Widow, Widow

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized

Widow, Widow

just north of K-Town

the village of Larchmont

teams with privileged smiles

hot asphalt, cold concrete

a boy takes me walking

talking about how the world

is alternate, elemental, now,

how everyone thinks pink

but the mean boys drive by

 

just south of the village a

quiet street the car slows

down to show the widow

walking, one, not two dogs

chestnuts is a dummy, a

straw man might tell you to stop.

maybe you stop and watch her

in your mirror, like a creepo

and a mean boy drives by.

 

in the mountain cabin we

cackle at the poet and the

pie bears and the quiet sad

fir trees – lunacy by the studio

down the mountain music blaring,

gossiping, chain smoking and stoking

hearth cherries fire arc out the window

her body, an open revolt, an uncivil war

 

and the mean girls drive by

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Cloaked Figures and Crooked Smiles

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized

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Lillian has a bruise on her face when she finally shows up. She catches me on the sidewalk, maybe fifteen feet away, staring at an Instagram notification. Sliding open the tall, wrought iron fence surrounding her housing complex, she makes her way toward my car. I glance up. The bruise is the first thing I notice. Secondly, she’s about 15 pounds lighter than the last time I saw her. She smiles from the side of her face. Crooked.

This is Los Angeles, so from a showbiz lense I’d say she’s starting to look viable now, thinner, maybe even fringing on looking really good, but my social work brain says wait-a-minute this probably means she’s back on meth. I hope she’s not back on meth.

Lillian has only managed small stretches of sobriety so far. A month here. Six weeks there. I hope she’s not high. She’s incoherent when she’s high. I also hope she’s not hung over. She’s likely to flare up nasty when she’s jonesing. She stops and makes eye contact just outside the car, peering in. Smiling askew, she shoves her hands into her front pockets. Her jeans are so big on her, now. She seems sheepish, standing outside the car. Lost.

I was thinking of the dream I had this morning. Vivid and semi-conscious, I kept hitting snooze to stay in the dream of Big Sur. Of a vibrant community carved into the side of God’s Cliffs, clapboard houses, a thriving town square. There was a mass shooter in my dream, a cloaked figure with a gun who mowed down the crowd. White picket gazebos tainted with wide swaths of blood.

Lillian gets into the car. I compliment her. She smiles again when I ask if she’s lost weight, when I tell her she looks good. She’s glassy in the eyes, but it’s clear she’s put some effort in today. Her hair is wet. She showered. Okay, I think to myself -we can probably work with this.

I ask about her ID. We’re going to try to enter her into a coordinated database for homeless and at-risk youth. She wants to be able to provide for herself and her baby, when she gets her baby back. There are social service and private organizations that can help. No, she says, she didn’t bring her ID. Should she go get it? Yes, I say. You should always bring your ID and you should have your social memorized. She informs me that she has it memorized this time, thank you very much. She’s proud. She’s the same type of proud my other clients get sometimes when they ace a test, or get a small scholarship for school, or land a job – except in this case her source of pride is the simple fact she has memorized nine numbers. She is 18, and she has a two year old daughter who has already been taken away from her. I wouldn’t put her literacy past the 8th grade level. Go get your ID, I tell her, I’ll wait.

She goes back into her complex. The yard is piebald, barren. Generations of barefoot children have trodden down smooth dirt pathways, linking the units. A quick glance at the ground reveals which families are friendly with which other families, and who doesn’t seem to get along with anyone at all. Some of the lesser worn pathways have weeds growing up, in places. Keep up those connections, I say, admonishing no one. I mouth the words in the afternoon sun.

My phone buzzes. It’s a news update. The BBC News wants to tell me what Trump has in common with Abe Lincoln and Ferris Bueller. Fuck you, iPhone news client, I say to my phone. The dream creeps in, again, around the edges of my morning.

I’m there in the town square, relaxing on a park bench. Three people play frisbee, laughing, semi-joyous. They are smiling. Suddenly one of them explodes like a watermelon dropped off the side of a produce truck. The other two are horrified, but it’s only seconds before, shocked, they twist and fall. Blood splashes from them in strange angles. It seems to come from nowhere. I’m sure there were gunshots in the dream, but in my memory it’s just quiet. They buckle, and drop. They writhe, broken, pitiful.

Crowds of people being mown down, in bright preppy clothing, against a backdrop of brightly colored cliffside mainstreet businesses. A little girl and her younger brother, staring in horror at blood spattered ice cream cones dripping down their wrists. People twitching, jerking out bizarre dance moves on hot asphalt, gaily dressed in bright gingham shirts. Upbeat, inane music playing reassuringly in the background. A dazzling blue sky; the sun’s eye, indifferent to the bloodbath.

Lillian returns and we set off to the address. Only five miles away, but it’s Friday afternoon in Los Angeles, so this could easily take 45 minutes. I start asking Lillian what’s been going on with her. I didn’t get my hours in with her last month, and frankly, I’m kind of worried. I tell her as much. When she’s not hungover, it’s pretty easy to be frank and open with Lillian. She hasn’t learned the same things most people her age have learned. She’s not great with math or reading. It’s frequent that I can only understand 70% of what she’s saying when she texts me. But there’s a cleverness there. She’s not dumb, just unlearnt, I suppose. In any case, I try to treat my clients as being more clever than they actually are. Sometimes it tricks them into actually being more clever, or making better decisions.

It’s a trick I also sometimes play on myself, when I can get away with it.

We chat about her mom, about her daughter, Lizzie, who Lillian badly wants custody of. They took her away when she was staying in a transitional housing facility for young, single mothers. Lillian had been getting friendly with some of the guys from the streets. She’d disappeared for long stretches of time to do meth with guys in rented hotel rooms. This was all before she turned 18. So illegal.

After they took her baby, they threw her out of St. Theresa’s, and she went back to live with her mother and her aunt. She’s been trying for more than a year to get her baby back. She keeps failing to prove she’s enrolled in school though, keeps failing to prove she can attend drug counselling classes on a regular basis (or, indeed, pass drug tests), keeps failing to show up with any proof of gainful employment.

Lillian opens up to me now. She wants to apply for transitional housing. She can raise Lizzie at her mother’s place, but she’d rather have her own space to live with her daughter. I tell her I was glad to hear from her, finally. She’s likely to have a new cell phone every month, so I’ve become used to getting texts from strange numbers. She never announces herself, either, when she texts from a new number. She’ll say something like, “Hey, are we gonna do the thing you were talking about last time?”

And I’ll say, “Is this Lillian?”

And she’ll say, yes, and act like it was obvious it was her. It’s infuriating.

I broach the subject of custody. I’m happy to hear she’s getting her child back, I tell her. She’s been texting about that, recently, as if it’s a done deal. I wonder – is it possible a judge has adjudicated custody to her? I ask about the details. They’re going to give her back, she says matter of factly. Because, they’re molesting her – and I already told them and made a report, but the social worker lady doesn’t believe me, but it doesn’t matter because I reported it, and they can’t keep my daughter if they’re molesting her.

No, I say. The people who are keeping your daughter can’t keep her if they’re molesting her, and in fact, they’ll go to jail if it can be proven. What made you think they’re molesting her, I ask?

I notice now, at a stoplight, she’s hungover. Or, maybe still high? Her eyes are red and watery, and she’s not quite making coherent sense. She also didn’t react, earlier in the conversation when I tried to corner her and ask her about missing our appointments last month. About going incommunicado. And this new, slim, model figure, the black eye. The rushed, emotional way she’s describing things, without putting context or chronological order into any of the details. Yeah, she’s not entirely sober, if at all. She sees me noticing, and doesn’t like it. I ask again. What made you think they’re molesting your daughter?

There was all this shit in the back of her diaper. Baby shit, she clarifies, when I ask. Poop. I make a face as if to say, come on now, you said molestation – but now you’re describing evidence of neglect.

Plus, she says, they grabbed her by the neck when she was leaving with her baby. Who, you or the baby? Me. Well, that’s what happens when you try to take a baby from protective custody on a supervised visit. Who’s side are you on, she asks? Plus a mother has her intuition, and that’s just as good as any evidence.

I finally piece a story together. She’s asked the two year old if people have been touching her inappropriately, the two year old has nodded yes, and even said yes, once. But only after repeated questioning and coaching. She hasn’t supplied specific details that add up to molestation, though. She will only answer yes when asked if they touched here in certain places. When the social worker came to ask Lillian and Lizzie about the supposed molestation, Lillian was trying to get the baby to tell her, over and over. Finally the baby recited what her mother had been telling her to say. I nod. I fail to mention my doubts about this. She doesn’t have any real evidence beyond a seemingly coached accusation, a dirty diaper and intuition.

But even further than this, even if she had hard evidence the child was being interfered with – that doesn’t mean Lillian is about to get her back. One thing is not relative to another. A foster parent acting abusive or neglectful doesn’t erase the judge’s knowledge that she once disappeared from St. Theresa’s for five full days on a meth binge, leaving the staff of the facility to care for Lizzie. Or that she hasn’t been able to produce three months worth of consecutive negative drug tests.

(Or that she shows up to appointments with social service and county workers fifteen pounds lighter, with a black eye).

I don’t say any of these things, but I want to. I want to point out – the best case scenario is that she knows her child hasn’t been molested, and she’s trying to make some story up that gives her emotional leverage in this narrative. She may not be academic, but she’s good at emotional manipulation. The other, grosser possibility is that she is paranoid, but clinging to the idea that her child actually has been molested, for the idea of some moral high ground. She either knows she’s making it up, or wants something horrible to be true, for the sake of her narrative.

Lillian, I want to say to her. Being right doesn’t produce clean drug tests. But I don’t say anything. We drive in silence. Lillian puts something on the radio.

We pull into the parking lot of the Covenant House about five minutes later. Lillian starts to get agitated. I told you, she says, I don’t want to go into a homeless shelter. I want transitional housing where me and Lizzie could live together. I know that, I say, but this facility does more than just homeless sheltering. It’s also an entry portal. They have a database which records your name and age and set of circumstances, so that public and private organizations can share information. It will go out to shelters, but also transitional living organizations, and women’s homes.

She’s going into one of her spirals now. She doesn’t like entering databases. Her (paranoid, abusive) boyfriend told her it’s the illuminati controlling everything. He thinks they track poor people. Those illuminati people, they control the things like homeless shelters. They keep people sick. Doped up. Stupid, she says.  I beg her, please, let’s just go up to the front counter and ask for basic information. I figure I can get a seasoned social worker to help me persuade Lillian to just sit down and fill out a profile on the database. She finally agrees, we can go inside and ask the receptionist questions.

We head in. The receptionist explains the program. Lillian would do best to enter the database, alerting all of the relevant organizations in the vicinity to her need. Lillian seems cowed, for a while. She agrees, finally, yes, maybe the database is a good idea, and the social services system isn’t run by the illuminati. I make eye contact with the receptionist and joke that DCFS couldn’t possibly be run by the illuminati – they’d function so much more efficiently! We laugh, and the receptionist affirms my sentiment. Just one thing though, she says, the Youth Entry Portal is in a building across the street, and they’re closed for lunch from 12pm to 1pm. We’ll have to kill a half an hour waiting for them to get back from lunch.

Back in the parking lot Lillian is getting agitated again. No more crooked smiles. I can tell she’s really jonesing. She’s getting sweaty, and it’s chilly out today. She scuffs the toes of her shoes on the parking lot, and says, I don’t want to be here.

I don’t want to be here either, I say, trying to empathize. But I talked to quite a few social workers and explained your situation, and since you’re over 18, with a closed DCFS case, this is the best protocol to follow for getting into a transitional housing program. Neither of us want to be here, I say, but let’s just wait the twenty minutes and enter that database.

No, she says, but this time she’s more forceful. I don’t want to do this. I don’t feel comfortable here. Take me home. She knows I can’t force her to do anything, and she’s setting in her heels. I try a few more angles of reason with her, about waiting just a few minutes and trying, for the sake of her kid, to get into this database for transitional housing. They have housing for single parents under 22, I say. But she doesn’t care, she’s made up her mind.

And I don’t care, either.

I mean. I do – it’s not the productive outcome I’d hoped for when I picked her up today, but I got billable hours, so I won’t walk away not having done my job. I’m defeated, and this sucks – today won’t end up any closer to a happy ending for Lillian, but maybe the timing is wrong for this anyhow? If she gets into one of these housing programs, they’ll require her to stay sober, to keep a job, to be in school. Let’s be honest, I say to myself, she’d bounce out of a transitional housing program just as fast as she could fill out the papers.

There is a quick flash, a memory from this morning’s dream. The picturesque cliffside community, the stores and flowerbeds, the people. The bloodbath.

Okay, get in the car, I say. I’ll drive you home then. Inside, we are icy quiet. Try again next time, I say softly-but-audibly, as we pull out of the parking lot. We have another 45 minute drive back to her place.

After about ten minutes of silence I start talking.

I hate seeing you show up with a black eye, Lillian. I hate seeing you this thin. I mean, don’t get me wrong, my God, you look fantastic right now, but I know you and this is a really rapid weight loss in a short amount of time and I have to worry that it’s meth. And meth, combined with a black eye means you’ve been seeing Victor. I’m worried about you.

You’re right, she says. I saw Victor again. I’m sorry. I know I promised I would stay away from him, but he had my stuff, and I only saw him because I wanted my stuff back and then he hit me in the face and took my EBT card.

I sigh. The last time I saw her we waited in the General Relief office for four hours for the first replacement EBT card, which was only missing in the first place because Victor stole it. Please, just stop seeing that guy? I don’t like this. You have a black eye. I’m a mandated reporter. I have to report this.

No, you don’t, Lillian says. I already called the cops this time when he hit me.

Good, I say, that’s actually the best news I’ve heard all day, hearing that you finally filed a police report. Suddenly, shaking, nearly trembling in my passenger seat, Lillian is willing to throw me another crooked smile. I laugh, and I tell her I’ve known a few people named Victor in my time. They always have to win. She thinks this is funny. Pfft, she says, fuck them!

Yes, I agree. Fuck them.

There’s something in her eyes. A twinkle of conspiracy, perhaps. It makes me feel protective. She has natural, innocent curiosity. But, not unspoiled innocence. She has a few secrets, and can probably keep a few, too. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make her cravings go away, or, more useful – I wish I could fill that empty void in her heart she thinks meth and booze is going to fix.

But, the longer I do this job, the less I wish things, and the more I focus on meeting the client where they are emotionally, that day – preferably in a neighborhood adjacent to reality, if we can make it there.

By the time we get back to her place a tender truce springs up between us. It’s not hard to forgive each other. Even if we’re not firing on all cylinders, we still almost always try to show up for one another.

We talk about her getting a job. Maybe at some place like Walmart, or Target. I think it’s a great idea. She seems buoyed by even this minor level of approval. I tell her again she looks great, and that I hope she’s eating, and that next time we’ll work on finding employment, if that’s what she’d like to focus on.

Lillian signs paperwork for our visit and goes inside her apartment complex. I pull into traffic. It isn’t quite late afternoon yet, but Los Angeles has already jammed itself up nicely on Western Avenue, down in South Central, all the way up through KTown into Hollywood, and further into the Valley. All jammed up and honking. Stuck like cold, thick molasses.

I stop at a red light and stare into the bulb. I think how powerless Lillian must feel, to be desperate enough to make up a story so horrible. Or, what an awful thing it must be to hope for – that someone is interfering with your child? I think of the dream this morning, of the people in that town square. How different that town was from Los Angeles.

I rev the engine. I go back to the dream. The cloaked figure, loading hundreds of bullets into an automatic rifle. Everyone clean and happy. Nobody shows up itchy, with a black eye, in the cliffside paradise. I see him. I can see what he’s about to do. I open my mouth. He puts the rifle on his shoulder. I adjust the rearview mirror. The people are walking dogs, returning library books. It’s a bluebird day.  He flips the safety open. The light turns green. I open my mouth, but I’m unable to speak. Unable to warn these people, I ease gas into the throttle.

He opens up into the unsuspecting crowd.

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Role Modelland

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized

Tom Daley awoke with a start, still sitting upright – bathed in the bluish glow of multiple screens. He had fallen asleep watching looped footage of Adam Rippon while consuming his nightly combo of muscle relaxers and Chardonnay. A trick learned from Terry Gross after recording a particularly earnest segment with her a few years back. He had asked her how she handled her breakneck schedule. Scotch and Valium, she replied, nonchalantly tapping her paper coffee cup. The scotch at night, the Valium whenever.

“I need those adoption papers finalized YESTERDAY,” he snarled at his husband. Dustin said nothing, placing a double dark-roast espresso on Tom’s mahogany desk. Dustin knew Tom, like all obsessive control freaks, lived life on a constant slow burning fuse. But lately, since the start of the 2018 Winter Olympics, Tom had been having explosive moments of acuity; white searing apopleptic rage was apt to erupt from him without warning, with very little provocation.

Dustin weighed his words carefully. Any phrasing misstep might be likely to deepen his husband’s rage.

“The baby is due in July, love.” he said. “She’ll sign the papers minutes after her labor is complete, or she won’t get the substantial signing bonus.”

They had chosen a Vassar student (lower middle class) to be their surrogate, knowing she couldn’t afford not to sign the adoption papers. She desperately needed the 250,000 they would pay her for signing the child away.

“I’m confident she’ll sign. We can trust Lauren,” Tom’s Oscar winning husband said soothingly. But he wasn’t confident. Paying someone to give up their baby is criminal, and so there was no formal contract with their surrogate, Lauren – just a handshake agreement.

Dustin liked to joke that all Ivy League liberal arts girls were named Lauren, but a surprising number of the girls they had interviewed had indeed borne the name Lauren – including the candidate Tom had eventually selected. A straight haired honey blond Lauren in a black-watch plaid wool skirt. She possessed an icy blue Nicole Kidman-esque deadness behind her eyes, which Tom LOVED, and just had to have in his child. But, even after all their lunches together, and a trip into Manhattan to see Hamilton, where they all three bonded over kobe beef at Le Cirque – Dustin and Tom both knew perfectly well that Lauren could change her mind at any time, including the very day she went into labor.

Dustin stood in the broken silence of their extremely well lit morning. Highlights flashed in his husband’s tousled hair. Morning light traced Tom’s cheekbones, danced down his nose, kissed his chin.

He had married a man with a terrible, precise beauty.

Tom smiled, shrugged, and sipped his coffee – seemingly easing off his earlier wellspring of rage. He said something non-committal, like, if you say so, and Dustin shuffled off into their living room, plopping down in front of his 24 inch iMac. It was the third Monday of February. Time to renew their monthly donation to support Oprah’s African school for girls.

Sure, Tom thought to himself, brooding in his office. Easy for him to say. He can keep writing scripts forever. But me? There’s a ticking clock on MY social relevance. Tom swiveled his chair back to his screens, gulping down the rest of his espresso and refreshing his Olympic news feeds.

He hovered his cursor over the YouTube compilation of Adam Rippon performances and interviews. He could see his own reflection in the screen, behind the brighter image of graceful, perfect Adam.

He had two years to plan his next move.

He clenched his teeth, set his jaw, and breathed out all the breath in his lungs. He held himself absolutely still for several pregnant moments.

He moved the cursor in a slow circle around Adam’s perfect face.

He clicked play.

Maybe We Can Stay This Way

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized

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I can see him underwater the next lane over. He appears sharper through goggles than a person might in the real world. More vivid, bobbing, floating next to me. Ethereal and handsome -he is young, no older than 30, and lithe.

He has been swimming short, nearly frantic sprints – whereas I’ve been plodding along, more even paced, for the better part of a mile. I’m taken with him, the way you can only truly be taken with someone beautiful, who has yet to open their mouth.

And, he is beautiful. He’s a perfect, carved-from-renaissance-marble, Grade A thirst trap. His punk rock British flag speedo clings desperately, ephemerally to his human perfection, but he comports himself across the pool in semi-awkward fits and starts. Even this spastic swimming style has a way of wearing well on his frame. Strong, and broad of shoulder, his body is glossy – cut from sinew.

He seems almost unconscious of his phenomenal good looks, but that particular air has to be cultivated. You can’t pass through life that gorgeous and not have some sort of self awareness, can you?

I decide not to approach him. Having gamed it out, I’ve concluded – it can only end in disappointment. Either he’s arrogant, or an idiot, or not gay, or gay, but not into dudes in their 40s.

Or, even more likely, he’ll sniff out my own arrogant idiocy a mile away. I’ve run the numbers; it’s grim.

If it can’t end well, a professor of mine used to say, it’s better not to start at all.

I come to this decision about ten minutes after he gets into the pool, which, in a way, frees me up to fully enjoy his presence. Once I realize I’m not going to approach him, I stop being preoccupied with HOW I might do it – stop trying to rest at the wall conveniently next to him, stop trying to show off speed, or endurance, or form. Letting go of the possibility of meeting him frees me up to simply enjoy the model-of-human-perfection sharing these deserted three lanes with me.

And I do enjoy it. It’s a small joy to swim next to him – even though he thrashes a bit too much on his freestyle sprints. The whole thing seems a bit surreal, like a Dali painting maybe, or like we’re floating in space. He has faded, teal-yellow hair which might have lived a vibrant former life as a true indigo.

We continue like this for another fifteen minutes. Like astronauts but more graceful. Like dancers, but less. Being so close, almost naked with him is having an effect on me. I feel safer, smarter, more graceful, even better looking. I start to wonder if maybe I will approach him after all. Maybe, I think to myself, he only speaks some Eastern European language. Maybe we can stay this way forever, only ever communicating the most basic things to one another. Are you hungry, my beautiful darling? Are you cold? Thirsty? Would you like to have frantic, rowdy sex on this sectional sofa?

But, suddenly, he is gone. I see his smooth body slip up and out – breaking through the undulating ceiling of our small, shared universe – nullifying it. Canceling out the whole experience. A moment ago he existed, luminous, flailing, pulsing next to me in the water. Now, he doesn’t exist at all. Now, he’s just a symbol of a few brief, quiet, joyous moments. Something for me to write about later. A memory.

Good, I think to myself.

I can finally take a piss.

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Thanks, We Got This.

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized

 

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I’m standing in line in the Life-Saving-Monument-to-Human-Survival that is the Los Angeles LGBT center. It’s a long, slow moving line. My doctor has asked me to make a half hour appointment for later this month. There’s nothing wrong with me, she says, just that she’d like to look inside my colon, to make sure there isn’t any cancer brewing back there. All I need to do is make a doctors appointment and my inner self will be writ medium on a computer screen, for an audience of at least two, maybe more if there are interns present that day. I’m semi-dreading it, but I know myself, and I know that I’ll make stupid jokes the whole way through, as we sift through my colon together looking for fun little cancer polyps.

I make a mental note – ask the doctor later this month if I can have a digital video copy of my innards. I make a second mental note – if she asks me why I want the footage, I will, with a deadpan earnestness, tell her that it’s my anniversary, and wiggle my eyebrows at her.

I’m going to make a moment of it. I like her sense of humor.

I am distracted. While the LGBT center is an incredible facility – the largest of its kind in the world – it is also chronically understaffed. The lobby is always an interesting melange of business casual clean cut types, folks who look like maybe they work at Ralph’s, and other people who might be wearing last night’s club clothing. Today there is a man in a crimson robe, a matching velvet king’s crown, and a gold front tooth. With him is an attractive (transgender?) lady in a cocktail dress, fishnet stockings, and extremely high heels. All at 11:45am.  Good, I think to myself. Everyone who needs penicillin, or an emergency Truvada, or just an ear exam, is going to get it today.

They always screen some sort of iconic gay film in the waiting room, volume super loud, and today it’s To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. Wesley Snipes, John Leguizamo, and Patrick Swayze prance and swish and sway. There’s a tenderness to most of the choices the actors make. The film doesn’t seem to be holding up entirely, but it isn’t terrible. Still, something nags at me. There’s something disingenuous going on. Somehow, the performances feel precious. Cloying, even.

Lately, I’ve been super critical of straight actors performing gay roles in LGBT stories. There’s a rarely mentioned unfairness, a particularly insidious nihilism – to the ease at which homosexuals themselves capitulate to the idea that their stories can and should be told to them by heterosexual actors. I could list so many reasons for this, not the least of which that most of us walk around in a sort of PTSD shock that the world has been able to incrementally allow into its political discussion the idea that that maybe we are owed a semblance of equality.  But, in an environment where trans people are being kicked out of the military, and gays themselves lack employment protections, it seems like a far-away pipe dream to think we could ask Hollywood to stop handing over our stories to straight actors. And if we ourselves won’t act outraged when another gay role is handed to a straight actor, we certainly can’t expect our allies to.

Over the years I’ve had many occasions to engage other gay people with the idea that watching straight actors play homosexual is offensive. Most of the time gay people will agree, but it’s rare their agreement is vigorous or exuberant. It’s more likely to be a sigh or a nod, a silent resignation that yes, hypothetically, it would be nice to live in a world that had such consideration for our feelings, but no, we don’t live there, and what’s more, we might not even live near the general neighborhood. It’s the type of unfairness we all quietly, bitterly accept as immutable, just one of the ways the world tends to show its brutal side.

There is a need to feel normalized and accepted in this society straight people preside over, but when we go to the wellspring of pop culture to see ourselves reflected, the face that stares back is rarely even homosexual.

And yet, here we stand, firmly – in Trump’s America – where half of us simultaneously acknowledge that yes, the world is unfair, but we’d like to keep it that way if you don’t mind. In the new American order, you don’t have to dislike unfairness. There’s at least 50% of us celebrating unfairness with our proverbial dicks out. In this poisonous climate, watching straight men play homosexuals gets under my skin in a way I can’t quite describe. In North American DysTrumpia, it’s getting more and more difficult for me to hide my disdain for the trappings of hetero-supremacy.

The line is long. It’s not seeming to move at all. I can’t seem to connect with the movie. I can’t get past the idea that the men who get to have the honor of telling this story are so far removed from the struggle they portray as not to even know the moments when they don’t get the tone right, when their performance slips from tender and vivacious to parody, or stereotype. I think to myself how a straight man, playing a gay man, playing a drag queen, adds yet another layer of misogyny to drag. Or possibly it’s the same misogyny made more acute, more dire without the irony of an authentic homosexual perspective.

The movie doesn’t feel made for me, it feels made for people who would like to find a way to digest me.

An old man tugs on my elbow to ask why I’ve narrowed my eyes so much at the screen. I explain some of my feelings to him. Not eloquently, I just mutter something about how I’m disgusted to have a homosexual story spoon fed to me by the face of the oppressor. His face lights up for a brief moment. There’s a sharpness, a glint in his eye. He chuckles.

“When do you think people change?” he asks me, suddenly all pointed and sinister.

I shrug. Do they, I wonder?

“When they absolutely have to,” he spits, “And, not a second sooner. And that’s what people mean when they say ‘equality.’ They mean, when they get around to it.”

I pause to sip this spicy, bitter cider this man is serving, before replying. “Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I wish there was some way for us to tell straight people ‘Thanks, we got this. You can stop trying to tell us our stories now.'”

The old man shakes his head, yes. But, a bit of the glint falls out of his eye. Now he seems wistful. He pats me on the side of my shoulder. Now he’s shaking his head, no. Whatever conspiratorial spell woven between us has passed. Reality seeps back. The secretary calls me forward and I make my appointment.

Later, in my car, I check my phone. One of my foster clients has texted me. She can’t meet today, but can we meet tomorrow at 3pm instead? I text back, yes, that’s fine. Suddenly, I have the afternoon free.

I pull out onto Sunset. There’s a Chevron station coming up and I’m suddenly reminded that I have a gas card in my glove box, from work. I billed 100% of my possible hours last month and they sent me a gas card in the mail.

Free gas, I think to myself as I’m filling up my tank. A full tank of free gas. Is there a more liberating feeling? I scan the parking lot. A handsome young dad type, well heeled, is filling up a newish-looking BMW sedan. I endow him with a story. He’s just come from a class as his luxury gym. He’ll duck into his office later today to attend a meeting, then head to a PTA conference with his wife,  an expensive dinner, hopefully, to reward their child for good academic performance at school.

I wonder if he feels the same way as I do? If the aspartame empty calories of American privilege gnaws away at him? I wonder if he, himself, is doing the same calculations I’m doing right now. How much money do I have? What can I liquidate? How can I get myself away from here? Can I expect to have a reasonably comfortable situation if I remove myself? Where would I even go?

What use is this full tank of gas, I think to myself, if freedom is really only a feeling we get every week or ten days? If freedom is only the moment of filling up the tank, thinking of how far we could go if we wanted to, but then getting back into our cars, and driving right back to the system of responsibilities that fetter us here to this bloody spot of soil we carved out for ourselves on this beautiful, elegant, tragically scarred landscape? When do we get more than thirty seconds a week of feeling truly free? If this is privilege, how bad is the other? Does this handsome man with the BMW notice me staring at him and projecting all this onto him?

I get into my car, and turn it on. The tank is full. I could easily get all the way to San Francisco on this tank of gas. Further. I have enough ‘free’ gas on my card to get me into Canada. What’s more, I have a valid, current passport. I have enough resources to escape this American dystopia  we have foisted upon ourselves. I can, within 20 hours – less than a day – escape the post-Obama white purgatory we are forcing the entire world to witness, to live through. At the very least, I could watch it from the outside.

If the handsome man in the BMW makes eye contact with me I’m going to ask him if he’d like to take a drive with me. When he asks, where, I will say Canada, who knows? Canada, then the world!

But he doesn’t make eye contact with me. He gets back into his BMW. The windows are down and his stereo is turned up. Aerosmith is blasting some straight song about some straight joy that straight people have in elevators. He drives up Laurel Canyon – up to his architectural house on Mulholland. Back to his kids. His wife. His future.

Of course he does, I say to myself as I ease the car into drive.

The world is made for him.

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Cute Little Thing

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized


I spend Saturday evening writing, then take a walk around West Hollywood. I like to walk the streets sometimes, rather than watching Netflix  or scrolling through Facebook before bed. I’m starting to realize there are nights I need to be around, but not necessarily socialize with people. West Hollywood at 1am is perfect for watching young gays flirt, older gays having slow, languid dinners, homeless gays running whatever angle they’re running that night.  I haunt these streets, walking toward or away from nothing,  past the thoroughfare, past the streams of five and dime weekend gays who take the freeways in from Van Nuys, Antelope Valley, Orange County. These boys only get to be gay twice a month, and they arrive pre-gamed and ready to hit the town hard. 

Usually I’ll park on Crescent Heights and walk down to Robertson, past that nightmare-of-the-future dry cleaners, decked out like an Apple store, stark, shiny white plastic faux mid-century Scan design. Signage serving Deep Space Nine realness – trying to, anyway. It reads as an attempt to make a connection between some sleek idea of a technological age, and the boring dry cleaning business it actually is. The sign says something like “Valet, Direct to Your Door,” or some such nonsense. It occurs to me, if this is your business model, why spend the money on an antiquated-yet-sleek attempt at a brick and mortar store? This whole effect could be achieved digitally. You could spend a tenth of the rent money on digital ads, and have the dry cleaning done in a much cheaper space, down by the airport. “I have to run your business for you?” I ask myself as I slouch by.

This is what’s wrong with the world. I have to run everyone’s businesses for them. Unbelievable. 

I think of other, semi-infuriating businesses in the neighborhood. Just Food For Dogs, a store (a chain, no less) encouraging yuppie dog owners to come in and design ultra-nutra-herbi-ganic dog food tailored to what they think their dogs might need to best extend and optimize their health. Beef and russet potato, chicken breast treats, do it yourself fish nutrient blend – all things sounding like they might be human food, and indeed, priced similar to appetizers at a mid-grade restaurant. Just Food For Dogs made me livid, when I first moved here. You don’t want to be driving around Weho, feeling  poor, lonely, invalidated, just to realize your average homosexual living in this neighborhood is so far removed from poverty as to be able to feed his dog restaurant food at least once a day. I quickly multiply eleven dollars a day, with 365 days in a year, with 12 or so years. Almost 50 grand. Could buy an embarrassingly nice luxury car with that, pay for a year at UCLA, get really exquisitely done plastic surgery.  

I can’t catch a break in this town, I used to think, but somebody’s French bull dog is walking around here thinking she’s Madonna. 

I make a note to myself. Dog Yoga, I scribble into an idea pad I sometimes keep on my person. Dog Yoga is definitely going to be the key to establishing my polyamorous gay compound up in the Hollywood Hills. 

I’ve actually been thinking of polyamory a lot, lately. I mean, I’ve always been poly-minded, but lately, when someone asks me if I’m dating anyone, I immediately answer “I’m dating everyone.” Nobody ever thinks it’s funny, but I do. People get tense about poly, I think. Disney gays, especially, somehow. So vulnerable to narrative, I guess… Plus, they act like the simple fact that you said you were poly means they have to justify monogamy, which they absolutely do not. This happens at Mickeys. I duck inside the two story dance club and make a pass through. Near the downstairs bar a very handsome, very nicely built young man catches my eye. He gestures me to come talk to him. He’s been drinking and his first question is “Are you looking for a boyfriend?” 

I’m looking for 3 boyfriends, I answer, and he turns away immediately. Now he refuses to talk to me. I think this is funny and play dumb for a few minutes, grabbing his elbow and explaining how there will be a ginger college twink, some indie musicians and a corporate lawyer who pays for all of us. He looks confused and I ask if he’s a corporate lawyer. He is now annoyed and starts stank-facing me. I blow him a kiss as I’m leaving.

I can’t stand when people approach you, then ignore you when they decide you’re not going to suit their immediate needs. Like, it’s my fault he was attracted to me and wanted to say hi? So I’m not boyfriend material, so what? Does that mean you should treat me like I don’t exist, after you started a conversation? Take some responsibility for yourself. It’s not like I’d divulged I was running a white slavery ring.

Youth, I think as I’m leaving the bar – at least it’s a curable disease.


At Mother Lode there is another sweet faced boy with a great smile. He’s wearing a silver bolero-style necklace. The clasp, a hollow equilateral triangle, hangs near his sternum. His eyes are bright but somehow vacant. He’s been drinking quite a bit. I leave without talking to him. There are nights when I’m out I feel like I’m hunting. There are nights, too, when I feel like I’m fishing. But tonight I just needed to take a walk, clear my head, hear a little music and catch lively energy from people walking by. I head out onto Santa Monica, and cross back onto the main drag, near Rage, and Trunks, and Boots and Saddle. 

I lean against a tree in the thick of things, watching the stream of wasted, buzzed, tipsy people walking by. Maybe half the people seem genuinely happy to be out and about. Some have closed body language, folded arms, shaking heads. They’re giving their boyfriends or friends the business. Some seem legitimately sad, on the verge of tears. One boy is actually crying, having broken off from a larger group of pals. Another guy is ineptly trying to console him. His other friends mill around and toe the sidewalk, discussing whether to call it a night or push through the emotional outburst and head to the next club. 

“It isn’t fair!” The boy is nearly grief stricken. “We’re supposed to be out celebrating! Why can’t we just go out and celebrate each other? Why do we have to be cunty and mean?”

“Because it’s fun,” a rather tall, attractive, guy from the larger group shouts over to the boy crying on the sidewalk. I hear another of their friends chuckle softly. “Get over it, girl – nobody has time for your crying on a Saturday night!”

I want to reach out to the crying boy, to say – hey, the problem isn’t you, it’s people. What’s more, it’s the idea that you need lots of friends. You don’t need these ten people who care more about getting two more drinks in them before they drunk drive back to Orange County. You only need to focus on the one person in this group of ten who actually cares that you’re crying. That’s your friend. Rather than trying to have ten good friends, try to have one, then one more, them maybe one more. 

I also want to reach out to the mean, good looking guy trying to preserve the sanctity of his own Saturday night party. I feel like, if I buy him a drink and show him some charm maybe I can show him what empathy is and fix him with my penis. Obviously that’s not true, he’s an awful person who should work at a junkyard forever, but I could still try to fix him with my penis. Maybe I could have furtive, emotional, passionate sex with him for a couple months before looking into his beautiful, selfish eyes and finally walking away, realizing he’s not good enough for me to waste the good sex on. 

Worth a shot, I say audibly to myself as I walk away, not at all giving it a shot. Also, I remind myself, he’s 22 and you’re two decades older than him – the only person thinking of you as a variable in this sexual equation, is you. I laugh at myself. 

I walk farther away from all the sturm and rabble and crapola. Past Gym Bar and even further east. This entire stretch of West Hollywood is shuttered for the evening. ABCs of Dance, Total Tan, weed dispensaries all wait for the sun to come up and respectable business hours to resume. Monaco Liquor is the only wee-hours holdout. Yellow illuminated sign with red writing, straight from the mid 80s and full of dingy linoleum tile flooring, Monaco Liquor is exactly what you want from ghost town WeHo. An indolent clerk has a one sided blue tooth conversation in a language I don’t comprehend. He’s not concerned with me in the slightest, and won’t make eye contact when I ask about the restroom. I debate between getting a small package of Oreo’s or some pork rinds (higher fat/salt, but much lower carb/sugar). In a supernatural display of self control I simply purchase a Perrier and continue down the street.  Man, I think to myself, selecting the zero-calorie option is almost as satisfying as fixing that rotten twink with my penis. Think of the time and money I’m saving! I laugh at myself again. 

I walk up the stairway to the dark, powered down Trader Joe’s complex. There’s a spot in the abandoned parking lot where I urinate. I notice pamphlets for HIV testing and used condoms on the ground. Good, I think, someone made a responsible choice. 


I walk back down to Santa Monica, choosing a bench outside some strip mall. A cute guy is making his way up the lonely cityscape toward me. Oh shit. It’s the boy from Mother Lode – the one with the triangle necklace. He comes closer. He is smiling. He has black, straight hair, fair skin, and a killer smile. Love that smile of his. Hello, he says, and plops down next to me. What a cutie, I think to myself, and he’s just starting to become aware of his own cuteness. He’s just starting to realize a good outfit, some posture, and a pinch of self esteem can turn a scrawny twerp into a cute little thing.

That’s the real trick to life, I think. 

Cute Little Thing starts in immediately, a monologue about how he knows it’s the strangest thing in the world to just sit down next to a stranger and start up a conversation with them, but you know what, that’s just how he is, because he’s just like his favorite writer, have I heard of David Sedaris? Well, he’s a writer and used to work odd jobs that were strange, or cultivate amphetamine addictions – just to have something to write about and even now that he lives in Europe, he still does things to have something to write about like picking up trash on the side of the road, or French classes or whatever – and maybe I should think about doing things like that if I really want to be a writer, but whatever he’s just glad to live in WeHo finally, even if it is as far east as Fairfax; it’s still much better than living with family in Orange County, and by the way why don’t I do interesting things like David Sedaris?

I respond that I sometimes do interesting things, and he immediately hits me with a skeptical, like what? I rack my brain and come up with a vignette about a time when I was in college and some attractive older guy was hitting on me in a noisy New Orleans gay club, and how he said, let’s get out of here and go back to my place. That’s not interesting, that’s pedestrian, Cute Little Thing says, and I explain that, yes, he’s right, but the interesting thing is that while we were walking out of the club the older man pulls out a collapsable cane, and is visibly limping down the road next to me. I explain that in my drunkenness, and the loud darkness of the club, I didn’t realize he’d recently had a stroke and was mostly paralyzed on one side.


Ew, says Cute Little Thing, but he wants to know what happened. I explained that I went ahead and went home with the guy, who wound up being extremely into S&M, and wanted me to abuse his left side, the semi-paralyzed side, so the echoes of feeling would remind him that, possibly, mobility was coming back. 

Cute Little Thing is not happy with this. This is not a Sedaris-worthy activity. “That’s your own shit to deal with,” he says, and now it’s all stank face and frustration, and Snapchat. I’m extremely amused. He’s acting jealous, maybe? He’s drunk enough not to remember the sequence of events and now he doesn’t like how I brought something sexual and vulgar into a conversation, even if he himself was asking for examples of interesting situations I’ve put myself into. Now he’s totally into his phone. I sit, silent, next to him, looking across the street. I want to say something. I know I can change the subject and start trying to be charming. I know he mentioned he lives on Fairfax because we’re close to Fairfax and he’s fishing for a late night tussle. It’s not difficult to get this back on track.

But, I don’t. I want to see what will happen if I don’t offer him a way out of his own judgmental mood-swing. Lately I’m getting tired of other people holding me accountable for their mood swings, if I’m being completely honest. Cute Little Thing is collateral damage tonight, for the behavior of other people who are closer to me. He sighs, and wonders aloud if he should head back west, and keep dancing. I remind him that the bars close at 2, but I think one of them stays open late if he wants to just dance. 

“The problem is,” he says, “I can’t get any of my friends to text me back. That’s the real reason I sat down and started talking to you.” I give a plaintive, patient smile, put my arm on his shoulder, make deep eye contact and say, hey, that’s okay – David Sedaris would have done the same. There is a brief breath, a pause. Then Cute Little Thing is annoyed. Whatever, goodbye, he says. I let him get about a quarter of a block away before yelling out after him. He whips around and says, what?!

Thanks for saying hi, I say. It was flattering. You’re a Cute Little Thing.

That’s all it takes. He’s suddenly rushing back toward me. He jumps up and throws his arms around me. There is an awkward moment. I squeeze him. I’m so much bigger than him. He feels fragile, almost. I bet he felt like a scrawny twerp most of his life. 

“You’re adorable,” I say. “Go see your friends.”

“Thanks for chatting with me,” he says. “I really did like you, a little.”

He hurries off down the street. I tilt my head up and watch him go. I think of this evening, of the boy who dismissed me because I wasn’t boyfriend material, about the transactional nature of all my exchanges tonight. With bouncers, with boys, with cashiers. I see Cute Little Thing slow his gait and approach a small group of other boys. He adjusts his posture, hiding hints of scrawn and twerpitude. He’s a completely different person now. I tilt my head back down, perpendicular to the street. 

Suddenly, I am no longer looking down my nose. 


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Seersucker Shorts and South Central

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized


I wake up a full twenty five minutes before Alexa prompts me, so I’m already feeling smug.

I pad into the kitchen, making coffee in the pour-over – tired eyes adjusting, straining to focus – a new phenomenon. My eyes don’t adjust to contrasts between light/dark very well anymore. It takes a few minutes in the morning before I’m ready to read things. Driving has become difficult at sunset. With age comes humility, whether you’re resisting it as hard as you can or not – and I am. I’m resisting both age and humility. I try to be the unbridled ego manic I was ten years ago. I set out every day with that goal, and by noon, I can barely remember my social security number, let alone how I was going to take over the world. The upside is, by dinner, I don’t even remember wanting to take over the world.

Time does heal everything, but it bears mentioning – the way it heals is by equalizing things at a minuscule pace. Like taking fine sandpaper to driftwood, time makes people brittle, yet inoffensive. The sharp corners of youth are exchanged for a smoother, curved grain. I’m not quite an unattractive version of myself now, but a grey one – certainly clumsier than before. More myopic, too.

I enjoy a strong, semi-acrid coffee on my terrace. I perch with it in a ludicrous   velour chair –  contemplating the lattice framework of a fence covered in greenery. The gorge separating our estate from the one next door is covered in lush ivy which gets watered three times a day, drought or no drought. My landlady is an American classic, thank you very much. She’s in her 80’s, and yes, she does have a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. At some point she also left indoor vintage 70’s furniture out here, and a rustic coffee table that seems fashioned out of a tree stump. I gaze over the chasm between neighboring estates, this verdant hillock and tiny valley between our respective domains.

I feel placid. Grateful, even. 

My therapist calls to confirm this week’s appointment, and while we’re on the phone he mentions a few goals we’ve talked about. I’m trying to learn how to be a better version of myself. We are deciding whether I have bipolar II or hyperactivity disorder, whether we medicate it, and to what degree. I’m expecting a titanic uphill slog because I’m incredibly argumentative and stubborn. I’m so painfully tough on myself – then I turn around and expect the world to maintain a moral, ethical standard I cannot possibly even fringe upon. I’m a hypocrite, is what I’m saying, I suppose. I’m a hypocrite but I’m trying to forgive myself this fault and move beyond it. Every person on this planet is a hypocrite, which is possibly why we hate hypocrisy so much. Every single person is a two-faced liar, a sanctimonious prig prone to lecturing other people on harmony and clean living, unable to get their own finger out of their own nose. We are all finger jammed up to the knuckle, digging around in there, hard and deep, for nothing. For vanity. For beauty. For meaning.

I’m trying to forgive that particular human trait in myself. Apparently I’ll forgive everyone else, if I do. I don’t know. For a ten dollar co-pay, you can’t beat the effort.

In my car, I realize I’ve worn pink today. Pink seersucker shorts and matching socks pulled up, with a tight white tee-shirt and white canvas shoes. I look darling, but every bit a gay man. It occurs to me I’ve dressed like a model from Target’s “Precious Little Faggot” collection for 11-14 year old non-gender-binary tweens. I get a phone call from my client. Running late, but I’m already on my way. I’m heading to South Central Los Angeles. 

I do social work. I service foster youth transitioning into adulthood. It’s my job to link them to social services like housing, college tuition, driving lessons, etc. Plus, just provide companionship and guidance. I like my job and I’d like to think I’m good at it. Certainly I’m getting better at it, at the very least. 

My client texts she’ll be a full hour late, but I’m already on the road. Nothing to be done. I’ll get some lunch in her neighborhood, then we’ll go on a supervised visit to see her baby. She’s 17, and sweet-natured – fun with a good sense of humor. She has a 1.5 year old daughter who’s also in the DCFS system. She hasn’t done meth in over a month and is proud of herself. We’re working on showing her judge responsible behavior patterns. The long term goal is independence – some sort of subsidized apartment for her and her baby to live in while she attends trade school. It’s my hope once she turns 22 and her benefits run out, she will have a middle class income; a sense that she can provide for herself and her child. It’s a tall order. I, myself, couldn’t provide for a child when I was 17, and indeed at this particular moment I take stock of my life and wonder if I could swing it even now. It would take some doing, but yes, I suppose I could.

Wait, what? No. I’m too self-absorbed for that. 

South Central has gone through some changes in the last 20 years. The particular area I’m concentrating on today is near a train station. Dilapidated, shack-like structures stand next to semi-pristine Craftsman homes. To look at the hodgepodge of architecture in this area, you’d swear gentrification was already well underway. I imagine I could easily spot a group of post-undergrads from USC, who have moved to this neighborhood to live together and launch their ironic-Bluegrass-band empire together. I entertain this notion for a bit. They’re a “diverse” band, with gender queer members, some mixed race and Asian members – but still 60-70% white. Maybe there’s an extremely dark person playing banjo, that they all treat like a Greek seer, or some sort of liberal sacred cow. That’s my idea of who would gentrify this neighborhood. I think of the white band members sitting in Eagle Rock coffee houses after gigs, explaining how, yes, they live in South Central, but because of the demographics of their band, they’re not really the ones gentrifying the area. 

It’s always some other poseurs doing the truly evil stuff, when you’re dealing with white liberals. I should know. I helped gentrify Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early aughts. You’re welcome, New York. 

My client is running even more late, so I pull out of her residential area, onto this neighborhood’s main drag. Charming (if slightly shabby) side nooks give way to a main street’s dilapidated wasteland. I pull into a plaza and park my car. Cricket phone stores, Burger Kings, Chinese Food joints clog this strip mall, which in turn clog the larger environ. Cheap, vinyl American flags hang outside a store advertising tax help in Spanish. Choked gutters form a clumped monstrosity of brittle palm fronds, candy wrappers, grocery store coupon books. The sidewalks are filthy, spots of gum mottle the walk, having turned dark black over years of neglect. Nobody is ever going to take solvent to remove this gum, but it’s so well trod at this point as to be of no threat to the bottom of anyone’s shoes. Matted, dull, innocuous – formless, nameless.

Around here it seems like hope is in short supply.  

I pass a bus station. A middle-aged woman with a milk eye sits, dressed for church, in a muted robin’s egg pantsuit and matching hat. The hat’s featured lavender flower rests askew, cockeyed. She sits next to a saxophone player who summons the air of a desert bedouin, clad in layers of earth toned fabric so oily, so misshapen – the sleeves blend into the rest of the garment. He is a lump of burlap holding the tarnished instrument. There’s no case for the sax, and it’s missing the reed needed to play it anyhow. Next to him there are two boys with skateboards and bright, clear eyes. They draw my attention. They don’t look defeated. They don’t look completely beaten into submission. In a few years, these boys could easily be clients of mine, if they’re lucky. If they’re unlucky. If whatever…

I’m conscious of seeming condescending in situations like this, even just by looking. I am well aware of my status as interloper, as “other.” I might as well be wearing a tee-shirt that says Well Intentioned White Social Worker.  I wish I hadn’t come down here dressed as a gay candy cane.

A woman stops short in front of me. A fire engine has pulled off the side of the road, about twenty yards ahead of us. The woman starts yelling about a fire that happened sometime in the recent past, about how the fire engine didn’t come fast enough to save her cousin’s belongings and how it’s some sort of conspiracy because her family isn’t the right sort of people to get prompt service from the fire department. I can’t help it. I smirk. 

Briefly, I imagine a two story firehouse with a dalmatian and and a pole to slide down. In my fantasy the staff of the firehouse is multicultural and buff. They rest -having herbal tea and playing scrabble, moving slightly when the phone rings, but then reverting to banal relaxation upon seeing the call coming from the undesirable lady’s cousin’s house. Maybe one of them quietly says, nope.

I have to pee.

I head into a Popeye’s. No bathroom. Underlining the message of “eat here but don’t pee here,” the door between the employee area and the customer area is made of thick bulletproof plastic. It’s like what you’d see in a Chase bank, except yellowed by grease, and made cloudy by ten thousand tiny scratches. I try three more fast food places – none of them have restroom access. Finally, at a Korean drug store an employee takes pity on me, and leads me into the back, where, of course they have a toilet.  

As the logy mass of water in my bladder voids itself I acknowledge even this as a privilege I routinely take for granted. How could I not? Drug stores are supposed to let you use the bathroom. But in this particular neighborhood the rules are different. 

I’m reminded of the difference again as soon as I’m back in the front of the store. I decide to buy a pack of Trident. I just want to show this store worker gratitude. I thank her as she’s ringing me up. Preferred customer, she says. I take a minute and pause. She glances out the window and nods her head at the rogue’s gallery marching by. You’re not from here, she says, and gives me a knowing smile. Oh Jesus, I say audibly, then glance down at my pink Little Lord Fauntleroy shorts. Is it my gayness or my whiteness that makes me a “preferred customer?” 

“Okay, then,” is all I can manage out of this particular exchange.

I make my way out of the store and back to my silver Prius (silver because it won’t show dirt, Prius because, gay). As a parting thought I smirk again, and think to myself, I should’ve said, I’m not a preferred customer, lady – I come to this neighborhood and tell everyone exactly how to live. I’m an UN-preferred customer!

My phone buzzes. My client has finally gotten out of the shower, and is ready for her supervised visit. She’s asking if I can call ahead to report we’re going to be 15 minutes late. I tell her no, that she has to do it, that it’s her responsibility to be on time, or account for her lateness. I’m being terse with her.  I could use a cute emoji or a sticker to show that I’m not annoyed, but I am annoyed. I want her to get her child back, and I need her to be more responsible. She sees me as a fun goofball, but I have an unforgiving side too. Once in a while, I bust out the tough love. She can handle it, I think. It won’t drive her back to drug use, and if it does, something or someone else would have done that anyhow. 

I pull up outside her house. I’m illegally parked and cannot come inside, I text. She’s blowdrying her hair and will be out in five minutes. I type out a response about how she said she was ready, then delete it. She does get points for trying. People get points for trying, sometimes. 

I make a few phone calls – County Social Workers, Probation Officers. I’m constantly playing phone tag with these folks, trying to locate clients or connect them to social services. Sometimes people help. Sometimes it’s an elaborate system of pass-the-buckery. 

My client gets into the car. She’s excited to see her baby. She smells good, like soap. Like a fresh shower.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says. I put on a deflated-looking face. 

“It’s okay.”

I put the address for the supervised visit into my GPS. After some significant time has passed, my client asks, “Michael, do you think I should try harder?”

There is a long pause. Finally, I speak. 

“I think the fact that you asked that question is evidence that you are trying harder. I think that you should be proud to be sober for a month, and I think you should just focus on that, and secondarily on running a schedule that isn’t constantly late all day. You’d be surprised at how much credit you get in life for simply showing up when you say you will.”

My client seems to like this response. In no time she’s recovered from the cranky text I sent. We play with her baby, who somehow at 18 months has a head of hair to rival a 35 year old woman. I agree, the baby is getting fat. I disagree, the baby hasn’t stopped recognizing her. I downplay the fact that the baby becomes noticeably excited toward the end of our visit, when the foster mother returns. We say goodbye to her baby.

“Jews,” my client says, when we get back into the car. “What do you think of Jewish ladies? Are they okay?”

Yes, I say. Most of them are well-intentioned. Certainly the ones participating in the foster system. I rattle off a list of positive stereotypes: Jews have a cultural tendency to value education, to support the arts, to encourage one another’s success. She finds this information reassuring. 

She wants to know if I think her baby will freak out, when and if the judge decides to give her custody again. 

Yes, I say. She’ll probably freak out. But, only for a few days. Once she gets used to her new environment she’ll be fine. She loves you. My client seems happy with this. She starts talking about her new boyfriend, who wants to marry her. She’s seventeen. Her boyfriend is 31. I try to minimize her expectations, to encourage her to focus on herself. Out of nowhere, my client changes the subject.

“Pink shorts,” she says, pointing at my legs. 

“What about them?”

“I like them. Where’d you get them, Target?”

“Um, no. I got them on sale at J. Crew.”

“J. Crew! White people love that place.”

“That’s correct. We do. Any time I’m feeling bad about being a white guy in America I can go to a J. Crew. It’s always air conditioned and there’s music playing that makes me feel calm – like I deserve understated luxury and pink seersucker shorts.”

She laughs. “You’re funny! You do deserve it! But you’re also an idiot, sometimes.”

I laugh along with her and turn up the radio. She’s not wrong. About the luxury. About the funny. About the idiot. She isn’t always right, but today she isn’t wrong. 

Later that night, I walk back up the staircase to my butler’s apartment in the back of an estate Orson Wells built for Rita Hayworth. 

I open up Grindr and flirt with Weho boys who want to see photos of me naked, but will under no circumstances drive up the canyon to visit me after 10:30pm. I send some photos. I receive some. I take a Benadryl and 3mg Melatonin and sit out on my porch. The hoot owl in the yard is letting me know all about its private 2am grievances with the canyon. The owl complains endlessly, screeching into the night. He levies all sorts of complaints about being an owl, about hunting for field mice, about being nocturnal. 

Who? Who? He demands. Who?

Sorry, I can’t help you, I say to nobody and nothing in particular. 

Seahorse Becomes Grapefruit Moon

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized
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Naruki Kukita is a Japanese artist living in New York City

 

It’s the guy.

The one from about a month ago. The one with the seahorse tattoo and the word “Brooklyn,” in the New York Times font – on his left shoulder blade. He’s Asian, or Pacific Islander I’d say. Actually, I wouldn’t say that. I won’t. I won’t mention his ethnicity until he does. Wait, will I? Will I seem like a ‘color blind’ white asshole if we go out for a few dates and I don’t ask him about his ethnicity? Whatever, I’ll gauge it later. I can mention being white on the second date self-effacingly, and see what information he offers.  I’ll say I’m Icelandic and we’re good at stoicism and have a high happiness index. Nope. Won’t say anything like that. Stooge.

Holy shit, he’s smiling! Jeez! I’m being charming. This is awesome.  He’s never going to put a shirt on for the entirety of this conversation is he? Oh man. Now I’m bringing up work schedules. And work. Fuck. He’s a writer. Of course he is. Beautiful. The tattoos say he has some sort of sense of humor.  Of course, a writer. What else would he be? Oh fuck he works for Showtime. Of course he does. I’m also a writer, I say. OH NO my arm is propped up on the side of this bank of lockers! Jesus, I look like a villain in a John Hughes movie hitting on a timid girl. Come on, correct yourself… Open up the body. Breathe. What is he saying? What am I saying? Did I just say I even love being in traffic sometimes? What an idiot. Whatever. I’m trying. It’s obvious I’m trying.

Smile. He’s being nice. His body language is open. Now I’m casually saying how I’ve learned, since the election, to just look at the news for 15 minutes a day, and turn the radio off in the car, so I can be alone with my thoughts, and focus on serenity. What a fucking asshole! Focus on serenity. I mean, it’s true, but good lord I sound like a used wet wipe. Awful.

He’s. So. Fucking. Cute.

If someone ever approached me like this, would I go on a date with them??

Whatever. I’ve been waiting to chat him up again for almost a month. I’m asking him out, or I never will. Okay –

“Well, I’ll let you go. I just need to know when you’re taking me out for a drink.” Wow. Idiot! You should offer to take him out! Really hitting it out of the park today, fool. Still, maybe he caught the irony that I’m doing something cutely inappropriate, like offering to let him take me out for a drink. I’m not even a drinker anymore. Whatever. I’ll pay and it will seem adorkable in retrospect. I’ll find a way to make this memory of me asking him out seem charming.

Great.  I bump into the towel cart, and the small brown man pushing a load of wet towels back to the laundry. I make deep eye contact and mouth the word “sorry” to him. Some of the brown men who tend the towels and squeegee the floors, some of them I never look at. The ones that seem cocky or mean, like they’d say misogynist jokes if they were alone with you, and expect you to laugh along. Also, sometimes those jokes are funny and I laugh along, and feel bad later. Also, sometimes I forget to feel bad entirely. It depends on my day.

But this middle-aged man of the towels is sweet and kind, so I always look at him and say hello. Eye contact. Mutual respect. Los Angeles runs on small framed brown people taking away the dirty towels, stocking the shelves in the grocery stores, cutting the grass. It’s easy to forget to look at them. It’s also condescending and stupid to look at them on purpose. If I really cared about them I’d hand them cash. I guess I only care about myself. I guess that’s okay? That’s okay. I help people for a living. That’s fine. I’m fine. Am I fine? Yes.

Oh SHIT. It occurs to me in this weird, lingering moment –  I’m making dumb, deep eye contact with the middle aged brown man I like, while hitting on a young grapefruit skinned man I like much more. Right in front of both of them. I’m certain this is foolish behavior. I’m a fool.

Oh, shit, though. The seahorse guy is handing me his phone! Yes. He says he’ll text me. I enter my number, and text “Hi, dummy,” to myself.  Yeah. That’s charming, isn’t it? Ugh.

Well it’s done. I say goodbye and go work out.

I don’t get a text.

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Fuck me in the fucking face. I put the wrong number in. Asshole. Idiot. Now it will be, what, another month before I see him again? I trudge through the rest of my workout. I become inundated with sweat. I’m walking up the eternal stair treadmill, watching my sweat on the endless up-the-down-escalator turn from droplets to rivulets, now a trough of sweat. I walk back to the locker room. The kind faced small brown man who does the towels is there. He looks at me. He opens his mouth as if to say something. I hold eye contact with him. He says nothing. I touch him on the arm. It’s too much. Now it’s weird. Okay fine, bye.

I start to feel better in the shower. The seahorse guy told me his name, and the name of the last show he worked on. I can find him on IMDB and message him somewhere.  He has Twitter, I’m sure. Facebook. I’ll send a message. I’ll say something charming.

Then I see it. There, in the cubby.

The showers are chrome and sleek, with doors of semi-opaque frosted glass. Always immaculate – always pristine in here. Tight marble tiles on the floor. Ceramic actually, but they’re made to emulate marble. Smooth tiles on the walls. A cubby hole for your goggles, or suit, or cell phone, or soap. In the cubby, I see it. A gum wad.

I’ve seen gum wads left in the cubby before. People somehow frequently decide they’re done with their gum in the shower, and can’t be bothered to hold the mealy, flavorless offense in their mouth even five minutes to shower. Or, maybe they’re brushing? Even so, though, they have to make the decision to leave the gum in the cubby, and I always feel a small outrage for the towel people when I see careless gum in the shower. You’re so pampered you can’t even pick your gum back up and throw it out? Gross.

But this isn’t errant, wayward gum. This gum is jammed into the back corner of the cubby. Someone smashed it in with their thumb. Someone wanted to humiliate the towel guys? Or, maybe they hate the towel guy I like with the kind eyes? Maybe they just want to know someone has to work to dig their gum out of the cubby where they lodged it? Maybe it’s pure sadism. Sadistic person at the expensive gym? Probably common. I think about a comedy set I heard last week about how some people who go to my gym shit next to the toilets, just because they can. I feel deflated. Defeated. Sullen, even. I’m not going to pick the gum out, that’s absurd. The gym membership is embarrassingly expensive. It’s a car payment.

But, on my way out of the stall I see a discarded tooth brush on the shower room floor. I grab it and take it back to the stall. I poke at the gum.

It springs open.

It has suddenly become a frizzy spider web egg sack. Spiders – glossy rust colored spiders emerge from the gum wad. Hundreds, thousands. They pour out of the angry wad and radiate up around and down. In twenty seconds the stall is mostly covered with them. Hundreds of thousands of spiders now, pouring into the shower room. It reminds me of movies, when a ship springs a leak. There are so many of them. I back out, naked, into the locker room. I drop the toothbrush. Millions of spiders now. They’re engulfing everything. Counter tops, mirrors. People running in horror, but as soon as the first spider bites they are paralyzed. Frozen in place. Like a kid’s game of freeze tag. It’s coming too fast now.  I grab the kind faced brown towel man and look into his eyes. It’s time to run. He holds me fast. His eyes say, stop. You know this is pointless. It’s happening. It’s all ending right now. That’s not gum, or a spider egg sack in there – and this is the End of Things. Call it God, or a pinprick into a worm hole. But you know what this is. You know we are all ending right now.

I suddenly stop struggling. Instinctively I know he is right. Some reptile part of my brain activates enough to tell me there is no hope left.  The world has given way to something different. Something much more simple and primal.  I lock forearms with the kind faced brown man. His eyes are dark inkwells, with a deep azure ring around them. An optical illusion.

“You wear contacts, don’t you?” He nods. It’s barely perceivable, but he nods.

I only feel the first bite. Soon we two are as one. Covered in an increasingly infinite coating of spiders. I think, we must look like a gnarled rust colored tree. Withering. They’re eating our bodies. Our faces. His foreskin. My eye. We feel nothing. We dissolve into a writhing reddish orange goo. At some point, things go dark. There is nothing, but it’s still something. Just an awareness of nothing is something. It must be.

The seahorse guy is on top of the parking garage. He sees the dirty orange red tide start to seep up Vine and spread out into Argyle. They’re coming up to the roof. He takes his clothes off. He smiles and looks down. It is a sad, resigned smile. He rises into the sky, naked, with a seahorse on his left arm and the word “Brooklyn” stamped on his left shoulder blade. He rises more. Higher and higher he goes, up, up into the stratosphere. Beyond. But, slowly, while the ruddy stain spreads up the coast like a gunshot wound. It’s happening so fast now. Nobody is even afraid. The seahorse man curls himself up into a ball. He swells huge. Bigger than huge, and rises even further up into the nothingness.

Later that night the world takes on a black, reddish glisten. The spiders are everywhere. There is nothing else. No land mass. No oceans. Just an unctuous throbbing mass. Two moons hang in the sky bathing the writhing spiders in different colored lights. Trillions. More. So many. A whole world full of other dimension spiders.

One of the moons is stark, white and pock marked. It looks made of cheese. The bigger one is warmer. Golden.

The seahorse has become a faint whisper on the surface of a grapefruit moon. Brooklyn has vanished completely.

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Instagram Cat Famous

by piefolk, posted in Uncategorized

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Two straight-presenting black men are having lunch next to me in Studio City. They keep using the word “faggot” to describe a mutual friend who, as far as I can discern, is acting lame this weekend and not coming to a party with them because he wants to spend time with his girlfriend.

You know, just like a faggot does.

I was going to use this post to make a provocative joke about how I’m going to use the “n” word with impunity from now on, but that’s not actually how I feel. I want the n word to be off limits. I want people to err on the side of sensitivity when they’re in public, at the very least. I’d like to live in a world where using words like faggot, cunt, trannie, dyke carry the same risk as using the n word offhandedly. I don’t live anywhere near that world, and I live in an historic mansion in the Hollywood hills.

Sometimes, I call it out. I’ll ask, in my requisite right-but-annoying tone, can we please keep the bigoted language to a minimum? Today, however, I’m not in the mood to start an altercation. I don’t need to be the 40 year old man yelling at college aged kids. I mean, it’s a crowded cafe. There’s a diverse swath of people eating here. Everyone can hear these guys throwing the word faggot around and nobody is going to say anything.

Including me.

I’m going to take that mute, indignant anger, put it on Facebook, and continue with my day. Later I’ll perform an intake session with a 16 year old probationary foster youth. A new client for my social work job. Part of my intake questionnaire will be to ask if the youth needs LGBT resources. I’m bracing myself for the inevitable answer of “I don’t need any faggot shit,” or some variation of that. It happens often in this line of work. I’m servicing underprivileged teenagers-wards of the state. They are not even a little bit PC. They will say faggot and not even apologize when you ask them to stop. Indeed, they will also not even stop.

I did, however, make eye contact with a scruffy person sitting here in the same cafe. They’re wearing a mesh top and a cute pencil skirt. Our eye contact seemed to convey the mutual pain of having to hear the word faggot, unchallenged, in public, in Southern California, in 2017. Who knows? Maybe the eye contact just meant eye contact? I did the only thing I could think to do: on the way to the restroom I mentioned I liked their skirt. They seemed appreciative of the compliment. They smiled. It was a nice moment.

The black dudes have moved on to a new subject – bitches. It also sounds like they’re talking about how some bitches can’t handle their Instagram branding. “This bitch stupid! She gonna try to be cat famous with this kinda branding??” Scintillating stuff.

Later this afternoon I’ll come home and take a nap before heading down to Silverlake to tend bar at a dance party. College students blowing mom and dads money and learning how to hit on each other. If there’s time between social work, napping, and tending bar, I might unpack my knapsack and play with all my white male privilege. But, probably not. It’s not even noon yet and the day’s already proving to be exhausting.

Sure do hope that bitch on Instagram becomes cat famous, though – despite her janked-out branding. If that can happen, if just one person in this equation can rise above the scrum and rabble to join the lucrative ranks of Instagram cat fame, it will prove to be a shining beacon of hope in an otherwise dark world.

June 21, 2011 Large

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