Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The Other Boy's Father...

As a young boy, I belonged to a tribe in the Indian Guides.  Think the Boy Scouts, but with a Native American, rather than Pioneer, theme.  Instead of merit badges, we received various colored and decorated feathers for fulfilling specific tasks.  Instead of "dens" and "den-meetings" we had "tribes" and "pow-wows."  It was run by the local YMCA, and looking back on it now, it was actually pretty racist.  A bunch of suburban white boys and their fathers dressing up in feathers and war-paint, beating drums and pretending to be Native Americans, back when we still called them "Indians" and thought nothing of it.  Though, at the time, I was too young to notice any of that.  I just loved getting to do all of the crafts, coming up with my Indian Name ("Howling Wolf"), collecting feathers for my coup-stick, and especially, getting to spend time with my father.  He worked two jobs and went to night school, so any time we got to spend together was very special.  But what I loved the most, was when we would go camping.

A couple of times a year, our entire Nation (a group of local tribes) would rent out a campsite somewhere, and we would spend a long weekend out in the woods, making crafts, telling stories, cooking hotdogs on sticks over campfires, and other typical Boy Scout-type things.  Over the years, I grew to be good friends with all of the boys in my tribe, and their fathers, and I would look forward to every opportunity we had to get together.  They felt like a second family.  And the weekends we all spent in the woods are, to this day, some of the happiest memories I have of my childhood.

I remember one night in particular when I was around ten or eleven, as we were sitting around the fire after our hot dogs and beans, and after our s'mores, and after the last ghost story had been told, and long after most of the other boys were asleep in their bunks, I was trying to stay up late, to be with my father (whose Indian Name was, tellingly, "Night Owl").  I must've started to nod off at some point.  I don't remember exactly how it happened, but for some reason it was another one of the fathers, Tom, who carried me to my bunk that night, rather than my own.  Tom was tall and gangly and rather nerdy, always funny and good with us boys.  I remember he was also very handy, good at fixing things and such.  He was a plumber by trade, and owned a local plumbing company.  I'll still pass a truck with his name on it on the road every once in a while.

The cabin was almost completely dark, filled with the soft sound of sleeping young boys.  Tom carried me almost effortlessly down the dark, quiet cabin, toward my bunk at the far end.  It felt strange, the way he carried me.  My father would carry me almost slung over his shoulder.  But Tom carried me cradled in his arms, like a mother would carry her baby.  When we eventually reached the back of the cabin, he very gently lifted me up and laid me down in my bunk.  Because I was on the top bunk, I was lying down almost as high up as he was tall, very nearly face-to-face.  After making sure I was situated properly in my sleeping bag, he reached out with an enormous right hand, and cupped my head very gently.  He lightly brushed the hair off of my forehead.  Still holding my head in his hand, he softly stroked my cheek with his thumb, and then whispered, "Goodnight."  

And then, still cupping my tiny head in his giant, calloused hand, he leaned down very slowly, and kissed me on the lips more gently than anyone ever had before.  It wasn't like any goodnight kiss I'd ever had.  It was unlike any kiss any relative or family member had ever given me.  Even to my young mind back then, it clearly most resembled the romantic kisses I'd seen on TV and in movies.  Lips slightly parted.  Mouth to mouth.  Very soft and gentle.  And he lingered there with his mouth on mine for a long moment.  Then he smiled down at me, stroked my cheek once more, and left to go join the other fathers around the campfire, leaving me alone with my thoughts, and the twisting fear in my belly.

I never told anyone.  I was old enough to know that sometimes men touched children in bad ways.  But I don't think I felt certain enough about what happened with Tom that night to risk getting him in trouble by telling anyone.  Maybe I was afraid I would be the one to get in trouble.  Maybe I just didn't want to risk hurting anyone in my tribe, my second family.  But I remember that I wasn't entirely sure if what he'd done was really wrong or not.  It wasn't actually sexual; just strange.  I know that it made me feel very uncomfortable, but that could've been just because it was so different from anything I'd ever experienced before.  For all I knew that was how he kissed his own son goodnight, too, and he was just trying to be nice to me and treat me like he would his own.  No one but my own family had ever tucked me into bed or kissed me goodnight before.  Maybe the experience only felt strange to me because it was so different from the way I was used to with my own father.

I never thought that Tom was gay.  He wasn't effeminate at all.  And he was married and had a son.  And even his son seemed unusually straight for an adolescent boy.  When another boy from our tribe and I had taken Tom's son out into the woods one night to show him what we did out there by ourselves, and to invite him to join us, he wouldn't.  He just walked away, and left us there, half-naked on the ground, under the trees.  Maybe he'd told his father about what we'd done.  And maybe his father was gay.  And so maybe Tom thought he knew what I was going through.  Maybe he was trying to show me that it was okay, that he understood, that he was like me.  Maybe he thought he'd finally found someone he could share his secret with; this dark and horrible secret he'd been keeping his whole life.  Maybe that night, in the dark, in my tiny eyes, he thought he'd seen some sort of recognition.  Maybe he thought he'd finally found someone who understood him.

I don't know.  I'll never know.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Keeping Her Secret, Postcards Home...

In the middle of our two weeks at Summer camp, we received a special treat.  We were allowed to kayak out to Santa Claus Island, an uninhabited spit of sand and tall pine in the middle of Rehoboth Bay, and camp there for the night.  There were about thirty of us boys, all around nine years-old, and six adult camp counselors to watch over us all.  We picked our campsite, pitched our tents, built our fire, dug our latrine, and spent the rest of the day catching crabs from the bay for dinner that night.  Late in the afternoon, I snuck off into the deep woods by myself to masturbate.  After dark, I was running through the woods with some other boys, our flashlight beams bobbing and strobing through the brush as we ran full speed, and I tripped over a root I hadn't seen.  Scraped myself up pretty good.  That was normal for me.  I was a spaz.  Always getting myself hurt somehow.

We ran back to the camp to get first-aid from the counselors.  As they gathered around me, shining their flashlights on my leg to check the extent of my injuries, one of the grown-ups whispered to the counselor who was holding my leg, "Dude.  Your arm."  I looked down to see something protruding from the sweatband he was wearing stretched across his forearm.  I recognized it as a rolled-up sandwich baggie.  I knew exactly what it was.  My parents kept theirs in the same type of bag, rolled up in the same way, in the secret drawer in our coffee table.  At night, they would pinch a little from the bag and smoke it from their tiny wooden pipe, and then laugh and laugh and laugh.  I can still remember lying in bed as a child, and hearing my mother's laughter echoing up from two floors below.  Sometimes, if she was already in her nightgown by the time the call finally came in, and she didn't want to have to get dressed again, she would send me out to meet her connection for her.  I would meet him down at the end of our cul-de-sac, hand him a check for the correct amount, and he would hand me one of those rolled up sandwich bags, filled with the fragrant dried remains of the secret plant that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about, ever.  And I would bring it back to her and she would smoke it and I would smell the strong burnt odor and she would laugh and laugh.

The counselors had a Secret.  And I knew what it was.

I don't know if it's true or not, but at the time I felt like I was the only one who knew.  Even if any of the other boys had seen the counselor's stash peeking out from his wristband, surely they wouldn't have known what it was.  But I was Special.  I had grown up keeping this secret.  I knew the ways of this hidden adult world, and was comfortable there.  I like to think that when the counselor looked up at me with panic in his eyes after re-secreting his hidden eighth, that I said something like, "Don't worry, it's cool.  I won't tell anyone."  Because I wanted them to know that I was cool.  I wanted them to know that I was down.  That I knew what they were doing, and that I was perfectly okay with it.  I wasn't like all these other little boys who didn't know anything about what adults like to do to have fun.  But I don't think I actually said anything.  I was too shocked, and too afraid of getting in trouble.  I probably just pretended not to notice.  But I saw.  And as I laid in my tent that night, trying to sleep, I couldn't get out of my mind the image of the counselors sitting around our fire outside the tent, passing a joint the way I'd seen my parents and their friends do so many times before.  It reminded me of Home.  It was the first time I'd felt comfortable the entire time I'd been at camp.  The first time I'd felt like I fit in at all.  But no one knew that I knew.  No one could know that I knew.  So even though I suddenly, finally, felt like I belonged, to everyone else I was still just The Spaz.  And there was nothing I could do about it.

Back at camp the next day, we were encouraged to write a postcard to our folks back home.  I was only there for a two-week stay, so I'd only brought one postcard with me.  Trying to think of what to say to my parents, all I could think of was the counselors' secret.  The secret they and my parents shared.  So I wrote it all down on the postcard.  I wanted to tell my parents that there were people like them here with me, watching over me.  "It's okay, they smoke just like you."  I wanted them to know that I was okay here.  That we were all part of the same group, the same tribe, the same family.  The family of people who Kept The Secret.  And I was so proud of myself for being such a grown-up about the whole situation.  And I wanted to show them what a good, grown-up young man I was being for them.  After I'd finished writing out the whole story, filling the entire postcard, I went to hand it in to my counselor to put in the mail for me with the others, so pleased with myself.  And when he held out his hand to take it, I suddenly realized the horrible mistake I'd made.  This was a postcard, not a letter.  There was no envelope.  Who knows how many hands this would pass through between me and my parents?  Certainly other camp staff would see it.  And right there on the back was a detailed description of the secret I was supposed to be keeping.  That I was so proud of keeping.  The counselors smoke pot.  My parents smoke pot.  And everyone who saw this postcard would know!

I couldn't hand it in.  I quickly said I had to fix something, and ran back to my bunk, fear knotting in my gut.  I didn't want to get anyone in trouble.  Not the counselors, and especially not my parents.  I'd written it in pen, so I couldn't erase it.  But I couldn't re-write it, either; I'd used all of the room on the back.  And I didn't have another postcard.  And the counselor was waiting for me to hurry up and hand it in.  Everyone else had already finished theirs and were ready to move on to our next activity for the day.  Everyone was waiting on me.  I had to do something, but I didn't know what to do.  I had to hand in this postcard, but I couldn't hand it in with these words on it for anyone to read.  So I just started blacking out each letter, one-by-one.  Using my pen the same way we used our #2 pencils to fill in the bubbles on our scan forms when we took tests at school, I drew spirals over and over and over each letter until they were just a dark-blue scribbled blob of ink, and the letter underneath was completely obscured.  I pressed down hard, so that my marks bulged out on the backside image on the postcard, like braille.  It felt like it took forever, and eventually the rest of the group left me there in the cabin by myself to finish up whatever it was that I was doing that was so secret and so important.  Once I was finished, all that remained of my original letter home were the words "Hi Mom and Dad!" followed by line after line after line of big, fat, blue scribbled dots, and concluding with a quick "I miss you.  Love, Mike" squeezed into the lower right-hand corner, like an afterthought.  And then I handed it in.  And worried every day the rest of the time I was there that Summer that I might've just ruined my parents' lives.  What if someone could make out the words underneath my scribbles?  How could I have been so careless?

When I got home at the end of the week, my parents asked me about the postcard.  When it had arrived in the mail, they didn't know whether they should laugh about it, or be worried about me.  Once again, I'd done something strange, that didn't seem to make much sense, and that they didn't know how to take.  But now that we were alone, I could finally tell them the whole story.  And afterwards, I saw relief spread across my mother's face.  And then she kissed me, and told me she was proud of me for being so smart, and for doing such a good job of keeping her secret.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Everything Changed Then...

It was fourteen years ago today, that we drove home from the flop house on Fort Ave., disheveled and ruined in our best and blackest finery, and stopped at the Perkins to try and sooth our hangovers and our bruised souls with disgusting food and even worse coffee.  We both felt so sick in so many different ways, for so many different reasons.  We sat there and we cried and we tried to look each other in the eye as we fought to figure out what to do with our lives.

And you told me you realized something that night.  You realized you wanted me.  You wanted me more than you wanted anyone else.  You told me that you couldn't bear the idea of losing me.  As a friend, or anything else.

And I knew right then, you had me.  Completely.  Always.

Friday, August 23, 2013

Median Meridian Mean...

There is a Middle Road between all Worlds
I know this to be Truth
I have always seen it, glimpsed like a shadow in the corner of my Eye
Everywhere I have ever Looked
Everywhere I have ever Been
Everywhere
I have always felt myself to be
Known my Self to be
Standing to one side or the other of this Lost and Delicate Way
Skipping between the Extremes, always
Too High
or Too Low
too Hard or
too Soft
too Strong or too Weak
Too Much
or Never Enough
a Life Exhausted, leaping Across the Divide
from Mountaintop to Mountaintop
Seeking in vain the peaceful Valley on the Horizon
Always in The Distance
always Almost
never Now
Until
Until
until

until I collapse
until I cannot Go Any Further
until I finally Let Go
and Let My Self Fall
and Slide down the Mountain
because there is Nothing Left for me to do
but Lie Down
and Be Still
and Rest
Eyes Wide to the Sky
along the Middle Road

Monday, August 12, 2013

At The Corner Of Drunk And Pretentious...

Last night, I took a twenty dollar bill from my drawer
the last one
marked it with my words
in thick, black ink
grabbed a tack from the desk
and went wandering the alleys and backways and sideways of my town
scanning for the right spot
the right time
And alone on Cumberland, across from Potomac
I found a pristine telephone poll
sprouting tall and straight from the asphalt
like an urban redwood
Took the knife from my belt
the tack from my teeth
BOOM
BOOM
BOOM
and I walked away, heart pounding
hoping no one heard, no one saw
leaving the twenty hanging there like jesus
like a sign
in thick, black ink
asking,
"What do you REALLY want?"

I feel like a fraud.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Again A Darklight Day...

there's a strange and beautiful light in the building this morning
as i walk down the hall lined with empty offices all dark
on my merry way to my morning coffee
it's dark and storming outside
sweet Summer rain
heavy dark, almost night
and that odd, grey-cast half-light
that is not quite shadow but neither true illumination
filters in through the tinted office windows
into the hall
into my eyes
blending on the way with the white bright from buzzing fluorescents
that draw a dotted line down the halls' ceilings
so that the colors from within and the colors from without
merge
to form a singularly beautiful light that glows in the air
only on days like this
dark rain
morning sky
fluorescent light
off-white walls
and i'm suddenly lost in that ethereal glow
drawn back in time to a memory i had forgotten when i was still young
of the time when i had first learned to love this light
though i didn't know it then
and couldn't have put it to words even so
i was still only learning how to read
and the school day still included a time specifically for "napping"
but i knew that rainy days were different, somehow special
and not only because we would have recess in the gym
but because everything about this strange new world that i was shuttled off to every morning
Looked Different
on these dark rainy days
everything glowed in a strange way
and it wasn't like that when the sun was shining bright through the windows
and most days were sunny
it was only sometimes, only in the once-in-a-while
that the sun would hide behind the darkness
and the wet would come pouring down on us
and the class-room would glow
and i would feel the strangeness of that rare and special light inside of me
my tummy would roll and quiver all day in anticipation of
nothing in particular
my young body would vibrate to match the frequency of the fluorescence humming above me
overwhelmed with exuberant expectation
i couldn't have described it, couldn't have said what it was
i was still only learning to speak
but i knew something was different in my world
i knew it was rare
i knew that it did something to me
i knew that i liked it
and i came to realize that is what the word "beauty" meant
and that is where "love" came from
and though i didn't know it then
couldn't have known it then
now i realize
i've chased that strange and beautiful light
every day since