Crazies in Law

-{ Just a snippet of a phone call between The Activist and her mother }-

“MOM. You got hit by your OWN car! Daddy’s insurance is going to go up if you file a claim for that. MY insurance is going to go up. Are you in the bedroom. Is there going to be an insurance claim in the bedroom. I KNOW he hit you mom, but you two are taking this to a new level. You need to take a warm bath. If you still feel icky about it tomorrow go to the doctor. We have health insurance now. Oh Hell no. For someone who doesn’t drive and doesn’t use public transportation you can’t have a doctor across town. Why you want an old doctor who is about to die. Find a nice young doctor to take care of you. You like Jewish doctors? What does that mean? Jewish and Chinese doctors? Why? Jewish doctors really care about you? What does that mean? You like to call your doctor lieutenant? Why? Because she’s tough? Was she in the military? Oh, so you think she is lesbian. What do you mean you are okay with that? Lieutenant at the free clinic. Wow. That is kind of hot. What is her name? So, she wears her military uniform while she is giving you an exam? And you say she is a black lesbian. Wow. I found my doctor. Is she cute? Mom, is she cute? I am asking you a question. She’s tough. What’s a boogabear? She wears her hair short, short as in how – is it a fade or a tiny weenie afro? A precision cut? What does that mean? Mmhmm. Okay. Did you go to the estate sale? Uhm, that’s what your husband is for. Mmhmm. That van has so many problems. I am sick of hearing about that damn van, running people over breaking down . . . I don’t want to buy a mattress over ebay. Look, ebay is not the solution to all of your problems okay. Every time I ask you about something your answer is ebay. I don’t know what my rating is. What did you get? Your happy hooker book. Okay, mom. I keep meaning to like buy A Fiddler on the Roof, seven dollars. Your shopping at the wrong places for DVDs. Actually, best buy has some good deals. I buy used DVDs. I don’t order them online. Huh. Right. The whole DVD thing is scarring me. Do you have what? Beauty and the Beast on DVD. You got the hook-up? For Beauty and the Beast? Who is this Kathy person in Chicago and why is she sending you Christmas flowers? Who is this lady? Why is she sending you all these gifts? SHE is a LESBIAN. Who is this group? Who are these people? How do you not see the difference between that and your son having online friends? He is thirteen he can make friends too. You can’t see your friends either. I don’t think you can discount his online friendships. He has their pictures and addresses too. That scares you? How do you go from that to Target has furniture for %15 off? Let’s go back to the other thing. Her daughter’s name is Izzy or the cat’s name is Izzy? Oh, the cat’s name is Zoe. You don’t even have a picture of me why do you have a picture of someone else’s daughter? I am going to send them a picture of me. They don’t know your black? You don’t want them to know that your black? It’s against the law? How can that be against the law. Mom, do you think that it matters to them that you are black? What do you mean that is like telling your sexual orientation? What website are you chatting at that you can’t tell your race or your sexual orientation? Mom, they won’t care that you are black. You’re in an online clique. (Whispered: I’m terrified.) MMM. Or your race or your sexual orientation. Okay, well, uhm, I’ll . . . Oh they said derogatory things about black people . . . what did they say? Ugly black men. Hmm. You’re weeding them out. That’s a smart rule. Never reply to a post if you don’t know what you are talking about. Yeah, I know, India has a lot of call centers. I’m not saying that you’re wrong mom. There is a lot of, you know, out sourcing right now. No mom. Go buy you a queen-sized mattress. I don’t know what to tell you but to go buy a cheapo mattress from Nebraska. And buy me a platform bed frame. Yeah, I’d like a pillow top mattress too. Well, if you see it really cheap let me know, because I could sell mine really fast since it’s the first week of school. I tried to buy a used one, they all just smelled really funny. I was like I want one that smells good. Or they live in a studio and cook a lot of curry. I don’t want a curry mattress. I don’t want people’s cheap ugly mattresses. I want my own mattress. Day beds are only twin sized. Trust me I know or I would have a day bed already. Oh, its cherry. I can’t FIT on a twin sized-bed. Have daddy take you to the estate sale. Have daddy take you. Daddy will have the money I wont. Just go. Just go. Just go. I gotta go. Because I am naked. Mom, she has seen me naked before. No my titties are covered up. Mom, you have known that my titties are pierced for a while. No, you are not going to pull them out. You want your butt pierced? Oh your belly button. You’re an inny? Yeah, most people ARE innies, mom. You have boy’s hips? What does that mean? Ew. You should have that checked out. Have you been checked for osteoporosis. Mom, you don’t have to be white and short to have osteoporosis. Get it checked out. You have been loosing your butt. So have I. What’s up with that? How do you get a bigger butt? I’m just like you, I’m a fighter, a rebel and I intend to stay that way. I’m a bitch, a good bitch."

Diggery-Don't

I have lived with a lot of different folks over the years. For a while when I was in college in South Carolina my roommates and I referred to ourselves as the four D's: The Debutant, The Dwarf, The Dirty Whore and The Dyke (that's me). We were all self-described D's except for The Debutant, who preferred "high society" or "classy" or the worst, "normal."

My second roommate ever was named Laureli and she had a 1.0 GPA, wore her ROTC fatigues 24/7 and once attacked me in her sleep while I was crawling into the upper bunk of our bed. Her boyfriend was an engineering nerd and had programmed every electronic device in the room to be operated by my graphing calculator. He did this without telling me.

I have lived with all kinds of other queer folk, drug users, exhibitionists, radicals, conservatives, lovers, partners, men, women and everything in between. But no one has ever pissed me off quite like my new downstairs neighbors.

My current troubles started one morning when I was home from work. I heard a few thuds and the crash of symbols. A tinny beat started up and bam-ta-tin-tinned it's way up to my coffee mug. Then came the electronic whom-whom-whomp of an amped bass guitar. I had been living in the apartment for about two weeks and this was the first time I had heard my downstairs neighbors jam. I was thankful that they had been mindful enough to practice during the day while I was at work because, to be blunt, the music is really bad. It is worse than modern jazz.

Do you know the scene in the first Starwars trilogy where Hans, Luke and Obi-one go down into the nightclub and some funny-looking aliens are playing weird music? Yeah, it is just like that.

I was content to let bygones be bygones, I mean I don’t want to begrudge anyone their right to artistic expression. But, eventually, they stopped limiting themselves to playing while I was at work. It is not unusual now for me to come home, make dinner, sit down to eat and then loose my appetite when I hear the drummer warm up with a few high-hats.

I HATE THIS MUSIC.

The two of them know and play ONE song together. It is a horrible song. It should be stricken from the face of the earth. Additionally, one of them owns a ukulele. Yes, a ukulele. When they have finished their little impromptu set, which always sounds just as bad as the set before, one of them picks up the damn ukulele and plays the exact same song, every time. ERRR.

After one week of being serenaded by the two of them every other evening at increasingly later hours of the night I finally resorted to something I had never imagined myself doing: pounding on the floor. After I stomped my feet hard in a ridiculous frustration dance akin to the rapid feet flurries my mom did to her Jane Fonda video when I was a kid the music fuddered, faded and paused for about 2 beats. Then without listening for a second thumping the drummer did a little stick-stick-stick to re-establish the beat and on again they fucking went. I thudded again but there was no more pausing.

Two Wednesday's ago at 11:30 PM I finally called the landlord. I had been home sick all day and had to work the next morning. They were throwing a party and playing shitty music. After talking to the landlord they turned it down, but not off.

The last straw: last Saturday I was lounging in bed in the early afternoon when I heard a low ddddddrrrrr sound. I thought to myself, "Ah, someone is running a power tool somewhere." And I envisioned my neighborhood alive with weekend home repair projects. It made me think of families and how I might have my have house and family some day.

But the ddddrrrrrr-ddddddrrrrr-dddddddddddddrrrrr-dr-dr-dr kept on. Then it got louder and more confident.

I thought to myself, "Man, that sounds like a diggery-do." Then a few notes later, "Fuck, that IS a diggery-do." Finally, outloud, "Those fuckers bought a goddamn, motherfucking diggery-do.”

While I laid in bed and listened to the diggery-do I was overcome with the urge to cut a hole in the floor of my apartment and take a shit down into their apartment. I fantasized my poop-bomb landing on their bong, or smashing into a high-hat and dripping down the side of the amp. I thought of how fun it would be to shit on their stuff every time they left the house, then close the little hole back up so that no one would really know where the shit had come from.

This maybe the grossest thing I have ever fantasized doing to someone. But, I figure, they have claimed their right to shit music so, I am claiming my right to shit fantasies.

Our Second Snow

My one arm flung off the bed. She kissed it gently, doe-eyed, ears back, almost apologetic asking me gently to wake up. I cocked one eye loaded with blur and shot her a look of dazed compassion.

This morning we awoke to a warm blanket of snow. After rolling over to find proof in the form of flake-laden branches just inches from my new bedroom window. Can I tell you I have always been overcome by the contrast of dark branches and white snow? I jettisoned years of reason and felt myself laying in my childhood bed in the north country where it is winter half the year long, fall for three glorious weeks and mud and mosquitoes the rest of the time. I made tunnels in that snow that sometimes came up to my chest. I n my sleepy pubescent joy I wrapped my arms around my puppy’s neck and stepped into my shoes while wiping sleep from my eyes and cooing “outside, outside, oh Pippa, wait until you see what is outside.”

On the other side of my front door the world was brighter and quieter. I watched her confused frame navigate feet sinking into snow, snow, snow. Running, kicking, biting snow. I stood and watched her until it was clear it didn’t matter that I was there, then I headed back upstairs to make a warm drink.

From the window I watched her pounce and claw and circle and skid. Everything is new to her. Everything is exciting. I longed suddenly for a family and a child, then three children.

Life is fleeting. It is a fleeting collection of more fleeting moments. It is a miracle to share them. There is no greater meaning than this: to stand at the back window with your lover, caretaker, partner watching the creatures you care for experience the world as if it was all brand new, as if it had always been here.

I dreamed up a massive pile of fluffy waffles with hot drizzling fruit and powdered sugar. My family and I could be eating big Belgium waffles while sipping hot cocoa and planning our sledding exploits and smiling, laughing and touching before throwing on thick layers to protect us from the cold, wet nature of fun.

But no, I stood at the window alone. I turned the coffee off and made plans for the day as I watched my puppy play. Buy a shovel. Shovel driveway. Go to gym. Lift weights. Go to store. Buy blender. Make a protein fruit shake. Take shower. Work. Return movies. Feed dog. Wash car. Scrub tub. Read book. Text message girlfriend. Fall asleep watching new movie rentals. Wake up, repeat.

my little BIG TIME

Hey y'll,

My little blog has been discovered thanks to a real nice gal in Lawrence who recomended it to the folks who run Lawrence.com.

I am now publishing there under the blog title "my punk heart."

Check it out.

The Luckiest Fag on the Face of the Earth

I rented the Electric Edwardians from Liberty Hall last night. It is fabulous. The DVD is a series of moving images recorded by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon of normal folks in Edwardian England going about their Edwardian lives.

I was so excited that I sent a message off to The Activist (my girlfriend).

Me: You have got to see this movie.
Her: Sounds cool.
Me: Edwardians are amazing.
Her: Yes, they have amazing corsetry.
Me: I can imagine based on the petticoats.
Her: Yeah, I have been thinking of getting back into corsetry. Just need to find the time.

It was then that I realized that I might possibly be the luckiest fag on the face of the earth. I mean, really, who is into Edwardian Corsetry? It is so great it makes my toes tingle. I love her.

Checking Out

On my bi-weekly excursion to the local discount grocery wharehouse I overheard the following exchange while sacking my own food:

Her: So then she said to him, "YOU can cook?!"
Him: Wow.
Her: Yeah, like, hello. Squirrel, he can cook squirrel. That didn't matter, just that he can cook.

I couldn't help but look up from my bagging. They were a new couple both in their late forties or early fifties. They handn't worked out the little couple things like who pays for the groceries, who bags, who pushes the cart, who carries the sacks to the car. They were both wearing blue jeans and they smiled at each other a whole lot.

I realized they were at that place in a young romance when ridiculous stories about your lover's family are still fun because, well, it isn't YOUR family, yet. It is incredibly liberating, actually, to see your squirrel-cooking uncle through the stranger in your bedroom's smile.

As I left the store behind them they argued over the sack and finally settled on carrying it together, each grabbing a side, the way two people will walk with their child and swing him forwards off his feet.

Funny Little Whore

Sonja (1928) by Christian Schad

There are statistics. They tell us things about . . . the numbers of casualties in war, the amount of time the average person spends standing in front of the average painting in the average museum, the number of slaves that fit on a triangular trade ship. Statistics. They provide some type of comfort. But they tell us nothing about the way any of these things feel or what they mean. We invent that part or intuit it because we are rarely told.

I am not an expert in the subject area I am about to embark upon. It is weird that I am not an expert because I have been hearing about it my entire life. I don't feel as though I know many of the facts. It would be comfortable to frame my suppositions in numbers and rely on mathmatics as if 'math' was the same thing as 'truth,' but I am going to do something much more radical than that. I am going to tell a story about the world through art and direct observation.

Before I get started I need to provide some context to the reader. I am a United States citizen writing in the year 2007. I am 27 years of age. I am queer.

Recently my lover and I went to a show at the Metropolitain Museum of Art entitled "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s." The show features t ten Weimar German artists doing portrait work between the world wars. I had studied the artist that recieved the bulk of the focus at the show, Otto Dix, in school. Without digging out my notebooks for specifics, I remember feeling indifferent towards his work and, if forced to choose, I guess I would say I had felt more positively than negatively about it.

I had a professor in art school who tried to make the argument once that Diane Arbus' photographs were "funny." I found it infuriating that he read her work as humorous. My teacher said she was, "allowing us to laugh at all the freaks of nature." I felt very differently. I think Diane Arbus purposely sought out the biggest freaks she could find, the most stereotypically marginalized individuals to show us their humanity: the old, overweight drag queen with a bored little dog nestled in the crook of her elbow, the porn star overwhelmed by the graphic prints in her ultra-modern apartment, the beautiful woman in a bikini top with the marks from her outdoor chair pressed into the flesh of her back.

At any rate, I think my teacher was much more accurately describing the work of Otto Dix. His work is all bored contempt, disgust, bigotry and hatred. The paintings are described as veristic, but really they go beyond verism into chariacature. And they are mean chariacatures. As we walked from room to room I became more and more disgusted with Otto Dix. Maxine Gerber was shown as an old snobbish ghost, black jazz musician were painted with pure black pigment and their features were distorted until they looked subhuman.

Finally my girlfriend, The Activist, and I stopped in front of a recently rediscovered Dix painting, Woman with a Mink (1920).


Woman with Mink (1920) by Otto Dix

I grunted. The Activist grunted back. She said, "I am really sick of this Dix shit." I said, "Me too. His work lacks all compassion."

Just then I heard a squeal over my shoulder, "OOOOhhh, I LIKE that one." A thirty-something, well-to-do former sorrority sister came breezing by us, smelling like *rich people and dripping in well weighted, yet understated fabrics (supple leather, natural hemp, linen, etc). "Just look at the funny little whore. Hahaha. This makes me laugh."

In shock I reached for my notebook.

The picture shows, cruelly, a woman who has been ravaged by poverty, hunger, brutality and unsafe sex. It is mean. It is accusatory. It is savage. I was struck by how incredibly dumb this woman was and how it was quite likely that she offended people all day long, taxi drivers, door men, checkout clerks. It was hard to stand there and have a person with money, power and good looks laugh cooly at an image of a person who had nothing but a vagina to get her through the world.

I have a number of friends who have been involved in the sex industry to one degree or another. Most of them are women. Most of them did sex work because they were poor. None of them were professional prostitutes. But for all of them, it seems like it started as the most casual of things. One friend was dating a drug dealer, she would give him head in exchange for coke. One friend would blow her ex for rent and grocery money. To me these relationships don't seem any different than marriage with the exception that the bartering is much more open and honest and each person has the option of looking elsewhere.

I could tell, though, that the woman with the fabric didn't know too many "whores." She probably thinks all the sex she had with frat boys in college was concesual. She probably doesn't think that her sexual prowess or lack there of was a bartering point in her marrying rich. She may even feel a little trampy, now, when she has sex without the express purpose of having children. And that little kinkiness, sex for sex sake, really turns her into a wild woman. She sometimes wears red silk underwear and waits for her husband at the door in a little black robe. When he arives she pushes the leather briefcase from his hand and puts her arms inside of his full-length double-breasted winter coat. He smells the $300 perfume he bought her. He looks at her $10,000 face, bought from the best plastics man on Manhatten. He touches her $400 haircut. She grabs him by his strong, round back muscles bought by a $1000 gym membership and 400 hours of hard labor. He loosens his $250 necktie. She scratches him with her $150 manicure and presses her $8000 breasts against his manly pink designer $200 shirt. They move to the bedroom, she is wild with excitement. Her eyes flash. He unzips his gold-plated fly and unleashes his priceless cock. She get on all fours on their $200 sheets. She is moaning and clutching the Egyptian sateen. He pushes into her, "You like that, whore? You want me to give it to you?" She squeezes her eyes shut in anticipation, "Oh, yes, daddy, give it to me hard."

Okay, maybe there is some truth in the numbers.

We were tired when we left the museum. It was New Years Eve. We had walked there 25 blocks from our hotel because no trains were running uptown on the East side of Manhatten. We walked to the nearest downtown train and stuffed ourselves, literally into the car with all the folks looking for a wild time.

As we sat and listened to some opinionated prick go on about all the different express/local train combinations that might be better or faster than tthe one we were on I started to think about Weimar Germany. I wonder if Hitler, too, had been disgusted by Otto Dix. I had heard he was a self-proclaimed artist and that he wanted to paint the world with beautiful people. I wondered if it might have been German Verism that threw him over the edge.

Later, in our hotel room The Activist and I had a bitch-slap fight. It was the kind of fight you have with your siblings when you are home alone. I think she won, as evidenced by the fact that I went for the face first and by the large bruise I had for a week in the place on my left leg where she managed to land 4 or 5 blows in a row because I was giggling too hard to pdefend myself. Afterwards we snuggled.

I would never call her a whore. Not even in play. I just like her too much. It doesn't turn me on to degrade her. Don't get me wrong, I will tie her up and paddle her, or tickle her with feathers on a waterbed or do whatever she asks me to do, but I don't want to hurt her. I don't want to hurt anyone.

Anyway, there was an artist in the show that I liked a lot. His name is Christian Schad. His paintings were of quiet, pained and ghostly people. They were feminist in their emotional quality. They showed women who were liberated not so much through will as necessity. Afterall, we all simply need freedom. We need justice. They aren't ideals, they simply are.

* My sister bought me an expensive face cream for the holidays. When she went to cash out it was quite a bit more expensive than she realized, but she felt pressured into buying it. I actually love it a lot. It smells divine, or as I have taken to saying, "It smells like rich people."

The world according to me

The Activist had a brilliant idea this morning. She suggested that I start adding words from my personal lexicon to Wikipedia and attributing the sayings to myself. So this morning I officially coined my first term. Check it out.

Poor Little Rich Boy

Just before Christmas The Activist and I paused outside of a bookstore located on The Plaza in Kansas City. As we stood taking in the swelling crowds rushing to purchase over-priced presents in the ridiculously faux-ritzy Plaza at stores like Armani Exchange and FAO Schwartz where men stand pinching fabric between their fingers and frowning and women delight over ridiculously useless cutting-edge gadgets I took notice of one man in particular. He was wearing an all black outfit topped with glints of metal and leather. He was pacing the area in front of the bookstore talking on a fancy cellular phone.

I guessed that the sum total of things he was wearing or carrying on his person was somewhere in the range of $2000-$3000 and my disdain for this young, pompus rich man deepened the more I watched him. I say he was pompus because he had the air of owning the sidewalk. The way he paced unaware of the flow of traffic, expecting others to adjust, and the way he talked, loudly, not caring who overheard.

"You are staring." Chimed The Activist from the side of her mouth.
"I know." I say, "It is a new thing. I stare now."

As he paced he shifted his supple leather bag to his other shoulder and threw his full-length wool coat over the bag. He placed his sleek little phone back to his ear and said, "I mean I have never even MET my neice. She is three. They haven't come to Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Years in the past two years. So, I sit there and talk to no one and no one talks to me."

Boohoo, poor little rich boy.

"So I got them all little things. Even the maid. But I am not going to visit this year."

Imagine the sad tear running down my face.

"I mean they told me not to bring my boyfriend. I haven't even told them he is Asian. Can you imagine my family eating with two gays, one of them Asian?"

He set his bag down.

"Could you be a little less obvious?" asked The Activist.

Fifteen feet away on the same curb a man played a horn. He was spouting out Christmas joy. I had the distinct impression he was there more for the playing than the tips. He was dressed up in a nice outfit, though it paled next to the poor little gay rich boy's.

The rich boy caught a private cab. We went in the book store. When we came back out the musician placed his horn in a richly lined box. The street, reclaimed by the bored, wealthy, heteronormative capitalists kept on being as faux-snooty as ever.