My Daily Bone: 08/25/07

Becky couldn't think of another excuse to leave the house, couldn't think of another good reason to walk the 2.37 miles to the Bay Plaza Shopping Center, to the Piggly Wiggly. She could stop in at Beall's or maybe the 5 & Dime, it was getting toward the end of summer, getting time to start shopping for school clothes and school supplies. But her mama was busy and had said they would do that on the Saturday before the Monday when school started, when Bay Plaza had their annual sidewalk sale. She didn't have any money of her own, enough for a canned soda maybe. But how long could she busy herself in the Piggly Wiggly? That's really where she wanted to go. How long could she linger at the front of the store before someone got suspicious, before they asked questions, before they made a phone call, to her house or to the police?

Becky was in love with the sacker. Over the course of the previous seven weeks she had realized that there was no other boy for her. He was two years older than her, an eighth grader at Horace Mann, and she would have to make her move this year -- this summer, if possible -- before he was off to high school, never to think of her again. She worried at first about the age difference, but then she found out that her father was three-and-a-half years older than her mama, so she relaxed about that.

But he was Mexican -- or Hispanic is the correct way to say it -- but Mexican in her family. They weren't hardcore racists, no more than any other mid-size Texas town was in the late 70s; the Mexicans had their neighborhood with the White Trash, and the Black people, well, you never even saw them except at school, where they couldn't be avoided.

Not that Becky was interested in avoiding the Black kids, or any of the kids, but that was what she had to live with, and she had come to a sort of understanding about it. That was before she went into the Piggly Wiggly for the first time that summer. She was accidentally pretty that day, wearing her brand new blue sunflower sun dress her grandma had just bought for her at Beall's -- a splurge. She wished later that she hadn't worn it that day, that she had worked up to wearing it in front of him because now she had nothing as nice to wear and no money to get anything new on her own -- and school clothes were so far away.

He smiled at her as he sacked their groceries.

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His teeth were so white in the middle of his tanned face, his hair so black. Becky smiled at him and quickly glanced back at her mama, for some kind of okay, or to make sure she wasn't being spied on. Becky was all alone with her sacker, just the two of them eye-to-eye as he carefully and expertly put her family's week's worth of meals into paper bags. Her mother was busy writing the check, taking her time as she always did, making the letters as fancy as possible, as if the manager of the store might send it off to Mr. Piggly Wiggly himself, so beautiful it was, and they would frame it to show other customers just how beautiful the name Piggly Wiggly could really be, the P and the W both with so many lacy squiggles as to appear drawn by a professional calligrapher.

Becky looked to the chest of the sacker, past the collar of his maroon polyester shirt (also a good color for his skin tone), the top button undone, to the Piggly Wiggly logo plainly embroidered over his heart, and his gold plastic name tag beneath it. It took her breath away -- not just the shiny gold tag, the black trim and black letters in the middle -- but the sacker's name: JESUS. Of course, she knew that wasn't the way he pronounced it, but she had seen it so many times in the Bible and at church, she couldn't help reading it like that, couldn't help smiling, blushing, as she mouthed the name in full view of the sacker: Jee-sus. He smiled again, a dimple flaring up and making her tingle.

This time she got nudged by her mama, pen in hand, "Becky."

"What."

"Get the potatoes." There was a five-pound bag of potatoes on the bottom rack of the shopping cart waiting to be rung up. Becky hated her mama in that moment, wanted to bring up the idea of her needing to be lady-like in a dress.

But then Jesus came to her rescue. He saw the exchange between mother and daughter, stopped what he was doing and jumped to the task. "I'll do it, ma'am," he said, and that was that.

Becky wanted to thank him, but it wasn't her place. Her mama did it. "That's nice! Thank you," she said. Becky could see out of the corner of her eye her mama unsnapping the bill compartment of her checkbook wallet, slipping a dollar-bill out and wadding it into her fist. A tip for the sacker.

Sometimes, her mama made Becky tip the sacker at the car. Becky hated to do that, she felt so silly ("It's not my dollar.") but this time she prayed that her mama would give it to her, whisper, "Give this to him." She prayed to Jesus, the real one.

I am a writer.

I’m writing my first novel. I'm actually fairly close to the end of the first draft. But I'm struggling. Writing a novel is hard!

I’ve been writing all my life (well, since I was in first grade). Around eighth grade, it became therapeutic. Maybe it was all along and I just didn’t realize it. I started by writing short stories. I “wrote a movie” in the eighth grade based on an urban legend from the town I was living in, featuring a Goat Man who killed the teens he caught on Lovers Lane by removing their legs and leaving them to bleed to death. I didn’t know anything about writing a movie; it’s pretty funny to look back at the script/story now. The camera and music moved around the scene like characters (i.e., “The camera climbed the street sign, it said Evergreen; the music screamed!”).

I moved from Bigtown, Texas, to New York City when I was twenty-four, with hopes of writing musical plays. I loved Oklahoma! and Hair and thought that loving them was enough to make my dream a possibility. I joined a group of musical playwrights and was told I didn’t know anything about writing musicals. I started writing straight plays, short stuff, one acts, monologues. Most of it black comedy. I was fortunate to have several of my plays produced, one of which starred RuPaul; it was "an intergalactic one-act," sort of an "I Love Lucy" that took place on the planet Ramada. It was called "My Pet Homo" and it ran for a couple of months as a late-night show in a theater in the basement of a Methodist church. It got pretty good reviews, too, even though the two main actors usually flubbed their lines (some of the reviews were good because of that fact.

I met Steven in 1992 and he and I fell in love and started performing (simultaneously). He had a background in writing music for the theater and I was writing plays and we became a musical duo, a sort of Prairie Home Companion or Grand Ole Opry of two. We called our act "Y'all." We both wrote songs and we both wrote stories, but Steven wrote more of the songs and I wrote more of the stories. We turned the stories and songs into a faux autobiography of the characters we played onstage, self-published it and sold it to our fans.

The progression of our performing career started in the Gay & Lesbian Center in NYC, then progressed to Downtown theaters, rock clubs, random MTV and other TV appearances (one with Jon Stewart on his show before The Daily Show), Borders Bookstores (before they were so corporate and as they were becoming more corporate), folk clubs and coffeehouses, house concerts, retirement homes, and Unitarian Universalist churches.

We started in New York City, then moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to try to be taken more seriously as a musical act, then moved into a 20-foot travel trailer and lived on the road for two years, which was freeing and difficult in many ways. Our personal relationship was pretty much non-existent until we met Roger at a concert in Joshua Tree, California, and he moved in with us and we started having a three-way relationship. Things got more wonderful and more difficult all at once. A fan/friend who had supported Y'all over the years suggested we make a Y'all documentary, and he financed it. It became more of a documentary about the end of Y'all and the end of mine and Steven's relationship, and our relationship with Roger.

We split up toward the end of 2002, went our separate ways, anxious to do our own things. Steven went to Jersey City and edited the three-hundred hours of footage he, Roger and I had shot in ten months into a documentary called "Life In A Box." Roger moved around a lot and settled most recently in Massachusetts where he's a yoga instructor full-time. I lived in a Florida beach town, played nanny for a friend’s kids, did some community theater and made up a board game.

Mostly I was depressed, though. It took me a couple of years to get out of that. I was thirty-eight years old and didn’t know what to do with my life. I thought moving back to Nashville was the answer. It was and it wasn't. Things continued falling apart for me when I got there (a good friend died of lung cancer six weeks after I arrived; the UU minister who had had a strong influence on me, left the church, left Tennessee). But Nashville was also the place where dear old friends lived, and I started to heal. I lived with a couple of friends rent-free; one of them gave me a job, paid me more than that position usually paid. Tennessee had a good health care program at the time, so I was able to get psychiatric help; I met an amazing doctor, David Campbell, and took medication for depression for a while (Zoloft gave me panic attacks; Lexapro did nothing; Cymbalta was the bomb).

I got into meditating. Roger had gotten us into this when we lived on the road, he had turned me onto Pema Chödrön (her book "When Things Fall Apart" changed my life). But I wanted to go deeper. I found a small meditation group in Nashville.

At some point I decided to move to the West Coast, to Santa Cruz, close to San Francisco, where Steven was living, but not too close. I was in a relationship that wasn't really a relationship; it was frustrating and unfulfilling. A cross-country trip was part of the move. (I still love traveling.) I stopped in Houston and lived with my mother for two months while her mother died. I have a difficult time with my family sometimes, and my meditation practice blossomed; I was meditating an hour a day in half-hour increments, sometimes longer.

I was still in huge debt from living on the road those two years and meditation helped me come to the realization that perhaps the West Coast wasn’t the best place for me to be if I wanted to get out of debt. Houston is a cheap place to live, but I knew I couldn’t live there. I went to Austin for a meditation retreat and loved it. I decided after Nana died to move to Austin and stay until I got out of debt or until I stopped loving it, whichever came later. She died a lot sooner than expected and I found myself in Austin as of October 2005. I loved it so much that Steven moved here in 2006.

I got an idea for a novel (brought on by regular visits to NYC, where my freelance job is) and went to BookPeople in Austin to look for writing books not so much to tell me how, but just for inspiration. I noticed a book published by Shambhala Publications, which is the publishing house of a lot of Buddhist books I’d read, and for that reason alone, I picked up the book. It was Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. And it really helped open up my creativity.

So that’s what this blog is, essentially, timed exercises taken specifically from Natalie's book or from other sources. (The basic idea of Writing Down The Bones is to write non-stop for the period of the exercise, be it five minutes, fifteen, or sixty; the idea is to get past the internal editor to the artist deeper within.) If you decide to read what I've written, I hope more than anything else that you are entertained.

-jdjb

The last book I read was...

What Is The What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers.

I love Dave Eggers. I find his writing style very inspiring. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, particularly because of the strong voice of Deng, and because of the history lesson it provides. There were things in it that made me cry, things that made me laugh. And there were things that really annoyed me, like the fact that for a while about three-quarters of the way in, there were quite a few evidences of sloppy editing, typos, words that didn't belong in the text. That shit drives me crazy! I feel compelled to mark the text and send a note to the author, but I haven't done so with this book, not yet anyway.

My Daily Bone

I'm over here now.

August 25: testing, testing

August 25: Becky & Jesus (13 + 10 minutes)

Read the first two chapters of my novel!

My name is Jay.

I am a writer.

What I'm reading right now:

The last book I read was...

These are the blogs and other websites I sometimes visit.

These are my past blogs that you may have missed.