The Erotic Holism of Audre Lorde: A Testament in Two Parts

I.

     The dictionary defines holism as “a theory that the universe and especially living nature is correctly seen in terms of interacting wholes that are more than the mere sum of elementary particles” (Merriam-Webster, 2003).    In reading Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, I am struck by her clearly holistic view of the erotic, and its function in women’s lives.  For Lorde, the erotic equals the “assertion of the life force of women” (Lorde, 1984), in its most comprehensive manifestation.  The erotic makes women whole.

     Without empty rhetoric or abstractions, Lorde makes quick work of explaining that, within “the context of male models of power” (Lorde, 1984), there can be no true feminine erotic reality.  Phallocentric discourse reduces the erotic to cheaply sexualized images.  Each woman is charged to look beyond the puritanical distortion that confines the erotic to the bedroom, where women can be “psychically milked” (Lorde, 1984) by men.  Freed from this confinement, women find the true depth and breadth of the erotic possible within themselves.  For Lorde, the erotic is not synonymous with its most predatory alteration in this society, pornography.  While the erotic is fulfillment, pornography is “the abuse of feeling” (Lorde, 1984).

      Erotic holism is a tall order to fill, a call to move “beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society” (Lorde, 1984).  This movement requires, before all else, we look within ourselves and to leave no stone unturned in discovering our passion.  In this pursuit, the aim is to find what makes one feel deeply about being, and the difference between one person’s passion for auto mechanics and another’s passion for poetry is not measured by quality.  They are both equal if within both the “erotic kernel” (Lorde, 1984) can be found.

This requires courage: the force of the erotic is daunting, especially in this society, where it has been fashioned into “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” (Lorde, 1984).  Once our inner parameters have been explored, and we learn the height and scope of our own fervent possibility, our power is limitless.  Lorde asserts that once this fullness has been achieved, we can have a “celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors” (Lorde, 1984).

     Women thus empowered are truly free to connect with others and begin to regain the things that have been taken from them – “our language, our history, our dancing, our work, our lives” (Lorde, 1984).  There is a sharing with others on a more than casual level.  There is an opening up, a baring of the self, which is an existential holism.  The “dichotomy between the spiritual and the political” (Lorde, 1984), so villified by Lorde, can only be bridged when women who are self-aware and whole seek committee with one another, bearing their individual passions before them.

     In addition, Lorde has succeeded in reshaping a tired, overused feminist polemic: making the personal political.  She shuns an external locus of politics, preferring instead that “our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within” (Lorde, 1984).  Lorde nullifies political correctness.  There is no ideological, de facto imposition of “the truth”.  Instead, there is the idea that ethical guidance from the depth of one’s self motivates action - renewal of the self as well as a transformation of society.  Though the concept was developed by 1978, it foreshadows Adrienne Rich’s “politics of location”, creating a paradigm for modern feminism that suggests the meaning of women’s lives is rooted in the personal, as bounded and defined by cultural experience.

Lorde’s work suggests you must know yourself before you can know the world.  This holistic self-knowing assures that real change can occur, and not just the “shifting of characters in the same weary drama” (Lorde, 1984).

           

II.

     So, what does this mean to me, and why did I, who has little or no acumen or interest in politics, choose to handle Audre Lorde?  Well, as it turns out, Audre Lorde and her essay are a part of my evolution, both literally and figuratively.

     In late 1984, I became a student at Hunter College, almost by accident.  Friends who were part of the Lesbians Rising student group there pushed me into a writing class I didn’t want to take.  The teacher, they said, was phenomenal, intense, passionate, incredible.  The teacher was Audre Lorde.  I didn’t know who she was.  I had no inkling of her status.  I was singularly nonplussed at her zeal.  But, on some level, I knew enough to pay attention.

     As a matter of habit, I sat to Lorde’s left, watching her stalk across the terrain of the classroom, always challenging someone, usually gesturing wildly, often laughing.  I would be lying if I said I did not sit through her classes like some slack-jawed yokel, in awe of her power.  I would be lying if I said that when I read Sister, Outsider that semester, I understood it.  And I would also be lying if I said Audre Lorde liked my poetry.

     It was clear that she liked me – we often walked to the subway together, and I drove her home to Staten Island a few times.  But it was also absolutely clear that she thought my poetry needed divine intervention.  She spent the entire semester tough-loving me into authenticity.  

     Lorde called me on every weak and superficial verse, every obnoxious and erudite turn of phrase, sometimes not sparing my work from scathing invectives despite polite company.  It was the first time I had ever simultaneously loathed and venerated a person.  I was completely infatuated.   And I finally did write one good poem.

SHE & me

Dandelion days, Bosco nights

and searching her purse to find the magic nutshells

that turned my stubby little fingers red.

I played hide and seek with the laughter

lurking in the folds of her dress

and paddycake with the workwise hands

of the maid/cook/babysitter/mommy.

“Anything for my pumpkin”!”

Until the almost-ever-present

knitted-brow smirk told me

I was breaking laws I never knew

blasting off to the planet Teenager.

 During my stay, I was beckoned by memories

of Pine Sol and Chanel No. 5

and a voice teddy bear soft

beyond the new schoolmarmish cold.

I closed stinging red eyes to the stranger

searching for Mommy like a prospector

wading in the muck to find ore.

When the nugget surfaced, starshine from

her liquid amber eyes warmed me.

We hugged, nose to nose,

heart to heart.

                       

Lorde wrote a single word across the bottom of the page – “Beautiful!”     

Being in Lorde’s presence was like participating in my own autopsy.  A dark reference, but I certainly don’t mean it to be so.  You see, there was something about her words that prompted me to leave my disinterested, disconnected self behind and come to a new consciousness.   Lorde did not seek to reform me, she was simply the archetypal reagent in my self-transformation.

    Knowing what I now know, I can say that my twenty-year-old self had a brush with the erotic. 

(References excluded.)

Hit Bononut: An Italian Childhood Among the Hasidim

“There were voices --
Thunder and lightning and a long blast of the shofar;
The mountain was covered in clouds and smoke.
On that day,
We saw the voices.

When you see voices
You never forget it as long as you live.”

from “Standing at Sinai”

 ____________________________________________

25 Tamuz 5732

     “Well he’s bad, bad Leroy Brown…baddest man in the whole damn town!”

     I’m bouncing a little pink Spalding ball (hereabouts known as a spaldeen) against the flaking grey steps of our row house, singing my nearly eight-year-old lungs out.  Sweat is running little rivers down my back, but it’s too early to go in the pool yet.  I wonder if I can invite someone in today.

     My mother comes out on the porch, and I begin to ask her if I can ask Honey to come in.  Honey Weiner, whose real name is Channi (converted for the convenience of the goyim who can’t pronounce the glottal ch), lives next door.  She is ten.  I know she probably can’t come in, because she isn’t allowed to wear a bathing suit in public.  I want to ask anyway.   Maybe she’ll still come over to play. 

     “What are you up to?” my mother asks.  Before I can answer, there is a sickening crash followed by a harrowing scream from next door.  Mrs. Weiner, Honey’s mother, flies out onto her balcony, dragging Eliezer, Channi’s brother, behind her.  They are both holding a bloody towel to his meaty mess of a hand.

     “Vey is mire!  Oy vey!” she wailed.  Then she called out to my mother, “Margie!  Margie!”

     My mother runs down the porch steps, “What happened?  Oh my God!”           

“Mein gott, he fell through the window!  Please can you take us to the hospital?  My husband is not home…”

     “Okay, okay,” my mother runs back toward the house to get her keys.  “Come down.  I’ll take you.”

     We scramble into our olive-green 1972 Satellite Sebring.  The Weiners sit in the back.  Eliezer has not uttered a sound.   With his uninjured hand, he twirls his payos and looks fretfully out the back window.  Mrs. Weiner speaks to her son in Yiddish, and thanks my mother over and over at frequent intervals. 

     I am puzzled.  How does she know my mother’s name?  Do they ever talk?  What else do they know about us? 

Adult Hasidim, especially the men in their voluminous black coats and brimmed black hats, seem to look through me.  When I see them on the street, they don’t say hello, don’t make eye contact, just rush by. They look either sad or serious or angry (I can never tell).  But they know us!  Why do they not let us know them?

     Weeks after the incident, when Eliezer has recovered, Honey and her mother arrive at our doorstep with a token of thanks.  It is a dress and a doll for me.  I want to ask her if we can be friends.  I want to ask her about her school – I know it is Shulamith School for Girls because I read the words on the back of her jacket.   But I say nothing.

 

“Saying that one kind word will soften every

insult uttered on the face of the earth. Doing

that one good deed will nullify all the evil

in the universe. Because the world is one,

and you are the world.”

based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe,

 Menachem Mendel Schneerson

15 Tishrei 5735

     I hear the rhythm of reverent voices, low and sweet.  They echo in the stillness of the October night.  Flickering shadows creep along the corrugated plastic walls of the makeshift hut that take up the entire balcony outside the living room of Spitzers’ apartment.  I know the whole family is huddled in there, that they will finish singing their prayers and stay there all night.   I stand in the darkened street, and look up at the third floor, wondering.

     I know it is Shavuot (pronounced shavoowiss by the thick-tongued Italians in my neighborhood).  I want to know more.  I want to see what it feels like to know a kind, loving, and compassionate god who only demands of humans to be like him.  To spend hours performing mimes of ancestors’ actions, hands moving as theirs have moved,  thoughts flying as theirs have flown.  All the time sure that the delight of an awesome deity rests in your own capable hands.  All lessons lead to the moment of veneration, and those moments come often.  What parallel experience could my watered-down, ashes-and-palms Roman Catholicism possibly provide?  I know the answer before I can even articulate it: not a one.

While we are busy planning which houses we’ll egg and chalk at Halloween, the Hasidic families in our Brooklyn neighborhood are preparing to praise their God in thanks for the grain harvest.  I personally had never seen a grain harvest, except on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  But it is a living symbol to my Borough Park neighbors, who bear gratitude for the bounty of the Torah in their hearts.

Black-hatted men, cautiously-dressed women and hordes of children possess their shtetl - this neighborhood, eyes focused on something I can’t see, but want to.  There is something wise, something mysterious, something utterly other-worldly about these Lubavitch followers of the Ba’al Shem Tov.  It is in their midst I find the roots of my fascination with the divine and the mystical.  Their rituals, their gathering, their inviting the spirit of god daily into their midst impress the print of heaven on my soul.

“May songs of praise ever be upon your tongue
and your vision be on a straight path before you.
May your eyes shine with the light of holy words
and your face reflect the brightness of the heavens.
May your lips speak wisdom
and your fulfillment be in righteousness
even as you ever yearn to hear the words
of the Holy Ancient One of Old.”

from Talmud Berachot 17A

21 Iyyar 5738

      My face is buried in Thomas Tryon’s The Other.   I don’t so much read the words as devour them these days.  My mind is open and wants desperately to be filled with all the knowledge it can hold.  I have been sitting on the stoop since lunch, the warm spring sun on my face, reading. 

      My parents return from an afternoon function at church.  Uncle John and his friend, Jackie, are with them.  My parents head inside, and my uncle walks Jackie a few doors down the street to her apartment.    Once they have gone, the street becomes silent again.  I return to my reading.

Suddenly, I hear a single set of running feet, then a desperate voice shouts, “Gotteniu!  Help me!  Somebody!”  

My head snaps up.  I see Mr. Tischman, the jeweler who lives four houses up grappling for his jewelry case with a strange man.  My uncle sees the commotion and darts past, hurling his skinny body on top of the two men.  They all fall to the pavement, limbs flailing.

I jump to my feet and shout, “Daddy!  Daddy!”   My father has already heard the fracas.  He flies to the aid of Mr.Tischman and my uncle.  He leaps into the fray, and holds the man down.  All of them are yelling.  I can’t understand a word. 

A sea of black coats descend upon the scene like Caesar’s troops embarking on the Gauls.  Voices are voluble, hands gesticulate wildly.  There are at least four dozen angry Hassids, - pallid, unarmed and singularly fearless - clamoring to tear the thief limb from limb.  My father and uncle are lost in the swarm.  I am afraid they’ll be crushed, or worse – mistaken for the perpetrator. 

     Later, my father tells me, “This guy was trying to get up, and I told him if he didn’t stop, I’d leave him there alone.  And then they would kill him.”

Police from the 66^th Precinct show up and the mob evaporates.  They will materialize later at the stationhouse, demanding justice.  For now, things are quiet.  My mind turns the event over and over.  I know these people would have died helping Mr. Tischman.  They never hesitated for a moment.  Some of them do not even know him.

    I wish for myself – for my family – that kind of unbridled loyalty.

“When asked why his experiences during

the war had not embittered him, one

survivor said, I learned about friendship in

Auschwitz.  When I was cold, strangers

shielded me with their bodies from the

blowing winds, for they had nothing else

to offer but themselves.”

                                                                                    Arnost Lustig

15 Nisan 5740

     “Tell me you don’t think they’re freakin’ beautiful.”

I am sitting on my stoop.  My bespectacled, nihilist friend, Jeanne, sits beside me, a The Anarchist Cookbook open in her lap.  Jeanne sighs, looks up from her tome, and regards me seriously. 

“Yeah, maybe,” she allows.  “Hot, but very repressed.”

     “You think?”

“I know.”

     I continue to watch a gaggle of Hasidic women chat happily in the street.  They gather, as if their odd habit, in the middle of the street as if it is the most natural thing in the world to deter traffic.  Indeed, whenever a car cruises down our street, they step slowly aside, as if some other impetus compels them to do so.  Whether the car has to wait six or sixty seconds has no bearing on them. Their conversation is never interrupted.

I am focused on a woman of about eighteen.  She is a rare, wondrous jewel – blushing with health, full of vigor and life.  Her hair, thick and shining, cascades down her back in ringlets and curls.  Her emerald eyes shine with enthusiasm.  I know she must be intelligent – I fantasize that she is.  Years later, I will remember her comprehensively when Yentl’s Amy Irving portrays the young maiden, Hadass.

I don’t know why, but I know her name – Tova.  She is dressed in fine linen, a subdued mid-calf dress the color of wheat.  Her creamy skin is covered past the elbows. 

           

“Kovod bas melech p’nima­” – the glory of the

king’s daughter is within, our sages tell us. Tznius

is regal.  Tznius …allows her to externalize

fashions that suit her soul.  The soul requires

majesty.”

                                                                        from Around Sarah’s Table

                 

      She is my standard for feminine beauty.  This concept of tznius – Jewish modesty – has rides in my back pocket throughout my life.  Women of modesty, of self-respect, of sedate and refined nature draw me to them as a moth to flame.  I find an image of myself most clear when it is reflected in their eyes. 

Whenever I reach for a pen, the ink that flows describes women of this ilk.  There is always something quiet, something reserved and enigmatic about the female love interest of my protagonist.  She is always a shadow of Tova, a manifestation of gentle beauty I covet.  I cannot – I do not wish to – exterminate her.

                       

“Therefore, engage her first in conversation

that puts her heart and mind at ease and gladdens

her…Speak words which arouse her to passion,

union, love, desire and eros….Win her over with

words of graciousness and seductiveness…Hurry

not to arouse passion until her mood is ready.”

                                    

from The Epistle of Holiness

by Rabbi Moses benNahman

17 Av 5742

      “Moishe!  Moishe!”  Karl, our frenetic, overstressed neighbor, sticks his head out the living room window, and is calls to the third (and cutest) of his five sons.  Eleven-year-old Moishe, meanwhile, is bent gamely over his aged bicycle, trying to repair the chain for the tenth time at least. 

      “Yes, Tatte?” the boy responds, without looking up.

      “Moishe, it’s almost sundown.  Come daven Mincha.”

      “Okay, Tatte.”  He goes back to his bike.  Karl disappears into the window, not unlike a cuckoo into a clock.

      Minutes pass.  Moishe is covered in grease.  His yarmulke is askew, his clothes disheveled.  His tallit hangs dangerously close to the mess. The sun dips behind the peak of the house across the street.  Moishe works on.

The front door of their house flies open.  Karl appears.  I notice that the veins on his neck are pulsing.  I can tell he is trying to control himself, and failing miserably.  He growls, “Moishe!”

Moishe looks up this time, “Yes, Tatte?”

“We’re going to daven Mincha.   Come in now.”

“Okay, Tatte.” 

Karl disappears.  Moishe goes back to his bike.  He works more feverishly now.  I fold my arms, and lean against the fender of my Chevette.  I need to go in and eat, but this is too good to miss.

 The street is now more shadow than light.  Moshe moves to the basement steps, and looks at the bike from beneath – perhaps a new perspective will help.  His brother, Shia, walks out onto the porch and looks around.  He doesn’t see Moishe, so he goes inside to report to Karl.

Karl flies out onto the porch himself, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Moishe!”

Startled, Moishe answers, “Yes, Tatte?”

“Moishe, let me ask you a question,” Karl says calmly.

“Yes, Tatte?”

“Are you Jewish?”

Moishe looks confused, but answers quickly, “Yes.”

“Then come DAVEN!”

This time, Moishe follows him into the house, no doubt wondering whether tardiness to daven Mincha could result in excommunication. 

“The Jew has made a marvelous fight in this

world, in all the ages; and has done it with his

hands tied behind him.”

                                   Mark Twain

     I am the storyteller.  I wear a cloak woven with threads of the Brooklyn neighborhood that begat me.  I am the child raised by a village.  I retrace my steps, find my center, and feel it as much Hasidic as Italian.

     From my progenitors - my beloved family – I am blessed with strength, depth, wit, ardor and an innumerable host of intangible essentials.    This is my bountiful birthright.  By this, I am humbled.

From the Hasidic neighbors whose lives ebbed and flowed concurrent with mine - my chosen, personal precursors - I learned resiliency, selflessness, and awe for the divine.  This is a gift I did not deserve.  For this, I am grateful.

North Randolph in the Rain

I look out onto the rainy street beyond the porch railing.  It is silent.  The Saturday morning ballet of nattering neighbors and carousing kids is delayed by the soft rain pattering to the pavement.  The air is a wet wool blanket clinging to my shoulders.  I sit, shift restlessly, fight the impulse to tread barefoot in the morning drizzle.

 I watch Doug step out his door, quiet as a cat burglar.  He reaches out, palm up, feeling for the exact cadence of the raindrops.  He frowns, mustache drooping like a dejected blonde caterpillar.  There will be no golf this morning.  He tiptoes back in.

The windchime is tangled.  I lean cautiously over the railing, stretching to unsnarl the delicate strands.  Meanwhile, giant drops of water divebomb from the gutter’s edge and plunk me on the head.  I persist, and soon the chime peals gratefully at me, a lullabye sound. 

The motion has made ancient injuries smart.  Both heels are sore, and my hamstring is cranky.  Humidity seeps into crevices and corners of my muscles like a spelunker. I smile, remembering the double plays and the Brooklyn-Queens championships that left me the legacy of a complaining physique.  The weather won’t let me forget.   

Water is running in rivers beside the curb.  It flows around clumps of cottonwood pods with artistic agility, feigning left, going right, and finally continuing its descent to the storm drains at the foot of Hooker Avenue.  The motion moves the air.  The sweet locust scent and the chalky essence of asphalt ride the breeze. 

I consider the swamp maples, the stalwart old ladies of the hill.  Sturdy and mossy, they soar over the houses reaching toward the sky.  Their branches lay open, welcoming the gentle shower from above. 

Birds flit from branch to branch, too busy to notice the rain.  They study the mulberries, like rabbinical students poring over Talmud. They converse in another tongue, chattering insistently, but still I understand. 

I am a foreigner among the native life.  Nature maintains its rhythms when I cannot manage mine.  I wrestle with doubts that descend on my life like sudden downpours.  I question and fret and wonder and despair as if tomorrow will never come. 

            The leaves don’t know how much growing they should do until the rain tells them.   I sit back, and listen harder.

Cugine

[Names have been changed to respect the privacy of the respected parties whose lives are detailed here.]           

 
      I find it somehow disturbing that I cannot find his name on the Internet.  It seems his obituary should at least be there.  It doesn’t seem right, or fair, or reasonable.  I guess what my girlfriend says is true.  People’s lives are like pebbles dropping one by one into a tranquil pond.  The water ripples in ever-widening circles, until there is no motion left, and the surface becomes still again.  The pond looks unchanged, but it isn’t, really.
            “What?  You what?” I struggled to untangle myself from the serpentine sheets that threatened to swallow me.  

“I didn’t mean to call you so early, ya know, “ Louie’s staccato voice was full of apologies.  “But I just found out and I wanted to let you know as soon as I knew that I’m HIV positive.”

         I met Louie in the dank recesses of a neighborhood dive named Rhythms.  He was nineteen years old.  A Foreign Language major at LIU, Louie was a brash, frenetic Bensonhurst boy with a ready smile and an infectious laugh. 
         I had met a lot of gay men during my furtive trips to Rhythms.  He was the only gay guido I had ever met.  He had an Italian temper and a sense of humor to match. 

Louie and I fell in with a small, cohesive crowd of gay club hoppers that trekked from borough to borough in search of a good time.  At the hub of that circle was Louie, chain-smoking Parliaments and dancing himself into a Sufi-like trance under the dazzling swirl of dance-floor lights.  People would often step aside to give him more room and watch him dance.  He loved the attention. 

Contrasted with this club kid identity was the side of Louie that made him a riveting Language teacher: “my intellectual snob side”, he called it.  His porn flicks shared the video cabinet with National Geographic films about the plight of Sumatran tigers   His bookshelves spilled over with books whose titles I couldn’t translate: Essais – Montaigne, Catalogo Dei Premi Letterari Italiani, Mein Kampf.  He taught himself Afrikaans in his spare time.  Once he got sick, his only ambition was to go on safari in Africa, so he could get close to the giraffes. 

My vowel-laden surname and Catholic school history, combined with the fact that I was absolutely no sexual threat, made me a natural choice for Louie’s “fake girlfriend”.  Louie didn’t come out to anyone but his mother until his early twenties, so family functions before that point always demanded a surrogate date.  I always obliged.

I learned early on that Louie’s mother was the center of his world.  His relationship with his father was never more than perfunctory.  Louie often said he was tired of trying.  That he would never be like his brother, Charles – the older, athletic, macho golden boy – and thus would never win the approval of his stoic, taciturn father.

Their relationship was painful to watch.  Louie could have set himself on fire and run through the living room, and still his father would ignore him.  I never saw them hug or kiss or exchange kind words.  According to Louie, when he needed money, his father took him to his Washington Heights wholesale grocery and put him to work in the packing room to earn what he needed.  When Charles needed money, his father took out the checkbook and asked how much. 

Louie summed up his relationship with his father in four succinct words, “He’s a fuckin’ jerk.”

Louie may have had a hard time with his family, and his family may have had a hard time with his sexuality.  But Louie certainly didn’t.  He loved men.  Wildly, obsessively, unapologetically.  He was like a Venus flytrap in the bars, always with several cute but unsuspecting flies buzzing around him, buying him drinks, laughing at his nonstop jokes, lighting his cigarettes.  He never went home alone.  Often, I dropped him off at Shore Road, the local gay cruise strip, so he could flit from vehicle to bike path to park bench, orgiastically worshipping the bodies of anonymous men he encountered.  It was his element.

          As our twenties faded, the bar scene and party-hearty habits we’d developed fell away like the discarded skin of a snake.  Louie held on the longest.  He did not handle aging – he got hairplugs, and he always talked about wanting liposuction.  He did not handle change - his greatest lament was the demise of disco music.  He considered 1981 the best year of his life, from which the best music and his best memories were gleaned.   I still cannot hear Jimmy Bo Horne’s “Spank” without thinking of Louie.

By the time I got the call that Louie was HIV positive, our lives had diverged in the way lives usually do.  Louie was teaching at a public high school in Brooklyn, not far from the neighborhood in which he grew up.  He was in a tumultuous relationship with Hernan, a personable Bajan guy.  His mother had passed, and his father had remarried almost immediately, then moved to Florida, leaving Charles with the house.  Every time we spoke, Louie talked about the old days, and I spent the whole conversation laughing.

Eventually, Louie’s health failed.  He had CNS Toxoplasmosis and came close to dying.  The bout left him blind in one eye.  He retired on disability from teaching and moved to Florida.  He couldn’t handle winters in the Northeast anymore.  Hernan, drained from previous months of being a caregiver, decided he could not stand Louie’s jealous behavior and fits of temper any longer, and moved to Savannah to be near his family.  

Louie had no driver’s license due to his visual impairment.  He drove anyway.  He tried only half-heartedly to quit smoking.  He enjoyed the sun, and took a job landscaping.  The job, he informed me, was making him buff.  The Internet opened up a whole new cruising venue for him.  He took full advantage.

He liked Florida because of all the barely-dressed guys.  He hated it because it wasn’t Brooklyn. 

I had fallen into the across-the-miles routine of emailing Louie frequently and telephoning every few months.  Not hearing from him for an extended stretch was no reason to panic.  Sometimes, he would forget to pay his phone bill, and would be without AOL and long distance for a month or two.  Then an Instant Message would pop up on my computer, or a rambling message would be waiting in my voicemail, and there he was. 

When a childhood friend of mine – the sister of Louie’s best friend – emailed and said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you – Louie passed away”, it was a few months after the fact.  I felt a rush of guilt and anger and sorrow about losing him.  But, for Louie, I felt relief.

I believe that Louie had already lived the happiest years of his life and some part of him knew that.  Having AIDS never panicked or depressed him.  Perhaps that’s why.  He never felt particularly comfortable or happy with the inevitable weight of maturity.  Like the stars in Orion’s belt blazing into the night sky, Louie recalled his previous luminosity and could not persevere without it.  Sometimes, I understand how he felt.

I still expect the phone to ring, and Louie to be on the other end, ready to regale me with some tale of sexual daring, or a complaint about the HMO establishment.  Part of me knows that will never happen.  Another part of me refuses to accept that.  Because of Louie, the surface of my pond will never be still. 

Transparency, or Early Notice

 
I have been watching the brutal Danse Macabre of your relationship for some time now.  This is a locked-in pose, the players are frozen in a death throe that is contorted and blatantly obvious to everyone except you, my friend, who believes that strangulation begets willing submission and suffocation begets bliss.

The woman you love is dying.  As surely as the seasons turn, this vibrant woman is withering to dust.  You have embarked on myriad maneuvers to cut off all routes of egress.  Either by feigned helplessness or lies or threat of violence or inflicting chaos on her loved ones, you have assured her compliance.  You have cut her off from her comfort, bereft her of safety and companionship, constructed a bubble that encapsulates her completely.  And you feel safe, unchallenged, untouchable.

Meanwhile, your captive is gradually disappearing.  The lively dreams she once had glimmer faintly in the distance.  She speaks of her life in the past tense.  She has become a reactionary, cannot move independently without fear of inflicted paralysis, cannot think freely without fear of complete dissolution. 

But there is a bell tolling, my friend.  It peals loudly.  Can you hear?  It heralds the exposure of your one fatal mistake.  Your plan, your web, this prison you have constructed – it is transparent.  We can see through it, to its multitude of flaws, the chinks in its protection.  No matter how long it takes, we intend to dismantle it piece by piece, lie by lie, manipulation by manipulation, until all that’s left are pieces of you scattered to all the winds.

Better run.  We see through you, too.

An Open Letter to the Father That Never Was

I have been watching you silently for years now, teaching by example that there are men who deposit children into the world simply to convince themselves that they are men, then spend their entire lives proving to their children that they are not worth the bodily fluid that made them. 

I have said nothing because you are the twins’ father, and I would no sooner hurt them frivolously than cut off an arm.  But you have gone far enough.  You left your twenty-one-year-old son standing by himself for nearly two hours in a place he has never been before, after he traveled three hours by public transit specifically to see you.  You are a villain.

Without thinking, I can recall myriad occasions when you dashed these boys to the rocks in favor of some selfish pursuit.  If I could assemble your lies side by side, they would encircle this city.  You engage in hype, in endless rhetoric, then fail to deliver.  Always.  You have bought one twin a birthday gift, but not the other.  You have let Christmases pass with nothing.  You have refused to house them when we were in need, then moved in with your new woman and her ungrateful children.  You have ducked child support but told them to come see your new boat.  Then you have called them, angry because they didn’t call you for Father’s Day.

Well, “father”, let me tell you about your sons.  Their entire lives are a reaction to what you have done to them. 

One shut down for years, angry and frustrated and hurt and sad that the world seemed to have left him behind.  That other people “have it like that”, and he doesn’t.   He had to crawl out of that pit without help or acknowledgement from you.  He speaks to you because he has to, because he loves his mother and doesn’t want her to think ill of him.  But he has no use for you.  You are a non-entity to him.

The other exhausts himself chasing the attention and affection of people who constantly hurt and disappoint him.  He is the sweetest boy in the world with the most self-loathing I have ever seen exist in one person.  He is a simple mind and holds out a useless hope that you will turn out to be something more than the walking, talking piece of human detritus that you are.

Did you know that these boys do for each other what you do not do for them?

Twin One is the father figure – he makes patient explanations and calms his brother when he is agitated.  His brother comes to him for advice and consolation.  We count on him to understand Two as only a man can and we cannot, because there is no other man in his life.

Twin Two is the provider – when One has been unable to work, it is Justin that has provided.  He rarely gets things for himself without getting one for Adam.  He has paid both their bills when it is necessary.  He gets goofy when One needs a laugh.  He always wants to know where One is and what he is doing, endlessly seeking out One’s  company and his attention.

So, at the end of this rant, it becomes very clear that they really don’t need you, “Dad”, which is just as well, because they have never really had you in first place.  But that’s OK.  They have their mother, and they have me.   As long as they have us, nothing you can ever do will have any lasting effect on their lives. 

And that’s the best thing about having you for a father.

Of Chickens and Nylons

My friend Diana and I engaged in this exchange in email some time ago.  Personally, I think there's something wrong with both of us...

Diana:  Now, on to another important question.  How do you pick out nylons?  I mean, I'm hearing about garter belts, control top (what are you controlling exactly?), color options (if it's nude color what's the point?), ones above the knees, ones below the knees, something about coming in an egg though I thought nylons were man made?  Do I have to find a chicken to get a pair of nylons?

Me:
In the matter of your other (sic) burning question: the nylons.  They were the bane of my existence during my time in corporate hell, so I am a recovering wearer.  In terms of picking them out, I may as well have hurled a dart into the display rack at Macy's and chosen that way.  Whatever the method, for me they had all the comfort of the Judas Cradle at a medieval execution dock.  I know I am in the minority here, but I own my biases - my wounds are still fresh.

Those free-thinking hosiers have concocted a method of sizing that relates to the measurement of nothing else in the known universe.  Other clothing manufacturers must have patented the idea of numeric sizes, because this intrepid group chose letter sizes as their domain.  And single letters were not enough.  No, not for these pioneers.  You must choose a letter range.  A-B for the habitually anorexic. C-D for the "I'm-on-Atkins" crowd, and E-F for most others.

Not to mount a soapbox here, but you'll notice there are no letters for larger-than-average hosiery.  That's because this group of Neanderthals (men, no doubt) have decided to grace us with the epithet "Queen Size", which I could abide only if they would guarantee I would be treated like one upon wearing the garments.

Some tips for safe use:  You cannot be too moist after a shower, because they will grind to a halt halfway up your legs, your knees will bind together, you may need to have the Jaws of Life applied in order to be extricated from them.  If have skin that is too rough, they will shred like Christmas tissue paper and run so badly that your legs will look striped.  If you fail to pull them up far enough, the crotch will sag, you will experience fatal chafing, and your ankles will look like those of an African elephant roaming the savannah. 

Control top hose are intended to conceal extra pounds by compression.  Since it is physically impossible to cram ten pounds of sand into a five pound bag, the excess pounds merely struggle for freedom above the waistband and spend their time trying to roll the waistband toward the thighs, freeing the rest of their captive brethren.  Hence, control top hose only succeed in controlling your inconvenient urge to take a full breath.

Color should not be a problem in the least.  As long as you can distinguish fluently between ecru, eggshell, taupe, off-white, beige, crème, fawn, mushroom, and light brown, it should be quite simple.  Likewise black, night, midnight, ebony, ink, let, onyx, raven, and sable.

The nude thing stumps me completely.  I have never in my linguistic travels (and I am an English teacher) heard the misbegotten phrase "semi-nude" uttered anywhere else.  Nude is a word that should join the ranks of words of the the "you-are-or-you-aren't" distinction: I.e., dead, alive, pregnant.

And where nylons begat of eggs are concerned, you must rely on your highly-developed sense of reason.
Ponder this conundrum: is a chicken stupid enough to wear nylons?

Color My Childhood Green (for my father)

     Green is the overriding color of my childhood. Every memory I have has some element of green in it, despite the obvious lack of harmony green has with having grown up in a city dominated by concrete and asphalt. The Brooklyn of my childhood was definitely green.
     My favorite sneakers were kelly green Pro-Keds. I remember wearing them until the rubber soles separated from the canvas body of the shoes.
     I remember seeing the green in my eyes when I looked in the mirror. They are olive green, a color I have never seen in anyone else’s eyes. Everyone mistake them for green – even the DMV – but I know better.
      One of my earliest memories is walking along the street with my mother. She was wheeling my cousin in a baby carriage, and we were walking next to a pile of rubble that used to be a building. I was wearing a lime green sleeveless polyester pullover (everything was polyester in the 60’s), matching shorts with seams down each thigh, and a coordinating headband.
      Our kitchen was small and neat. It was dominated by a huge, avocado-green refrigerator. The single best feature was that the fridge on top and the freezer on the bottom. The metal cabinets were painted the same avocado color.
      My mother is fond of saying she has a “brown thumb”. That she can’t for the life of her make plants grow. But I remember flowing spider plants and descending philodendron spilling from window pots and planters and into my world. 
     We used to strip leaves off the long, flexible branches of a particular type of weedy bright green perennial found in untended gardens, and call the remaining stalk a “whip”. These whips became a pirate sword, a teacher’s pointer and a weapon to flog an unsuspecting little brother.
      Every spring, like clockwork, the big oak tree in front of my house rained thousands of seed pods down on the sidewalk. My friends and I called the pods “spinners”, and gathered great handfuls of them – the green ones were best. We sat and split them open at took out the seed. The remaining v-shaped pod fit beautifully over the bridge of a kid’s nose. A bit of sticky moisture left by the seed acted like glue and held it there. We spent hours laughing at how we looked, and flicking seeds at each other to try to knock the pod off.
      Green is the color of so many other things I remember, like the blue-green of the pool in my yard, or the iridescent green of the traffic signal at the corner in front of Aldo’s Pizzeria, or the lush-looking green of the hillside in the colorized scenes from the Wizard of Oz.
      But the most dominant green of my life is the leafy green of the infield grass. I spent the better part of ten softball seasons six steps behind the grass, four strides off the first base line, studying the batter in the chalk-lined box beyond. The earth of this verdant field rooted my relationship with my father, who knew everything about softball, and, by extension, everything about everything else, too. The endless series of Saturday afternoons created my hero. I am a ballplayer, like him, and am a teacher, like him. And if I can ever be half the person he is, I will be grateful.