Another morning of screeching pipes, I get up and decide not to cruise the internet anymore. It’s my birthday—I’m 31 on the 31st! Rue comes over with freshly made Vietnamese spring rolls, and then we visit the sea lions. It’s Memorial Day on Pier 39, so it’s packed with tourists, but there are a lot of sea lions, and pretty soon Ralowe, Gina, and Liz show up, too. I love watching the way the sea lions lie on top of each other and nothing matters, one of them focuses intently on mastering yoga postures—first sun salute and then what’s that one—the bow? A tiny one is busy figuring out how to get out from underneath hundreds of pounds, then suddenly they all start yelling and sneezing in each other’s faces, pushing each other off the docks and into the freezing water and then after a short swim they get back on the docks and go right back to sleeping.
There’s one enormous one—she must be about 800 pounds—and she’s got a whole dock to herself. Any time someone else tries to join her, she just shakes her head—no, no, no. At the marine mammal shop, I get postcards and Gina gets a fake tattoo. We go to the Inner Richmond for Burmese food, but end up getting an MSG surprise instead, because we miss our place in line and the kitchen closes, we have to go down the street to the MSG factory. An unforgiving experience and an unforgettable topic.
In the morning, what’s in my head? Sawdust, cotton—the kind of cotton that hurts to touch—windshield wipers that are broken and rusted open, dying pigeons that don’t quite smell yet, an olive tree with roots, an airplane hangar like the one that collapsed in Paris though actually that was a terminal, a broken air-raid siren that doesn’t even make the sound I like, dandruff on flower stems, venomous snakes, radio waves, the enteric coating from 6,000 bottles of aspirin, plastic recycling fumes, rabies, a CAT scan, Marie Antoinette’s head, better off dead, lots of glue that burns, photo-developing chemicals, toluene, broken light bulbs, a deer’s head with antlers poking out, 700 bags of cat litter, 200 different toxic perfumes.
And more: chlorine from every pool in Texas, construction vehicles, a fire hydrant that doesn’t work, weeping weeping willows, so many crumbling walls, rocks and boulders and cliffs that don’t just jut—especially when you fall off—the Grand Canyon—potted plants that didn’t make it, berries with thorns, more glue, so much glue and maybe mildew dried out too because it’s all dry in there, even the berries aren’t colorful they’re gray.
I go to bed again—the pipes don’t squeak, but it doesn’t matter because I sleep like shit anyway. What’s in my head in the morning? Hollow-point bullets, Marriott hotels that fell off the chain, demolition debris, paper cuts, mint-flavored hacky-sack choking my eyeballs. What? I push at all the pain to see if I can find the center, but it’s all pain.
OH BEAUTIFUL . . .
Ralowe says he’s been on the internet for eight hours, and it just keeps getting worse. But there’s good news: Ronald Reagan is dead! Jaysen goes to the war demo, he says I just wanted to see what they were like now, but I had to leave because I realized I could be doing something more important, like folding laundry.
You don’t want to know what NPR has to say about Reagan’s death—they bring out Margaret Thatcher. George Bush says: his work is done, and now a shining city awaits him. I call Andee—11 p.m. is 7 a.m. for her, but of course she’s still awake. She tells me about when she took valerian and there was sweat pouring down her back, she thought it was snakes. She says: maybe you should try cocktails for a week, and then your fibromyalgia will go away. Um, maybe you should try valerian.
In the morning, I open the spices cabinet and four roaches fall on my shoulder—why do they like living so close to the edge? Or maybe it’s in their genes—hard-wired for danger. Blake says: have you seen that book Rats—it might help. Benjamin calls, she says I just had the most disturbing conversation with Ralowe—he’s probably told you about it, but I don’t know.
Ralowe calls, he says I just want to kill myself, I don’t have any friends—I was talking to Benjamin and she’s just not interested in connecting with me in the ways that we always have. I used to feel like Benjamin and I could have these conversations about race and identity and living in the world. I felt like we had this closeness because we’ve experienced trauma and alienation in similar ways and now she’s telling me that never happened, she said: I’m not interested in that, you’re making assumptions—I was just interested in your artistic process. I don’t know who I’m going to have those conversations with—I know you have all your own problems, and I don’t want to burden you, but I go out on the street and everyone’s talking to each other, how do they do it? What does it all mean?
Benjamin says: it was like a break-up conversation, he expressed the need for certain things from me, and I expressed a disinterest in those things. It became much more dramatic than it needed to be. I don’t want to be another person who thinks Ralowe’s too difficult to deal with.
A survey for the world—what do you think is making those scratching noises in my walls: is it pigeons or rats, cats, mice, lice, rice, dice, or a flotation device? If it’s rats or pigeons—well, we already know all about that! If it’s cats, I hope they’re not rabid. If it’s mice—same old story. If it’s rice, then when am I getting married? If it’s dice, what’s my lucky number? If my lucky number is seven, isn’t that a cliché? And what do I win, anyway?
Decompression advice: I go to the Nob Hill Theatre and eat more come. It tastes good, but afterwards my throat feels raw and I start worrying about STDs again—welcome back to gay life! This new going-to-bed-at-7-a.m. schedule is not working—all day long, I feel like I’m drifting inside of a wall. Chrissie wants to come over and cook a stir-fry—sure, why not? She doesn’t show, and I actually end up going to bed by 3.
Of course I’m awake at 9 a.m., ready to start a macrobiotic hair salon—I eat toast, get back in bed to wait for funding. At 10 a.m. I’m still awake, but more desperate. I get up to look at a postcard of the sea lions—they just sleep, in any position at all! I take part of a sleeping pill, get back in bed for another hour of pounding on heaven’s—or wait, it’s knock knock knockin’—fuck it, just LET ME IN, I swear I’ll even become a transaction documentation specialist or a hedge funds advisor or a Louis Vuitton attaché or just strange and blasé, touché, outré.
I get a few hours where I’m looking straight up at bright lights and thinking how can I be dreaming when there’s so much light? Aaron tells me there’s a new anti-depressant coming out this summer, he figures he can ride out the Paxil withdrawal long enough to try it, but not until after his mother visits. Rue tells his therapist he’s having trouble staying awake for more than a few hours, and the therapist gives him another bag of Strattera—the new ADD medicine—I wonder if that’s the same one they give U.S. fighter pilots to stay up and shoot Iraqis.
Here’s what my life has come to: I need to get curtains so that I don’t see the sun rising before I go to bed. Rue and I go to Jefferson Park to watch the sunset. It’s pretty, but the five-block walk wears us both out, my back feels like it’s going to crack off and then there’s no possible way to sit on the bench without hurting everything. We try sitting in the grass, but then my back hurts even more because there’s nowhere to lean. Rue’s day is coming to an end—9 p.m. is almost bedtime, but I got up at 4. There’s a state police officer patrolling the park to make sure no one’s sleeping there. When we get back to my house, my whole neck hurts, like I have bruises right up against the cartilage.
Ralowe says he had a trick last night, and it was like a whole year of working at Wells Fargo—some tweaker who inherited his house from a cop who died of cancer and the tweaker needed to re-install Windows on his computer, which took six hours and he was sweating so much that there were puddles on the floor and the dogs were licking it up. These were the dogs that the dead cop made his friend promise he’d take care of, but that was before he was dead.
In the morning, the trick’s shooting up . . . vitamin C. He keeps saying, over the course of the twelve romantic hours he and R
alowe spend together in the sweat-drenched sheets of mystic memory—wait, isn’t that Meryl Streep in Out of Africa? But don’t get distracted—the trick’s just doing Ralowe a favor, that’s what he keeps saying.
News from the laboratory: Paxil might not work for children! News from the Southern Baptist Church: when you have a big tent, with all different kinds of people in it, sometimes the tent collapses. News from Ralowe: the cruising bathrooms at Macy’s aren’t as crowded as they used to be. News from the Army: a new and improved battlefront uniform hits the racks in stores early next year. News from the hallway: did you order pizza?
News from the garbage chute: there are smart pigeons, hanging out in the stairwell, and when I walk in they fly right out the crack in the window! Benjamin visits the sea lions with her new boyfriend—somehow I can’t really picture that. She says it was really beautiful, well actually it was really beautiful seeing the way he reacted. The new mattress arrives, and I swear it’s already caving in. Maybe it’s some sort of scam: selling caved-in mattresses to faggots with body drama. At least it’s softer.
What is this headache, taking over both sides of my head like high-pressure headphones with sandblaster attached? I finally catch someone walking through the demolished building next door—I always suspected that it happened, but I never actually saw anyone doing it. I see this person because of their flashlight. They’re looking for something, and not finding it.
News from the BBC: Africans love globalization! My mother calls, for some reason I’m meeting her next week and she sounds so excited, I feel like crying. Kirk does a performance where he appears dressed as Nancy Reagan at her hubbie’s funeral, leans his head on the flag-draped coffin, takes a knife out of the coffin and asks the audience to scream YES while he screams NO, chopping up the flag. I wake up to piss, and break a glass. It rolls off the dish rack like magic until it’s shattered all over the floor. I sweep it up, and miraculously don’t cut myself. Rue tells me scientists just discovered a deep-sea fish that’s as old as the Tyrannosaurus Rex. It has teeth like a shark, but it looks like a rat, a five-foot-long rat with wings. Maybe that’s what’s in my walls.
My trick is so smashed he can’t really speak. He wants to suck my dick, but he’s biting me and gagging. Just when I think he’s hating everything, he says: you’re wonderful. I know I shouldn’t be turning tricks anymore, because I want to cry, lie down and die.
My new phone sex boyfriend wears baggy jeans and doesn’t like having sex outdoors too much because he gets nervous. He’s my phone boyfriend because he’s staying with a friend in an SRO, can’t get back in after 10 p.m. He has a sexy voice and he likes my voicemail greetings, keeps getting his friends to call and laugh. He’s a social worker who’s about to get SSI for bipolar and PTSD but he watches Fox News.
Benjamin loves her new recording and her new boyfriend, but she’s exhausted—she wants to know if I was more tired when I went out with Jeremy. She’s wondering if all this intense connection is tiring her out. I call my phone boyfriend, he’s not there. It’s past his curfew anyway. Maybe tomorrow we’ll finally meet.
Gina’s thinking of moving to LA to get a film job—oh, no! Just when she’s done with school and breaking up with her girlfriend, and we’ve actually been seeing each other. Andreas, my phone boyfriend, comes over—I don’t think we’re going to be boyfriends. We’re lying in bed, he’s rubbing my chest, which feels nice, but not in a sexual way really, he wants to know why I’m not attracted to him.
We lie there awhile, maybe two hours, staring at the ceiling and cuddling and at one point it reminds me of the first scene in Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, which was my favorite movie when I saw it in high school. In the beginning, two girls lie in the grass and talk to each other while they look at the sky. Maybe that’s what Andreas and I are doing. I wonder if I know what I want sex to feel like.
Though really I’m afraid of bridges, afraid I might fall off. Ralowe says: I was all nervous going to probation and so I was up all night on the internet, then I went to the jail and at the last minute, the lawyer shows up and he says: Ralowe, it’s okay. So I went over to Embarcadero 4 and cruised the bathroom for five hours, or I’m not sure, maybe it was six hours. I’m feeling a little out of it because I didn’t sleep last night, I’m not quite all there. Now, I’m not saying that I’m better than you or anything, but usually I actually sleep.
Someone calls. I don’t answer it. But is this time special?
It’s special because it’s my mother, calling me back after I called to tell her I have a cold, don’t call me back. She says I’ll hang out with you even if you’re sick. Yuck—what you’ll do isn’t the point. Andee calls—I’m in Seattle! What? I’m visiting my mother. Did something happen? She had to have a breast tumor removed, but she’s okay. How long are you going to be here? Two weeks. When are you coming down to SF? That’s an entirely different question.
My mother shows up, she understands why I like my apartment—there’s so much light, the layout is so interesting, you have so many interesting things around. She looks at the ’70s porn decorating my kitchen cabinets: does this have anything to do with you? No, I just thought it was funny. She says: it is funny.
We go to Millennium—the moment I’ve been looking forward to. My mother orders the kombu noodles, but then she doesn’t even want to taste them—they’re green, she says. She likes my quinoa cake, and the dahl with it, but grimaces at the broccoli rabe. Actually, the broccoli’s called something else, something more unusual.
At home, the kids in the hallway are shooting each other with pellet guns, no wait the cooking school students are playing with them? One of the cooking students is hot, busting out of his tank top and tight pants as he runs up the stairs to shoot it. I stare.
Okay, so I know you’ve been wondering, all those times you find yourself strolling around Fisherman’s Wharf, and you look in the restaurants at all those smiling Americans, all those bulwarks of democracy, those future and current inventors and geniuses of the world—the free world—what are all these smiling Americans eating? And the answer: bowls of steaming clam chowder inside hollowed-out loaves of sourdough bread.
Even my mother can’t believe it—the sourdough part—it was just so disgusting, she says—now my face is fat. My mother wants to know if I like flowers—she likes plants better too, they don’t die and make such a mess. They’re renovating their kitchen, she and my father—at least she thinks so, she’ll believe it when she sees it.
My mother likes my apartment, except it’s so sunny she has to wear sunglasses. I can’t sit in here without them, she says—I’m really sensitive to the light, but oh this weather—every day it’s perfect. She asks how I’m feeling—I’m a mess. She says you look exactly the opposite of the way you feel. We go to buy computer ink, she’s brought me some but it’s the wrong kind. They won’t exchange it, so she buys more, says: I’ll return it at home. The buzzer goes off, she tells the guard: I’m stealing this, but I’m not very good at it.
We go to Millennium again, this time it’s too hot inside, and the food’s making me sick. It’s Pink Saturday, so there are smiling gay boys at the bar from the hotel upstairs, ordering their first Pride cocktails. I stare at my mother, she asks me something—I don’t know what it is, really—maybe she’s talking about returning the ink. I look her right in the eyes, and say: you can’t take everything back. She doesn’t notice. When she hugs me goodbye, I have to feel stiff so that I’m not too vulnerable.
But it’s Pink Saturday—Ralowe, Liz and I go to see Imelda, where Imelda Marcos tells us that her would-be assassin should have used a prettier knife, and at her trial in New York, the Negroes were rooting for her. Everything’s okay until Rue calls from Faerie Village at Pride—smashed, of course. She says I wanted to call you because I know you don’t like hanging out with me when I’m drunk, and we’re hanging out later. But why are you at Pride? Because I wanted to see people. Who? I got a contact for a job, she says. Right.
/> I get a message from my mother: I enjoyed spending time with you, but I noticed you were staring at me at the restaurant, and I wondered if there was something you were thinking about, if there was some underlying issue. My mother, the therapist. I call her back: don’t delude yourself into thinking you don’t know what it is, or that you’re helping me.
I’m sucked into serious sinus headache heartache and Ralowe calls, I can’t function because it’s too hot in my house, I made too much cauliflower, I think the 5HTP I’m taking for sleep is killing my houseplants. What the fuck is 5HTP? I don’t know, some awful capsule I swallow before turning on the new relaxation CD.
The relaxation CD works—at getting me to fall asleep, though someone’s still pumping turpentine into my lungs. In the morning, scientists are protecting endangered plants with genetically engineered insects! But don’t worry—consumer spending rose last month because people are spending more on food and energy. Gina tells me that when she was a born-again Christian, she learned that she was filling her heart with all these things that weren’t God-shaped, and so they didn’t fit, because everyone has a God-shaped heart!
I wake up with a God-shaped bloody nose. The blood doesn’t come pouring out, doesn’t stain the sheets or stream onto the floor and make me slip and release more. The blood’s just in my nose, waiting for me to blow. Blow. Blow. Until bedtime, which comes remarkably quickly. I know I’m sketchy because I’m heating up some food and I see something in the window, it makes me shudder with a little bit of panic—I look closer and it’s my reflection.
It’s gotten to the point where I can’t actually remember romantic sex. I look at a guy on the bus, he has a cute smile—is he the one? I see some straight hipster on Valencia—fuck my face, okay? That’s romance? Well, sure—when they examine my body in the street, come and blood dripping out of my mouth, tire tracks all over my back—bicycle tires—they’ll know that it was a crime of passion and longing. His passion, my longing. My fashion, his belonging.
So Many Ways to Sleep Badly Page 25