love the way a clothesline-dried bath towel feels, all stiff and rough and super-absorbent. We have a washing machine! But we don't have a dryer. There isn't any outside ventilation for a dryer, but that's okay, we're saving money, and apparently saving our clothes, too, according to a friend I lived with in Nashville. He was a laundry-nazi (if that isn't too un-PC to say; if it is: oops!). He had a washer and a dryer, but he only put clothes and other laundry items in the dryer for five or ten minutes, "just long enough to get the wrinkles out," he said.

He brought me a pair of brand new overalls from his work one time, 36" long. But they were way long on me. I told him that they must make their overalls long and he said, "Or you're just used to your clothes getting shrunk in the dryer."

I liked the way the overalls felt, too, thick and stiff, but there seemed to be so much extra fabric that I didn't wear them a lot. Also, denim is pretty warm as a fabric when it's all new and thick, not worn down by tumbling to complete dryness. My friend was annoyingly right about a lot of things.

We don't have a dryer, but we have a clothesline. Actually, we have two, one outside and another inside. It's in the middle room, the living room, some would call it, but now I call it the living/laundry room! I put three hooks in the frames of two doors and one window, high up so we don't decapitate ourselves going through the house. It's kind of eccentric, I guess, but I guess I like that. Our whole living situation is pretty eccentric, truth be told.

The front room, which was most likely the original living room, is my bedroom. I hung a bamboo curtain inside the front door to create a sort of foyer, or at least to create the effect of not entering into a bedroom. But it's still a bedroom. Now it's kind of a bedroom/office with a bamboo curtain partition.

My front window curtain is an old sheet, but it's a groovy sheet, with big orange and red flowers on it, and I hung it up in a way that it doesn't looking like just a sheet. The other windows have a bedspread, I think, hung across them with clippy-rings. I think it's a bedspread. I got it at a resale shop. It has a backing, hand-sewn, and a forest scene with a deep red background, a close match to the wall color.

The middle room, besides being a living/laundry room, has a colorful shower curtain on the windows. Plus, it has a pillow case-sized hole in the ceiling from a plumber who came and couldn't fix the plumbing and didn't fix the hole. Another plumber fixed the plumbing but not the hole in the ceiling. I covered it with a pillow case; that's how I know how big it is. A standard pillow case.

The kitchen has the washing machine in it, so I guess it's an eat-in kitchen/laundry room.

Steven's bedroom/office is in the back of the house. He has no curtains on two windows, but a grove of bamboo outside gives him plenty of privacy. On the other two windows, he has actual curtains hanging on actual curtain hooks and an actual curtain rod. I got the curtains at the same resale shop before he moved here, didn't know where to put them so I kept them in a trunk. They're old and pretty groovy, cream-colored with greenish and brownish designs on them that sort of mimic the bamboo outside.

The bathroom is just a bathroom (sigh!), but the landing between the kitchen, Steven's room and the bathroom has the door to a junk closet, which I hung a curtain in front of. I asked Steven if he liked it when I hung it up. He said, "It's kind of eccentric," but he didn't say he didn't like it. I took that as a compliment, by the way.

I like our eccentric little pad. That's just the way a couple of ex-partner/best friends/once and occasional co-creators should live. It's a comfortable existence -- anything but stiff -- even with all of the slashes!

May 29: Titz (30 minutes)

She's in the yard, in the wild side, taming it, tramping down the wildflowers and exotic grasses, nestled at the base of the pecan tree between the large cactus -- its last yellow blooms fallen and pale and rotting in the dirt -- and the old porch swing, put out there on a small table with legs (short table, not small). Her bed is dirt black, rick earth, she spends most of the day in it, scratching up a few more weeds, clearing out a slightly larger place to be, a slightly cooler place to bed.

Sometimes she roams the neighborhood, acts like she owns the neighborhood, even though she hasn't been around all that long, six months maybe, since the last cold spell. She just appeared one cool afternoon, making a ruckus, running scared if you got to near her, unless you were a dog; she seems to like dogs, a lot.

She's a dog herself, a stray bitch, though her littering days are long behind her. She has six or eight knobs on her underside, black knobs like dried up berries, she carries them under her yellow tank of a body. There's a sprinkling of black around her neck, ears and snout, and on the tip of her bottle brush tail, but other than that, she's yellow, blond maybe.

But she's no dummy, just a sad case, wandering through the cemetery -- an eight-block square with a busy road down the middle of it. A couple of neighbors spotted her sleeping in the tall grasses around some of the graves when they were there running their dog. They didn't encourage her, but she took it upon herself to follow them home, follow their dog home anyway. And they put out food which she timidly ate but only when they left her alone for a long time.

They built a tee pee (maybe a pup tent is a better choice!) filled and covered with old blankets and cushions. She slept in the vacant lot for a couple of nights then made her way to the bed, to the front porch of their house, near the bowl of food. They started calling her Titz, for obvious reasons.

She was sickly, everybody gossiped about her in the neighborhood, nobody thought she would live long. The girlfriend of the college biker boy across the street put food out for her, too, but she wouldn't call her Titz. She called her Bella; there was no rhyme or reason for that.

She lived through the cold months. She barked ferociously at humans, at the people walking down the street; she would "chase" them from a safe distance down the middle of the street until they were on the next block or around a corner. She decided she did own the neighborhood, decided that it was her neighborhood, planned to protect it from all the humans. Only dogs were allowed.

Of course, we didn't let her chase us away. We all knew she was more afraid of us than we were of her, we knew she wouldn't actually hurt us. Not only was her bark worse than her bite, it seemed to be all there was.

One day a large, crooked old woman showed up in front of the neighbor's house in a car belching gray smoke. Titz didn't run from her, she wagged her tail at her. The old woman opened the hatch on her car and brought out a bowl, a bag of food and a container of raw hamburger. She clicked and clucked the entire time she was there; Titz never stopped wagging her tail. The old lady left the food in the front yard and drove off and Titz ate the food happily, wagging her tail, smiling about the old woman.

At the time Titz was skinny and sickly. The woman came by every day. For many days the neighbors weren't at home when she came so they had no idea where the food was coming from. They asked around and all of us neighbors gave our particular version of the story. Some talked about the way the woman looked, others focused more on the sounds she made, while others talked about the car. Everybody mentioned the raw hamburger. But that was no surprise to the neighbors because they were suddenly inundated with flies, inside and outside of their house.

The man neighbor decided he had to talk to the old woman, had to ask her -- or tell her -- not to bring the raw meat every day; Titz wasn't eating all of it so other strays were coming around and their dog was getting her fill of it as well.

The old woman told him that the dog had belonged to the people she lived next to in the neighborhood on the far side of the cemetery. They were drug dealers and all around no-good neighbors. They kept the dog on a short chain, bred her and mistreated the puppies to make them mean and entered them in dog fights. Then one day they moved away and left Titz behind. She was no longer doing her job. So the old woman fed her until she could get close enough to her to cut her loose. The dog immediately ran off. The old woman had been searching for her for a while, worried about her.

So how can I be upset about a sad old dog sleeping in my yard, tramping the wildflowers and exotic grasses?

May 28: asleep (22 minutes)

I knew I had fallen asleep when I woke up, but not much else; everything was a blur, the clouds were a blur, in the sky directly above me, blue and anticipating, the clouds were like cuttlefish, like dead cuttlefish, dehydrated and wired to the inside of a parakeet's cage.

The cat looks through the window from the four-by-four separating this side of the yard from that side of the yard, a little skirt of redwood around him, on either side. He can see the big wire cage hanging over the dining room bar, high but not so high as to prevent a clever cat from getting to it. He can't quite tell if the wide wire bars are wide enough to allow a quick swipe of his paw. He knows that if he can swipe at the bird, all enclosed and thwarted from free movement, he can finish it off at the wires and pull it through piece by piece, if necessary.

There is a hole in the door, for the entry of creatures smaller than people. That is where the cat supposes he will be able to make his entrance into the house. The bar is right there inside the door; it's a quick hop up to the cage, to the tasty blue and yellow snack of feathers, meat, and bones.

Right now as he watches through the window, the bird nervously sharpens its beak on the cuttlefish hanging on the wire like some kind of trophy, as if the bird actually went out a'fishin' and caught a cuttlefish and had it dried and brought it back to the cage for display. As if. The cat knows better than this!

The other thing the cat knows is that there is a dog that comes in and out of that door in the door. A big dog, its sides both touch both sides of the door when he comes or goes. It's a fat old dog but it's not as slow as it looks. The cat knows this because he has hidden and seen the dog running in the back yard chasing balls, practicing to catch the likes of him, a cat. The dog shakes the ball in its mouth, back and forth. If the ball had legs they would be flailing about; if the ball had fur it would be punctured in the dog's mouth and bits of it along with blood and guts would be slinging about. That's what that dog is about, the cat knows this.

And so he tries to devise a plan for getting into the house and onto the bar under the cage without the old dog catching him, without the fat old dog even hearing him.

He wakes up and realizes he has been asleep, asleep on the fence, watching the window, inside of which there is no bird cage, no bird, not even a dog. There on the kitchen floor a big furry cat sits bathing himself, washing his front paws then washing his face, washing the long mottled hairs that grow on his back, his bushy tail. Licking like he's just had a snack, a snack given him by the cat owner who lives there, who goes away and leaves bowls of food and water out then comes home again after being gone for a long while and puts more food out, and pets the cat, runs a hand from his nose to his tail, tip to tip. The cat on the fence can't hear it but he knows the cat in the house is purring, is content, happy, a full belly, a loving hand.

The cat thinks he would rather not have such luxuries. He prefers the freedom of the outdoors, chasing, hunting, sleeping when he wants to. He moves to a fresh stretch of fence, a cool piece of redwood with slats on both sides. He is a wild cat, wiry and small, and he can lie flat and not be detected by anyone or any thing and he likes it like this.

He falls asleep and dreams he is on a couch, in a house, he sees a lap and he goes to it, stretches out on it, a hand caresses his bony back, his spine arches toward the human hand. Across the room a bowl of food sits waiting, partially eaten, otherwise untouched. He considers it awhile but knows it will be there later, and so he falls asleep as the caressing hand slowly halts its motion, or maybe not, the cat is asleep, dreaming he is a wild cat in a wild jungle, hunting a helpless prey, a wild bird, something big and colorful, feathers, meat, and bones.

May 27: Randy (10 minutes)

I don't know why I said I never took anyone home before. That was a lie, or at the very least an untruth. No, a lie; let's call it what it is. I grew up telling lies, not calling them that, but just making things up, elaborate answers to simple questions, just, I suppose, to see if I could.

What I should have said was that I never took anyone home without planning on having sex with him. He was the first. It was, I believe, my first act of charity -- or compassion is a better word for it. We eventually did have sex, but it was something different, it was something we got around to, an unavoidable thing for gay men (or for me at any rate) if I spend a certain amount of time, "sleeping time," in the same room as another man. It doesn't really matter what he looks like; it matters almost as little what his dick looks like, just that he has one is all that's important, that he have one at least long enough to stimulate my prostate, I've come to realize.

August had a nice cock. A nice enough dick to be called a cock. In my view, they're all dicks, regardless of size, but the ones that are useful for sticking up my ass, those I call cocks. They don't have to be all that big to qualify. My own dick, slightly less than average, could be a cock on another body, on a "top," if you prefer to call it that (I do not because I am opposed to the term "bottom" for myself), but on me it is just a dick. And really, August's was hardly more than a dick as well.

What a shame, a shame that we thought we could ever be compatible. I'm not sure, but I would venture to guess that on that first night we actually decided to go through with it, when we discovered that both our dicks were unsheathed in our pajamas, that we lay there four legs in the air, two puckering assholes waiting to be plunged, before we repositioned ourselves and tried for something different, something a little more natural for the both of us. And it was a shame that August's beautiful cock was wasted, relegated to the position of snug against his belly instead of inside me. But I couldn't stay hard inside him and he couldn't stay hard inside me, and eventually we reverted to the less spectacular but much "safer" 69. When I say it lacked spectacle, I mean on August's part mostly because I am a champion cocksucker and he was not.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about August. Maybe it wasn't my ass in particular, maybe for him it was ass in general. The fact that he wound up with a woman was my first clue, no matter that her name was Roberta and that she was fairly butch.

May 25: lean (20 minutes)

The sunflowers stand nine feet tall, two inches thick at the bottoms, reaching up, up, up, green, green, green, then yellow, bursts like fireworks, red-gold centers, off-center, the petals on one side one-and-a-half times as long as on the other. They're smirking.

The tallest, biggest one with the most puckered green mouths not yet exploding open, is leaning toward the street, heavy, a thick arm, leaning under its own weight. I drove a small stake into the ground on the other side and tied a piece of brown yarn near the bottom, above the bottom leaves, big green heart-shapes with holes in them where the fuzzy black-and-orange worms have taken liberties, made snacks of the greenery. I pulled the yarn taut, tied it in a bow on the other side of the stake, leaned the giant flower back toward the yard, back into the garden.

Rain came throughout the day, a heavy shower brought a flurry of ice pellets, little flat marbles clear and cold, sparkling on the ground, rat-a-tatting on the earth, the tops of cars, the sidewalk, the black top street, my back. I was out snipping flowers--not sunflowers, the zinnias growing up at the bases of the sunflowers, bright zinnias, pale zinnias, variegated zinnias, yellow, red, orange, pink and dusty rose, all the colors of the red end of the spectrum, in fact, even purple, but not blue or green. All leaning together, swaying in the breeze, flowing like children at their mother's tattered apron.

Across the street a house is empty, the windows are open, workers are fixing it up, getting it ready for new tenants. In the front yard a matte black mailbox with its shiny red flag down, is leaning awkwardly back, like a drinker doing a shot, like a drunk man falling back on his thin black leg. One leg on the mailbox, not nearly as big as the stalks on the sunflowers, barely enough to hold it upright, not in the moist earth from all this rain.

At the end of the day, the brown yarn is slack, the big sunflower leans another way, not going along with my plan. It's like she wants to get up and walk away, down the street to another yard where there aren't any flowers, where the last of the pomegranate flowers are falling like bright red drops of blood to the ground.

More red like tomatoes, tomatoes ready to be stewed, dinnertime in the neighborhood. The neighbors are having a dinner party with lots of guests; somebody parked in front of the garden, in front of the sunflowers. We met some of those guests the last time they had a dinner party. Last time, we were invited. It was a last minute thing. It always is. One guy whose name I don't recall spotted me as he walked out onto the front porch with a beer, into the front yard, between the trees. He spotted me and leaned back to say hello, tipped his beer in my direction. I responded. I don't feel like going to a dinner party tonight. I didn't say that. I didn't have to. I wasn't asked. We smiled, he went about his business; the men laughed on the front porch, the women laughed inside. Their laughter made them lean back, lean back to laugh, leaning, leaning, further; careful or you'll fall off your chair!

I looked around at the green yard, the flowers, the green beans, peppers, black earth, vibrant green. I feel good, full of the life around me, feel myself leaning forward, leaning, leaning toward the garden.

May 24, part two: faces (15 minutes)

• tall head with angles accentuated by strong jaw muscles from constantly chewing gum; dark hair, messy, unattended, as if it were plopped on top as an afterthought...
• prominent cheek bones, weak chin, spooked eyes, dark circles, open wide; little mouth which purses when he smiles. forehead hidden behind a great down-swoop of bangs...
• a small cube on his shoulders, frameless glasses, animated features--eyebrows that accentuate words, tongue that pops out like a jack; squinty eyes, acne scars at the temples...
• inverted triangle, prominent forehead, overhanging eyebrows, long hooked nose, innocent smile, crew cut and long sideburns...
• bulbous nose, large flat ears pressed flat against the sides of the head, indentations in the skull making nooks to keep them in. eyes close together. shaved head and new goatee coming out around a lipless mouth, obviously to give his face some sort of structural sense...
• teeth, wide teeth, a little bucked on the top row, dimples deep in fat cheeks, an extra chin, thin John Waters mustache, out-of-date plastic glasses...
• silvery hair, whiter at the ends and around the ears. severely wrinkled forehead. bright blue eyes...
• blond, blond hair, skinny face, red scabs on each cheek bone, one gold earring, one missing tooth (canine)...
• reddish-brown beard, well groomed, pale green eyes, huge pupils, baby fat, pouty lips...
• high forehead, shiny black hair, prominent chin, jawline, big lips, top one with two pointy peaks. long slender nose, caramel colored skin...
• almost nonexistent eyebrows, long curly eyelashes, cleft chin, rugged skin, five o'clock shadow...
• reading glasses on the three-balled end of his nose, prominent purple bottom lip, kinky salt and pepper hair on the bottom of his chin, bags under his eyes curving around to the tops of his cheeks. big flappy ears....
  

May 24, part one: overheard (10 minutes)

Waiting for a plane, trying to read, a young woman came and sat right next to me and started talking loudly on her cell phone, so I started jotting down what I heard and what I could remember.

I would be the best anti-drug advocate because I have done all of that and it's just stupid. I started doing drugs when I was 12 and lived in a shit little town outside of Houston and I needed guidance and I didn't have any and I was bored so there was nothing else to do except get messed up and now it's different. I live in a big city now!

I don't know if I told you this, but my mom is bipolar and she was in and out of mental hospitals when I was younger. I mean, it's not hard. It's nothing to be ashamed of; I mean, it's not like it's my fault or anything. It's not hard because of the drugs. It's hard when she's not on the drugs. But I know how she can be; she can be good, she can have a normal life, I've seen that, if she just wouldn't mess up like she's been doing lately.

My mom got divorced from my stepdad and we've been alone since then. For the last ten years he was taking care of me and my mother and my brother and I was a spoiled brat. But now she doesn't have him anymore and she's not doing anything, she's not trying to get a job or anything, she's just living off of the alimony. I got a job 'cause I don't want to be poor.

We have nice things, we have a nice things, we have a nice place to live and all that but we can't necessarily afford it all. I mean, we can afford the rent!

I don't know how I'm gonna get around Dallas. My brother better let me use his car or I'm gonna have a hissy fit. I said my brother better let me use his car or I'm gonna have a hissy fit.

I'm going to Austin. Isn't that ironic? Your name is Austin and I'm going to Austin. It's all around me. And every time I see it I think of you.

May 23: Mexicans for hire (30 minutes)

Mexicans stood outside of Home Depot, around the parking lot, all types, fat ones, skinny ones, ugly ones, handsome ones, strong- and weak-looking ones, laughing ones and quiet ones off by themselves, under trees, sitting, or standing at the entrance to the parking lot in groups, looking for work, waiting for someone to drive by-- or not even some one, maybe just looking for a truck or any kind of vehicle that might have meant work. Some of them had a water bottle, a gallon jug filled from the sink at home, or maybe a soda, something orange or brown. Some wore work boots, others running shoes or completely inappropriate shoes, their only pair, perhaps.

It was getting on about lunchtime and I was sure every one of them was hungry, but I couldn't afford to feed them all. But I hunger, too. I knew it would work because the one guy waved at me as I drove into the parking lot. Me of all people!, I thought to myself, in a sedan. He waved at me to get my attention. Take me! Take me! I knew it would work, but he wasn't the one I pulled up to. My car would be overtaken if I pulled up to his group. And he wasn't right, a little too rough around the edges. I knew they were all that way but I had the luxury of picking exactly the one who was right for the job. That was my prerogative, I had the car; I was the White Man with the car and the job.

At the far end of the parking lot a boy looking no older than 12 or 13 sat by himself under a pine tree. He wore a tank top and baggy jeans, work boots that looked like skis they were so big. I wondered if they were hand-me-downs or found (or stolen), or if they really fit him. He would be perfect for the job. And he was far enough away from the others that I didn't feel too self-conscious driving up to him. He was sitting under a pine tree, sitting slouched under a tall, straight, stiff tree, a tree in formation, a triangle of trees, landscaping, bowling pins on the grassy bank next to the freeway and he was the bowling ball, all brown and smooth and perfect.

As I pulled into a parking spot next to where he sat, he popped up, just in case, dusted off the seat of his pants; ready. I rolled down my window and motioned him over with a tip of my head. "I've never done this before." I wanted to tell him I'd never done this before, but that seemed foolish, or at the very least just wrong. 11:52 on my dashboard. I asked him if he was hungry, he said he was. Are you gonna work today?, I asked him. He didn't know what I was talking about. I told him I didn't have work for him, yet, but I would be willing to buy him lunch and then bring him back here. He understood that, got in the car. We went to Lot-A-Burger and I nibbled on onion rings while he devoured, devoured a double fish sandwich, french fries and a large chocolate shake.

We didn't talk. I didn't know what to say, purposefully put the onion rings into my mouth at awkward angles, bites too big so I wouldn't be able to talk around them. He didn't seem to care, he just ate his food, his mouth stuffed full like a nervous gerbil, and smiled big showing partially chewed food through a missing tooth whenever our eyes met. My heart thumped the entire time. When he was finally done, he put his napkin wad in the paper sandwich boat and pushed his tray away. I picked it up, took it to the big industrial garbage cube and stuffed everything but the tray in. He was at my heels, maybe thinking he should be doing that. But I didn't want him to feel subservient. I wanted him to know he had some power, that I had given him some power.

I thought maybe I should go through with it but chickened out. We didn't talk back to Home Depot. Most of the Mexicans were gone when we got there. I was afraid I had prevented him from getting work and I said so, said I hope I didn't lose you a job. He said what? I said everybody's gone. He said they went home. Then he did a curious, sweet thing; he pushed up his shirt and rubbed his bare stomach and said, "They went home hungry!" He smiled. I asked him his name, he said Juan Carlos, I said Frederick and wondered if he'd lied about his name, too. I told him I would come by again if I had work, said I would look for him; he said he would be there in the same place, and I said again that I would look for him and he said he wanted me to, and I wondered if he knew what I was getting at.

May 22: cat (6 minutes)

emergency! cat pee! red cat pee! but not bloody cat pee, just red. red pee that turns kind of golden colored when it dries. goldenrod. on the throw pillow, which I threw out. on a couple of t-shirts, which I threw out. one with a roadrunner on it. the roadrunner. but I'll never get that smell out. I don't know about the stain. I just threw it out. Marcie gave me a couple of pills for bladder problems for Timmy because he's been acting weird, going to the box a lot, not always peeing, sometimes peeing a little, sometimes peeing the regular amount. and then I had to go out of town, had to take John to the emergency room in Houston. got back today. Steven said Timmy's been peeing everywhere. I decided to take him to the vet. I was trying to avoid that. feeling money crunched, that's why I let Marcie talk me into giving him her over the counter bladder pills. they'll make your pee red, she said, and they did. not mine, his. pee on the chair cushions, pee on my shirts I put on the chairs to keep him from peeing on the chairs, but that only works if he's being territorial, not if he has a legitimate urinary problem. and so I threw those shirts out. I might have to throw the chairs out, too.

May 20: thoughts for chapter seven (40 minutes)

I never met another boy (or man) who could live up to the high bar set early in my life by Rich White. Looks-wise, I mean. And so I didn't even really try. I never was much to look at even in my younger years, what with my frizzy red hair and short stature, so I wasn't one to be making demands on others in the looks department and so I just never did. But being that I was a Scorpio, I guess, and born on Halloween no less, it wasn't like I had the option of being chaste or saintly. Those strikes against me, or in my favor according to who you ask, sent me on an endless search for sex in the lowliest of places.

I was told more than once that I had a nice ass, and I spent a good amount of time sizing it up in the privacy of my apartment, and so I decided that was my best feature, my best asset. That and my sarcastic humor. Over the years as I went from young and naive to old and bent over from snorting coke and tossing back Southern Comfort like it was punch at a Jim Jones retreat, that became less of an asset -- my biting humor I'm talking about now -- and so I've worked toward reigning it in. It got a lot easier when I got on Interstate 10 going maybe 55 miles per hour in Mona's junker Dodge Dart. If it hasn't come through in my writing, this humor I keep bragging about, won't shut up about, I guess that's a good sign.

I've always believed, however, that my ass would be the last part of me to go, and I still believe that to be true, if my experiences in the various rest stops from Florida to Texas are any testament. There are twelve rest stops on westbound I-10 in the stretch I was on for ___ days and nights, and I'll be damned if I didn't stop at thirteen of them. (This was possible because I was so obsessed with stopping at each and every one of them -- because of the mysteries and promises they held -- that I turned around and drove back east for an embarrassing amount of time when I thought I'd missed one and stopped at a rest stop on that side of the interstate as well.)

For those of you who are curious -- and why would you be reading this if you weren't? -- there is a surprising amount of man on man action in rest stops and truck stops on interstates. My only experiences were when I drove north on I-75 from Florida to New York back when I was first escaping my homely hell, and then more recently when I escaped again, I-75 north to I-10 and then westward to San Francisco, or the West Coast anyway, or out of Florida at the very least. I was too green and scared to notice if anything was happening when I drove the U-Haul to New York City in 1982, though there were a couple of times in Pennsylvania and New Jersey when I suspected something. Ten years later everything is different; I'm a sick old fag in my dead mother's car going west instead of north, jaded and angry and bored.

And then I stopped to pee and everything changed. Suddenly I was back in New York City, in the Grand Central Terminal men's room downstairs, trying to pee and trying not to look at the boner in the next urinal over. But how could I avoid looking? If a man is standing next to you peeing, it's impolite (if not dangerous) to check his stuff out; a glance is allowed if it's timed right. If a man is standing next to you with a boner, stroking himself, then that's a completely different game.

For me, sexual expression became about body parts, and I'm not referring to arms and legs and faces, those things came later, if at all. Ten minutes or more can easily be spent concentrating on your neighbor's dick, your own dick, the swan logo on the urinal, the chrome hardware, the constantly flushing water (pretending to be nearly finished for those who might be waiting), the jizz shooting into the water swirling away, with no information about the man except for his skin color and possibly some religious affiliation. Nothing more is needed for this exchange to be complete. Of course there are variations on this scenario and hundreds of ways they can play out, and I've been witness to nearly all of them I humbly admit.

I spent a grotesque amount of my life standing at the urinals in Grand Central, Penn Station, Port Authority and other public urinals, hoping the man who struck my fancy enough to pull up next to him would, one, be playing the same game, and two, would find me to his liking as well. Like I said, my ass has always been my best feature (fortunately I was young and elastic when Rich White did most of his work on it in our youth), but one can't very well show off that part of himself in a public restroom -- perhaps surprisingly, since easily half of the men I "peed" next to over the ten-year period I lived in the City weren't really there to pee, or not exclusively.

My dick isn't huge. I suppose it's proportionate for a man of my stature, but it is nice-looking. At least I think so, and I've had zillions of comparisons. And it is interesting, with the orange-red pubes and the purplish-red head emergin from the pale white foreskin, blue veins readily visible. It's quite the color sensation, if you ask me, a veritable rainbow in my pants, though I haven't shouted that far and wide (until now) because I do feel that the organized homosexuals have overused so many aspects of the otherwise humdrum. All I'm trying to say is that while I spent countless hours in ten- to twenty-minute intervals at various urinals around the metropolis and therefore have the experiences to draw upon, those were the exception rather than the norm of where I was choosing my potential mates. And again, I must say that the word "mate" is used in the most vague sense, but is useful to help me avoid using bitter-sounding terms like "fuck buddy" and/or "trick," etc.

So the question that is likely on your uninitiated lips is probably somewhere along the lines of "Where does a gay guy go to show off his best asset in public then?" Why, to the porn theaters of Times Square! Since I lived the whole ten years of my New York existence in the same apartment, a five-flight walk-up in Hell's Kitchen, they were dangerously available to me.

May 19: fragile squirrel (15 minutes)

That's me, crawling to the edge of the limb, clamoring more like it, for what? A lousy pecan. Not that I don't like pecans. Pecans are great, they're just so far out there. I tremble, I grasp, and still I feel like I'm gonna fall. That thing about squirrels always landing on their feet, that's not about squirrels. I found that out the hard way! Flat on my back, gasping for air. Gasping to exhale, really. My lungs felt like they were to capacity and I couldn't empty them out, couldn't blow out to make room to suck in. Quite a pitiful conundrum to be quite honest.

I don't have any problem with honesty. I'm told I'm a complainer; I'm just being honest. The bugs are unbearable. I don't know what you're about, but I'm trying to shake the bugs out of my tail; that's why I'm twitching. And I'm not gonna fight you for your nuts. What do I care about your nuts? If I steal them I'll just have to bury them and then who's the idiot? I may not be the smartest squirrel in the nut farm but I'm smart enough not to be Huckleberried by the likes of you.

Clever does not equal smart, no matter what you think. I don't know, can't imagine, don't want to know where you got a leather jacket to fit you. For what? What good does it do? In this heat and humidity only a mentally deranged squirrel would say that's cool. I don't care if you are a flying squirrel. I tell you what, a piece of blackened dead animal skin is not gonna help you fly any faster; if anything I'm pretty sure it's gonna slow you down.

I wish I could just be left alone. I've got things to do. They may be inane but they're squirrel things and like it or not I'm a squirrel, that's the deck I've been handed in this lifetime. I can only have faith that I'm on an upward trajectory, that my karma is leading me toward something better. Perhaps not more important, but at the very least I believe -- or want to believe -- that I'll have better tools for grasping, climbing, gathering, burying, remembering where I buried my fucking nuts in the first place. Or is that in the last place?

Oh, woe to me, stuck here in this state, waiting for the honey train, or whatever it's called. The nut cup? The bucket of bounty? I don't know enough to know what's instinct and what is my imagination at work. I'm a squirrel, hear me roar. No, I don't think that's right either.

Just please let me make it to that pecan without falling to the street below and meeting the rubber and metal of an oncoming vehicle. Just please let me not end up in the sorry, flat state I've seen several of my brothers and sisters in!

May 17: cat eye (15 minutes)

I turn onto Navasota and my headlights reflect back the blue-green lights that are a neighborhood cat's eyes looking my way as he scurries to the side of the road, to the cement embankment around a yard, outside of a chain link fence. Two dots, there then gone, there again. He is mostly black, I can tell only by the white spots on his right front leg and on one side. That's all I see in the pitch blackness, that and the two marbles in the middle of his head.

It reminds me of a game we used to play when I was in the eighth grade, at the front end of Donovan Street where it met up in a T with Nolan. There were ditches on either side of the streets, we hovered near them and dove to the depths when a car tuned our way. We did this after dark, at the end of the play day, on our ways back home. I continued the game even when I was alone and I doubt my friends did. I had a vivid imagination, I blamed it on that. Before the lights of the car hit us, we dove to the bottom of the ditch screaming "Cat eye!" and lay there suppressing laughs but giggling anyway, excited by the suppression, excited by youth, by night time, by the frogs in a puddle unseen behind a house.

I didn't scream the name of the game when I was alone, and I didn't giggle so much when I was alone, but still I dove into the ditch, avoided the headlights all the same, my heart racing, my head buried in my arms, covered in darkness, like a younger child playing peekaboo and believing he can't be seen because he can't see anything. To that young child it is fun but serious, and it was the same for me alone with my game of cat eye all the way to the dead end of Donovan, to my house, last on the left, with the two windows on the front, one on either side of the door, lit from within like two eyes, like the eyes of a cat struck by the lights of a car.

My house was a big head with the different slopes of the roof making a sort of set of ears. I lived in that big head. I lived in my head. I talked to myself constantly, felt like I was being watched, not in a horror movie kind of way, more like I had an audience. And I welcomed my audience, talked to them silently, narrated my day, my life, said goodnight to them as I lay in bed with the covers pulled to my chin.

May 16: there's a little girl... (15 minutes)

...whose mother is tired of her and whose father is way too fond of her and she doesn't know what to do with herself so she wanders in the collection of trees at the dead end that everybody calls the woods even though most everybody knows they aren't really woods at all, just a sparse collection of trees with a lot of vines growing through them, entangling them, making them out to be more than they really are, and all the boys know the trail through the low lying brush and this little girl knows it too because this is where she goes when she's trying to make herself scarce, trying to get out of her mother's way and trying to stay way far away from her father especially on the days he gets off work early (like seven a.m. early) because he starts drinking beers because he worked all through the night and now that he's off work it's like the end of the day for him and even though this little girl might be eating breakfast, some toast or a bowl of dry cereal, her father is drinking beer, drinking till he comes down, drinking till he can finally get to sleep, and she doesn't want to be anywhere within reach when he's somewhere in the middle of the pile, when he's about halfway or closer to all the way to being able to sleep because that's when he gets so friendly and she'd rather he not be so friendly, she'd rather he be more like her mother in those times, wishes her mother and her father could just change places in those times, her father all sad and sleepy and her mother all noisy and anxious and a lot on her mind to say, or at the very least wishes she could change places with one of the boys she sees out in the woods, any one of 'em, any of the ones she follows far behind into the tangle of kudzu into the dark cool underpaths that lead out to the rain soaked dirty old mattress where they keep the magazines underneath with the pictures of the naked women, and they do things to each other like her father does to her but they seem to be so happy doing it, both of them, with smiles and chirps like birds and giggles, even -- giggles, even! -- but she figures she can't ever be like these boys so she picks wildflowers to give to her mother to try to make her smile like that, but they're the kinds of flowers with hollow stems that don't keep too well in a tight fist and they all droop by the time she puts them in a cup of water and her mother won't do anything but sigh at the state of the flowers and her father will only laugh at her if he is still awake and she will cry and he will make is move, gentle move, to her side, will hold her in his arms, purring like he means it, telling her things that should make her feel good, nice, and she betrays herself because she meant never to listen to his words again but she needs to hear these types of words more than just about anybody she imagines, and he's the only one saying them, and she falls under his spell once again.

May 15: he... (30 minutes)

...was the firstborn son, they were poor, he was different, he knew it deep inside, but he dared not tell anyone. His father was a tyrant, at least that's how he saw him, spent his days in the oil fields, brought home a lot of anger but not much money. His mother was sweet, powerful, funny, but she deferred to her husband because that's what it said in the bible and they never went against what it said in the bible. There were a lot of things in the bible that he couldn't make heads nor tails of but he dared not speak of his confusion, not to his father because he was a tyrant and not to his mother because she deferred, first to the lord and second to her husband and there was no room for him in that equation.

A few years later his mother had another baby, a girl, and he poured all of himself into her, imagined she was a tiny pink vessel like in a bible story and he filled her up to overflowing, and she grew up in his shadow, and she saw the same harsh world that he saw but it wasn't as harsh because of him, because he was there, because he said he would stand up for her, that he would take care of her, and he did, as best as he could. He swallowed hard and pushed aside that in him which didn't fit, didn't seem to belong, and he helped to make the world a happier place, a place where tyrants and matriarchs ruled, but where smiles could be exchanged and laughter could be heard.

And then more children were born and brought into a new old house, a small house which because smaller every time another child was brought into it, and the tyrant seemed to become bigger and the matriarch became more powerful, and the little children huddled together and did the best they could, and when they could not they took the punishments they knew were to come, the lashings, the thrashings, the spankings, the screaming to bring up holy hell, and the fear was more painful than anything, the fear of the elders, and the fear of the stories they had been told, about their souls, about where they were bound to go if they continued to act in this way.

Then a great tragedy struck. The youngest child was killed in an accident. It was nobody's fault, and that was the greatest tragedy. It was nobody's fault so there was nobody to blame, nowhere to put the confusion and the sadness and the rage, nowhere to put it, they just had to hold it in, swallow it like a memory, like a bible story without a logical conclusion. Most of them weren't able to do that very well. His father turned sullen, his mother went mad, his sister became angry, the other turned to god demanding an answer, demanding an explanation, and she promised to serve him forever until he provided an answer....

The eldest knew about holding secrets, knew what that took, knew what it took out of a person, and he could do it no more. He ran away, took his secrets in borrowed suitcases he promised to return but knew he never would. But of course he couldn't say that, that he would never come back. How he longed to hear himself say those words to his family, to see his father's face, to watch his sisters wipe away their mother's tears. But what if it wasn't true? He couldn't say the words for fear the fates would somehow turn against him. So he just left it all behind, didn't leave a note, ran all the way back to the state where he was born, lived a wild and free life, met many like-minded people, found one whose soul he thought belonged to him. They shared their lives together, lived a life of public shame but private ecstasy. They cherished having discovered another who shared their sensibilities, who didn't question every move of the other.

But then a great tragedy struck his lover and left him crippled, crippled and drunk, and he stood by and watched as the lover ruined both their lives with alcohol and lies. But he had pledged his love forever, and if he took anything out of the church he was raised in with him when he left it was that the love of a mate is the most important, the most sacred, the most worthy of sacrifice. And so he sacrificed a good portion of his life for his lover, whom he no longer loved and with whom he no longer shared even the tiniest morsel of intimacy. His attentions turned to drunken encounters in darkened corners, where shame grows like mold in an unkept bathroom, a dripping faucet, a shame, shaded eyes, guilt, self-hate, desire unattained.

Eventually his lover tried to kill him and he was able to free himself from the clutches of that withered flower. But his future looked no brighter, his dreams no longer as vivid as in his younger days. Shame haunted him through the death of another lover, the death of a mother who never really knew who he was, and as he took in a much younger lover who was addled with his own set of addictions, addictions that allowed him to weave elaborate lies to get what he wanted, what he needed. And then, when that no longer worked, he beat him up and left him bruised and bleeding, inside and out, stole his possessions and told him he would be back for the rest, "So you better not even try to go anywhere."

He lay there in his apartment and cried. He lay there in his empty living room and cried, his TV gone, his furniture gone, his dignity sold on the corner for a needle's worth of something someone in a moment of desperation called "love."

May 14: twelve (20 minutes)

I find it hard to believe that there are only twelve rest stops on west bound Interstate 10 from the intersection of I-1o and I-75 in Florida and Houston. It's a good thing, though. I want to tell a story in X parts, according to the number of rest stops, and twelve will be easy to do. Easier than what I was thinking. My rough guesstimation of the number of rest stops was four-hundred and seventy-eight. It was a random number. I wasn't trying to be right, I just picked a random number. Twelve is a random number as well, perhaps not as random as four-hundred and seventy-eight, but random enough. Random enough for the purposes of my story. And it's not just any story, it's the story that takes place in chapter seven. Randy drives across Interstate 10 from the intersection of I-10 and I-75 to Houston, and he manages to stop at every rest area, and he remembers sexual experiences in New York City, is reminded by the men he sees at the rest stops, some because of their physical appearance, some because of what they are doing, some because of the appearance of the room, some just because he's looking for what might be there, looking to make something happen. I'm not sure exactly what all happens in the various rest area rest rooms, I only know that something happens (real or imagined) in the first one he stops at and he quickly becomes obsessed with stopping at every one of them. Maybe he even thinks he's missed one along the way and drives a long way back looking for the one he missed, and stops at the east bound side of the interstate, which makes for a nice number (thirteen) of rest areas he visits.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I'm going to write but not actually writing. People have been asking me how the writing's going and I either say fine, which is true, or I say I've been thinking more than writing lately, which is also true, though not truer. I am on the verge of frustration about not writing but I don't really feel frustrated with the writing, or lack of it. I know this is part of the process. It's definitely part of the process for me. Some people would say it's important to work on the project at least a little bit every day, but I disagree with that concept. I think forcing myself to write when I'm not ready, not actually where I need to be to write, could be more harmful to the process. I do write something almost every day. I am getting a pretty steady writing workout in my life. So I don't really feel like I'm ignoring the novel. I sometimes think I am, but I don't really think I am.

So that's where I am. Today I organized the nest of power cords and other cords behind my desk. It was a big mess. That always drives me crazy. I feel more organized and ready to write now that I've done that. I coiled the cords and tied them with yarn. Some of them I duct taped to the backs of the legs of my desk. (I know this probably isn't a very interesting read, but it's what is coming out.) I wasn't ready to write after I did that so I organized the junk hardware drawer in the kitchen, then I filled a cardboard canister with dirt and played with the compost for a long time. My hands were black and stank; I saw maggots or some kind of maggoty worms in the tumbling composter. That was exciting. Then I swept the middle room and my bedroom. Then I tried but failed at figuring out how to hang the mosquito net we got at a thrift store yesterday on the front porch. And somewhere in there I had two showers, juiced some veggies and made a fruit smoothie. Now I think I'll rehearse the keyboard, and later we're going to Hut's for two-for-one veggie burgers!

May 12, part three: what if I told you the truth? (12 minutes)

I am not who I say I am, have not been for thirty years. When we moved to East Texas I decided to take on a new identity, leave everything behind. I ran away, killed a boy who was my age, strangled him with a pair of gym shorts. He didn't see it coming. We were at school, wrong place wrong time.

I knew where he lived, so I went there, walked in, sat down at the table and told the woman at the kitchen sink I didn't feel well; didn't feel like myself, was the way she later put it to the man in the living room. He was blind, so that worked out, and she was a mother and didn't realize that her son had been replaced, just that her son was more in need of mothering than before and that was a role she felt very comfortable in and she was happy for the enhanced need.

My own family never missed me. They never knew I was there in the first place. I'm sure they just went about their business without me, none the wiser. And so I took on this new identity, found the room that was mine and slipped into the identity of this schoolmate I hardly knew.

He wasn't a popular kid so nobody noticed that he and I weren't the same one. He was quiet. And so was I. I grew up like that. Married the woman of his dreams, got a job doing what he was best at, selling cars, and now I drive a BMW and I take trips alone and drive around towns I've ever been to before and I cry behind the dark tinting of my fancy windows and I'm looking for someone, looking for the next place to go, looking for the man whose place I'll take.

I'll yank him out of his car, take his identification and let him roll off a cliff in my car, then I'll find his house and see what my new family looks like, see how many kids I have and what plans we have for the summer. My wife and kids won't miss me. They never seem to know when I'm even there. They're not really my family anyway.

May 12, part two: a piece of paper flapping in the wind... (9 minutes)

...lifted up from the front porch junk trunk and danced across the wicker chair to the landing, the sidewalk, past the bird bath. A cat huddles down at the coming sound, waddles, leaps, attacks, bats the paper into the street and there it sits, not flat, more crippled from the cat play. The wind plays with it again when the cat has lost interest. Briefly it ponders the pile of sticks and other garden clippings piled up for the coming pickup, but the clippings are various shades of dull green and brown and this paper, though not white-white like the smooth white pages in the desk drawer, is too white for that group. It lets the wind carry it on down the street, caught in a whirl of wind, past the fig tree in the house that's being renovated. A week ago, the paper would had to have stayed there because a limb hung out onto the street low and heavy and deformed, its leaves would have halted the paper, held it there, kept it for further inspection when its bulbous fingers turned purple and left sticky prints on the paper. But no, the paper moved on, swept along the street past the abandoned house, past the new build modern structured rumored to have been bought by Hollywood star Kirsten Dunst. The paper doesn't know Kirsten Dunst. It might be vaguely aware of Robert DeNiro for his role in the movie Brazil, but not well enough to say so. The paper blows, makes its way to the end of the street, to the chain link fence that surrounds the cemetery. It waves at me when I pass by in my car. Waves as if to say, "Hey, look at me! Now I'm free!"

May 12, part one: I am (12 minutes)

I am six feet four and a half inches tall.
I am a white boy but I don't always feel so white or so boy.
I am ready to drive cross country at the drop of a hat.
I am relatively happy with the way my life is
going but I seem to have fucked up my right
shoulder somewhere along the way.
I am right-handed.
I am afraid I will lose my hearing and eyesight.
I am writing a novel and it annoys me when
people say, "Is that based on your life?"
I am fatherless, have been since I was sixteen; it's for the best.
I am done with a three-day fast that started a week ago today and I do feel healthier.
I am not drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes or pot anymore.
I am not saying I never will again.
I am excited about the weather.
I am anxious to see my old friend who is coming for a visit next month.
I am starting to perform again and I thought for awhile that I never would again.
I am damaged but it makes me interesting.
I am over organized religion, maybe I always have been.
I am trying to keep an ongoing, relatively healthy relationship with my family.
I am confused.
I am hungry for bread though I just had breakfast, but since I didn't have any kind of bread I
think that's another addiction.
I am constantly aware of my addictions and try to mess with them, push myself to my edges.
I am going to Bigtown tomorrow to take my mother out to lunch.
I am more in touch with both of my sisters since our grandmother died but it still doesn't feel
like it's enough.
I am close to a cemetery and I like to go for walks there.
I am exploring things about my nature that have lain dormant for many years.
I am a divorcee, but my marriage lasted such a short period of time and was nearly twenty
years ago, I always check the Single box on forms.
I am interested in painting, watercolor, just for the joy of it.
I am happy in my garden, snipping zinnias and picking weeds and watching the sunflower stalks
get taller and taller.
I am in love with the idea of composting, making dirt.
I am trying to make a difference in society.
I am volunteering at a thrift store four hours a week.
I am thinking that might get me in trouble.
I am going to tell you about those crazy duck people.
I am going to New York City in July.
I am going to buy a washing machine at a scratch and dent sale.
I am going to have to borrow money to finish paying for my truck.
I am ready to stop writing and start reading.

May 11: back (25 minutes)

I'm running hither and yon, went to Houston to sit with John, got back this morning, left yesterday morning, but right now it's like I wasn't even there, like I lost twenty-four hours (twenty-seven more like, and then some).

Jeff and Marcie both called me night before last. A friend of a friend was coming to town and they wanted me to meet him/wanted me to help entertain him (according to which one you asked). I think they both had the idea in the backs of their minds that they wanted to set me up with him, and that they are a little leery about having to meet strangers, but this guy came with a good recommendation -- The Art Guys -- and so they readily agreed to put the stranger up at their house as he was on his way to the next thing.

I was at body Choir when they called, didn't get their messages till I got back home. By that time I was ready for bed and so I didn't call back. But I always call them back, even if they don't always call me back when I call. (That's not a complaint, by the way, just an observation.)

But Marcie called me again before I had a chance to call her, yesterday morning. I had just gotten to Houston and was wandering around the Rice Village waiting for Nit Noi to open so I could take some lunch to John. I got there too early and had to kill time. I called John back and told him I could go somewhere else, but he really wanted ginger fried rice with tofu (for me, otherwise he would've gotten it with shrimp, but one is big enough for us to share, particularly since I had just come off a fast and wasn't eating as much).

I went to the Back Be Nimble store to look for something to make all of this driving I'm doing less hurtful to my back and tailbone but they wanted ninety to a hundred dollars and I guess I'd rather tough it out and/or get a massage. My friend Charlotte just got her certification and she's pretty good, though she "specializes in deep neck massage" and not back massage; it doesn't matter.

I went to Ten Thousand Villages to get a hummingbird knick knack for my mom (carved out of a tagua nut). I got her one for her birthday but she dropped it when she was hanging it up and it broke, so I thought I'd give her another chance (that's kind of supposed to be a joke, but it's not really funny so I take it back...!).

While I was doing that Marcie called and told me again how much she wanted me to meet this guy, how much we have in common, blah-blah-blah, and she put him on the phone and we said hello. Oh, and she told me that he was gonna be in Houston and I should definitely get in touch with him. So when we were on the phone we exchanged numbers and I told him I wasn't sure what my schedule with John would be but that I would call back, and I did, and we set a tentative plan to meet at ten p.m. John said, "Go, go, don't look back!" or something like that -- we share a sort of dark or silly sense of humor.

It was a stormy night, and this guy, Max, was staying with a friend, a mutual friend, the friend of a friend Jeff was talking about: The Art Guys. Steven and I sang at Jack's wedding. I know them. And it was great to see them again -- and it's nice to feel like we're back in touch (I packed up a copy of the movie and soundtrack since they said our music is and always has been in constant rotation on their high-tech jukebox

Mike built a warehouse work space/studio/home and it has a guest room in back which was where Max was sleeping. We drank beers (all of us, Max and me, The Art Guys and Mike's girlfriend Rainey.

I didn't think about it till I got back to Austin but Mike and Jack both have girlfriends with meteorological names: Rainey and Starr. I wonder if that was planned or intentional.

May 9: cemetery (15 minutes)

Cemetery, green with life, moss on headstones weeping for the long past. The reddish brown moss is the only thing left that remembers the bones under the carved rocks. A culvert runs through the cemetery, three feet deep and five feet wide, rusty metal bars hold it open; little water passes through but there's always a constant stream, enough to carve out a jagged gash along the bottom where the grackles, mockingbirds, starlings, cardinals and mourning doves come for a beak full of water under the shade of the weary trees.

Cedar, oak, pecan trees stand like soldiers over the battlefield, the dead all around them at their feet. They invite the breeze and she comes and they whistle their approval as the birds sing endlessly.

The first names I saw were GLASSCOCK and BELCHER. Old names, changed out of embarrassment, perhaps, or maybe these were the people who never married, never had children, didn't leave a bit of themselves behind for future generations.

The grackle has a pretty song, clucks and machinery, flutters of noise, happy sounds, specks of laughter.

The dead in this cemetery are long gone, most of them, I would imagine, particularly the ones from two or three centuries ago, especially the babies who lived a day or two, a month at the most, their little stones weathered and rounded, nothing but their name and a couple of dates to show for themselves, nothing more to say for their lives. LITTLE CHARLES LUCK. Or Little Luck, as he might be called. Why is it sadder when an infant dies? I think it's sadder when a child of five or six, or anywhere under twenty or thirty dies, that's really sad. Sad for the people who loved him. Still do love him.

Off in the distance I hear children playing and the very familiar sound of the ice cream truck coming closer, the electronically plinked out classical song coming from the speaker on top is likely making that composer turn over in his grave again and again and again and again, plink-plink-plink.

All around me are busy streets, an interstate heavy with traffic here at the rush hour evening time. But there is peacefulness here in this grand old cemetery. Iron fences rusting and falling apart add to the mystery, add to the beauty. Dried wildflowers gone to seed in an unmown patch dotted with the low to the ground rounded headstones of the Miller clan.

Death is beautiful.

May 8: salt... (14 minutes)

...in my morning ritual, thirty-two ounces of water and two teaspoons of sea salt warmed and drunk as quickly as possible. Today was the last day I have to do that for a while.

Salt-white makes me thing of New Mexico, of a trip my family took to see the White Sands National Monument. My father went back there when he and my mother were going through their most difficult period. He brought back souvenirs two weeks later, from King Tut's tomb. He said he had only been to White Sands but I didn't believe him. There were no pyramids, no unearthed pharaohs when we were there. He brought me a lucite pyramid with an image of a sphinx inside. I loved it, loved how it felt, the sharp, clear point.

Salt water makes me think of Galveston, a nasty beach. Even South Padre is nasty; all of that part of the Gulf is disgusting, covered in seaweed and jellyfish and even residue of oil spills sometimes, dead fish like coal miners. Sad, sick, some not dead yet.

When I was young my uncle took me to Galveston for the first time. He was always taking me places for the first time, exposing me to new things. He got second degree burns -- maybe some third degree burns as well -- lying out on the beach all day. He was red like a boiled lobster and spent the next day sick in bed in the hotel room, the air conditioner cranked too high.

I came back from that trip with a coconut carved out to look like some kind of a boogie man. My uncle always blew a lot of money on me, unnecessary things, anything I wanted. I loved him more than my father because he took me with him, let me pick out my own souvenirs.

He took me to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. My mother made him take my sisters, too. He couldn't play such favoritism for one of her three children. Bummer! All that salt-white snow and I had to share it with them! But we had a good time anyway, cross-country skiing and making fools of ourselves on the side of the mountain.

Cocaine is as white but much finer. I did a lot of that with my uncle, too. He had a toupee at the time -- and still the good job -- and his hairdresser also had a coke habit and he turned my uncle onto it and the next thing we knew we were all getting high on the stuff. He never smoked pot though because the fear of that had been so firmly planted in him by his middle class religious family. The gateway drug!

Salt. I had a bowl of broth tonight. Steven made it for me, vegetables with a little cayenne and two pinches of salt. I only allowed myself to eat a few of the vegetables because I'm breaking a fast and I want to do it right.

May 7: Fey Ray (15 minutes)

It was probably when he was in the third grade that he got that awful nickname. He had beautiful blonde hair, lots of curls. His mother didn't dream of cutting it. And his eyes were the most beautiful shade of blue-green, like the water in some exotic and secret lagoon in the South Seas.

Ray was a very pretty boy, people always told his mother he was gonna be a heartbreaker some day, but she just laughed in that way that almost made you feel sorry for her, a palm to her bosom, her eyes glistening. If she laughed for more than a few seconds, she was bound to cry. Of course she wasn't sad, she was quite gay, but her style of laughter was very disarming to some. And she had this one child, this perfect little boy, sweet and beautiful with all that curly blonde hair, like hers. She was proud of it and loved to hear people mention it.

Some whispered close to her, "Is that your daughter?," hesitant to say the word, because while he was a very pretty boy, there was something unmistakably "boy" about him. He had his father's features, his eyes, a strong chin with a slight cleft in it already starting to appear, one dimple on the left side. And he had big hands and feet. Dissected he wouldn't be nearly as pretty. His hands and feet didn't belong on him, not really, but she was glad for them because they were the little bit of her husband left in this country to remind her that he still exists, that he ever existed, off fighting a war.

She was terribly proud of her husband, but ached for him. The bed where they came together to create this beautiful child seemed so big, so cold. He wouldn't approve of Ray's hair being so long. It wasn't the style, not for a little boy, and that's the one secret she kept from her husband in the letters she wrote to him. She never mentioned Ray's hair, just his father's eyes and his dimple and how much Ray reminded her of him and how much she missed him.

A lot of her loneliness was placed on her eight year old, forever stroking his hair, letting him sleep in her big lonely bed when storms blew over their Kansas ranch house. She entertained him whenever he was home. And this caused him to be a little different from the other children, caused him to be particularly different from the boys, who enjoyed picking on him.

Somebody caught him off guard and he screamed, high pitched, loud enough to bend the ears of the stray dog that always hung around the school playground. And from that day and for many years after, his classmates called him Fey Ray.

May 6: pout (20 minutes)

You look like a child when you push your lips out like that, not quite pursed, just out, like paddles. Your face is a river, a gentle, mysterious river, eyes closed. Look at me! Notice me...

You're in your own world, not exactly sad, just turned inward. Dark hair, a strange haircut, like maybe you were a Hare Krishna up until recently, the front part has grown out a bit but the back still stands out. Or maybe you just like the unkempt look. You've certainly got that down! And I like it too.

Why I'm drawn to you I don't know. You are young, perhaps you are a child. You could even be my child. That would be awful, such a beautiful thing as my child. The pain of loving such beauty, of having to stop short.

You don't open your eyes, you massage them with your fingertips, push your knuckles into your eye sockets, rub on the part of your skull that protrudes, where your eyebrows grow. Your forehead is a wide expanse, an open-ended question. I want to ask you, I want to ask, I want to, I want...

You stretch against the wall and I dance close to you, not so close as to be a bother, just so I can observe you closer, take notes, draw a picture in my mind, charcoal on newsprint, dirty fingers, marks on your hips where I pull you close and plant a kiss on your pouty lips. But I'm afraid. You might reject me, and then I would have nothing to look at, nothing to ponder, nothing to write about.

Your clothes are outdated, dirty, your shirt with its little flaps on the shoulders buttoned at the bottom of the neck, the bottom hem cut out. You stretch up and the shortened shirt reveals your belly button -- peekaboo! -- and a finger-width of hair narrowing, arrowing down into your waistband. Slacks, dress pants that have been cut off short, short-short, maybe too short. When you sit down you have to arrange the short legs to make sure your stuff doesn't show. But I've already seen it, in my mind. In the charcoal drawing you aren't wearing the shorts. When you stretch upward, arms high in the air, again and again, I can make out the shape, the texture even, beneath the silly plaid pattern. Your stretching is erotic, repetitive. I'm coming in for the kill, the catch, whatever you want to call it.

A small tattoo on each arm, one at the wrist, the other at the elbow. Are there others I need to know about to make my drawing complete? Accurate? You sit, adjust, bend forward. Your spine protrudes close to your hip bones. Skin and bones all marked up with fingerprints. Detectives would be able to find me so easily; I'm the one with smudged fingers, you're the one with marks, smeared, spread over your thin, delicate flesh.

I move around the dance floor and keep close enough to see you, to enjoy you. You pout and I wonder what's wrong, wonder if you would respond to a touch, respond to me.

You're sitting away from me and I sit catacorner and stare at you as you meditate, legs crossed, half lotus. Still pouting. A song comes on and I see a smile. Everybody sings along: O, Suzanna, oh, don't you cry for me. I've come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee. You too, me too. We're singing together. If you would but open your eyes you would see me, I would smile, we could take it from there.

I decide that I don't need a lover who's all pouty. It's nice to look at but how heavy is that? You're thin and light bodied but your soul and heart are dark and heavy. That's what I decide. And then our friend introduces us quite by chance and you confess that you have a hangover and I want to hug you.

I put a hand on your leg as I say goodbye and then when we see each other again outside, you touch me and I'm back to square one. Your smile melts me and I'm glad I didn't see it earlier because I might have disappeared.

May 5: day one (5 minutes)

I had my internal salt water "bath" and didn't hate it too much. I then alternated between 40 ounce bottles of "lemonade" and 48 ounce bottles of water, three times throughout the day. I put in my contacts for improv class, and because of that as much as because of the coming rain (and perhaps the hunger), I got a headache, and it got worse and worse. By the time I went to bed my brain was really fucking with me. The headache was up to migraine proportions, though it was the entire top of my head and not focused in my left eye as my migraines are, and I almost had an anxiety attack. This had to do a little bit with looking at a website that talks about going off of the fast, about slowly working your way back to real food. I started tripping, thinking I needed food RIGHT THEN and all these fears came back. It's a loss of control, really, something I struggle with a lot in my life: giving it up. I went to bed at 9 p.m. and woke up five times in the night to pee, and each time until 6:30 I still had the headache. But now it's 7:15 of DAY TWO and I have no headache, I feel fine. I just finished my yummy internal salt water "bath" and I'm getting ready to do some work and start on my first "lemonade."

I realized yesterday morning as I lay in bed getting ready for DAY ONE that I asked my mom out for a Mother's Day lunch, and that would be on DAY NINE, and Steven convinced me that it might make her feel self-conscious if I were to just sit and watch her eat, so this is only gonna be for three days. In the middle of the night last night I was thinking I needed to get off of this TODAY, but this morning is a new day and I feel much better.

May 4: Smooth Move (10 minutes)

I start my Master Cleanse tomorrow. I am having my tea before bed now. I went to the store and bought forty lemons, a quart of maple syrup and a box of laxative tea. I hesitated for a moment when I saw that this company also (now) makes a chocolate flavored Smooth Move. Why, I love chocolate! ...But, no, I just can't go there!

Tonight I went to G.'s house to rehearse for a gig on gay pride day, a disco improv thing. It's very exciting. I don't know why I'm so excited. Well, I didn't know why I was so excited about it except that when I got home I told S. that this was what I always wanted to do. Twenty some odd years ago it was my dream to play a one-fingered keyboard and rock back and forth on my feet and make up silly songs, in front of people. We aren't exactly making up songs, but we're making them disco, the ones that aren't. Several of them -- maybe all but one -- are songs that G. wrote, and perhaps she wrote them as disco songs, but one of them is a gospel song, an old Louvin Brothers' song, "I Like the Christian Life," which really is special with the EuroTrance style added to it! We did this, G. and S. and me, when we performed in LaGrange. That was a fun gig. G. did the first set and then S. and I went up for the second set and sang seven or eight gospel songs, most of them with the help of the presets on my keyboard. I was a little embarrassed that my keyboard had some dust on it tonight when I got it there. Truth is I haven't touched it since the gig in LaGrange, but I also live in a very dusty house, and all of the windows are open now and the fans are blasting, and there are dust bunnies coming out from under everything that are actually the size of bunnies!

I don't want to whine about the Master Cleanse. I don't want to be nit-picky. I talked to C. tonight. She just finished doing her Master Cleanse. I wrote in a recent blog that she referred to herself as being a "Jehovah's Witness Convert to the Cleanse" and I got a weird response to that blog from some sort of religious nut or something, I'm not sure. I didn't click on the link, and I didn't allow the comment to be posted. It wasn't weird enough to be put up there for weirdness factor. It seemed more like a possible spam or even an evil virus. I don't know. I don't know much about those kinds of things. The comment said:

DIVORCE, BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS, AND OTHER LEGAL ISSUES AFFECTING CHILDREN OF JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES

It had a link to the "article" or a website or something. I really couldn't figure it out. It just seemed weird, so I clicked the "reject" button instead of the "publish" button. I don't know how many people really read my blog. Well, I have one of those timer things. Or timer isn't the right word. I can't think of the right word right now. It's the little rainbow box at the bottom of the right side of the page. It tells me who* has been looking at the blog and where they are and when they did it and which page they came on at and which page they left from, and it has a world map. It's kind of interesting. I guess it's used for some kind of marketing thing. Maybe that's how this weird message got to me. Or maybe that just came about because I only started blogging recently and they're bound to get you sooner or later. Whatever.

*not by name; it just has the network the person connects to in order to get internet access, if that scared you from making a comment. I do enjoy getting comments, real comments, comments from actual people who have actually read the blog they're commenting on!