Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School, Part 2. (Hall Pass)

 

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School is a series of short essays about growing up  frustrated in small-town Pennsylvania.

 

Everyone loves Mr. Haines because he’s awesome.
That’s their way of saying it – but it’s so generic.  He’s awesome, all right, but what does that tell you?  Nothing.  Here’s what I’d say about him: he’s built and funny and young and his hair is blonde. His face gets red when he’s angry or embarrassed and he lets us get away with a lot more than other teachers.  He’s smart and really interested in us, and can you tell I’m kind of obsessed with him?

His last name is the name of an underwear brand, so it’s not weird that I’m constantly thinking of him in plain white briefs, or today when he tells me to stay after class.

He’s saying stuff, but I have no idea what he’s saying, because I’ve made this deal with myself that I’m going to stare at his dick the whole time.

I’m sixteen and I’ve really just started to read and love books that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy or horror and there’s this book by Herman Hesse called Demian and it’s not the best book I’ve ever read, but it has this part about staring into someone’s eyes that I’ll remember for the rest of my life:

If you stare into someone’s eyes and they look away, then you know you have power over them.
So when someone’s looking at you, don’t ever, ever look away.
I’ve got this down.

In the halls, when the guys that pick on me walk by, I don’t look away.  Maybe they pick on me more because of this, but they don’t win.  And I don’t look away from my parents or the guidance counselor or teachers.  They’ve all taken a sudden interest in my “behavior.”

I’m not dumb: all “behavior” means is that I don’t act like they want me to act.  It’s only “behavior” because they notice it.  They notice my punk rock t-shirts and the stories I’m writing and my foul fucking mouth.  They only notice it because it isn’t nothing, and that’s what they want from me, a pleasant, unnoticeable nothing.

It bothers them that I don’t look away when they talk to me, so they look at each other and lose their power.

Not looking away gives another power, too: When you’re looking around, you see all the people that are looking down or have their eyes open but might as well be sleepwalking.  Or like the handful of black kids in my school, what are they looking at?  They look at each other and they look around nervously, but that’s it.  Everyone who’s not black – which is almost everyone – is looking at them and the Puerto Rican kids, and it’s a sort of scared look, or sometimes a “poor thing” look.  Or sometimes an I-fucking-hate-you look.

I know what it’s like, I guess, because for awhile, everyone was calling me “camel jockey” or “dot.”  They were so stupid, they didn’t know the difference between an Indian and an Arab.  Arabs don’t wear dots, stupid.  They’d call me “sand nigger” and said when you suck your dad’s dick, does the dickhead have a towel on it?  Mrs. Rothrock, my eighth grade cultures teacher, got mad at me for talking in class and told me that if I didn’t shutup, she’s send me back to Syria on a camel.  I thought, “I grew up in Pennsylvania, you dumb bitch,” but I didn’t say anything. I just listened to everyone laughing and I shut up.  I looked down then, because I didn’t know any better, because I didn’t even know who Herman Hesse was.  I was too busy reading Piers Anthony and comic books.

So anyway, if I can look in someone’s eyes, then I figure no problem, I can stare at someone’s dick.  Mr. Haines is sitting loosely in his chair, leaning back, his legs spread open.  Why do guys always sit like this – like they’re just waiting for someone to come up and suck their dicks?  Relaxed, leaned back, legs sprawled out.  He’s talking to me, but all I’m paying attention to is his crotch, which is all stuffed and full of his dick and his balls, a big bulge in his kakhi pants.

I catch a few words – it’s about my report I just turned in.  I guess he liked it, because it had “well-done” written on it in red ink.  It was a report about skinheads because it had to be about “culture” and in my town there are neo-Nazi skinheads and KKK members, so I just wrote about my own town.

I wrote it in a night, and yeah, I made up some fake sources and fake quotes – but that was only because my real sources were kids from my school.  Skinheads.

I’m still figuring out what “irony” is, I mean, I’ve pretty much figured it out, it’s just I’m not sure about this: Is the fact that the skinheads in my school hang out with me – even though I’m half Syrian, and even though the jocks are calling me a faggot – ironic?
Either way, it’s a good thing, because if they weren’t my friends, they’d scare the shit out of me.
Actually, I take that back, they still kind of scare the shit out of me.
They’re outsiders, too.  I mean, you’d never see a skinhead on the football team.  So maybe me being a sort of outcast is more important to them than my race.
Maybe being lonely is bigger than being angry.

I asked Jay and Chris for information so I could write the report.  Jay sits at lunch with me and we talk about punk rock.  He catches the yellowjackets that tap against the cafeteria window and will eat one if you pay him fifty cents.  He brings a fake gun to school and people think that’s perfectly hilarious. He gives me a tape of music by a Nazi band called Skrewdriver, and I include the lyrics in my report.
Nigger, nigger,
Get on your boat.
Nigger, nigger,
Get out of here.
It’s a dumb song, but would be sort of catchy I guess if it didn’t have the nigger part in it.  There’s another song about the IRA, which at first I confuse for the IRS until I find out what it really is.  And there’s this song about violent uprising and the chorus goes,  “You can shove your fucking dove/up your ass!”

Chris gives me a newspaper made by skinheads called American Skinhead.  Well, he calls it a newspaper, but actually, it’s more like a zine.  Chris is into tattoos.  All the skinheads are.  Jay has a tattoo of the word “hatred” on the inside of his lower lip.  There’s a skinhead I’ve met once that’s supposed to have a tattoo of Hitler right on his groin, and Hitler’s arm is tattooed on his dick, so that whenever he gets a hard on, the arm rises up in a sieg heil.  I know I should be repulsed, but thinking about his tattooed hard on makes me horny. Of course asking him to see it would make me dead.  So I don’t.

The stuff from the CD and the zine go into my report, and Mr. Haines is impressed, but he’s not getting hard.  If I can just stand here, looking, maybe he’ll pull his dick out of his pants and his dickhead will be flushed red like his face gets and I’ll get on my knees and suck it.  It’s like when me and my friend Courtney found out that if you stare at a candle flame long enough, it’ll move when you will it to.  At least that’s what it seems like.  Get hard, Mr. Haines, I’m thinking.  Get hard and pull your dick out.  Now.  Now.

Courtney’s half black and we talk about occult stuff and music and monster movies, and Jay hangs out with her too, which is confusing because he’s always talking about a race war.  When the race war comes, will he save her or just stomp on her head with his Doc Martens?  If we have to pick sides, I’m not sure what I’d do because there’s no side for someone like me or Courtney.  Anyway, what is a race war?  Will there be people in the streets with guns and helicopters flying above us and fires in windows?

People have been talking about race war since Rodney King got beat up a few years ago.  Whoever was holding that camera definitely didn’t look away as all those police officers just brought their clubs up and down and up and down.  Skinheads like Jay say that Rodney King deserved it and that he probably had a weapon and that if he were innocent, he would have just stayed down.  I’m not convinced, but I tread carefully, because I’ve heard the skinheads call people “nigger-lovers” when they stand up for Rodney King.

One of the popular girls, Jess, called one of the other girls a nigger-lover in the bathroom once.  At least that’s what I heard.  Maybe there really is a race war coming, because I also heard that it got back to a Puerto Rican girl (so maybe Puerto Ricans and blacks side with each other, I’m not sure) and that this girl ran right up to Jess after school.  And Jess jumped into her expensive yellow car and started to roll the window up, but the other girl thrust her hand in at the last minute.  Then she grabbed Jess by the hair and slammed her against the dashboard again and again until her face was bleeding.  When she was done, she made Jess give her the expensive watch she wears to school.  I don’t know if this is all true, but I know I like the story.
Maybe that tells me what side I’d be on.

Is it racist against white people to pick the other side?  I know what Jay and Chris would say, but I don’t think I’d agree.  The white people always seem like the bullies.  Even when they’re my friends, I’m afraid of them.  I’m not afraid of the black kids, but maybe that’s just because there’s only a few of them.

Then again, I know when I jerk off thinking about Grady, one of the black kids, I think about him standing next to me at the urinal and saying, “See, I knew black guys had bigger dicks than Arabs,” and then I’d have to suck his dick.  I know this is somehow racist.  It’s like I can’t just think of sucking his dick, I always have to frame it somehow.  I always have to think of it happening because he’s black, because he talks about being black.

Not like Mr. Haines.  It doesn’t matter that he’s older, or that he’s a teacher.  It doesn’t matter that he’d get in trouble.  In my mind, standing here after class, getting hard in my pants and wishing he’d get hard in his, I think of him as an equal.  I think he could maybe fall in love with me if he’d just get hard.
But he’s saying my name now, and fuck, I’ll have to look at him instead of his crotch.  I don’t want to look him in the eyes, I want to stay right here staring at his dick until this works out for us.
He says my name again and I look up at him, right into his blue eyes.  They’re so intense.  His brow knots up a bit, and I say, “yes,” and nod like I’ve been listening the whole time.  And then there’s this pause.  I don’t move, I don’t breathe.

Who will protect us in this town, I think.  There are skinheads and KKK people and bullies.  There are dogs that run snarling to the edge of their yards when you walk home and stare too long at them.  There are jocks and racists and homophobes and Christian crazies and angry teachers and this school, this whole school is crazy and I’m burning like a bright moving speck of fire every single day.

I look back down at Mr. Haines’s crotch and try to stay there, but it doesn’t work, everything is dispelled. I look into his eyes and can see he knows what I’ve been doing.  He sits up straight and stops relaxing, and his face turns red.  He says, “All right, you better get going,” and writes me a permission slip for being late to my next class.  I take it and turn back, but he’s already in his own world of numbers and letters, writing in his gradebook.

And I walk out into the hall and everyone else is already in class.  The halls are empty, which feels calm.  I like times like this, when there’s no one to look at, just the lines of lockers and the sun coming through the windows and people in their classes, teachers saying things I can’t hear through the closed classroom doors.

I tuck my hard on up under the waist of my pants, but I’m never sure if people can see this or not, so I walk slowly so that it’ll calm down.  I get to English class and walk in, and the same thing happens every time a kid walks into class late.  The teacher keeps looking ahead at the class and talking, but he sort of reaches his arm out for your slip.  So I walk to the front of the room and hand it to him, and all the other kids, the skinheads and the jocks and the popular girls all look at me, because they think I’m late because I’ve gotten in trouble, right?  They think I had to be in the office because of my “behavior,” but I know them.  I know how they talk about each other and hate each other.  And how they pretend to be good kids but say racist shit in the bathrooms or pretend to be racist but hang out with me and Courtney.  So I look at all of them and keep my eyes on them the whole way back to my seat and one by one they turn their eyes back to the teacher but I never, ever look away.

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School, Part 1. (Gym Class.)

Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School is a series of short essays about growing up  frustrated in small-town Pennsylvania.  

#1 – Gym Class

I don’t know if this is normal, but in the early mornings before I left for school, I would actually get down on my knees and pray to God for the whole gym class to fuck me. Even the teacher. Especially the teacher.

There were two gym teachers at my high school – one was kindhearted and gullible and taught sex ed. The other – Mr. Wolfe, my gym teacher – was masculine and always angry. He was perfectly built and yelled at us like we were his soldiers. He would do walking handstands in front of us, and his arms tensed to show off the thick cords of tendon; his shirt would drift toward his head and I could see his belly, flat, punctuated with muscle, hairy. He had a beat-up face. When we played dodgeball, the losing team had to rush to the locker room door one by one, a door that was lined on either side by the winners, who pelted you with the mottled pink balls. He made us run til we puked. He called us “pussies” and told us no girls would want to smell our stinking bodies after class, so we’d better take showers.

No one took showers. The big open shower room, dry, unused, didn’t even show up in my fantasies. Instead my thoughts would all center around the locker room itself.

I could see their balls in the spaces between their underwear and their thighs. Their dickheads would push aside the front opening of their boxers. They’d daringly moon each other. One of them, Brian, pulled his waistband below his ass and strutted around. He was making a joke, but I missed it. It couldn’t have been more serious to me. Every week, twice a week, I was surrounded by half naked boys. Dave, Sean, Jamie, Brian, Marco, Ethan, Brad. Their dicks would sway in their underwear as they undressed. Our skin was smooth, although most of us had armpit hair and leg hair, and some with hair just below our belly buttons.

Amazingly, I never got hard. It wasn’t that I could control it: I’d get hard in the halls, on field trips, in classes; I was constantly getting erections. There was no control, just mysterious mercy that kept me from getting caught.

Not that it mattered. Eventually, I was being called “faggot” anyway.

A high school gym isn’t like a gym you work out in as an adult. It’s only a big open space with a wooden shine where everyone can see you. We’d bring out nets and play volleyball, bring out mats and wrestle, follow Mr. Wolfe with equipment to the baseball field. Or we’d run to the big hill next to the track and play flag football. No one had ever taught me how to play football – my Syrian father didn’t know anything about American sports except boxing – and so my teacher and teammates were invariably disappointed in me. I couldn’t catch footballs or hit baseballs. Being picked last became a badge of honor. We’d bring out the horse and bars do gymnastics, and I was better at that than most kids. I have strong legs. They didn’t save me.

Until I was a senior, I was taunted and teased. Sometimes I was pushed into lockers. Once I was punched in the stomach.

I wore shirts with the names of bands – The Jesus Lizard, The Cows, Seaweed – that no one had ever heard of. I was constantly questioning the teachers, showing off some sort of angry iconoclasm. None of these things fit, so I was “gay” to them. The other kids knew I was off before I did. I knew I was attracted to men, but I wouldn’t have ever identified as gay, and was especially reluctant to when I found out that identity was nothing but an insult.

Dave kicked the bottom of my shoes as I walked, making me trip forward. Ethan pushed me as I ascended the stairs. Jamie grabbed me by the neck. Sean called me a faggot. It felt like everyone was calling me a faggot, even the girls.

When I became 17 it suddenly stopped. Maybe that was because I became friends with some of the more popular kids, or because the main instigators – one class above me – had graduated.

I thought (like most kids?) about blowing up the school. I thought about picking up my fork and going absolutely apeshit and stabbing the eyes out of my persecutors at lunch. I thought of ways to ruin their lives and cripple them. I didn’t create that violence, it was brought to me, pushed and shouted and taunted into me each day.

I hated going to school, except for gym days. And I hated gym class, but I wanted it anyway. My feelings were competing in me, and I wanted to stop competing. What were we always competing for, anyway?

Instead of killing them, I’d take my lunch and sneak upstairs everyday to the empty media lab, full of TVs and cameras. I jerked off in there and ate my lunch alone. As long as I had that time to myself, as long as I could think about them fucking me, I could keep all of us safe.

On the wooden benches, by the lockers, I’d imagine them taking turns, sliding their underwear down to their ankles, their asses were all smooth, their bodies were all young, and they were fucking my mouth and my ass. I’d think of them talking to each other over me, while they were inside me, almost as if I weren’t there. I wanted to be what made them feel good, I wanted them to meet in me. And I’d be invisible. If they were in me together, maybe I could experience their comradery. At the end, I’d see myself appear again and they’d pat me on the back and tell me I did well. I’d imagine one or more of them putting their arms around me in school the next day. I’d jerk off to them being my friends.

Dave, a year ahead of me, the most relentless of the bullies, once said to me during gym class, “You sexy bitch.” No one else was around, and to this day, I don’t understand why he said it. I wrote in my confused and urgent journal that night that he must have secretly loved me. We were reading A Separate Peace in English class, and I was consumed with thoughts of loving and hating someone at the same time. But he didn’t love me or hate me; I bumped into him at a Borders a few years after my graduation and he didn’t even recognize me. All that meaning, all those times I hated him or jerked off to him, all the times I thought about stabbing him in the throat with a fork, and I was nobody. He walked by with his pregnant wife and looked at me the way you’d look past someone you’ve never met and aren’t interested in. He had long hair but was still handsome.

Is this why so many men identify with and long for the men who dominate us? Sex was reaching its unbearable teenage fever in me at the same time that I was being pushed into walls, torn away from my backpack, berated.

In his office connected to the locker room, Mr. Wolfe had a separate shower. I imagined that little shower was for him and for his special students. I didn’t know what that meant, “special students,” I just thought the most athletic kids got to shower in there for some reason.

And when I wasn’t imagining getting gangbanged by my classmates, I’d be in Mr. Wolfe’s shower with him. He’d turn on the water and fuck me. I’d always envision him holding onto me, so that we were both standing, bent over, and his hard, hairy chest was on my smooth back, and his legs were touching my legs. His dick was huge and painful and all the way in me. My head was in the crook of his neck. His arms were wrapped around me.

I imagined all this and I prayed for it. But they never fucked me. I was never a good athlete or called into Mr. Wolfe’s office. They never put their arms around me. And we never became friends.

Sex, Horror, and TV. Or: I’ve Been Real Busy.

Generally, I only post if I have, you know, a post. But I’ve had so much going on in other venues lately, that I think an update is in order.

First is my essay on The Cabin in the Woods is up on horror icon Peaches Christ’s website. Peaches Christ, in case you don’t know, is an internationally famous drag queen, horor event host, and artist. She’s currently working on a giant horror-related event with Elvira. Whoa!

Second: I’m now Logo TV’s Sex Expert, via their NewNowNext site. You send questions about sex, I answer them in a video with my standard good-natured/goofy/slutty manner. So far, I’ve answered questions about a lack of hard-ons and the right attitude for being in pornography.

Third: my first essay as a contributing writer to Salon.com, Rest Area Confidential” “came out about a month ago, and it’s on having sex at rest areas. It caused a bit of a shit storm, including a defense on Out Magazine’s site and an appearance on the Mike Bullard Show. This kind of stuff always makes a writer happy.

More? Well, yes, more. I’ve got an essay coming out in a book from Evolver Editions. It’s an essay on pornography, love, touch, and rebellion.
My essay on Occupy Wall Street is being anthologized in a free education PDF on Occupy.
Finally, my essay on Lynn Margulis will be in a collection from Chelsea Green this Fall.
More on all those as they get closer to publication.

Oh, and of course, there’s the pornography!
Thanks for coming here and check back for a proper blog entry soon!
- CH

By the Time You’ve Seen It, It’s Too Late

After having my latest essay up for a few hours, it was picked up for publication by one of my very favorite websites,TheRumpus.net.
Below is an excerpt of that essay. Read the whole thing here.

If you’re new to my blog, here are some links to my posts on my experience with gay domestic violence, the nature of compassion, and working with gay-for-pay perfomers.

You can also check out my essay on my friend and mentor, biologist Lynn Margulis, on RealitySandwich.com.

EXCERPTS from “By the Time You’ve Seen It, It’s Too Late“

Our best shot at understanding the foundation of obscenity law is through watching Sam Raimi’s 1981 horror film, The Evil Dead. In it, a group of (who else?) students stay (where else?) at a cabin in the woods. Amidst the jokes and sexual tension, they uncover a book of demonic spells and rites. They also find a reel to reel tape player, and on it, the voice of scientist reciting a string of incantations.

The kids, as usual, never had a chance. Simply playing of the tape summons the demons; such was the power of the muffled words. Aside from the normal possessing and flesh-eating demons, there are also demons in the form of the woods themselves, which assault – physically and sexually – one of the girls. The demons literally fall apart at the end of the film when the occult book is thrown into the fire.

The movie is a cult classic and has spawned sequels as well as inspired later films, such as The Ring (and its Japanese original) in which the same sort of thing occurs except this time (perhaps more germane to the topic of pornography) from a VHS tape… (and) by the time the tape is playing, it’s already too late.

The obscenity trial of Michael Peacock arose from such fears of the supernatural power of the image and word, and even though he was found not guilty and we are told these laws will perhaps undergo a radical reevaluation, the fear will stay with us…

* * *

A popular approach to answering how the image affects us has been through scientific experimentation and social science surveys; and science is our most occult of philosophies, filled with symbols, images, and tools. But there, we have mostly failed. Not because we haven’t gathered evidence, but because all the evidence seems to clash. How can there be so many books on sex and violence that reach different conclusions?

In the meantime, a demand is made: Take sides.

Will watching fisting make someone want to try fisting? Yes or no. Do you believe that bareback sex in porn makes the viewer want to have condom-less sex? Yes or no. Will watching horror movies make you more prone to violent acts? Yes or no. Do fantasy portrayals of incest in pornography glorify abuse? What about portrayals of rape? What about gay or lesbian sex? What about general corruption and depravity – can watching a sexual or violent act make you a worse person?

The questions gather and back us into a corner, so it is easy to see why such a callous and ridiculous statement as Andrea Dworkin’s, that, “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too,” becomes appealing: It’s not an answer, it’s an escape.

Just give up one or the other – your values or your sexuality.

Yes or no, please.

But most importantly, answer quickly, there are monsters at the door.

Permitting one form of the image on principle or cultural critique alone, but not permitting it in another form proves very difficult, and all arguments seem to undo themselves.

For example, one might object to comparisons of pornography and sexualized images of women in advertising because porn is consumed privately and advertising (sometimes) isn’t. But the logical consequence could easily – and often has easily – become: we cannot have women depicted sexually in public. To keep the argument logically consistent: in porn, we consent and so it’s okay, in advertisement, we don’t consent, so it’s not. That means banning advertisement with questionable content, back to women showing their ankles off in ads, and wearing full-length dresses otherwise.

More evidence for how problematic this is: Would you object, as many did, to gay cruising site Manhunt.com’s billboard campaign prominently displaying two men about to kiss (and surely, one thing leads to another) to anyone on the street, ? Yes or no.

What if they were kissing and you had your kids with you?

Since you’re reading this essay, I suspect your answer would be no, but you can see how the question weaves into others, and evades easy answers.

What if they were fucking?

Whether it’s behind closed doors or freely displayed must shrink in importance in our conversation next to the question, “How does the image affect us?” But to answer, we need to do more than respond with feelings and thoughts.

The menace of the image and its affects leads some to talk supernaturally about images, as if stating their names is evidence enough for their power. Because the depiction of the act is what has initially repulsed the critic, one only needs to state what the act is to argue. This is why arguments against pornography are often simply descriptions of the act. “He had a bullwhip up his rectum!” anti-Maplethorpe censors cried. Or, in Chris Hedges’s essay (in an otherwise thoughtful book – Empire of Illusion -from an otherwise thoughtful man, in which he desperately clings to Dworkin’s escapist quote), “The Illusion of Love”, he falls under the (sexual?) trance of naming what he sees and believing this naming presents some sort of self-evident truth: “…oral sex, vaginal sex, double penetration, and double anal.” He quotes a performer who says during a shoot, “Shove it up my fucking ass…: and “Fuck, motherfucker…” and “Fucking love it…” No explanations required for Hedges, who is always more rigorous than this.

The supernatural: To say its name is to evoke it…

The Big Picture, and the Little One Too.

1/4/2012 UPDATE: This essay is now going to appear in another magazine, and in Fall of 2012, a book, so I’m removing most of the content here and leaving an excerpt. You can still read the full essay on Reality Sandwich – the link is below.

On November 22nd, 2011, my friend and teacher, Lynn Margulis, died. She was the smartest person I’ve ever known, and also one of the most loving. I’m working on a more personal essay about her, but here is the essay I wrote on her life’s work. She was a world-renowned biologist and thinker, whose ideas changed and continue to change the way we understand life. She had a fearless spirit. You can also find this essay on web magazine,Reality Sandwich.

As Above, So Below: The Worldview of Lynn Margulis

“In the arithmetic of life, One is always Many.”

Lynn Margulis, biologist and Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, composed a grand and powerful view of the living and the non-living. Integrating the work of obscure Russian scientists, DNA pulled from cell organelles, computer-generated daisies, and the hindguts of termites, her vision was wider in scope and more profound in depth than any other coherent scientific world view. At the time of her death on November 22nd, 2011, it is a vision that remains misunderstood and misconstrued by many scientists.

Much of this view came from her uncanny ability to first lean forward and see the smallest inhabitants of the Earth; to hover there, and then to leap back at the speed of thought to conceptualize the entire planet. Lean forward, then stand back. This inner movement, this seeing from soil to space, marked a unique scientific endeavor.

This perspective was earned only through walking through diverse areas of study – geology, genetics, biology, chemistry, literature, embryology, paleontology. Those fields, are sometimes separated by an untraversed distance at universities: they are housed in separate buildings which may as well be different worlds. In Margulis, they found agreement and discussion with each other; they were reconnected, just as they are intrinsically connected in nature.

This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena – the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational “loops” that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.

Taken separately these concepts have the ability to redefine, respectively, how we understand organisms and the environment.

Taken together, they can redefine our consciousness.

* * *

…neo-Darwinists were…critical of Margulis’s work, some going so far as to say she was “corrupted by fame” – presumably the slight fame she achieved after she popularized the endosymbiotic origin of cell organelles. Anyone who knew Margulis laughed at such accusations. She worked in a small lab with a few dedicated graduate students: The lab was small in part because she resisted funding from corporate and governmental agencies that she thought would damage the integrity of her work. Once she dismissed a potential funder for wanting her to do work whose content could not be disclosed to the public. “If it’s not public, it’s not science,” she said, and hung up the phone on tens of thousands, possibly millions, of dollars. The graduate students were dedicated because she practiced science for science’s sake, and was fond of quoting quantum physicist and philosopher David Bohm, who said, “Science is the search for truth…whether we like it or not.” The truth was Margulis’s concern, not popularity, not big money, and certainly not fame.

Many neo-Darwinist concerns circled nervously around words like “Gaia” and “cooperation” (which Margulis did not like to use). They were, perhaps rightly, concerned that these terms were ripe for religious appropriation. But Margulis herself was outspoken against such mishandling of her research.

Some new agers love to grasp symbiosis as signifying “altruism” between organisms. But it’s much more complex than that – there is something “in it” for every symbiont, just as a state beneficial in some way arises out of each symbiosis. Terms like “altruism” had no scientific value, because they are too single-minded to describe the phenomenon.

New age thinkers also use Gaia as a blanket term. They’ve appropriated it to mean that the Earth is a living organism. Or they refer to Gaia as a “goddess”. This turns Gaia into a sort of Stepford planet by containing its complexity in a simple and inadequate metaphor. This no more grasps reality than “selfishness” does our genes.

Margulis expressed her solution to the error once by saying, “Gaia is not merely an organism.” The Earth is beyond stale conception. It is more magnificent and active than we can imagine. Gaia is object and process. Gaia houses volcanos and every book, every word on volcanos ever written, and at the same time is those volcanos. It is where our greatest loves live, and where every human heartbeat has ever rhythmically pulsed. In this new understanding; that something can pulse with life and yet be beyond our concepts of living, those concepts begin to change.

If Gaia is conscious, it possesses a consciousness of a different magnitude, probably of a different order all together.

Richard Dawkins and his pre-cursors like John Maynard Smith, as well as other misguided neo-Darwinist thinkers could not and cannot understand this lesson: this complexity is impossible to incorporate in a linear and reductive understanding.

Part of their failure lies in a misunderstood version of cause and effect that plagues science. At a certain level of complexity, somewhere just above a billiard ball clanking into a another billiard ball, cause and effect begins to change its shape. This change may be real – that is, it may actually shift in its laws and patterns in nature – or it may be imagined – in other words, it may demand a different sort of thinking . Effectively it doesn’t matter, since we need to contend with the shift in our thinking. To encompass complex systems with our thinking, we must imagine a model that is less like “cause-effect” more like “being-manifestation.” That is, multiple layers and numerous agents of forces unconsciously conspire together, and their conspiring is so intermingled, that it is simultaneously cause and effect, and thus beyond both. For example, the being, or process of Gaia manifests itself as an unstable, constantly correcting level of oceanic salinity. One cannot be said to cause the other, since the oceanic salinity interacts so deeply with the beings and environs from which it arises. Symbiosis and biological forms demand the same sort of thought.

This complexity shames the metaphorical lack of nuance in “selfish genes”. Neo-Darwinists, who so often speak publicly about the erosion of sound scientific thought, have themselves engendered ideas that represent a threat to clear scientific thinking. It’s not merely that Dawkins’s metaphors are incorrect (and they are incorrect), but his whole idea of evolution is too mystical (in the pejorative sense), too imagined, too metaphorical to be correct. Dawkins, who claims to be an atheist, relies on a host of selfish angels within us and the possibility for meme-salvation to justify his theory. He substantiates his magical worldview on a meager past of scientific work.

Margulis on the other hand, worked constantly and tirelessly in her lab, always aiming at and incorporating new pursuits. At the time of her death, she – with her handful of graduate students and a clutch of international scientists as collaborators – was researching cures for Lyme disease and reassessing how treatable syphilis is (both Lyme and syphilis come from spirochetes, which Margulis probably knew more about than any other scientist); she was also writing a book on Emily Dickinson. Her projects often had the unsettling side-effect of forcing us to reexamine our most cherished presumptions. In other words, she was a sort of investigative light where Dawkins is merely polemical shadow: she was a true materialist whose work produced spiritual effects.

Neo-Darwinism is an evolution that people can and have build social theories (memes, for example) out of. But symbiogenesis and Gaia theory, truer versions of evolutionary motivators, require a new philosophy and perspective to understand at all.

It requires the deepening of the capacity to understand.

These concepts are not conveniently, like neo-Darwinism, mirror-images of the current economic system (nor are they, as many confusedly think, a Kropotkian “mutual aid” analogue for socialism) and so have enjoyed no real social metaphor. Perhaps as we – in the newly and deeply connected world of the internet, social profiles, and globalization – witness the dissolution of the cult of isolated individuality and embark on understanding a clearer and more nuanced view of individuality, so to will we ready ourselves for a clearer view of evolution and life.

“In the arithmetic of life, One is always Many. Many often make one, and one, when looked at more closely, can be seen to be composed of many,” said Margulis and Guerrero. Being able to move from one perspectival state to the next – this is a sort of mental phase transition that is necessary to understand life, evolution, and the environment. It is the sort of thinking Goethe advocated; a thinking whose movement mirrored the movement of life itself…

blog occupation

My new post is coming soon. Until then, here’s my most recent publication, iOccupy, an article on Occupy Wall Street and the death of Steve Jobs. It was published a few weeks ago by Daniel Pinchbeck’s web magazine, Reality Sandwich . Thanks for reading, back with more soon!

iOccupy

I.
On the front page of today’s New York Times (October 6, 2011), two images, staggered: One, a crowd; the colors are vibrant and varied. There are people, dozens, maybe hundreds, spilling out of the frame and into the world beyond the photo. Sitting, standing, yelling and looking up. Signs held up high read, “OCCUPY-RESIST”, read, “REVOLT.”

Next to it, down the page a bit, is a man against a black background. He’s pale and staring into a screen. He’s seated. Alone. This man could be nowhere but on a stage.

This man, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has just died, and with his death, a worldview is dying with him.
The worldview in the other photo, as enacted by Occupy Wall Street has just been born.

Yesterday, one could feel the mass media about to finally present Occupy Wall Street – the movement that is largest in New York, but growing into other cities, echoing Middle East protests, and targeting corporate greed and demanding corporate accountability. Leftist journalist Amy Goodman had showed up on the livestream; documentarian Michael Moore was tweeting away, unions had joined. Surely, no one could ignore the movement.

Then, Steve Jobs died, and and opening had been made for the media to crawl out of or into. A “visionary” as he is being called by seemingly every media outlet everywhere, had passed. Pancreatic cancer – we saw it coming, but, as always with death, still seemed to come from nowhere.

My twitter feed, which had been very slowly filling with Occupy Wall Street-related news, erupted with “RIP Steve Jobs” messages which ranged from the heartfelt (“Your technology has made my life possible”) to the light-hearted but warm (“iSad”). Many recounted their first Apple purchases.

II.
I started earlier than most: My mother bought my family an Apple IIc in the 1980s. With it, I began to write a novel when I was seven years old. The computer, with its clumsy floppy disks and off-white entire-desk-occupying monitor fused with my creative life. I would have never written so much as a child without the computer, and writing so much is what kept the thread going – from writing then to writing now. And the thread is here at this moment; I’m writing this on a Mac.

But despite this early involvement with Jobs’s early, clumsy children, I wasn’t exactly moved by his death. He was and Apple is, unlike prime competitor Bill Gates, notorious for not making charitable donations (at least publicly – Jobs’s apologists, including Andrew Ross Sorkin and Forbes magazine say he may be giving secretly). His company is reported to use sweatshop labor, and last year, materials used for Apple products were traced back to murderous African militia groups. He was as anti-pornography as someone could be while not being a radical fundamentalist. His devices are, according to many public health advocates, spreading cancer. Without even approaching the enormous amount of resource depletion and pollution creation computers are responsible for (and this should not be ignored, should be examined more deeply and more often), Jobs and his work are problematic and cannot hope to present moral value in and of themselves.

On top of that, there was and is, what from any angle looks like a revolution happening, and the mainstream media had suddenly shut it out.
The twitter feeds kept coming in from sources (like @OccupyWallSt ) directly related to the protests; many stating police were corralling protestors to arrest them and worse. Some protestors were being beaten and pepper-sprayed for doing little more than holding those colorful signs and bearing witness to economic crimes against humanity.

While this was happening, people began to march to Apple Stores, not to occupy them, but to grieve, with their glowing devices in hand; mock candles that costs hundreds of dollars. They placed notes. Some cried. Many took photos of each other.

III.
Commenting on any of this in public was tricky business, I learned. When I said on twitter and in a cafe I was worried that people were projecting emotion onto their gadgets, I got a cold “fuck you” and called an asshole more than once. “He changed the world!” Was the most common response, as if change were value-laden, the measure by which a person’s life is gaged. As if we all don’t change the world.

When I said, “let’s not forget Occupy Wall St while we mourn” people scolded me. Didn’t I know, they wondered, that the whole movement couldn’t be happening without Steve Jobs’s innovations? I mused back: maybe these protests wouldn’t be necessary without the corporate and technological running amok. Not much of a response there, only that I was “dismissing people’s sense of loss.”

I was reminded of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s particularly stupid article on Occupy Wall Street just a few days earlier (The New York Times, October 3, 2011). He thinks he’s got some sort of stick-it-to-them line for the protestors: a withered and sixth-grade criticism. He asks one (out of tens of thousands) how they got to the protest. When the response is by plane, he questions more “deeply” that planes are part of corporate culture no? “…doesn’t Virgin America represent the corporations you are trying to fight?” he asks. In other words: don’t these fools know they’re hypocrites? Sorkin’s question is profound, though by no credit of his own. He doesn’t know it’s profound, because he asks with the intent of dismissing the group. The call of hypocrisy is often a child’s game, because it refuses to recognize complexity.

The real weight of this question in light of Jobs’s death is this – where do these gadgets, corporate-built but now woven into the fabric of our being, fit into our lives? It’s not clear that they’re good – good for whom? Certainly not Apple’s sweatshop workers, nor for the millions that can’t afford Apple products. Nor are they good for many of those who can afford them, but brandish them like badges of honor – status symbols in a strange war for whose iPhone is the whitest. Add, again, the problems of resources and social implications of these devices and I’m not so sure they’re good for us or that the way in which Jobs “changed the world” was for the better.
Then again, bad for whom? Occupy Wall St and the movements they engendered or grew from them employ technological advances like no movement before.

Livestreams, twitter, phones with cameras, phones as walkie-talkies, hacking systems, broadcasting to the world, emailing demands. So, like the first apple, to bite at technology renders unto us a gift that is by no means free.

Of course, none of this means that Steve Jobs was a good person. The Nobel Prize was named after the inventor of dynamite, which was subsequently responsible for death after death. The Rhodes scholars take their name from a racist diamond mogul. Works of peace or beauty often come from violent and strange places.

IV.
Sorkin’s other question was “What’s the message?” He writes, “…at least to me, the message was clear,” but then uses the rest of the article to point out just how messy and unclear he thinks the message is. This is as ubiquitous a media sentiment about Occupy Wall Street as “visionary” is about Jobs. But aside from the fact that many of the participants have stated clearly what they want, their detractors miss the point: decentralization is its greatest strength and most profound feature. And this decentralization was made possible historically and practically by technology.

Whereas once there were figureheads and men and women with megaphones fighting the power, now there are waves. The protestors don’t seek a leader, but consider themselves collectively as a leader of a new way of thinking. The movement is the leader, in service to its subjects.

This is possible only because our sense of self is changing; growing more accustomed to connectivity through the internet and globalization, we have begun to define ourselves by our interactions with others, not merely our own pursuits. Self is composed of a vast matrix of others instead of being segregated into Ones.

Of course this has its consequences too – as many media theorists have pointed out; we can become more isolated by thinking the rest of the world is in the computer rather than real. But Occupy Wall Street represents this new sense of self at its most human.
Connecting online before and during the protests, with each other as well as the world, Occupy Wall Street occupies real space, and finds solidarity in virtual space with those who can’t be there.
And this connectedness has given us a vast sense of equality that the protestors want borne out on a global, economic, and political level. A way to understand this is exhibited by the Ever-Shrinking Celebrity. No longer the untouchable black and white movie divas and leading men, celebrities are instead our neighbors, sitting in their living rooms. We’re connected to them and participating in our own exhibition on YouTube and facebook and tumblr. We’re curators of the fascinating museums of our superstar lives; media- and business-selected celebrities are less interesting to us. Even genuine mainstream celebrities like Lady Gaga show a different sense of self; in touch with her fans, she is her fan base, she tells us. Their actions are her blood. Other celebrities are less direct but nonetheless exhibit diminishing old-school fame. They talk to “the other 99%” on twitter. They’re no longer mobbed for autographs at the airport but instead they pose – without pay – for quick cellphone photos. We’re them. They’re us.
If our cherished celebrities cannot withstand the erosion of collectivity, how could our leaders – financial and political – hope to be spared? We’re interconnected enough to know what others need. We don’t need to be “represented” anymore, because we can actually speak to one another.

Famous, brilliant, “visionary” Steve Jobs, alone in the black with his gadget, isn’t quite the hero he would have been even ten years ago. Vitriolic responses to critics of his corporate miserliness can be seen as symptoms of clinging to an old worldview. Since we’re now understanding ourselves as connected, so will we connect moral bankruptcy with technological innovation. The latter will not excuse the former.

The world is fleshing out a new ethic and moral structure as the sense of self changes. Until it resolves (and perhaps it never will; perhaps it will be in this tension for a long, long time), we will stand in paradoxes. This isn’t hypocrisy, it’s a moment of learning, of process. But one of the messages of this moment has already emerged:
If you were famous, you will no longer be famous. If you were uncharitable but innovative, we’ll take the computers and turn them into charitable devices. If you were irresponsible, you’re one of us, and we demand responsibility of ourselves. No more figureheads. No more totalizing centralization. No more celebrities, no more superpowers, no more Wall Street or despots. No more crimes from iron-fisted, power-wielding authorities because there will no longer be any authorities.

The center is everywhere, and we occupy it.

If you ever did write anything about me, I’d want it to be about love.

There’s no way to begin this story where it started, so I’ll tell you its end first.

It ends with a night when a man – just barely a man, mostly a boy, full of jokes and laughter and passionate opinions – held me down on the thick black asphalt of the parking lot by my neck.
It ends with him driving his knee into my stomach, bursting parts of my intestines and telling me he should kill me. When I stood up, he punched me in the side and broke my rib.
We said we were in love.

I’m not supposed to tell this story; I should keep it private, I should hold it back. But this story, my story with him, has a life of its own. I know this because it’s still alive.
Sometimes, when I sleep on my left side, my ribs will ache.
If I’m worried that someone will read this and use it against me, somehow, to hurt me, I must remember that my memories already do that. A familiar song, the grass by the Charles River where we once fell asleep draped over each other, the photos of us together – they’re harsher than any person, filled with that living ghost of where he and I stood and slept and kissed.

It was Independence Day when we met, and I’ve often thought of this curious timing. After some messages back and forth, I drove from Amherst to Boston and walked up the back steps of his building and there he was, sitting on the balcony. He was twenty-four years old, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette and reading a book. His shirt was off. He was muscular and unfailingly Italian. I had never seen and will never see anyone so handsome.
We began kissing immediately and went to his room, where the air conditioning relieved the humidity and we had sex and then had sex again. In the hum of the air conditioner, we were sticky and exhausted. We talked about our lives and joked about too many things.

From there, it was four months of he and I together; back and forth, a two hour drive. Four months: looking forward, it can seem like forever. Looking back, it can feel like nothing. The black asphalt is like nothing, too. That night, there’s no world, no color. This is what nothing feels like, I think, until I feel his knee push down into my stomach.
“I should crack your skull open and leave you for dead.”

But before that night we’d walk in the morning with his dogs. They’d charge past us into the fields behind his parents’ house. They’d get lost and we’d have to find them. They’d return to us wet and happy. The mornings were cold and we’d hold hands. Those hands felt so thick.
Or sometimes we’d walk without the dogs and there were a hundred things to talk about.

Before that night, we fucked on the floor of his parents’ house. He’d just moved back, and I’d helped him pack, carrying furniture down the steps on a hot summer day. Boston was too hard on his own and he wasn’t sure what he’d do. He always thought his life was a mess.
Underneath us was the rug of the bedroom floor. We were covered in each other and cushioned by it.
“I’m so happy to see you,” he said. And then, “Please don’t ever leave me.” Those words stayed with me.
“I won’t,” I said.

That night, before he hit me, I started to cry. I knew I was leaving and moving to San Francisco. “Please, I don’t want to go without you,” I told him.
“Shutup,” he said. “Stop crying, you’re pathetic.”

I feel like it’s important to tell you, this isn’t the “complete” story. I wasn’t innocent of everything, and this is why people get confused: As if you must be completely clean and loving or else maybe you had it coming.
People would ask, “Did he hit you before?” Or, “Have you been in other abusive relationships?” The answer to both questions is no.
Is it so hard to think that the person who gets hit didn’t do anything to deserve it?

They’d ask, “What happened?” Or, more nuanced, “Why did he do that?”
What reason would have satisfied them or me? As if someone could even give a reason.
Because he was angry. Because he was hurting inside. Because he couldn’t cry and so hated seeing me cry. I don’t know. I wonder if people asked me “why” as a sort of protective amulet for themselves. If they knew why, maybe they could stop it from ever happening. Maybe it would all make sense.
But cause and effect lost its value on the asphalt.
Nothing links up, nothing makes sense, there’s only feelings and actions as you’re lost to something bigger than yourself. There is no cause.
In that way, and perhaps in that way only, it’s like love.

Once, I stole his hat. He told me he loved his hat more than he loved most people – a green Boston Red Sox hat that they didn’t make anymore. He came over and when he was drunk, I took it and hid it. I don’t even know why. It was a game or a joke or a grasp for power. I told him I didn’t know where it was, and he was furious. I returned it weeks later, but never told the truth. He knew the truth, he knew I hadn’t miraculously found it, but I never said so. And in spite of everything that happened after, I’m sorry I stole that hat.

Many times I was too upset, I was too dependent, I was too easy to unsettle. I wanted everything to be pure and happy and I shoved it out of balance so often.
Before I met him, I’d planned to move to San Francisco, and I asked him to come with me. He said yes, and we started to talk about our apartment together. We imagined a whole different city. The way the light would be different. What our bedroom would look like in the morning. Those images settled into me and they were like breathing. I became used to them and they kept me going, they woke me up.
Then a week later he said he wouldn’t come, and I had to imagine something different.

I cried and didn’t know where to turn or what to do. We looked at an apartment in Boston together, but it wasn’t the same. The motion of moving west had already seized me.
We’d sit at his dining room table and draw funny pictures together and reveal them, laughing. I was on my way, even then. I kept feeling like it was inevitable – I had to go to San Francisco. Please come with me, I asked too many times. I’m sorry for asking so many times.

And still, we’d spend time together as the end and that night rushed towards us. He told me about a book he’d read in which a lover, locked in prison, tears at the stones of his cell, bloodying his fingers and breaking his bones. He screams the name of his beloved.
“I’ve always wanted a love like that,” he told me. “Completely consuming.”
I could have guessed, then, that I was that love, and that this had no way of ending without blood and broken bones. But I thought we had something different. That maybe there was no cell, no prison, and that we were free. That we could hold each other when we wanted and that nothing was keeping us apart.
A few weeks later, after we got into an argument at a bar, he was lying in my bed.
He stared ahead and said, “I blew it. I feel like I’m losing this intense love you give me that I’ve wanted all my life.”
“You’re not,” I said. “Don’t worry, you’re not.”

I had to call the police and lawyers. There were medical bills to pay. There were charges to be filed. By a blessing, the bills were paid in another way and it never mattered. But before that, I had to call him, to try to get it settled.
“You’re not going to make me feel guilty for this,” he told me. He told me I made him do it. That was the most painful part of all. I thought, Do you hear yourself? Can’t you hear yourself saying what every abusive person has said on television and in every story?
“I’m not an abusive person,” he shouted.

I kept wanting a different outcome. I kept searching for a memory that wasn’t there; one in which he said, “I’m so sorry and I feel so ashamed and I’ll help you pay the bills and I love you.”
But the memory doesn’t exist. I wasn’t sure he ever even saw what he did as wrong.

Years later, I saw his old roommate who had moved to San Francisco. He said hello. He asked to hang out. I had nothing against the former roommate. He was always sort of defensive, but nice enough. He’d never done a thing to hurt me, and he was funny. I didn’t dislike him, even if we were never quite friends. But his presence was a sure sign that I hadn’t “gotten over it.” I could barely speak.
“I don’t,” I said, and stopped.
My sentence lingered and the friend said okay and walked away.
I took a breath and followed him.
“I don’t think you understand,” I said to the friend. “I don’t think you know what happened.”
“He’s my friend,” he said. “So even to hear your side wouldn’t…”
I cut him off.
“The last time I saw ____, he broke my rib. He put me in the hospital.”
His face drained of color – I’ve heard this expression before, but had never seen it. His face was pale. He hadn’t known.
“I don’t have anything against you,” I said. “But being around you is traumatic for me, in a way.”
“I understand,” the friend said. We hugged each other.

Somehow I thought the man I’d loved let everyone know. He was so charming, I imagined him telling people and having them simply shrug it off. Horrible, maybe, but in the past and let’s focus on the good stuff, right?
But the look in his friend’s face. Maybe I just read it there, maybe it was just a look of unknowing. But no, no, it was there. Fear, almost.
So the man that beat me up had never really confessed. He was raised Catholic, maybe confessing was unthinkable.
Perhaps, instead, he’d said he’d gotten into a fight with me. No big deal, people would think. They might even take his side.
Which means somewhere he had a sense that something was wrong, that he had been wrong in hitting me. I’d never even hoped for that before. In concealing the truth, he was admitting it to me.

Once, when we were on my couch, eating cookies, being gluttonous, he turned to me and held me. “You’re like this ginger molasses cookie,” he said. “I’m finished and I want more and more. You’re like,” he kissed me at each word, “my little ginger molasses cookie.”

When you don’t ever have an apology, you’re forced to find your own. Something that will let you rest. You will an apology into being. After you do it, you’ll still want to hear “sorry” in someone else’s voice. You’ll still want to hear that and breathe.
But you keep moving.

In Massachusetts, in the days following the assault (and I have only after years begun to understand that it was an “assault”), I could have forced him into confronting the wrongness of it.
Massachusetts has a zero tolerance policy for domestic violence. He would have been taken to jail immediately. I had the hospital report: broken rib, contusions in my intestines. And the record of everything else – the internal bleeding, the fear of split-open organs. I still have that yellow piece of triplicate paper. It’s in a box, wondering if it will be used.
But if I made the call I’d have to – I was told by the lawyer – face him in a court of law. I’d have to see him again. I saw him every day and when I close my eyes I will still sometimes see him. But to see him in person – those arms and hands, that beautiful face that used to be full of love? I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t brave enough or strong enough anymore. I was only tired and completely broken.
I struggled for so long with that phone call, and eventually it faded away. Instead, I put all my things in my car and drove across the country alone. I met my friends in San Francisco, and I felt safe. I kept thinking – so curiously! – that I hoped he was okay. How could someone be so angry at whoever loved him? How must it feel to hate being loved, and then to have the person that loved you run away in fear?
I should have protected other people.
I should have faced him.
I should have pressed charges.
That’s what I would have told anyone else to do.

Running away was the strongest, most exhausting thing I have ever done and it still wasn’t brave enough to be right.

There’s a short story by Raymond Carver called “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” In it, a character explains that he can’t figure out where his love for his ex-wife went. He used to love her, but now he hated her. She was allergic to bees and he’d imagine himself standing in front of the door in a beekeeper’s outfit, opening a hive in front of her and watching the bees sting her to death.
Another character talks about the screaming, the pulling of hair and the threats.
Of course in all cases it’s clear that the love is still there. But it’s contorted. When you hate someone so much, it’s easy to see the inversion and deformity of love. Instead of being pure and clean, it will take the strangest shapes.
The question isn’t, “Is that love?”
The question instead is what to do with love that’s changed form and that threatens you with all the force and passion that used to cradle and guard you.
We’re defenseless against it. Like a dog that turns on you and attacks you after years of being loyal – you can’t erase all those years and feelings you had because of that one moment. But something has to change because everything has.

On our last night together, I drove from Amherst to his parents’ house and we went to the bars outside of Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox game and drink and be close to each other. We were going to spend the night together and I found myself, later, trapped in that expectation, clinging to it because there was no other way to continue.
I’d told him I was going to San Francisco. I didn’t know if it was a bluff or not, all I know was that I had to tell him and start packing my things. Some sort of magnet was pulling at me and when I resisted it, I fell down.
We talked and laughed and kissed, we walked around town and met his friends. At a certain point, I saw him, standing away from me. I saw him there, on his own, talking to someone else in the loud music and dark light, and I thought, “How can this be the end?”
I saw Boston without me and San Francisco without him and the alcohol was blurring it all together the future and its places with us missing.
We walked back to the car, parked on a rooftop parking lot, totally open, empty. We were drunk and decided to sleep so we wouldn’t drive until we were sober. We got in the car and closed the doors.

I know I said I’d start this at the end. That wasn’t true, because there is no end to this story. I know he’s been to California. To LA where he worked, and maybe to San Francisco where I saw his friend.
I worry that I’ll see him around. Four years later. Would I run? Would I say hello or just open up and cry? Would I be able to move or even say a word, or would I feel pinned to the spot, hurt inside, sick the next day?

I woke up hours later and looked at him and then started crying. There he was, my love, my handsome and defiant boy who loved to be drunk and have sex and make me laugh. He’d beam at his huge muscles and I’d kiss them. He’d make clumsy artwork and show it to me proudly.
There he was, asleep.
He woke to my sobbing.
“Don’t let me go,” I said, though I don’t know if I meant it or if I was talking to him or myself or someone else.
He got out of the car and came around to my side.
He opened the door like a perfect gentleman and told me to stand up. He put his big hands, that used to hold me, on my arms.
“You’re thirty years old,” he said. “Grow up and get your fucking life together. Stop crying like a fucking bitch.”
And I had never seen such spiteful anger from him before. We’d yelled at each other and confused each other. We’d lost our way before.
I said things that I shouldn’t have said or at least that in any case at all, I’d regret.
I don’t remember being thrown to the ground, but then he was above me. He had me by my throat. He would kill me, I thought.
“I should kill you,” he said.

Why now? Why should I write about him? Four years later, it’s Independence Day again; the day I met him on his sweaty balcony. I don’t know. I don’t think about him every day, like I used to. I’ve had to work to bring some of the memories back. I’d forgot, for instance, the time we stopped at a gas station and he ran in and got me a rose. He handed it too me; it was so unnaturally red, and kissed me. I still have that rose in a little box. It’s dry now, and would fall apart if you held it too long.
I looked through letters and photos.
We’re laughing with our hats turned sideways. We’re naked in our beds.
His letters to me are full of grand sweeping statements and pained details.
In one letter, he wrote,
“If you ever did write anything about me, good or bad, I’d want it to be about love.”

When I got up, I couldn’t breathe right. I knew something in me was wrong and feverish, but couldn’t feel it. He threw his fist into my side. He screamed nothing, just a sound like a great pain; like the sound I should’ve been making.
He started to walk away.
I was catatonic and said, “get in the car.”
He got in and I drove him home, a half hour away. I pounded at the steering wheel with my hands, crying. I couldn’t think. I pounded and cried to blot out what had happened, the way you might pinch a spot that hurts, trying to overwhelm the pain.
We got back to his place and like exhausted wheels in a machine, it all worked in slow motion.
We walked up the steps to his bedroom.
We took our clothes off.
We turned the light off and lied down in bed.
I put my arm around him and he said, “You better back the fuck off.”
And that’s when, all at once, my body came back to life. I felt the pain in my broken rib, the bruises on my organs. I got up and quietly collected my clothes and walked to the bathroom. I turned the light on and looked in the mirror. Who was I?
I dressed and went back. He turned the light on and looked lonelier than I had ever seen him look.
“Where are you going?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“This will never change,” I told him. “This will never go away.”
We walked downstairs and I kissed him.
“I love you,” I said. “Goodbye.”

Once, we went to the house he grew up in. We snuck past the back yard, into the woods he played in as a little boy. There was a river there, cutting through a hill and lined with rocks. It was almost dried up in the summer heat.
“A woman lived back there,” he said, and pointed to a house farther back, covered up by trees.
“She told me that a turtle fell on its back on one of these rocks. A snapping turtle. And she told me that if I looked for it, I could find the print the turtle’s shell left on one of the rocks.”
He looked around.
“I never did find it, though.”
He climbed up the hill and stood there. The sun was lit up behind him and he looked down into the rocks, searching for the impression he’d never seen.
He was a boy up there. He hadn’t hurt anyone, he was just a boy.

In the hospital, where I spent the whole next day, in the days and months to come where I felt no trust beneath me, no life in me, no air or easy breathing through the pain of my ribs, I’d think of him standing on that hill. I still think of it, of who he was, innocent, before he hit me and would have to hide that night away.

And then, like the negative to that image, I see his face, shameful and angry, as he’s holding me down against the black nothingness of the ground.
The two are, only now, beginning to be the same person for me. The contradiction cannot be resolved or changed.
“You’ll write about this, and I’ll just be another story,” he said spitefully. “I know you will. You’ll tell everyone.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t.”