98 Wounds

by Justin Chin

  Bolster

  THINGS THAT CONVEY HOPE, OR THE POSSIBILITY OF HAPPINESS FORTHCOMING

  The morning after; One more spin, once more around, one more; “Don’t you pay them no mind”; The brief window the newly in-love find where they are shown who they should be; Proceeding with the day even while knowing that the other will cancel or simply not show, which does happen, and does not; The director asking, “How many props are necessary to pull off sorrow?”; Google-ing ‘insomnia’ in the middle of the night; From which altitude one looks like a weed in a field of weeds, an ineloquent dot asleep in a dream; The passage of time, the passing of life, the days, the countless hours and minutes and seconds, the sweep of the clock’s second hand; The glass half empty or half full in the dishwasher.

  * * *

  Are we made of stories or are we made of facts?

  And which builds better? The stories of evidence and archive, or the ones built from each living and dying cell of your body?

  The story of a life is constructed together in relationships. The people close to us — family, friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies even — become the mirrors and journals in which we recall and inscribe our history, they are the instruments that help us know ourselves and remember ourselves; and we do the same for them.

  But stories wear out, erode. You leave them behind — in an old apartment, under the sink, in the back of a cab squashed between the seat cushions. Or the story loses its legs, its lungs; the meaning holding it aloft wavers, flinches too much, gets outdated. Over time, you become someone else. The story suffers from too much light, too much darkness, from the constant poking and peeling, over familiarity.

  And what is left but all those dark eyes staring back at us. Look at the pictures, look in the archives, look in the footnotes, look at the souvenirs. Look in the mirror, in all the reflective surfaces.

  * * *

  THINGS ONE MIGHT TAKE TO BE A SIGN OF GREAT MEANING & SIGNIFICANCE BUT ARE REALLY UNREMARKABLE & INCONSEQUENTIAL

  Double rainbows; Two-headed calves; Feral parrots rousting in the palm trees at first light; Butterflies at night; A long shriveled plant coming back to life; Seeing the number 11 or 1’s and zeros in various permutations; Finding pennies on the street or in cracked spaces; Dreams where avifauna speak to you; Dreams of financial riches; All nightmares induced by eating Mission burritos before bedtime; Roadkill.

  * * *

  What happens after “Goodnight”? What happens after the bedtime story?

  We imagined apocalypse because it was easier than the complicated futures that lay ahead. A future fraught with baffling new technologies, impenetrable financial power structures, ever shifting alliances and collapsing social systems, perplexingly malevolent microorganisms, and a language devolving and impotent. Death was more imagineable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood and survival would make of us. Charging bullishly into life with all barrels loaded without the fear of consequences was an act of desperation, though at the time some might have mistaken it for fearlessness, youthful prerogative, or selfish immaturity. It was a declaration that there were more terrible things than death; there were desires so urgent — for anesthesia, distraction, the dark brooding forces of need, the quelling of survivor’s guilt; there were corrections so grave to undertake — the defying of fate’s gauntlet, the dissent against conformity and apathy, the mutiny against the downward spiral of despair and our inherited pessimism.

  Gambling, drug taking and love were our rituals of hope.

  But all hope suffers from its own insufficiency.

  Failure was our tutor and guide, was what we mostly learnt from.

  * * *

  You spend your life as an activist, an artist, a diva, or a slut, and then you’re the box of your coffin, the box of your columbarium, the box of ashes, the box of papers and artifacts sitting on a shelf.

  And you think about all the boxes you’ve tried to write and live yourself out of, and all the boxes other people have tried – successfully or un – to herd you into, and the boxes that you willingly climbed into, all the boxes you’ve struggled against, or made cozy with.

  Funny isn’t it, how everyone believes themselves to be “out of the box” thinkers? You don’t ever hear anyone declaring, I think inside the box. Maybe in-the-box types aren’t given to making declarations about themselves; they would have to think outside the box to do that.

  Then there is the other box, the more prurient one: the ones you really wanted to get into, and your own which you’ll gladly fold the flaps out open for whomever.

  Does all living lead into a box of some sort? Is it futile to think that one is ever free of the box? Hey, so… why is the mime trapped in a box? No, seriously, this is not a set-up for a punchline. Why is the mime trapped in a box? Of all the standard mime tricks, this one stands apart.

  The wall is understandable, we fall walls everyday of our lives. People pull on rope all the time, they climb ladders, they lean against things, they lift stuff, they eat sloppily. All these are common everyday acts, rooted in their normalcy, you may find yourself doing any one of these things. You may even find yourself struggling against the wind with your umbrella on some stormy day. But how often does one find oneself stuck in a box?

  And it’s a box. It’s not all that sturdy. Even if you’re stuck in a high-class box, it’s still cardboard. But even if it were wooden, if you push against it, brace and bare against the sides, it’ll come apart. If you’re trapped in a cardboard box and are too weak and puny to push your way out, just take a piss and it’ll sag and come apart.

  * * *

  THINGS THAT SOUND DELIGHTFULLY OBSCENE BUT AREN’T AT ALL

  Tittle, Umlaut, Glottal, Cockmaster, Titchy, Sloppy, Lorem Ipsum.

  * * *

  THINGS THAT SOUND DELIGHTFULLY OBSCENE BUT AREN’T EVEN WHEN THEY ARE

  Jarns, Nittles, Quimps, Grawlix.

  * * *

  There is a kind of euphoria in grief, a degree of madness, unspoken and unacknowledged, an undercurrent that fueled the survivors.

  This was a time when we still grieved in our own rooms, real or imagined, shared or squatted. We valued and stubbornly held on to the dignity we could feel slipping away. This was a time when we still had our private lives. When being a shameless whore or hussy was an action deliberately taken. It was beautiful work and the quality of the shamelessness, the effrontery of the brazenness, was all the more richer and dazzling for the effort put behind it.

  None of that national mourning, that showy community grieving that we find so commonplace these days. None of those garish roadside shrines, each one competing with the next for more stuffed animals, more plastic flowers, more ink-jet printed photos, or in a brilliant trumping move, stuffed animals and plastic flowers together encased in a balloon held aloft by a plastic rod.

  Real Simple magazine would recommend Ash (home-ground, of course) and Sackcloth (easily home-rendered as well.) It’s all you need.

  Many years ago, a neighbor back home had died and the wake was held in the house’s living room. Every day for a week, in the evening, a small silver van would pull up and a group of black clad women would get out of the van and proceed into the house. And then it began. The loudest, wailing-est, most screeching and terrifying screams and sobbing and crying ever heard. Professional mourners. Every day from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., except for Friday and Saturday which was from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday was a day off, of course. And at 7 p.m. or 2 p.m. on the dot, the bawling stopped as instantly as it started, as if someone had pressed the STOP button on the stereo, as if there was a conductor leading an orchestra to its final coda. Then the ladies would file out, clutching onto their handkerchiefs or tissues in one hand, with a can of soda or Orange Crush in the other, and pile into the van and off they went to the next gig.

  That is how it should be done. That is the job I would most like to have.

  * * *

  AIDS DRUGS THAT SOUND LIKE HIPSTER BABY NAMES

&nbs
p; Isentress; Sustiva; Truvada; Kaletra; Prezista; Reyataz; Selzentry; Lexiva; Ziagen; Zerit; Entriva.

  “Don’t mind her, Kaletra is very mature for her age, aren’t you sweetie?”

  “Isentress and Prezista have been raving non-stop about theatre camp…”

  “QiGong classes have really helped Lexiva and Ziagen to balance out their ADHD.”

  * * *

  The thing about activism is that so very often one ends up advocating on behalf of people who one just doesn’t quite care for. People who grate upon your very being. Perhaps they’ll mock your dedication, your hard selfless work; perhaps they’ll live their lives that will set the movement back tens of years, people who simply just aren’t helping. These people’s lives would be greatly enhanced and enriched by your sweat and stress and commitment to social justice even as they support causes and positions abhorrent to you.

  Yes, yes, no man is island; yeah, yeah, butterfly flapping wings; uhhuh uhhuh, greater humanity, greater good…

  At some point, you will realize that you are not one of your heroes. You are something else altogether and you have to take that into consideration.

  * * *

  We were past the awful crushing ’80s, death and day-glo, the dead were leveling off in the city and soon there would even be a week followed by more weeks where there was not one obituary in the fag-rags, which was some kind of minor miracle it seemed. The awful toxic medications had been reformulated to resemble something that could even pass for compassion. A stride had been struck, a pace brokered. Those with the wherewithal had managed to deftly work the red tape of SSI and disability and an assortment of city and state benefits into a nice trust fund from Uncle Sam. Not quite the level of the Rockefellers or the Hiltons, but enough to live their quirky, queer lives that everyone seemed to have hobbled together from thrift store bargains, temp jobs, and all the moxie of the beautifully worthless, the diseased nothings.

  Soon, the pile of pills we had in hand would become a different pile of pills. This time, with the power to drag that unswerving line of light into a prism to refract into a thousand pieces and points, except it wasn’t a prism glass but some old piece of glass, perhaps a chipped piece of windscreen, or a broken award trophy, found by the road.

  Little did we know but we each were the guinea pigs of the other. Our benevolent inquisitors, clipboards in hand, starched concern botoxed in their faces, recorded and collated and compiled, how much, how long, how wrong, when then, what happened, what failed irrevocably, what next.

  The prospects weren’t quite that gleaming and sunshiny, though it was soon to be, but we couldn’t have known that just yet. Nor could we fathom how astonishing it would be. We lived in the eternal present. We had to think like heroes, superheroes even, in order to be mere decent human beings.

  We could not know if there was something better over the hill or not, but that didn’t matter because we had our friends and lovers marshaled. And we had something that resembled hope and could very well have been it, albeit tattered and gimpy and effete.

  * * *

  40 NAMES

  Are they online usernames from M4M4Sex – or – actual Chinese restaurants from the southern and midwestern United States?

  1. TastyTop

  2. Hungry1

  3. BigWong

  4. Chopstix

  5. BlueDragon

  6. JoyLuck

  7. YellowRiver

  8. Chinamax

  9. ChinaBear

  10. ChinaMaster

  11. Nuthuggers

  12. HotWings

  13. GreenBamboo

  14. HoHo

  15. RiceBowl

  16. Chinex

  17. Eggroll

  18. PanDa

  19. Wok&Chops

  20. Noodling

  21. RiceLovers

  22. Dumpling

  23. Flaming

  24. Fuffut

  25. RiceFarm

  26. YumMy8

  27. JockMeat

  28. LickMy7

  29. GoldenCocks

  30. MushuU

  31. Prime8

  32. Irishwasabi

  33. shakeit

  34. TopMission

  35. Xlgmeat

  36. APlusTop

  37. BottomView

  38. CocknBull

  39. RicePatrol

  40. Gr8Buns4U2E

  * * *

  THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW I LOVED

  Silence, Solitude, Uncomplicatedness, The Desert (as much as the sea), Mornings (as much as nights), Winter storms, Home.

  * * *

  I used to live in the apartment beneath Junior Miss Speedfreak Northwest 1987. It’s such a trite cliché that it embarrasses me somewhat to even mention it, but it seemed as though she had not stopped vacuuming for four days — the whirr of some household appliance bumping into furniture and walls was a constant. And when she wasn’t vacuuming, she would be washing the pavement with the Wondermop™ that she obviously bought from an early morning infomercial, a product I too on certain aimless occasions had desired to possess. Some early mornings, I would peel back my curtains and she would be smoking in front of the apartment building with her mop, her oily acne-spotted cheeks shining in the last glows of the streetlamp’s halogen dying flare. You almost expect to see the lit tip of that cigarette inch into her oil-trap face and ignite into a pyre. She was harmless enough, and we all left her to her vices, ignoring her endless stream of boyfriends who visited at all hours of the night while she vacuumed. At least our sidewalk was spotless. Even in the fall, not one dried leaf was to be found on our block of sidewalk, it was as if the path was Scotchgarded. Then, one day, she stopped vacuuming and stopped mopping, the whirr wound down its humming decibels, her boyfriends stopped coming around, and eventually, when no one was looking, and no one was ever looking despite her persistent paranoid insistence that everyone was, she moved away. No one saw any moving trucks or her lugging any boxes out of the building. She just disappeared. The landlord showed up to inspect the place and found it bare, picked clean almost; he was expecting it to be trashed. And after a few hours, the pavements grew dusty and stained again. Someone said that maybe she got clean, tripped on her hideous oversized bell-bottoms and face-planted straight down that flight of twelve steps. I miss having a clean pavement, however unnatural it looked.

  I once witnessed a Buddhist wake — or was it Taoist? I’m never quite sure — where the mourners, paid and real, stayed up all night playing cards, eating and drinking and gambling and keeping watch over the casket. The wake spilled out of the house and into the driveway, crept out of the garage and onto the sidewalk and street, all lit by the harshest fluorescent lights and perfumed with unflinching incense and cigarette smoke. The assorted family members, mourners, and funeral workers gathered at the tables laid out for the funeral dinner and gambled all night. I longed to sneak into the wake but I didn’t need to. It was open to anyone, just as long as there was no disrespecting the deceased or the mourning family. I ended up in a gorgeous marathon mah-jong session, lost $217 when day finally broke, and as one shift of weary gambling mourners filed away to finally go to sleep, content with their duty to the deceased, and another shift arrived to take their place, I was left with the most beautiful ache in my gums and jaw from my sleep deprivation and all the second-hand smoke.