It’s a high-fashion take-over and I’m loving it—everything’s right here to see, all this money and coke and attitude and bad hair. Benjamin arrives and I’m jumping up and down, of course she’s chasing one of the boys—he’s from Santa Rosa but he’s giving I’ve-been-in-London-since-the-sixties. Konstantina shows up in some elaborately hand-crafted suit with matching hat, I say this party just went from low-end to high-end to high-end giving lowend to low-end giving high-end. Konstantina’s a bit wired, and everyone else is upstairs except some really scary coke-heads, so I go over to 24th Street and catch a cab.
Billeil calls to tell me the gays are lining up outside City Hall, in the rain, to camp out and get married in the morning, since Gavin Newsom said they could hitch. Billeil says he was riding by on his bike and saw all these people, he thought maybe it was a protest, but it was midnight and the gays were passing around wine and egg salad sandwiches. What could be more depressing?
On the radio, this guy says he was homeless because he was trying to find out what was truth. Sure, I’m looking for new themes or beams of light shining down from the not-heavens, nowhere near heavens NO. But let’s contextualize, elaborate, contemplate—which isn’t the same thing as dreaming: blight, flight and hand-held light, flickering on the walls of doom in my gloom room. Actually the walls are okay, it’s just that flickering in my head until it’s out.
There are these few minutes after chi gung class and ear acupuncture, when I’m on the BART chewing my food, or wait no I’m already on the bus because the BART was so quick. But the point is that then I’m on the bus, chewing my food, and I actually notice the texture of the rice, soft and smooth and silky and rough, all at once. The beans taste good, even if they don’t have much flavor. This is what it feels like to be in my body. By the time I get home, I’m exhausted again and my brain’s fogged up, but I’m excited about that window of taste and desire that didn’t quite feel like longing.
Later, I’m just tired, cruising for sex on the internet, which is great, really great. I send a letter to my man: So I know people on the internet are an inferior breed, but is that like some hot fucking fantasy . . . dude, I’m gonna send him an email, get him excited, tell him I’m gonna call him, and . . . ha ha ha . . . here I thought we were gonna get married . . . sob . . . though really, show some manners, I’m sure it just gets your pole rock fucking hard to do rails of tina in your sultry internet abode . . . but really, humans can be fun too, maybe you should meet some.
I’m in this old German train station with my father, we’re on a trip together and all the sudden someone starts shooting—I’m hurled to the ground by fear, the man in front of me is whimpering and I’m trying to position my head behind his ass, so that at least the bullets won’t hit my brain. I wonder whether that’s ethical, but the drive to survive brings me there anyway.
Six, seven, eight, nine bullets—I think that’s all there are, but actually I don’t know anything about guns. I get up anyway to run, and realize I’m heading towards the guy with the gun, because he turns back with it, and then I’m running the other way. Then I say it—Daddy!!!—that’s when I know it’s a dream because I don’t think I’ve called him that since . . . way before I stopped calling, I mean like maybe when I was five or six. But still, the way dreams are sticky, that’s me, running through the Berlin train station yelling Daddy!
We get outside and there’s no one around. I’m in a panic, pulling my father mentally around corners until we get to the subway, even though it’s so far above-ground that we have to climb a cliff to get there, and since it’s a dream my hands work but my father’s not in such good shape, someone helps him and then this Dutch boy with short blond hair grabs him in an embrace, like he’s the next big thing.
In this dream, it’s not the usual terror of my father, it’s like we’re on a trip together and I’m taking care of him. He and the blond boy go into the bathroom or the conductor’s cabin, and I think, well—I’m going to have to at least tell him to take my needs into account when he goes into bathrooms with boys. I try to look under the glass door, but I don’t want to scare my father.
That’s the beauty of the dream—and I know it sounds crazy, but it’s my desire and awareness that my father’s afraid of. This is the part where I’m slightly more awake, and so I wonder about the blond boy falling for this sixty-year-old man. Obviously it’s a Daddy-boy thing, except that my father somehow looks like he did when he was my age, his usual beard and moustache but that’s kind of trendy these days.
Then they come out, too quickly, and I want to say GET HIS NUMBER, because of all those missed opportunities in my life, but maybe this one’s missed too. When I wake up, I think: I have to remember this dream—but I don’t want to write it down, so I piss in the sink—that’s so I don’t wake up too much—and then I move the glass of water to the back of the kitchen counter, so my memory will be there when I get up again.
There’s some music that’s just so good that you could live in it, like when the bicycle horn comes in and out of the song that moves through samples and all these different melodies on toys, and then back into the beat, which is cracked, all the while sampling various men saying various things but still the beat, and Kevin says: is the narrator a music critic? What I love is when the whole song stops, just for a beat or two and then boom it’s back and almost backwards until the car skids, the record inside the music skips. The music almost slows because of all the talking with various records going so fast that everything else becomes scenery and still the horn, the horn, the horn and then back to the melody—or is it the harmony?—whatever it is fades out and there’s static.
When I fall back asleep it’s weirder, because I’m on my way back to the Berlin apartment and I find Rue on her way back from drinking at Heaven. Why did you go to Heaven, the tackiest club in London, of all the terrible places in the world? But I already know the story. Rue is fixated on who did the talking. I just want him to know that he doesn’t have to lie to me, I kind of want to know the details—what my father’s dick was like—oh no, Rue had sex with my father? Is Rue the blond boy, or did Rue have sex with the blond boy?
From the BBC: our reporter reflects upon the turbulent times unleashed upon South Africa following the release of Nelson Mandela. Then on NPR, there’s a guy talking about pitchers and catchers, but I don’t think he means what we mean. I take a sleeping pill at noon, well just a part of one. It’s after the screeching of the hot water wakes me up, what is wrong with the pipes? Then when I wake up—or at least get out of bed—there’s a sudden hailstorm, and when I get out of the bathroom, there are all these tiny balls of ice in the windowsill, and everything smells like vinegar.
Rue wants me to tell him how much more comfortable his bed is, now that he covered the futon in magical foam. No—it’s not magical, it’s memory. I’m lying on top of him, which is the most comfortable position for me, but then I’m crushing out all the air in his lungs, so I move over. It’s 9:30 p.m., so Rue’s decomposing. He holds his hand up in the air—what’s this? I look closely. It looks kind of like a lobster claw. Rue is giggling—and I’m laughing—and his roommates are walking by in the hallway, you can hear the creaking of the floor. Rue holds up his hand again: I’m five, he says. I’m thinking: I’ll be five with you—I want to try it all over again, sort of.
Waiting for the bus, there’s some preppy boy with a thick red hooded sweatshirt, I can’t stop thinking how comfortable it would be to be inside it. With him, sure, and I guess that’s some of what Ralowe feels too—wanting that ease. The safety disease. Though Ralowe’s fetish is a bit more over-the-top, or maybe I just keep mine quieter. On the bus, the preppy boy is looking away and I’m studying his white white calves, lips a bit too red, redder than the sweatshirt, which is really pinkish in its softness.
I go to a movie where fifteen-year-old boys plot to jump off buildings, it’s about the dark side of Singapore and the boys who are forced there by the smallest acts—like tattooing or pi
ercing—acts that grow larger, into murder and suicide. It’s about longing, mostly homosexual, though the director claims he only filmed what he saw, since these boys are non-actors acting like themselves. In one scene, this boy swallows condoms filled with pills, to smuggle them across the border, and it’s so clearly sexualized by the camera, even though and especially because of all the pain when the boy has to get the drugs out. Later, the director says: these kids had to do that every day, and if they didn’t get across in two hours then they could die when stomach acid went through the condoms.
Everything in the movie is surreal and you never see the boys do drugs, even though they’re always supposed to be on them. I wonder if that’s because of the law. In one scene, a schoolgirl jumps from a building when she fails her exams, and the boys look down at the blood dripping out of her mouth and walk onward. Later, they’re making music videos, rapping over techno and doing everything femme. Apparently they shot a lot of these scenes themselves, after the director gave them cameras so they could get used to them. In the end, he says, they got too good at acting, and I had to edit those parts out.
ECSTASY THERAPY
On NPR, a commentator wonders why baby boomers hate rap music—it almost seems like he’s going to critique the way the music industry creates corporate rap as a fake counterpoint to white power, but instead he goes on to explain that rap music doesn’t have a conscience. Actually he uses the word hip-hop. At one point, he says something about June Cleaver, and later in the week I’m going to see Kathleen Cleaver speak—I thought she was married to Eldridge Cleaver and they were in the Black Panthers together, but maybe that was June. Oh wait—June Cleaver is on The Simpsons.
Ralowe calls: what is that flavor-enhancing seaweed? Kombu. And what kind of mushrooms did you suggest for lentils? Crimini—are you at Rainbow? No, I’m at Baker Beach and there’s a man in a van, maybe I should get in the van. Later, Ralowe calls to ask why there are eight helicopters flying over. It’s because if there were seven, they’d get confused with the days of the week. I realize that June Cleaver can’t be married to Homer on The Simpsons because her name’s Cleaver. Oh—June Cleaver is the wife on Leave It to Beaver. It takes me six hours to figure this out, which is pretty exciting.
Sometimes everything’s terrible, and sometimes it’s worse. Of course I can’t fall asleep, I get up to eat toast, get back in bed. The rats are back in my kitchen, one of them is dashing across the floor and making skidding sounds. Is it a rat chasing a mouse? When I wake up, I feel like I’ve been fighting someone all night and there are bruises all over my body. The highlight of the day is getting my hair cut, 5:30 p.m. and then everything’s downhill. Actually, it’s uphill to sell CDs on Haight Street, where the guy will only give me twenty-four dollars for fifteen CDs. I think it’s because I left the store tags on them, saying they were bought used. Then I’m eating at the noodle house, and I feel like I’m going to nod off. That’s pretty much how I’ve felt all day long, for the last week at least, like at any moment I could just pass out. Everything, absolutely everything, is a challenge and I’m sick of it.
Oh wait—2 a.m. is around the corner and suddenly I can hardly breathe, my eyes popping out of my head. I check in the mirror to see if that’s really the case, and what’s really the case is that my eyes are surrounded by wrinkles when I smile—oh well, that’s thirty to you—but the wired part is that my pupils are tiny inside the rest. I guess I’ll have to go to the Power Exchange, unless I can think of some club that would be bearable.
Okay, so the next day is just hell, I can hardly even get out of the house I’m so exhausted and depressed and hopeless. Chrissie calls to try and sell me something from her new job, an entertainment card with discounts in Vegas or LA, Chrissie gets paid seven dollars per sale and there’s no hourly wage. Today she’s made one sale. Well—no reason to outsource telemarketing to India when you’ve got tweakers in San Francisco!
Later, Chrissie gives me the news: I’m looking at teenage fitness number seven, which is the number of the whore I think we can relate to this but what I’m talking about, eight is eternal, six is the beast, seven is the whore, then there’s magical four—we’re talking astronomical—raise yourself on parallel bars and then dip down as far as you can, you got to get some bars, go to a bar and push yourself up—but this is for teenagers and we’re old—I want what Britney Spears has, she can find out what each and every molecule needs and they give her that.
Fashion alert: Vuitton driver wearing MUNI! But wait: I actually meet a hot guy over the internet. He’s so nervous and maybe even straight, cute and preppy and so hard when he takes his clothes off. I suck his dick so I don’t come too quickly, and after we’re done, he’s still nervous. Went to Georgetown University, and he says the area’s even scarier now than how I remember it, just an outdoor mall full of Abercrombie stores for the college kids. This is when I realize the world’s more and less complicated than I ever imagined, because here’s this preppy guy who lives by the new ballpark and calls that an interesting neighborhood, but he’s giving a critique of Abercrombie even while giving Abercrombie. Though I didn’t check his labels, the girl is fully working Tevas.
Mabel Williams says something brilliant about taking up guns in Monroe, N.C. to defend against the KKK. She says: then the KKK members had to decide whether to risk their superior lives for our inferior ones. On the radio: democracy is a cleansing! But here’s how depressing my sex-and-romance life is: I’m already thinking about the boy from last night, wondering if he’ll call. You know the answer, from previous research. I check my email anyway. Then I get my first trick in a few weeks. I meet him at the Hot Tubs and I’m on, despite the nap that left me with a sinus headache—no, this is a hole. He’s into my hole, but I’m not feeling that. After he comes on my stomach, I lie in bed with him and I realize something about how sex can bring this beautiful intimacy into the room.
I ask him if he’s okay. He says: nothing, I’m just thinking. I don’t ask what he’s thinking about, because I can tell he doesn’t want me to know. Suddenly he gets up, dresses and leaves me in the room. Luckily, he paid me first. I take a towel on my way out, because I need to get back into stealing things—and because it says Hot Tubs, which makes it a great souvenir.
At the last minute, I rush to the breakaway march at the anti-war demo, food in my hands. There are these weird conservatives over by City Hall with signs that say things like, “I Don’t Support War—Unless a Democrat Is President.” And, “Vote Green—So We Can All Be Stupid and Poor.” There are cops everywhere, so it takes a while for us to find a place where we can break away.
The march is the usual, except there are so many cops that we can’t succeed in doing much, trying to march this way and then that way—the straight anarcho guys screaming like they’re in the military, and ordering people around. The annoying thing is that most people follow their orders, like when they say RUN, everybody runs like it’s a good idea or something. Pretty soon, we get to Market and I guess we’re too close to the Abercrombie store, so the cops surround us. We’re not allowed to be in the street or on the sidewalk—democracy in action: people get clobbered and dragged off. There are a lot of us, though—I’d say a thousand at the peak—so it almost feels empowering. Afterwards, Pouneh and I get food at my house, and then we take the 49 towards Market and it takes forever. Those goddamned anarchists—fucking up traffic!
A trick. A what? A trick. Oh, a trick. He’s in the penthouse suite at the Pickwick Hotel, which is funny because the Pickwick isn’t fancy. The suite is nice, though—the furniture’s a bit worn but the old paneling on the walls and the grand marble fireplace are beautiful. I’m sure you haven’t noticed yet, but I have a hotel fetish. The trick hasn’t gotten fucked in two years, so it’s kind of difficult. I’m so present it’s insane, and then afterwards he rubs my body while I jerk myself off, which is kind of fun because I haven’t come in a while—his hands feel good, plus I have complete control. Which is what every hooker wan
ts, I mean needs.
Outside, it’s cool and damp and foggy—I’m so glad. I always think the heat isn’t going to end, but then it always does, ’cause thankfully this is San Francisco. Eric leaves me a message about what happened to Eldridge Cleaver, he came back to the U.S. from exile and became a Republican, ran for Congress in California and then got addicted to crack, died in ’89.
Another dream where I’m going on a trip with my father, we stop at a gas station and the line is so long it goes out the door. It’s because we’re on the border. We wait in line forever. Afterwards, I ask my father if there was a Phish concert or something. He doesn’t get the joke; I mean he doesn’t know who Phish is.
When I wake up, every muscle in my body hurts. I try self-massage, which makes everything worse. When I get out of bed, there’s so much dust in my room. I read From Fatigued to Fantastic, a 440-page book, in one day. Afterwards, I’m exhausted. Actually, I’m exhausted the whole time. Socket comes over for beans and rice. She watches me using the foot massage tools under the table. She says: you’re so good at taking care of yourself—too bad it doesn’t work. I walk four blocks to the post office, but it’s closed. I’m exhausted. I go to Walgreen’s to get a new prescription sleeping pill, but it’s sixty dollars. I leave it there. I walk home. At my door, I’m so out of it that I think of lying down on the carpet in the hallway, a spectacle of collapse. I figure I can do that in my bed, too, which is caving in even more—pretty soon, I’ll hit the floor—Bingo/Fish/Uno!
Perhaps a new album by Wynton Marsalis will make it easier to put the children to sleep at night. But now I present to you: The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, fire engines in the rain, and a lifetime’s supply of grapefruit-flavored packing peanuts. Rue says those aren’t packing peanuts, they’re pomelos—but they taste the same. I keep thinking no one’s calling me back because it’s Friday, then I realize it’s Thursday, then I keep thinking no one’s calling me back because it’s Friday.
So Many Ways to Sleep Badly Page 22