Torso's Journal

2005-02-11T20:21:00.000-08:00

Rendell yesterday and once again I had to wait more than a hour and a half to see him. But I’m giving it time and being patient. We agreed to dispense with the patch entirely and he’s giving me a light dosage pill in the oxycontin family. I do hope it makes a difference. I was going to start it last night but Rite Aid had to order it and it won’t come in until Monday and it was too cold to be hustling around the city looking for a pharmacy that might’ve had in in stock so I decided to simply stick with this last patch until Monday and switch then. It’s kind of a miracle that I’m able to sit and make this entry–to be coherant at all----and I think it’s only because I finally broke down and bought a cup of coffee. Otherwise I’d still just be drifiting in the wind of the Duragesic.

It’s a brisk, clear February morning. Piano lesson number two. I will graduate from "Music Land" and move on to "Patterns." Not sure whether I’m going to take the train or a cab.

Later–

Proud of myself that I took train down and back. Lesson fine. Starting on chords. Adam is very encouraging.

Capote letters dull so far.

Box of Betsy Ann Chocolates from Mom for Jay and me. I do a load of laundry, read the Voice. Jay comes home and we hang out and watch a documentary about Trekkies.

Tomorrow is the official opening of Christo’s "Gates Project" in Central park so Jay and I are planning on going. I remember reading about the possibility of this at least 15 years ago.

2005-02-08T16:10:00.000-08:00

I’m trying to find my bearings again. God, though, nausea is hard to deal with. I wake almost every morning slightly nauseous and dizzy and with absolotely no appetite. My head feels shaky. I can’t think straight. What I’ve been doing lately is simply flipping on the TV but in the end that just makes me feel worse. So this morning I’m back here in the journal.

Drinking a cup of tea, a glass of flat ginger-ale, and I just finished a chocolate chip granola bar.

A little bit later—After talking to Jeff (I’d planned on calling him just after 9 but he beat me to the punch) about some interviews he did about the recent flap over gay marriage here in the city) I was able to get myself together to go downtown to meet up with Bruce for lunch. I took a cab both ways. I’m starting to think the pain patch just isn’t going to do it for me and that we’ve got to find a better way to control the back pain without filling me up with such toxic stuff. Really, I sometimes I have trouble putting sentences together and I’m nauseous half the time and my appetite is shot and I’m convinced it’s all related to the patch.

Bruce and I hung out at his place for a few minutes, catching up----health problems for me, financial problems for him----and then we walked a few blocks uptown to a great bagel place on 1st (I think it was 1st Avenue). I could barely get down a bowl of chicken soup and a bagel. But I got enough in me me to at least begin to feel a little bit more normal. Afterwards, he put me in a cab. What a sweet guy Bruce is!

Crashed when I got home, slept for about an hour, I guess, and woke feeling refreshed and capable of salvaging something from the day. I’d forgotten to call in for jury duty Sunday night so I called today, hoping I could get a postponement, and I did, of course. Jim Higgins called and we talked about getting together again though without making any specific plans.

Publisher’s Weekly review is out. Towards the end the reviewer writes: "McGowan is not always a graceful writer (‘the only anecdote (sic),’ he tells us, ‘for this strain of senseless tragedy that so often infects the world is love, family’) but his style is familiar and easy, as if he’s confiding his experiences to a trusted friend." I don’t know, aside from the typo—anecdote should be antidote, of course, I don’t think that sentence lacks grace.

2005-01-29T16:56:00.000-08:00

7:45PM

Not a bad day. Some major weakness early in the day but managed to nap that off and then finally take control. The piano guy–Leopold Folder–came around 2 with the lease papers. He says I’ll need to move the bookshelves to get the thing in here. Big pain in the ass job but it will be worth it. Moved chapter ten forward just a tad----really, it was hard to focus today----getting the boys out of the pool and into the locker room. Really, all I’ve got to do now is place them back on the reservoir and then let the shack scene unravel. It’s going to be an awfully long chapter. It feels like it’s asking to to be split up but I don’t need to worry about that right now

Edited chapter two and did the 77 blog. Really hilarious moment when I talk about not being taken when the rapture comes and worrying in the very next breath about the March of Dimes Walkathon being rained out.

Spoke to Mom and Gary and Fred and Robert. Unemployment checks have finally resumed so that’s a bit of a relief, though I’m in good shape, actually.

Craving for pot roast and cauliflower smothered in the Velveeta cheese sauce so there’s a roast in the oven and I’ll be putting the cauliflower on shortly.

2005-01-28T13:20:00.000-08:00

3:32PM

So much weakness. And I’ve lost more weight. Down to 132 lbs. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Keep someone in the hospital for a week and don’t feed them for more than half the time and they’re bound to lose weight. So now I’ve really got to work on getting some poundage back on.

It’s so cold and I find myself just holding my breath until the cold weather ends. It feels as if we’re all sealed below some threshold of life and until the temperature rises to a certain degree nothing will feel right again.

I just rented a piano. They’ll be delivering it next week some time. Yesterday I spoke with a guy named Adam on the UWS who is going to give me lessons, starting a week from today. I haven’t told anyone around me because I wanted to make sure I was actually doing it before I started talking about it. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And a few weeks back I got it into my head that somehow piano and zen together might be the proper complementary treatment I need for this cancer. Don’t ask why. I know it will be frustrating at first, learning the piano, but I really think I’ve learned the value of patience and have the understanding now that if I wait long enough and do step one and step two and step three and step four, eventually I’ll reach a step that will seem like several steps ahead and things will begin to open up.

Went to a Gilda’s Club orientation session yesterday. Not much to say about that. Four of us, including one facilitator, and the other three aren’t actually cancer patients but loved ones of cancer patients. But that’s fine. It’s a great space and they have a really cool library and I’m going to give it a go. The support groups are broken up into patients and loved ones so it’s not like I need to worry I’ll be in a room full of cancer-free loved ones wringing their hands over the fates of their friends and lovers.

Some talk tonight about Jay and I having dinner with Cara and Pete. I wasn’t feeling too hot after trip to Rendell this morning but after a nap seem to be rejuvenated.

2005-01-26T04:53:00.000-08:00

A few short, quick entries scribbled in the hospital:

January 22, 2005
Saturday
Roosevelt Hospital
Transcribed from a black Mead.

I’ve been allowing–no, not allowing—let’s just say I’ve been unable to find any sort of strength to rise above the bare minimums of survival—a kind of grunting, culture-less, TV-soaked desparation. Waiting, just waiting to heal. Waiting for the moment when I can reach back up above the sheer misery of decline—as if that decline wasn’t worthy of inspection—as if I simply could not begin to THINK again until I re-surfaced at a specific level—as if everything below that specific level is unchartable. And so the condition feeds of itself and it just gets worse and worse. Finally, tonight, despite being nauseous and despite being constipated and despite the sense that my entire digestive system is on the verge of collapse----I felt the urge to pull myself away from the TV–from Bushspin ("The speech rivaled Kennedy’s) and Bushrevulsion ("The speech was too broad to have any real meaning—and hasn’t ‘spreading freedom in the world’ been one of the pillars of US foreign policy since the end of the 2nd World War?") to "Malcolm in the Middle" and "Golden Girl" re-reruns–and really bottom of the barrel junk (it’s like Doritos with extra cheese, like that new, huge burger at one of the fast food chains), VH1's 90's show, Part Deux----to pull myself out of the zombie-waiting mode I’ve been in for days—and either continue reading the Hollinghurst or look at the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets Robert gave me this afternoon, or to write.

I chose writing. But unfortunately, even that tiny bit of effort (the paragraph above) has left me exhausted. I’m dizzy and need to stop for a second

January 24, 2005.
Roosevelt Hospital.
Monday
Transcribed 1-26 from a black Mead.

I’m trying not to be scared. I’m trying not to fall into the deepest of depressions. But it’s hard since, though I’m feeling better today, the news from Sara was not particularly encouraging. And then the hospice care people show up with a large brochure and I have to turn it face downwards so I won’t have to look at it.

Mom and Gil left. I would have liked their company today but I couldn’t bring myself to say so. It’s funny, but talking to Mom about my health—it still feels like a secret. It still feels like, say, being gay felt years ago. I’m ashamed of my illness—and instead of bringing comfort, Mom’s presence sometimes brings pure anxiety. Only sometimes, I should stress. I was grateful that they came. I was so glad to have them there, especially on Saturday and Sunday when not much was going on.

January 25, 2005
Roosevelt Hospital
Tuesday
Transcribed 1-26 from a black Mead

Clarity. Strength. Focus. I wish I knew how to hold onto them and summon them when needed. I fear they’ll collapse the next time I begin to feel the slightest bit ill.

It’s Tuesday afternoon and the sky outside my window on the 9th fl., looking south on Manhattan and west to the river and Jersey, is mottled all purple and white and blue. There are great swaths of ice-chunk collecting along the sides of the river. The city looks locked down, untouchable, like a portrait of New York in a super-realistic snow dome. The sun is setting. Down behind the Houston-like car show-rooms—ten, fifteen stories of dirty black glass hoisted up here and there along the broad whorish avenue. I’m finally going home, after what seems in hindsight to be a sort of hospital marathon—five procedures in six days–plus a cat scan and an x-ray and 3 days of NPO, and a late-night MRI that sorely tested my skills of self-calming. Jay and Fred will be here soon to take me home.

2005-01-15T17:02:00.000-08:00

Almost twenty-five years ago, on a hot June night in New York City, I went to see a Broadway show for the first time. I was seventeen years old and the show was Sweeny Todd with Dorothy Louden and George Hearn. I went alone and I had a fourth row orchestra seat, I think, and I ‘m pretty sure I paid only twenty five dollars for it. I wept throughout the opening number, overhwhelmed by the sheer power coming from the stage,and I wept as the show progressed and I wept at the end. After the show I walked out of the Gershwin Theater, onto 52nd Street, and went to the corner at 8th and phoned my mother in Pittsburgh to tell her what an experience it had been. As I spoke with her the big marquee from the Adonis movie theater across the street shone on my face and I found myself anxious to finish the call. I did, then crossed the street and entered the Adonis for the first time in my life.

I hadn’t gone to the theater alone again until Thursday night. Again it was Sondheim. This time a revival of Pacific Overtures, the Sondheim show that preceded Sweeny Todd in 1976. I paid 65 dollars for my Studio 54 mezzanine seat. Well, I was disappointed, though I did weep at the beginning, wept, as I often do, at the sheer exhilerating thrill of seeing live theater. But I bring such high expectations with me to Sondheim that I’m bound to be disappointed. And I wasn’t feeling too great. Sondheim’s music seemed stingy. The show’s polemical tilt seems to water down the power of the work, prohibiting the kind of high high moment that lifts shows like Company and Sunday in the Park with George and Passion into places so unexpectedly beautiful and rare that the music seems to work into your DNA and change you forever.

I didn’t go to the Adonis movie theater afterwards. It’s gone, razed nearly a decade ago now, I think, along with every other building on that block—the Chinese place on the corner, the Irish place where I met Kieren–to make way for a high rise apartment building with little pyramids of light on the corners that refer to the World Wide Plaza next door—and a mere two retail tenants, Duane Reade and Blockbuster, on the street level, two big chains that face the bustling, historical 8th Avenue, in all their uniformity and bright flourescence, with the callowness of a nineteen year old midwesterner freshly arrived from mallworld. This sad little block, on 8th Avenue between 51st and 52nd Street, is without a doubt one of the best examples of the stultifying effects of gentrification. You start with a half dozen buildings in a half dozen styles with a half dozen businesses----a lavish gay porno theater, world-famous, once a legitimitate theater, now crumbling towards the exquisitely baroque beauty that can only be found in the neglect of greatness, those smoke-stained nymphs dancing still up on the ceiling----a real New York Irish pub right next door-- with steam tables and all--- where all the bartenders are direct from Ireland, with a family of regulars, and a long, legitimate history of its own—and then four or five other independent businesses, a dry cleaner, I think, a newspaper/cigarette place, the Chinese place----and you replace all this vibrant diversity, all this legitimate New Yorkness----with one giant swath of uniformity, two-thirds for the drugstore, the final third for the Blockbuster—and suddenly, this block, once fascinating and full of life, filled with gay men fucking and Irish men drinking and Chinese people serving Chinese food and Pakistani men selling cigarettes—has been reduced to a particular amount of retail square footage in the large schemes of the Duane Reade people and the Blockbuster people, located who the hell knows where—and the block is no longer urban, really, the block ceases to be a city block, but has become, instead, just another piece in the ever-expanding pie of the big-chain-mall-world that is increasingly blotting out distinctions and differences all over the country and all over the world.

I walked up this block, after seeing Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, trying to imagine the Chinese place and trying to figure out the middle of the block, where I think the Adonis was, the bright white marquee shining so bright, and trying to imagine the Irish pub next door, the talk and smoke and music rushing out whenever someone would go in or out, but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see anything at all. It was if they’d managed to eliminate even the ghosts of that time, all of it swallowed up whole by the clean, happy consumerism that has so greedily replaced it.

2005-01-08T06:54:00.000-08:00

9AM

There was S–on Wednesday, who said I should write a letter to the hospital complaining of my troubles during my last stay there. And that I should have a talk with Jay about the fact that he never cleans the kitchen or the bathroom. Maryanne called from GLWD to do an intake interview and I got the first delivery Friday morning, excellent eggplant parmesan and a big oatmeal cookie and some weird chicken gravy that I wasn’t sure what to do with. Thursday was GMHC in the chilly, wet Chelsea morning—to sign the final copies of the will and health care proxy, which wasn’t strange or a big deal or anything at all, since I’ve done it twice before now over the past ten years. Then later I saw Rendel and he gave me a shot of Nandroline (sp?) and a prescription for megace, which is now in tablet form. As I was leaving I noticed Kevin sitting in the waiting room and we had a kind of emotional, stilted conversation. It was strange seeing him (the doctor) waiting like a patient, and he seemed diminished and vulnerable and I got the impression that he was holding back tears. I was afraid to inquire too deeply about his condition so I just asked general questions and then talked about myself, the chemo, etc. As I stepped out onto 82nd Street and started walking east towards the train, I found myself rushing to get away, anxious to shake off the exchange. And then it ocurred to me that I was treating him like a pariah, as if only he were dying, as if I was healthy as a horse and only visiting the doctor for some routine check-up. The truth is, of course, is that we probably have a great deal to talk about at this point, having each received a terribly bleak prognosis within the last few months, and I made a mental note to myself, walking east now across 81st Street, past the planetarium, to contact him at some point and suggest lunch or coffee. But maybe we don’t want to be around each other. Maybe he was feeling the exact same thing. Maybe we don’t want to be reminded of death so baldly. Maybe it’s too much like looking into a mirror. Then again, if he’s working with any amount of hope, as I am–I do have some hope left–misguided, foolish, perhaps–hope, nonetheless----maybe we can feed off each other–maybe we can help each other. One thing is for sure, very few people understand what we’re going through right now. To spend some time with someone who really knows, who is actually experiencing the same thing, might be a help to us both.

Yesterday Macy’s delivered the leather recliner and it looks fantastic. It made me more anxious than ever to move out of this place and find an apartment of my own.

2005-01-04T16:25:00.000-08:00

6:53PM

Maybe I spoke to soon. Or maybe I overdid it yesterday. Or maybe I need another dose of Procrit. In any case I was washed out again, tired, weak, no appetite. I didn’t feel too bad when I got up around 8, recorded an entry from the 77 journal, then made a couple pieces of toast with strawberry jam and managed eat that along with some of that scary green juice Jay bought last week and some grape juice with my meds. But then I hit a wall and found myself weak and nauseous. I took a compazine, knowing full well that it would probably knock me out, and it did, and I slept until almost 2 then rushed into the shower and dressed as fast as I could and hurried downtown on the train for my first dose of gemcitabine.

The chemo person, Diana, is wonderful, one of those no nonsense kind of New York women who I’m so often drawn to and who put me at ease. The gemcitabine (Diana called it gemcite–"You’re getting the gemcite, right?" she said) is supposed to cause few side-effects, they say, though some patients do develop bone marrow problems, so I may have to add neupogen to my regimen at some point. As I was writing down my next appt in my book the secretary asked me how many appointments I needed to make and I said I had no idea and it served as an unpleasant reminder that the framework for this is not so fixed, that the goal, unlike the goal of "cure" with Levine and the Hodgkins, is really open-ended, is really, if you’re a pessimist (some might say realist) to merely stem the tide for as long as possible.

But I picked up some literature for Gilda’s Club and I felt hopeful, finally getting the drug into me, knowing that we were doing something at last. So I’ll get into a support group and I’ll meet with the nutritionist and keep spring and summer as a kind of goal and keep seeing S--- and keep working on the novel and mush on, as that 18th Century English lit professor at Hunter used to say, my favorite, and I’ve forgotten her name.

2005-01-03T17:01:00.000-08:00

7:29PM

Mask the day. Mask the entry. He might as well be fifteen, scribbling in longhand in that tiny, thin-walled room he grew up in on Maryland Avenue, writing in code about masturbation, convinced that Jesus cares about such things.

The good news is that everything seems to have returned, including my own incalculable libido. Thus the mask. I am alive and I can ride the subway and I can walk around and not feel as if I’m about to dissolve into ten thousand tiny pieces. It may be that the Procrit finally bloomed so that my skinny body is now churning out red blood cells the way it ought to, though Brook said that would take weeks. Who knows? What matters is there’s life in my bones again and my brain seems to be working properly—or, if not properly, at least in the manner it normally works.

So it was about flaunting death. Maybe. There was a sense of seizing the day, seizing control, and saying I must, I must, I must. And I went. And there it was. And now, well, out of my system, and I can clean up the mess once again. I know how to do that. I’ve done it a million zillion times before.

There was a to do list, many things to do, phone calls to make, DG and GLWD and Luis and GMHC and the nutritionist and the MTA (about my half-price Metro Card, which doesn’t seem to be working) and the piano place. I wanted to buy the remaining seven frames for the W piece and there was an appt. with S—that just slipped past–and I had to call, embarassed, and apologize. There were messages from my mother, two, and then one from Jay, saying she’d called him as well, she was on the hunt, and a message from Cara. Nothing was done. I’d fled, slipped into the old familiar oblivion, the same oblivion I’ve been slipping into for 27 years, the one I’m trying to articulate in the novel so that I can overcome it, so that I won’t need it anymore, so that I won’t feel as if it’s my only means to authenticity.

And when it was finished, when I rose to the surface again, I called my mother and I called Jay and Fred called, saying he didn’t really want to go back to Nutley tonight, and I offered the air bed. I showered. I made a cup of tea. I put on Reich’s "Four Sections" and I wrote this masked entry.

2005-01-02T16:40:00.000-08:00

7:01PM

I won’t believe it. It’s not the right thing to be thinking. It’s just all negativity. But the pain in my stomach, well, I just can’t help thinking that it’s the cancer spreading, that the pain I’m feeling is actually the kind of cellular despair that only comes towards the end. And I can’t help thinking that I’m not prepared. I can’t help thinking that I need to set up home hospice care and that I haven’t signed off on the revisions in my little will and that there’s still so much clutterclutterclutter in this room, in those boxes up in the cupboard, in the stacks of paper next to the desk and underneath, so little resolved, the novel unfinished, and Jeff’s book not even published, and I’ve just begun to think about Zen in a more serious way and surely, surely, there will be more time, surely, surely there will be another spring, another summer, another birthday, another Christmas. And then it ocurrs to me that it isn’t like opening night, death, that it will come as casually as a thunderstorm, or daybreak, or a piece of junk mail or the need to shave or cut my hair. My death is not the end of a play. My death is not the end of a movie. My death is not the end of a novel. My death will be just another event, the last one in my life, the moment that will sit atop all the other moments: it will simply be the final one.
.
And so I go to the movies with Fred. We see "Sideways," and it’s good, it’s interesting, it’s not a great movie by any means (with the exception of the two wine monologues that come about 3/4 way through–they are spectacular), and all the hoopla must simply be the result of a rather lackluster year. And something about doing this very normal activity–going to the movies with Fred on a Sunday afternoon, meeting him early in front of Chelsea Cinemas, buying the tickets early out of fear the 3:30 will sell out, then going into Breadstix for food (lentil soup and a salt bagel for me, an egg sandwhich for Fred), and then wondering over to the Gap and Fred running into a guy he knows from work, then over to Utrechts to buy frames for the Wojnarowicz photos (I copied the Arthur Rimbaud series and I'm framing them for the hallway) then to Starbucks for tea and he reads The Onion and I read Suzuki’s first series of Essays in Zen Buddhism, then to CVS for popcorn and licorice (worrying about sugar as fuel for cancer) then finally to the movie----I can’t help thinking that all of this is somehow PROOF that I’m not dying, that I can’t possibly die today or any time in the immediate future, since, hey, look, he’s up on his feet, he’s riding the subway, he’s eating popcorn and licorice in the movies, he’s hanging Wojnarowicz photos in the hallway–no, no, death is serious, death will not come unannounced, there will be time for preparation, there will be time, there will be time—and it’s just not true, this isn’t true, my god, it’s not that organized, it’s not that clean, there won’t be peace, just dissolution then a kind of vanishing act, and then nothingness, and I won’t know, and suddenly my body will be in a place without me, and all the molecules that came together so uniquely to provide me with the breathtaking singularity that is the great mystery of our lives, that provied me with the means to experience, all this will begin to break apart and go their separate ways, folding back into the universe, free of the organizing principle of my MIND, of ME. That’s how it will be. And it might come sooner than later so I better stop acting as if I have all the time in the world. I am not resigned to death, I plan on fighting, but I need to start seeing some of the writing on the wall and act boldly and do everthing in my power to make this time MEANINGFUL and GOOD.

So the day seemed wrung out, blank, as if constituted of all the dregs of the holidays, an awful weariness in the streets, a borrowed day, all that grey slate in the sky.

2005-01-01T18:26:00.000-08:00

5:32PM

1+1=2.

A to B to C to D.

Move on.

It was all crying and dreariness and pain. And Mom came and waited on me hand and foot and that was great though I resented her after awhile and she resented me too, I think, and it ocurred to me that perhaps people very close to you may not be the best choice for caretakers when you’re seriously ill. Well, really, we spent over a week together in very close proximity. That’s hard for any two people, let alone a parent and adult child. That our worst moment came and went so quickly that before we knew it we’d dissolved into apologies and tears is a kind of miracle, actually.

There were fever, and chills, and sweats, but my numbers were good aside from a slightly low red blood count. Michael prescribed Procrit and I became convinced over the next few days as the dizziness and fatigue increased that I was seriously anemic. I convinced Brook to take more blood on Thursday but the numbers were fine, no anemia. Who knows? No one, apparently, at this point.

Finally, now, I’m beginning to feel like myself again. Finally, I’m a little bit horny and I’m not feverish and I’m enjoying food and I have some energy and I don’t feel dizzy all the time. Perhaps it was just my body dealing with the introduction of the stint. Perhaps it was the cancer itself. In any case, I seem to be on some sort of mend and I must take advantage of it.

I want to see another spring.

2004-12-20T17:46:00.000-08:00

8:32PM

"Longest Night of the Year—

The winter solstice marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. The sun appears at its lowest point in the sky, and its noontime elevation appears to be the same for several days before and after the solstice. Hence the origin of the word solstice, which comes from Latin solstitium, from sol, ‘sun’ and -stitium, ‘a stoppage.’ Following the winter solstice, the days begin to grow longer and the nights shorter."

Tomorrow is the solstice. But I’m thinking about the novel, the real time of which consists entirely of a few early morning moments during the winter solstice. So do I set it on the solstice itself—which would be this coming morning----after midnight—or tomorrow—which would actually be the morning of the day after the solstice?

In any case, today certainly felt like the solstice. Brutally cold and I bundled myself up quick this morning early and headed downtown to see Rendell at 9:45. He took blood and called later, said they’ll go ahead with the interventional procedure, probably on Wed., and I’ll have to wear a bag for a week and then they’ll fix it and put it all inside. Sara said waiting another week to start chemo was fine. Both procedures should be outpatient, with no lengthy recovery time in the hospital, I hope.

Jeff apologized in a kind of half-assed way.

I got into the Christmas spirit in a big way and am now really looking forward to the weekend up at Chelseas. Really hope the procedure doesn’t fuck things up. Would love to attend a Christmas Eve service in Warwick.

Cards from Dad and Patty, and Lois McFarlane (who I haven’t seen for, what? 20 years?), and Julie and Marc sent Jay and me a card from Paris and the New York Times left a card with a self-addressed envelope inside for a tip.

2004-12-19T17:13:00.000-08:00

1:59PM

I ran a high fever yesterday evening–102–with chills. I’m thinking I just overdid it a bit though I’m not sure I understand what that means. It’s not like I went to the gym or anything. In the morning I walked up to the bank on 164th Street, stopping along the way at Rite Aid to get some pills. After the bank I checked out the Columbia bookstore there and ended up doing some Christmas shopping. Then walked home. I thought it was a good thing to get some walking in. I came home and ate some lunch, napped, then Jay and I went down to Broadway to buy a tree, as we’d planned. The tree we wanted, the very tall tree, was 120 dollars, so we settled for a shorter one for 80, carried it home and set it up. Cara’s coming up in about an hour to help us decorate it. Jay and I sat down and I started falling asleep on the futon and he said, You ought to nap, and so I did, but a few minutes into the nap I started shaking like crazy, real bad chills. I felt so weak and chilled that I couldn’t even bring myself to raise my voice large enough to reach Jay so I called him on his cell phone and asked him for gingerale and tea. He brought in the beverages and extra blankets and tucked me in and I took 600mg of ibuprofen then called and left a message for Rendell. Soon the chills subsided but the fever never went away entirely, seemed to hover around 99.5, 100, but I was able to sleep through the night, thank god. Rendell said, What do you want to do? Meaning did I want to go to the hospital where they’d almost certainly hook me up to an IV antibiotic. But I’d have to go through the emergency room and I remembered my promise the other day so I said let’s just wait it out. He agreed that we needn’t do anything right now as long as the ibuprofen was keeping the fever reasonably under control. I’m seeing him tomorrow morning. God, I hope this is isolated and that I don’t have to spend Christmas in the hospital.

2004-12-18T03:45:00.000-08:00

6:38AM

"Wicked" was Sunday and on Monday I had my follow-up appt. with Wadler for the second opinion. I arrived a little bit late, having taken a cab through rush hour traffic, but it didn’t matter since the doctor didn’t see me until about two hours later. And there was some young doctor with him in the office, who he was training, the guy looked to be no more that 25, though surely he must’ve been older than that. And Wadler had nothing, really, nothing, at least, that differed from what Sara had offered me originally. Single agent chemo–gemcitabine–no cure, of course. A part of me wanted to be angry, feel as if I’d wasted a lot of time and energy, arranging for the petscan, having all my most recent films sent to Wadler’s office, and all the drama with his staff on the phone, but the sense that I’d at least done it, gone through with seeking a second opinion, kind of cancelled out the disappointment I felt at having, in the end, been given precisely the same treatment plan I’d been given back in October. In a way, it was a comfort to know that he’d arrived at the same conclusion. And in a way, I was also relieved to be able to stick with Sara and everyone on the west side affiliated with Roosevelt.

It was raining when I left the hospital. And the temperature seemed to have dropped considerably from when I arrived. Bone-chilling—it was that kind of damp cold—and I had to wait in the taxi line for about a half hour, admiring the energy of the taxi guys, and trying to hold off a fresh bout of chills and fever. I’d planned on doing something else–oh, I don’t remember what it was—but now I knew the best thing was to get in a cab and get home and back into bed as quickly as possible. Which is exactly what I did.

That night the chills and fever returned in full force. In the evening my temperature reached 104 so I called Kevin’s office only to get a voice message box for Brook, who was covering for him. Brook called back about a half hour later. I told him I’d taken ibuprofen but if the fever didn’t come down I wanted to be admitted to the hospital. I was scared. He said he thought that probably wouldn’t be necessary. The fever went down but my urine started darkening and I noticed my eyes beginning to jaundice just slightly in the corners so I knew something was going wrong.

The following day, Tuesday, I guess it was, I didn’t improve, and I finally convinced Brook that the hospital was necessary, but for some reason he had me go through emergency rather than simply admit me. Of course that added an extra layer of nightmare to the whole thing. Though I’ve had worse emergency room experiences (I was an emergency room patient at Columbia Presbyterian and St. Lukes in the late eighties and early nineties: men in the throes of D.T.s, women slumping and falling from wheelchairs, people screaming and moaning in pain—and all of them far down on the triage list since gunshot wounds came first. On average roughly 7 people were murdered in a day in NYC at that time. Now it’s roughly 2—I think it’s less than two, actually) it was still pretty bad. Dehumanizing. There’s always the sense that people have forgotten about you, that someone has dropped the ball, and unless you make a fuss they just might let you lay there for days without paying any attention to you.

It hardly took them any time at all to get me admitted but once admitted and laying vulnerable on a stretcher it was as if they had all the time in the world and I wasn’t moved up to a room on the 9th floor until 6 or 7 hours later.

It was decided that the stint wasn’t working properly and that another blockage had ocurred in my bilial tract. Another endoscopy was in order. They did that Wednesday morning and then for some odd reason gave me morphine afterwards, which, I think, was responsible for making me sick for days. But that procedure wasn’t entirely successful–it was clear by Friday—so they’d give it another go on Monday. In the meantime I fought with the nurses, was drastically losing weight, and felt increasingly helpless and alone. Honestly, I know people are human, even nurses are human, but is it too much to ask for mere competance? Apparently, yes it is.
Returning from the second endoscopy on Monday I found my bed stripped of sheet and blanket so I buzzed my nurse to get replacements. Nadine came in and threw a blanket at me. I said I needed a sheet as well and there must’ve been something in my voice that offended her because she went a little ballistic and said she didn’t come to work to be abused and I said I didn’t come to the hospital to be abused. Her response was to ignore me entirely. I was on an antibiotic and fluids but she failed to bring them. I had to get a sheet from another nurse. She didn’t bring my meds. The staff never got the meds right, even after a week. Amazing. So I went on the warpath, charging up to the front desk to complain about Nadine to the head nurse. It’s truly startling to walk up to one of those big desk areas, wearing the awful robes they provide you with (I doubled up so at least I didn’t have the humiliation of being exposed in the back all the time) dragging an IV pole with you, and there might be 10, 15 people working inside the boxed in area–doctors, nurses, orderlies, social workers–and not one of them, NOT ONE OF THEM even looks up at you. And when you speak they look at you like you’ve stepped over some sort of line.

Fortunately things did stabilize somewhat and Brook decided to release me on Tuesday. I’d lost ten pounds, was very, very, weak, dizzy in the cab, alone, riding up the west side highway in the bright afternoon sun, but at least I was on my own again, out of the hospital. The place engenders such a debilitating sense of helplessness! I won’t kid myself into thinking I won’t have to make another appearance on the 9th floor at Roosevelt—but I do hope it’s not for awhile–and I plan on doing everything in my power to stay out of there.

2004-12-17T08:54:00.000-08:00

9:29AM

I made it through the show. The ibuprofen kicked in and the contingincies returned. Dave had made a plan for Max and Terry and some others to meet us at a restaurant afterwards to surprise Chelsea. I don’t know whose idea it was but for some reason we met them at Mars2021, a phenomenally tacky theme restaurant not far from the theater. I knew I’d have to go after the surprise and Jay had said earlier that he wasn’t prepared for dinner—he was hungover—so we took Chels to the bar area–after winding down neon-lit ramps and tunnels—and there was Max and Terry and some other people I didn’t know and we all screamed surprise and hugged and all that and then Jay and I left.

Jeff just called and I think I was rude to him again. But he’s just bored on the road and looking for someone to authenticate himself–someone who will listen to him and agree and be impressed and that’s what I used to do–that’s what I’ve always done–and somehow, now, I just can’t do that anymore. It’s become clear to me, mostly from reading Love, Medicine and Miracles, that I have the classic personality profile of a cancer patient. And that the only way to make things better, in addition to chemo and radiation and the other western treatments Sara or Brook might offer me, is to break free from all the old patterns of depression and emotional repression and self-loathing. "Cancer," Siegel quotes someone in the book, I’ve forgotten who, "is despair on the cellular level." I see Attiyeh’s fine, clean Egyptian face, the finely tuned face of a very good surgeon, smiling at me, self-assured, "It’s a mechanical thing, that’s all. Just a mechanical thing. We’ll get it fixed and you’ll be on your way." And he’s right, of course, and his confidence, not to mention the sparkle in his eye, makes me feel better. It is simply, at this point, a matter of getting the stint placed, allowing for free flow through the bilial tract again, it is simply mechanical. And that’s his job. But there’s still the question of why? Why me? Why cancer? Why now? Why Hodgkins back in 2000? Why gall bladder last year? I used to think that posing these sorts of questions was useless and counterproductive. I remained so resolutely Western, so convinced that the body was simply a machine, that I couldn’t even bring myself to look at books like the Siegel. There was almost a belligerence about my attitude, a kind of bellicosity that seems nearly suspect, now that I’m considering these things with more of an open mind. By dimissing so brutally anything that carried even the slightest trace of mind/body, I was, perhaps, betraying my own suspician that something was deeply wrong with the way I interacted with the world, the way I saw myself in the world.

There is HIV, of course, and one of the main reasons I developed cancer was because my immune sysetem had been weakened by the virus. That’s western. I think it’s true, too. But when I was diagnosed with the Hodgkins, my t-cells had risen to nearly 900, up from 0 five years before. The gall bladder is easier to comprehend from the HIV standpoint since I never recovered from the chemo and radiation that was used on me to cure the Hodgkins, so that my immune system remained compromised, my t-cells hovering between 200 and 350. But I think it’s interesting to think about the timing.

I have said to S—that I’ve often found myself relieved when a new diagnosis comes up, relieved from the burden of having to manufucture meaning in a life I long ago became convinced was meaningless and irredeemable. I returned to school in the fall of 97, and remained relatively healthy for the next two years while I finished my degree. School provided me with meaning. Though I knew that getting a B.A. meant little, especially at this point in my life, I sill believed in the power of education, I still got excited buying fresh notebooks at the beginning of each semester, and textbooks, fresh textbooks, and the first day of class, all that promise. And then I graduated in the summer of 99. And found myself flailing around a little, applying to MFA programs (did I apply right away? I must have since I was supposed to start at the New School in the fall of 2000 but got a deferrment on account of the Hodgkins), but still finding myself back in a life with a job that I hated, feeling rudderless and lost, embarassed by my age and apparent lack of accomplishment. And so–six months later I developed Hodgkins–and suddenly my life filled up with meaning again. There was a struggle. There were specific parameters, things to deal with, a goal, there was drama. I got better, made it through, started work on the MFA in the fall of 2001, finished in the spring of 2003 and then found myself once again lost, without a plan, in a job I hated, now in an apartment I hated, now without a boyfriend, having driven Fred away with my compulsive sexual behavior, and six months later, in December of 2003, I was diagnosed with gall bladder cancer.

2004-12-16T03:48:00.000-08:00

5:56AM

It started Thursday night, I guess. I woke in the middle of the night, drenched, sweating, feverish. I took a couple ibubrofen and it went away. Spent most of the day in bed Friday, exhausted. Felt better Saturday, thought it had passed, that it had just been a 24 hour thing. Then–Sunday afternoon I’m sitting in the dead center of the Gershwin Theater, Jay on one side, Chelsea and Dave on the other, watching the musical, Wicked. All that screaiming. Idina Menzel seems to possess only one pitch in her voice and to know how to use only one dynamic: loud, louder, loudest. I felt like I was watching a Vegas stage show. And this is what won for the Tony for best musical last year. I kind of expected it, though I left open the posssibility for surprise. I wanted to be surprised, and I suppose there were some moments here and there, but, well....It was a birthday gift for Dave and Chels so...

But about two thirds of the way through the first act I started getting cold. I thought I felt a draft and then I got colder and colder. I put on my coat, looked around to see if others were doing the same, but they weren’t. Everyone, very pregnant Chelsea included, seemed perfectly happy in their Sunday afternoon shirtsleeves and sweaters. And then I started shaking and I had to close my mouth because my teeth actually began chattering. Soemthing was wrong. Soon the lights came up for intermission and everyone asked me what was wrong and I said I had chills. Fortunatley I’d had the good sense to bring some ibuprofen with me so I popped two of those, hoping that by the beginning of the second act I’d be back to at least semi-normalcy. I wanted to make it through the show. Chels gave me some of her water and laid her coat over my knees and Dave agreed to pick me up a seltzer outside and so I just sat there, shivering, chattering, remembering that night in the back seat of Peggy’s car in the fall of 93 as we drove across Pennsylvania in the middle of the night, on our way to Canadohta–Peggy and Andrea and Jay and me–when I became overwhelmed with such chills that I could barely speak and we had to turn the car around and drive back and rush me to Beth Israel at 5 in the morning, where I insisted to everyone that I had PCP and no one would believe me because the numbers just didn’t quite show it so they sent me home with nothing but an inhaler and a bill I couldn’t afford.

There’s a terrifying sense of loss of control. One feels as if all the body’s correcting mechanisms have suddenly been thrown out of whack and it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that those mechanisms will at some point find their way back to syncopation. That nourishing sense of symmetry, of wholeness, that one learns to take for granted, is suddenly no longer–it’s all just falling apart—falling towards a kind of Piccaso-like abstraction–away from the realistic portrait you’ve come to imagine is yourself in your body now, today, on this Sunday, in this seat, in this theater, watching this lousy musical that won all the Tony awards (who would ever think that the subject of race and ethnicity could be made so sachrine?—oh, yeah, Hairspray, I forgot)-----towards a collection of floating pieces, some of which seem to fit together in the vaguest sort of way, and some of which now seem to have nothing at all to do with one another. And if you could only get warm, if, if , if you could only get warm, it would be okay, but you pile on coat after coat and button everything tight and wrap the scarves around and don’t even see the stares you’re beginning to get from others in the orchestra----just get back to that side. I have to get back to that side, where it’s warm. My god, I’m beginning to panic. My body seems immune now to whatever I cover it with–it seems to be burning up cold, somehow, freezing towards a heat that will consume me entirely soon, if I let it. They’ve become the same thing, heat and cold, so there’s so longer any way to measure the world, no longer any way to measure myself in the world, since the most basic of opposites has been removed, merged towards a oneness that renders my mind, built upon contingincies, mute, obsolete.

The Christians Are Coming!

2004-12-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

8:55AM

It’s a bright, glorious Sunday morning and sometimes on Sunday mornings like this I wish I still had a church I could believe in. I still carry with me the urge for reverence, the urge to wrap some notion of the sacred within a familiar ritual. I remember those dry, bright Presbyterian mornings, especially the winter Sundays, in the Fremont Avenue Presbyterian Church, dressed in some starchy little boy suit, so clean and pink up in one of the balconys on either side, sitting on the hard wooden pews next to Patty Brodsky or John Furman or Shelly Johnston, watching Dr. Pearsall lift his tight arms up to prepare the choir for some opening hymn, his rimless spectacles sparkling in the smart, clean protestant light, and then later, watching him seat himself simply (he moved so efficiantly–I adored him) behind the enormous pipe organ and begin playing the opening to "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow." Such order, even the long stained glass windows running down either sides of the high vaulted dome, though gorgeous, even sumptuous, in some cases, one might say, still glowed with a certain amount of restraint, and a kind of order that seemed nearly mathematical. This was not the slovenly sacredness, the tarted up drag, of the Catholics down at Assumption on Jackson Avenue, nor was it the crazed lunacy of the evangelicals today in their wall-to-wall-carpeted mall churches, speaking in tongues and thinking wishfully towards apocalypse. This was the stone-floored, wood-pewed, high-domed, simple mainstream protestanism that was at that time the center of the religious tide flowing through the country. The church turned near gaudy at Easter, and Christmas, but only nearly, the design itself somewhow made such extravagance impossible. I loved the sound of that pipe organ and I loved pulling out the old hymnbooks from the little wooden shelves attached to the back of each pew and then standing up and singing out next to Patty and John and Shelly. I loved the little program, a kind of Playbill that we could follow along. I loved the smoothness of the pews, the wood always seemed polished to such a shine that you could actually make out some primitive reflection of yourself in it, at least enough to check to see if a piece of your hair was sticking up. There was a simplicity to things here, a simplicity bold enough to presume to carry within it all the mysteries of the universe, even the scientific mysteries, but never presumtuous enough to claim an ability to articulate those mysteries entirely, certainly never presumtuous enough to claim the sort of flat-footed literalness that robs the evangelicals of all that mystery and drains their religion of its real power as a result. There was room here for science, there was room here for anything good and clear and bright. It was, it seems to me now, a church built from without, meaning a church that existed as a kind of reflection of the community in which it found itself, like democracy itself, it was in service to that community, it was a symbol of the best of that community. My sense today is that the evangelical churches are built from within. They are essentially fascist in nature, not democratic, since their purpose is not to merely reflect the best in the community and bring that out but to impose from above an absolute plan, an absolute solution. Everything is planned. There is little patience for the very things that make us human and deserve our greatest attention.

It is the height of irony that the political party that worked hardest in the 20th Century to defeat centralized government, to defeat the very legitimacy of any kind of socialism, should, in the end----having witnessed the death of the greatest tree in the forest of socialism, Soviet Communism, having succeeded so purposefully in dismantling, bit by tiny bit, so many pieces of the socialism we ourselves incorporated during the Depression in the New Deal and later on in the Great Society, recognizing that capitalism was a good system, yes, but one that needed to be tamed and regulated, like a great river, in order to reap the most benefit from it, just as the Colorado was tamed in order to allow the Southwest to bloom fully----that the Rebublican Party, the mantra of which has been for so long-- less government, less government, less government-----should, in the end, be controlled by a group of people who are no less idealogues than Lenin himself----is really quite amazing. The Christian Right wants the world to be a certain way and it has a plan for it and our government, run now almost exclusively by a party that has claimed its central principle to be mistrust of government, is now so in debt to this group of antinomian religious lunatics, who are no less convinced of the absolote rightness of their claims than the most ardent Bolshevick in the early days of the Russian Revolution, that it has become precisely what it spent its whole life fighting: a party that puts principle before people, ideas in front of facts.

Surely it's true that we live in a religious nation, a religious nation that is particularly Christian. The church I attended when I was a boy in the sixties seemed to me a church that existed and sustained itself from the bottom up, an institution whose bloom was the result of the deep roots of democracy planted in the specific soil of the little southwestern Pennsylvania town in which I was born and allowed to grow. And it was a church that was part of the largest religious force in the country. And it seems to me that our government at the time reflected that bottom up approach. Today our government still reflects the major religious force in the country. But the religious force has changed. Mainstream Protestantism has been replaced by the new evangelicals, who we called "Jesus Freaks" in the early seventies. And everything is now top down. Everything falls straight from the heavans, straight from the word of god, or government, and that voice has become increasingly, and frighteningly, the same one. Forget bottom up, forget roots in the soil. All that matters is the "truth." The Russians have come at long last, but they’ve come disguised as Christian proselityzers, aiming to shape the world into a perfect heavan on earth. Christians of the world unite! You've got nothing to lose but your freedom!

2004-12-04T06:04:00.000-08:00

8:12AM

Dreaming of John Goodman

We were hooking up for some sort of sex scene, mildly S&M, though it’s all very unclear to me now. I went to his place, a non-descript apartment in a place that felt oddly like Baltimore, and it was drab and messy and not the sort of place one would expect John Goodman to be living in. But in the dream it made perfect sense to me. This was his secret life, apparently, and I knew all about it already and I was kind of in love with him, I think. When I got there two boys grabbed me and blindfolded me and gagged me and I was terrified, thought I’d really gone in over my head this time. And they really were boys and I worried about their actual ages. And then there was some mild sex play–though it was all vaguely unsatisfying–all of it hurried, anxious to move on to the next thing, like A.D.D. sex, so everything just felt flat. Goodman didn’t participate. When they finally took the blindfold off and the sex was over (how that was determined I have no idea since no one came, as far as I can remember–maybe Goodman did? Watching?) I saw him spread out across the big couch, his arm propped up behind his head, staring at us with a vaguely satisfied grin on his face. It had all been just a game and everything was fine now and here comes Aunt Mildred with some cold drinks for all of us. Yes, it was the oddest thing, there seemed to be a trio, at least a trio, of Goodman aunts or older sisters, living with him in this drab Baltimore apartment, though it seemed as if one of them ,at least , lived in the apartment across the hall, since she kept barging in and making a fuss. And they were all former show girls—in their seventies now–but all made up still----and in quite good shape—dressed in bright white pants suits with tassled, glittery blouses, with white, white hair pushed up high from weekly visits to the beauty parlor, and boots even, I think they were wearing boots. And the whole thing was hilarious and they were hilarious but it all seemed perfectly normal, as if we’d done this a thousand times before, and they had iced-tea and lemond-ade and Coca Cola–and Goodman thanked them and I woke up, then, to "When the Saints Go Marching In," the tune I’ve got my phone programmed to when Fred calls, and I told Fred the dream and he said, yes indeed, that was a strange one.

We’d planned on going to Sonya and Cleverson’s party out in Brooklyn but something came over me yesterday and I could barely get out of bed all day. Honestly, I must’ve slept 20 hours yesterday. I was like a cat, I was like Mr. Grant, waking up briefly to drink some water and then falling back into bed. At first I did get up and had some breakfast and showered and got dressed, thinking I’d go downtown to drop off some papers at Kevin’s and deposit a check. I even had my shoes on. And then I just laid back down, fully dressed, shoes still on, and slep for another four hours. There were phone calls from David Groff regarding the blog and my health and he gave great advice regarding PR people for the book and then Jeff called and called and we talked about it but I could barely keep my eyes open. There was a call from my mother(she’d gone out with Clare and Gary the night before to see Lauren in the highschool band and no one had mentioned my phone-fit Sunday morning), and a call for a Greg Martin. I began to worry that I was anemic. I began to worry that I was diabetic and had collapsed into a kind of sugar shock. I began to worry that this was the beginning of the end. I had no fight in me whatsoever. None. Finally, I did manage to get myself back up and out of the house and go downtown to Kevin’s. I figured the fresh air would help. Stupidly, I hadn’t called first and the office was closed, so I deposited my unemployment check and came back uptown—a long subway ride simply to deposit a check. When I got back I ate some noodles then collapsed into bed again, thinking perhaps a few more hours of sleep would do and I’d still be able to manage to go to the party at Sonya’s. But when Fred called again around 8 I still felt drugged and lost. I had to take a close look at the new bottle of ibuprofen I’d bought the night before, thinking that perhaps I’d bought a cold medicine by mistake–some generic cold and flu ibuprofen or something–and that the reason I was feeling so drugged was because I was popping 2, 3 of these cold pills every 4 hours for the pain in my lower back. But it was just regualr ibuprofen. I called Sonya and got Cleverson and said I wouldn’t be coming then slept a bit more and then ordered some dumplings and mai fun soup from Ollies. Read Proust, great scene with M. Norpois and Berma, and then the food came and I watched Big Fish on demand, which made me weep, literally weep, at least three or four times.

Feeling more like myself today, thank god, so maybe it was just a delayed reaction to the stress of the extended holiday and the drama with Clare and the bad meatloaf I had at Reme’s up on Broadway on Thursday night.

2004-12-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

Dreaming of the Famous

Elizabeth Taylor was there, drunk, very, very, drunk, and we were all indulging her because she was, well, Elizabeth Taylor. She looked frail and very old, though still very much like Elizabeth Taylor. At one point she stumbled and her dress flipped up, revealing a small, flabby belly, with something poking out in the center, as if she had a hernia. I felt sorry for her, but not too, since she still had that voice and that face and those eyes and she was just all there, the whole package, still, as I imagine it, having never actually met the woman, so more than anything I was simply mesmerized. She was sitting at our table, I think, and we were all at a shooting for what seemed to be a great big TV promotional for the Democrats, to re-invigorate the left after losing the election—it would be, it seemed, kind of like the I Love New York Campaign in the 70's. I don’t know why I was there. I suppose I’d become somewhat famous—mildly famous, perhaps, though I have no idea why. It was clear that my fame was relatively new, though. My big scene came with Nicole Kidman, who was also, I think, sitting at our table (the whole dream was a combination film shoot and old-fashioned awards ceremony—stars seated around big round tables, a plethora of drinking glasses and wine glasses and champagne flutes and bottles arrayed before them) and she was standing on a kind of bridge and said her line rather dramatically–it was confrontational, the scene, I think, and I had to call out to her from just off the bridge and reach out to her–or was I on the bridge and Nicole Kidman on land?—Yes, I think that’s how it ended up–me up on the bridge, me in the center, me in the spotlight. How all this worked into the big promotional to re-invigorate the Democrats I have no idea. And my big line was something about a blue chandelier. "And what of the Blue Chandelier?" I think I had to ask–and there was the sense that the Blue Chandelier was a film she’d made, or I’d made, or we’d both made (in fact it’s the title of a long short story I wrote and never published)–but it was also somehow part of the mini-narrative that had been contrived for the ad. And Nicole Kidman turned and reacted, shocked, beautiful, and she said something, though I can’t remember what, breathy and impassioned and kind of funny too, as if she were making fun of herself, half Virginia Woolf, half Satine from Moulin Rouge—and that was supposed to be the moment. I was just the relatively unknown newcomer setting her up with the question and then she delivered. But then for some reason I swung around on the bridge and lifted up my left leg and swivelled around and did something with my body, I want to stay–spread my arms akimbo–but it wasn’t that–it was a fanstastic movement, elegant and grand and totally unexpected–and I delivered the line again, not the whole line, just "Ah---The Blue Chandelier!!!" as if recalling the most magnificent thing in the world, with such grandeur and affectation that it stopped the whole shoot, everything stopped, and there was a kind of hushed amazement, awe, even, as if I’d just made history with that one moment, as if it was entirely clear to everyone that that moment was the moment I passed from being a relative newcomer to a fullblown star. I’d stolen the moment. I’d stolen the moment, and not just from anybody, I’d stolen the moment from Nicole Kidman.

Then there was some dispute about where to go after the shoot. After my take with Nicole Kidman, Amanda Plummer came up to me, wearing a big bulky wool sweater, like three sizes too big for her, and squatted down next to where I was sitting, and started chatting, as if we were very close friends, and all the while I had to keep refraining from saying things like: I can’t believe Amanda Plummer is my friend. I can’t believe Elizabeth Taylor wants me to join her after the shoot. I can’t believe I just upstaged Nicole Kidman. As she approached me her eyes, so friendly and full, were already telling me how impressed she was with what I’d just done, but not surprised, since she knew all along, and she wanted to know what I was doing after the shoot–a group of her friends were going out–and there was something so soft, something so soothing about Amanda Plummer, all wool and courdorroy, and for some reason she didn’t have a British accent and at one point she actually morphed into Lili Taylor, I think. Elizabeth was getting drunker and I think Shirly McClaine had now intervened and was trying to get Elizabeth to calm down, and she was very much in control, Shirly, as if she’d done this for Elizabeth Taylor a thousand times before. It was now clear a decision would have to be made. I really wanted to go out with Amanda/Lili and her friends, but Elizabeth Taylor? Elizabeth Taylor? How could one possibly refuse an invitation to join Elizabeth Taylor after a shoot, no matter how blotto she was? But then the dream faded out.

There was another–I can’t remember it, though, oh, no wait, there was more to the Democrat promotional dream. When I was talking to Amanda Plummer I asked her how it was all going to end up—what the big finale was going to be–Kenneth Branagh rising from below the stage? I asked, and she laughed, and said, no, no, he’ll be there but Al Sharpton will be on the platform–Al Sharpton will rise from below into the mass of celebrity.

So I’ve been a lazy blogger. Tuesday was the long train ride to Pittsburgh–to Mom and Gil’s new place out in the woods on top of some hill. Then Thanksgiving dinner at Clare and Gary’s with the Krayes and a bunch of the Mulheran crowd, a large enough group to require a kiddie table, which, for some strange reason, Clare set up in the guest room upstairs, and, in addition, she had Gary, Don G. and John Mulheran eat with plates on lap in the living room with the television set on. Maybe they wanted to watch whatever game was on but still–I just do not understand this–having the television on all the time thing—Jay, of course, does it, Gary and Clare seem to do it, Chelsea and Dave do it, Mom and Gil seem to be doing it now, too, having two television sets (they bought a flat screen for the little den) in an apartment half the size of their former one where they only had one. I resent it. I simply can’t stand it. Thankfully I think it was Clare who had the good sense to suggest the TV be turned off (or maybe just the sound turned down, I can’t remember) as she said grace prior to dinner, but then it was immediately turned on again and never went dark again. The food was good. We played a few games after dinner and it was fun and the whole thing was actually quite nice.

I got in Tuesday night and Wednesday Mom and I drove around Bellevue and Pittsburgh in the rain (always raining in Pittsburgh). I’d wanted to take a look at the reservoir for chapter ten. They’ve unearthed it, which ruins the whole idea for the story, but that, of course, doesn’t matter, since it wasn’t unearthed then, and it is fiction, after all, anyway. We did a full circle around the city then, up to Mount Washington and around to Homestead–where the old steel works have been replaced entirely by an uninspired mallish kind of place—and then over the river and into the city. It was too rainy to actually walk around. I wanted to get a closer look at the Gulf Building and the Frick Building and some others– the Steel Building too, of course---also for chapter ten–but it was just too rainy so we stayed in the car and just drove around slowly since the city was virtually dead, anyway. I get the feeling the heart of that city is now actually dead. They just can’t seem to get people to live down there and I don’t understand that. So there’s just more and more and more sprawl eating up the woods to the north and elsewhere----places around where Clare and Gary live----Maybe had we driven out to Shadyside we would’ve seen something more urbanized in a humane way–where people live and work, near the University–and there are shops and it’s like a village, the way humans, I think, at least, are built to live, rather than in these atomized developments whose only point of intersection is often an enormous Giant Eagle grocery store or Sams Club or just some big, fat, sprawling, mall, perched up high on a hill, with enough parking for five thousand cars.

Mom and I saw the new Bridget Jones at the big theater in Homestead. I can’t remember the name of the development–Riverfront something----and I’ve forgotten the movie entirely—really, nearly everything about it, though it was reliably watchable while we were sitting there eating our popcorn and sipping our Cokes. We always end up seeing something like that—something that drops from my head the moment the screen goes dark----well, Shall We Dance, I have to say, for some reason–I’m a little embarassed—has stuck with me, somehow— Gil had something to do but we met him after (or before? I can’t remember) for lunch at Max’s Allegheny Tavern–and I had great kielbasa.

There’s more. I stayed over at Gary and Clare’s Thursday night and Friday morning we piled in the car. He told Clare that they were driving me to the Cleveland airport (I’d gotten a good deal on a ticket) but then when we reached Clarion on 79 the jig was up and Clare seemed thrilled to be coming to New York. The surprise trip would be his 20th wedding anniversary gift to her. Tickets to The Producers. Museums. They would stay at my place Friday night then at the Hilton on 6th Saturday. I suggested Michael Jordan’s steakhouse in Grand Central for dinner Friday night and we ate there with Clare’s nice, Jessica, who’s 25 and a first year law student at Brooklyn College, and who I last saw 20 years ago at Gary and Clare’s wedding—she was the 5 year old flower girl. We walked around a bit after dinner, looking at the train station and then over to the Chrysler Building and across 42nd Street. Straight to bed when we got home. And in the morning, at 7:30, Gary taps me on the shoulder and says they’re leaving, and I say, what? And he says they’ve got to go. And I have no idea where they’re going at 7:30 in the morning. The car’s in the garage on 155th. They’re going to have to pay extra to put it in the Hilton prior to check-in, I guess, but he’s saying something about Clare wanting to get to the museums and I say the museums don’t open until at least 10 and what’s the rush? A cup of tea, coffee? Jay had actually gone out and bought breakfast things. I’d bought oranges to squeeze. I was going to fresh squeeze orange juice for these two. No, no, she wants to go now, we’ll call you later today--- and Clare’s nowhere in sight, I imagine she’s out in the hallway with the luggage, having already pressed the elevator button. There is a sense of flight–a sense of fleeing–a sense of "Let’s just get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible." and I’m hurt, my feelings are hurt, and I’m insulted, but I just say okay and goodbye. They haven't even showered.

Clare has always fancied herself something of a bohemian, I think, a little bit different, artistic–she is, after all, an art teacher. I haven’t received one store bought greeting card from her since the day she met my brother over 20 years ago. She’s made them all herself, with the help of the girls, of course, when they were younger. I think she used to call them ClareCards–something like that–a little trademark kind of thing on the back. Very creative. This past summer she spent her time at the cottage painting day lilies----later, she copied them onto the four panes of glass from one of the original windows of the cottage—that window is now hanging in the living room of their little two story house out in Zelienople. I always knew this creative part in my sister-in-law wasn’t really anything particulalry radical, but it always offered me a little hope—it seemed like a way in----a way into a shared perspective—oh, who knows? But now I realize that there was never any way in–that there isn’t even the slightest trace of the bohemian in her, that she’s merely the most typical, fearful, bourgeois imaginable-----Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she secretly voted for Bush. She’s just a terrified, middle-aged white woman, trying to get by, clinging to every little morsel the awful system will spit out for her. Put it this way—Don’t bother inviting her to the revolution. She has day lilies to paint. And greeting cards to design.

I may regret posting this on the blog but I don’t care. I’ve broken through something in the last few days. When Clare had the gall to have Jessica call me at 7:30 on Saturday evening to apologize for not getting in touch with me during the day, I knew I wouldn’t be able to pretend everything was just fine the next time I spoke with her. That’s the way we’ve always done things in our family. And it’s the way, I think, they’ve always done things in her family as well. No one talks about anything, ever. No one fights. No one yells. I don’t have time for this anymore. So when Gary called me on Sunday to say hello and thank me for letting them stay Friday night I said no problem, of course, but then I told him I was hurt and insulted by their leaving so early and I knew it wasn’t him, it was her, so put your wife on the phone, would you? I can barely remember what either of us said. I remember specifically saying that it was insulting that she didn’t even have the common courtesy to say goodbye and thank you. That’s about all I remember. I don’t remember her even trying to provide an explanation. It was just all so weird. Even if she hated the apartment, was frightened by the "mixed" neighborhood, didn’t like Jay (which seems impossible–everyone loves Jay the moment they meet him), she could have at least said thank you and goodbye. She didn’t. And that’s just fucking rude. The Queen of England would’ve said thank you and goodbye. Surely, Clare Torso could have done the same.

The following day Michael Mulheran, after having not heard from him for over a year, called me, which was even weirder, but it made a kind of Mulheran-sense, though I’m not sure why.

Maybe I’m going a little bit crazy with all that’s happening with my health, displacing my own fear about death and illness into these little outbursts of drama—but it sure does feel good to yell at people, especially when it’s your phony sister-in-law, who was, by the way, so terrified of the rats on the tracks in the subway that I thought she was going to puke up her 40 dollar Michael Jordan swordfish all over the 125th Street platform.

2004-11-18T19:54:00.000-08:00

8:22AM

I’m trying to find a better routine. I’m trying to find a routine, period, let’s just say. I saw Robert Caro interviewed by Bud Miskin on NY1 and he said that he could write anywhere in the world but at home so that’s why he has an office where he does the work. I think that’s what I need to do. I can’t afford to rent office space. But there’s no reason in the world I can’t go downtown every day in the morning and work, say, in the Fogelman library. I managed to do it yesterday for a few hours and it felt right and I did manage roughly one good page of work on chapter ten so...

I’m having misgivings about this blog.

Later:

10:37PM

I’d been thinking about the word inventory. I’d been thinking about the idea of Jay and Fred and Mom going through my things, my journals, Playbills, birthday cards, letters, ticket stubs, cassettes, pictures, all the stuff a person accumulates and as much as they’d be touched by this or that, for the most part, it would all just go, it would all mean just about nothing to them, and that would be it, and then it would be gone, and so I began to think about taking a massive inventory. I thought if I could write down each thing, explain each object, MAKE IT KNOWN to someone other than myself, on the page, give it a life on the page, EXPLAIN, make explicit the meaning, the very personal meaning, to me, and then, though most everything would still probably end up in the garbage truck out on Saint Nicholas one morning, the object, the song, the picture, the letter, would live on, they’d live on. I’m sitting here crying right now because this is what writing is, in fact, this is why I’m a writer, because I don’t want life to go away, because I so desparately want life to have meaning, and I still think that, I still believe that somehow there can be meaning if only I CAN FIND IT IN LANGUAGE. And it became so clear to me tonight, when I put in the Both Sides Now Joni Mitchell cassette, the collection of standards she did, the one Fred bought and that I associate so closely with Woodside and with him and with our relationship when it was still all just fresh possibility. This song, in particular, this slow, lovely rendition of Both Sides Now just breaks my heart and so now it’s known, why this particular song on this particular cassette, the particular object that contains the particular song, means so much to me. I actually went out and bought a new cassette player so that I could take an inventory of all the music I have on tape, so I could hear it and write about it and this one, well, it’s so beautiful, and I can see Fred on the Brooklyn Bridge, all the bright, bright, spring blue behind him, and the two towers, still there, and all the lunches we shared in Union Square Park, how he’d bound up from the Trade Center at lunch time just to sit in the park and have lunch with me and the whole squirrel universe we created, all the squirrels, all the squirrels, and that night in the Trade Center plaza—the summer of 2001, was it?–or 2000–listening to Phillip Glass as the sun disappeared down behind the towers—so there, there you have it, if anyone should pick up this homemade tape of Joni Mitchells Both Sides Now, know this, read this, I’ve got it catalogued.

I think that’s just how I may approach this whole blog thing, after all, since keeping it as a regular journal just doesn’t seem right to me, it’s not what I want. So that’s why I’ve gone through all the old papers and journals and begun sorting them by years, and why I’ve begun a new blog, 1977, which was the first year I started journalling, and I may even get more obsessive about all this cataloguing—I mean like photos and letters and all that too–using each one as a kind of launching pad to memory and meaning.

So–good—that’s settled then. In terms of this week–well Monday was S—at noon and the yoga fart later, Tuesday was flirting with R—the dermatologist, who’s always encouraging me to get laid, and said, this time, as we walked out of the examining room up towards the reception area, to give him a call should I need to talk, or whatever...and it also happened to be "screaming at Wadler’s secretary day," Yvonne–and I won’t go into all that–let’s just say I took control and probably made enemies of Wadler’s entire support staff–but hey–I’m the one with cancer, not them. Wednesday was more fighting with Wadler people then downtown to meet up with Fred and we walked over to Jim’s then back west and north to Cleverson’s show on 27th Street then we split up and I went to Fogelman and read heartbreaking JT Leroy and wrote about a page and a half in chapter ten, then dinner with Sonya at Typhoon on 8th Street, then home. Petscan tomorrow morning at 7:30—on the east side.

2004-11-14T08:57:00.000-08:00

10:27AM

I went to the Cutting Room last night, to see the Wau Wau Sisters. Cara’s boyfriend, Pete, produced the show and the CD they were giving away. Some adolescent girls, backed by a boy and girl no more than five or six years old, opened for the Wau Wau Sisters, and it was jarring and strange, watching these little girls pretending to be rock stars—one more dollop of authenticity and they’d have been grabbing their crotches—It was, frankly, embarassing, and not only was the girls’ behavior embarassing, their voices kind of sucked too, which made the mock vulgarity (think of two eleven year old girls in Spinal Tap) even less bearable. It was hard to tell, actually, since they were screaming so loud and their voices were of the eleven year old girl variety, with all that squeak and power----had they not been so fucking loud and not so distracting acting like Axel Rose we might have discovered that they actually had good voices. Fun for the parents of these kids, I guess, sucked for the rest of us.

Then the Wau Wau Sisters came out, opening with a trapeze routine, and then launching into a series of funny songs. But they just weren’t outrageous enough. I laughed out loud at times, and, for the most part, totally enjoyed the show, but it just seemed to me that they weren’t going far enough, being black enough, something...I kind of expected, after having checked out the website and then after the trapeze opener, that I was going to see something I’d never seen before, something entirely original and wild and completely over the top, but it just never seemed to happen. There were moments, some really clever bits on stage, and bits of dialogue and chatter with the audience—"Country Ham" was hysterical, though it rests on one joke, one really, really funny joke, but just one, nonetheless, and after that, with very few exceptions, I really felt as if I’d seen it all before, somewhow, in bits on SNL, in Kiki and Herb, and other places, it just wasn’t enough.

We hung out afterwards, having drinks, Cara and me and her boyfriend, Pete, and a bunch of people Cara knew. There was one gay guy in the group, as far as I could tell, and we shared cigarettes outside together and I thought maybe there was a little flirtation going on but that never seemed to go anywhere. And pretty soon I found myself eating hotdogs and french fries, and then saying goodnight.

2004-11-13T21:38:00.000-08:00

11:22PM

1972

Roundabout(jon anderson/steve howe)

I’ll be the round about
The words will make you out ’n’ out
I'll spend the day your way
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
In and out the valley

The muses dance and sing
They make the children really ring
I spend the day your way
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
In and out the valley

Chorus
In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there
One mile over we’ll be there and we’ll see you
Ten true summers we’ll be there and laughing too
Twenty four before my love you’ll see
I’ll be there with you

I will remember you
Your silhouette will charge the view
Of distant atmosphere
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
Even in the valley

Chorus

Along the drifting cloud the eagle searching
Down on the land
Catching the swirling wind the sailor sees
The rim of the land
The eagle’s dancing wings create as weather
Spins out of hand
Go closer hold the land feel partly no more
Than grains of sand
We stand to lose all time a thousand answers
By in our hand
Next to your deeper fears we stand
Surrounded by a million years

I’ll be the roundabout
The words will make you out ’n’ out
I’ll be the roundabout
The words will make you out ’n’ out

In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there
Twentyfour before my love and I'll be there

I’ll be the roundabout
The words will make you out ’n’ out
I spend the day your way
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
In and out the valley

Chorus

Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah

While I was working on chapter 10—the boys up on the reservoir in the summer of 1974—this morning, I don’t know why but this song popped into my head, and suddenly it made me feel so good to think that this wonderful song was pulsing throught their heads----as it was mine–at that time, in the early seventies, when, it seems to me now, as a nostalgic 42 year old man, burdened with all the romance of memory and vanished youth, that all the popular music was about a kind of smart JOY, a SPIRITUAL HOPE-----

August 8, 1974

They are up on the reservoir now, Pestas and Gabriel, sitting atop the white concrete dome, in tight, faded, short short, Levi cutoffs, the bottoms frayed from many washings, shirtless, watching the early August sun collapse down behind the smoldering smokestacks of Neville Island and the Ohio River Valley. The boys come here after dinner sometimes, climbing over the chainlink fence at the end of yellow-bricked Highland, scurrying around the edges of the inner fence, then, that surrounds the great white dome, until they reach the spot where a hole’s been dug beneath the fence and they pull themselves under and then up, up onto the great expanse of the top of the resevoir (most of the actual tank is buried beneath the Highland Hill) rushing up through the sky, across the bright white dome, all the way to the very top, where there’s a small hole (no more than a few inches wide) encircled with chicken wire and topped with a tin roof that usually serves as their destination, though sometimes they like to hang out on one of the sides of the dome, resting on all that curved blankness, as if laying on the edge of the moon. They love the sense of dislocation, on the sides, without the tin-roofed hole to tell them where they are, the expanse so wide and deep that it’s possible to lose all sense of place, to find themselves, if they’re careful to keep their eyes within a certain set of parameters, reduced to mere figures on white in blue, two figures moving through sheer white against a backdrop of sheer blue, and green, too, if they’re careful to stay on the valley side.

Tonight they’re at the top, facing away from the valley, looking down at the little town of Bellevue, in the immediate foreground, the two boys "hidden in plain view," Pestas once said, "watching from the castle," Gabriel liked to say, at 8 and 9 and 10, but now, at 12 he thinks of it more in terms of space, "like watching from the moon," he says. Indeed when you’re coming down Union Avenue, the two-lane tucked into the hill on the other side of the valley, the white dome of the reservoir looks like the side of the moon, or the top of a planet buried beneath the Highland Hill.

Moving their eyes out beyond the town and the Ohio, their eyes are drawn to the left, slighly to the east and south, to the river’s source, the Golden Triangle, where the Monongahela and Allegheny collide to form the Ohio, and the little skyline of Pittsburgh, perfectly proportioned now that the US Steel Building has been completed, sparkling faintly in the summer evening haze of the Valley. From this perspective, six miles north and west, the new, three-sided skyscraper, has had the effect of drawing together all the smaller, older, buildings----The Gulf Building, the Mellon Center, the Frick building, the Koppers, Alcoa, the glittering gold Hilton in front of Gateway Center, standing sentinal now, a shining gold curtain, before the refurbished Point State Park and old Fort Duquene, the new fountain blasting high into the blue of the valley sky (though the boys are too far away to make out such details)—the new sixty-four story Steel Building, planned at one point to be the tallest building in the world, has had the effect, by its sheer bulk and height, of pulling together this strange mix of the neo-classical, the art-deco, the international, to make, finally, a skyline, like a proud father protectively gathering together his eclectic brood of children for a family portrait.

To the boys, though, sitting at the very top of the reservoir, their scraped knees folded up beneath their chins, the skyline is a mere smudge, one or two strokes on a canvas, though the smudge that is undoubtedly the central focus of the painting, and a smudge that seems to suggest, from this water dome far away on a hill in the northern suburbs, all the mysteries of the world..

Paul leans back, unfolds his legs and rests his head in the palm of his hand.

There’s the Cathedral, he says, lifting his free hand vaguely to the left of the skyline.

Where?

There.

You mean for the Catholics? Gabriel says, squinting now out into the open sky.

The Cathedral of Learning, you dope, for Pitt.

Oh, yeah, where Marc’s going.

Right.

I can’t see it.

It’s better over on Summit, you can see everything over there.

It’s behind the Steel Building?

Yeah, here, and Paul pulls himself up, stands directly behind Gabriel and leans over his shoulder, pointing.

Just follow my finger, he says.

I still can’t see it. I thought you couldn’t see it from here, only from the steps on Summit.

It’s there, Gabe, you can’t miss it, look.

But Gabriel still can’t seem to locate the great neo-gothic Cathedral of Learning, its forty-two stories unmistakable just beyond the downtown skyline, rising up like a gracious assault into the Oakland sky, dwarfing everything around it.

Okay, wait, Paul says, squatting down behind Gabriel now and placing his two hands on either side of Gabriel’s head.

Just hold steady, he says, let me move your head. His own head is now directly behind the younger boy’s and Gabriel can feel Paul’s breath on the back of his neck, can smell the piece of grape Bazooka he put in his mouth just a few minutes before, and the older boy’s sweat, mild, almost sweet, and Breck Shampoo, and cigarettes. Paul’s face is now directly beside Gabriel’s as he moves his head towards the Cathedral. The touch of Paul’s hands on his temples feels good. He can feel Paul’s skin now, his chest, shoulders, arms, up against his own exposed upper body.

Relax, Gabriel, Paul says, you’re tensing up.

But...

Don’t think, just let me move your head.

Okay.

Now, Paul says, pulling his face even closer and moving his right hand from Gabriel’s temple to his chin, holding the smooth jaw tight between thumb and forefinger while at the same time placing his left hand securely on top of Gabriel’s head, as if he’s going to unscrew a jar.

You see the Steel Building, right?

Right. Gabriel can feel Paul’s sun-red face brushing against his own now. He feels an itch rising on his nose, the skin peeling from too much sun at Canadohta the week before, and motions to scratch but Paul stops him.

Here, he says, let me scratch it, and he does

Now, Paul says, very, very slowly to the left, not much, it’s not far, it’s just the next smudge, it’s right, it’s right there, there, he says, holding Gabriel’s head steady now, their faces smashed together.

You see it?

Yeah, Gabriel, says, though he’s unsure if the smudge he’s seeing is the smudge Paul’s talking about. Paul releases Gabriel’s head and chin and slips down behind him, wrapping his legs down around in front and his arms around Gabriels chest, they’re like bent upright spoons now, sitting high on the bright white water dome.

I’m going there too. You should go there, Gabe. It’s a really good school. Did you know that building is the biggest school building in the whole western hemisphere?

That’s so neat. I’ll probably go there too, I guess. We went down once and saw all the different rooms at Christmas-time. My mom loves that stuff, it was so cool, like, the Polish room and the Hungarian room and the French room, all the different kinds of Christmas trees.

There is a plane, now, rising into the sky, straight up into the dark, dark blue gathering behind them, on the other side of the valley, where it’s all just green velvet thickness, it looks like wildnerness, though it’s not, not really, not anymore, and the sound reaches the boys and they raise their heads skywards, stretch their necks back, in a kind of perfect unision, as if the move’s been choreographed, until it comes into view, this plane, moving so fast and so straight, as if diving deep in reverse, "Like a rocket," Gabriel says, "To the moon," Paul says, leaning back and back, taking Gabriel with him, until they’re lying flat, Gabriel on top of Paul, his head resting on the older boy’s chest, his shoulders resting on his thighs.

2004-11-12T16:32:00.000-08:00

A Personal History of Beds or All the Beds I Have Known (my own, not others I’ve merely slept in or fucked
in–that would be encyclopedic), or–and this was the original title I thought of-A Bed To Die In

I went to Macys yesterday and bought a bed. They were having a Veteran’s Day sale. Ever since I threw away that old ratty futon from Robert I had on top of my bed (I had the futon on top of the mattress–it softened it) I’ve been suffering from lower back pain. A part of me suspected that it might not be the bed, that the pain I was suffering might be related to the gallbladder cancer, but I just wouldn’t accept that. The bed I was sleeping on, after all, was an incredibly cheap thing I bought when I moved out to Woodside in 97–for something like 100 bucks, the whole thing, boxspring, mattress, and frame–at that big store on Queens Boulevard at about 50th Street (I’ve forgotten the name, a family name, a family business)–and after seven years it was in pretty bad shape, lumpy and way too soft–so I mentioned this to Fred and he said go to Macys, they’re having a sale on Thursday, so I did.

The thing was, well, ever since I was diagnosed with AIDS back in 93 I’ve had a moment each time I’ve moved when I’ve asked myself--- Is this a place I wouldn’t mind dying in? Could I die here peacefully? And then, and more importantly, WILL I die here? I felt pretty certain in 93 when I was diagnosed that I wasn’t going to die in Carrie Gengo’s place on 99th Street, the place Jay and I sublet for a year while she was studying in Italy, though with 9 t-cells and PCP, my death that year would have come as no surprise to anyone. And then Bleeker Street. I loved that place immensely, loved the time we spent there, the parties we had, the dinners we prepared, loved our open relationship with the guy downstairs and his dog, Joey, the skinny German Shepherd who developed the nasty habit of eating out of the cats litter box. Dying there didn’t seem like such a bad idea. But by that point I was kind of intent on surviving, starting therapy and getting involved in things I’d never done before and taking better care of myself. Then came 12th Street. I knew I couldn’t die on 12th Street. That’s one of the reasons I fled to Key West. Dying in that hovel on 12th Street would’ve been the height of ignominy.

There was the hostel in Key West then the dreadful attic space on Whitehead Street, which I came to love, actually, but was (Robert was right) simply unfit for a person in such precarious health. Finally, Robert’s place in the Truman Annex—620 Thomas Street (I still have the tag we had made up for Pluto with the address on it----I put it on my key chain after he died and have been carrying it with me ever since)—I could have died there. That wasn’t so bad. And I actually came quite close. But the new drugs came and then we moved back to New York, to 88th Street, which also was die–able or death-worthy (to coin a morbid phrase)----except that Robert went out of his mind there and ended up coke-binging and having sex in the loft bed all the time with that homeless guy who used to hang out in front of the Gristedes on 96th Street. The Woodside apartment, especially after Fred had helped me re-do the whole place so it really felt like a home, would have been fine, and I suffered through the Hodgkins there, with Fred’s help as well, but by that time everything seemed treatable, it all seemed surmountable somehow, the worst was over, and I’m not even sure if I ever asked myself the death question on Skillman Avenue. And now here, Saint Nicholas Avenue, well, well, well.

But this was supposed to be about beds, not apartments. And I was interrupted by the bed delivery. And now it’s hours later and the bed is all set up, the old one’s sitting out in the hallway, waiting for Jay’s arrival home so that he can help me drag it downstairs.I’ve gone up and down the island in the rain. I opened a new account at Chase on S–‘s advice, ate lunch at the BBQ up there in what used to be the Audobon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was shot, watched two women in front of me stop before beginning the chicken vegetable soup that came with their early bird special to say a rather lengthy prayer, mother and daughter, I assumed, the mother saying the prayer, the daughter looking embarassed, refusing to even join in with an amen at the end, and the mother seemed annoyed. Exhausted and bloated when I got back, I laid down on top of the new bed, which I’d already made up with the new set of sheets and comfortor, tried to coax the cat to try out the bed and found myself feeling a little pathetic, actually searching the whole apartment for the cat, determined to get him to try out the new bed with me. My god, you think you know what lonliness is and then something happens and you realize you’ve never had a clue, you’ve never even been close, it’s that bad. The phone rang just I was beginning to nod off. It was the insurance person, Ursula, from Standard, saying she needed to ask me a few questions before approving my claim for permanent disability, which, incidentally, I won’t be eligible for for six months. How was I was feeling today? How did I normally feel during the day? What did the doctors say? And so she’d be approving my claim and I should be getting my first check in April, for about 400 bucks. Oh joy. You take care of yourself, now, Greg, Ursula said, and I said, thank you, Ursula, thanks, bye bye. So then I had a phone fight with Luis about the ceiling in the bathroom and then went downtown to pick up pictures from Jay’s birthday dinner at the Maritime, stopped in at Gourmet Garage and paid astronomical prices for fruits and vegetables and very good cheese and then a bottle of red wine at the liquor store on Waverly, near the subway entrance, and then dragged my tired ass down the subway steps, past the old hippie guy who’s been playing his guitar there for what seems like decades, honestly.

And so what about this bed business? When I went into Macys yesterday and took the escalators up to the ninth floor, to the bed department, I was approached immediately by a a gay guy with lypodystophy in his face, a mattress salesman, with a red flower in his lapel, which means something special at Macys, if my memory as a shoe salesman there in the early eighties serves me right, he’s a floor manager or something, and the first bed he pointed out to me was the bed I ended up buying. Not the cheapest, but not the most expensive, either. He poo-poohed the cheaper ones, and I thought, well, geez, I might not need this thing for very long so...I’ve never bought a mattress in a real methodical way, like an adult, is what I mean, I guess, so when he pointed out the first one I just sat on the edge of it kind of tentatively and he said, Go ahead, lay back, put your feet up, get a feel for it, and so I did and tried to get a sense of what it might be like to sleep on it. I’m a salesperson’s dream because for some reason I seem to be very interested in pleasing them. Still, I did manage, I think for a moment, to forget about him as I laid back on the mid-priced mattress, and stared up at the white ceiling and white flouresent lights. Not much ambience in the mattress department, I must say, I guess because everyone NEEDS one—then again everyone NEEDS food too, but today I was willing to pay 2.99 a pound for a green pepper tastefully displayed in a wicker basket at the Gourmet Garage, the same green pepper I could’ve got at the neighborhood C-Town up here, sans wicker, for .99 a pound, so....Well, I laid back and closed my eyes and folded my hands on my chest in a self-conscious way (the guy was watching me, after all). I can never sleep this way, or even get comfortable like this, even in my own bed at home, since it always makes me think of death, it always makes me feel like I’m in a coffin. And it ocurred to me, THIS time as I had the usual thought this action invariably produces in me, in public now, laying on the mid-priced (not even mid-priced, really, more on the lower end of mid-priced--$578 for the whole thing) display model of "Coastline Cushion Firm" (I think that’s what it was called) in the middle of the mattress department on the 9th floor of Macy’s Department Store on 34th Street, that this might very well be the bed I would die in so I better make sure I like it.

I’m tired now and running out of steam.

I felt so inspired to write when I got home but now all I can think is: Will I ever write a true sentence?

I don’t care. It’s Friday night and I’m lonely and I need to find a man to share my new bed with, for more than an hour, for more than a night.

2004-11-08T20:08:00.000-08:00

9:12PM

Wadler today at New York Hospital–gorgeous old deco building—and I have to wait and wait and wait and there must be fifty people in the waiting room, waiting for chemo, looking like shit, some of them, at least (the dapper elderly couple next to me–he in bowtie and black jacket, she in an elegant black knee-length dress, being the great exception), a roomful of cancer patients, snoring, sneezing, coughing, crosswordpuzzling, chatting on cellphones, and I’m patient, patient, patient, reading the old New Yorker I threw in my bag in my rush out of the apartment this morning to get to the train to 72nd Street to the bus stop, across the street from the Dakota, gas lights flickering in the fall wind, which grows colder as the day moves forward, and weakens (the day, I mean, weakening, becoming brittle, cold, changing dramatically from balmy fall to almost-winter, as if the wind is systematically sucking all the light from the world, and the final nail can at long last be hammered down into summer’s coffin) and then up onto the bus and it swings around down fast to 66th and then plunges into the park, lit now with all the dying colors of an autumn day–the burnt oranges and reds, the leaves fluttering past the windows as we pull up out of the over-pass and sweep up towards Fifth and across to Madison and up again, back, to 72nd Street, and then over, over, into the foreign lands, at least for me–of the far upper east side–York Avenue. And it’s the Theresa-Heinz Kerry profile I meant to read but didn’t, the one I almost started, back in September, when I was at Kevin’s, waiting for Sam to draw blood, or something, and all this recent drama had yet to materialize fully, and Sam had said, I want to read that piece, that Judith Thurman piece, and I thought he thought I was trying to steal the magazine from the office, though I’m not sure I remember having ever seen the New Yorker among all the Body Postives and Men’s Healths and New York Magizines, in Kevin’s office, so I rolled the magazine up in a way that I imagined looked proprietory, as if I’d rolled the magazine up before (and I had), as if I could demonstrate to Sam that the fold had already taken place, before, coming from the subway, there was sweat on the pages from my hands, and said, simply, smiling, yes, I love her, I want to read it too, but then Sam had to take blood, and that day hurled us forward and I never got around to reading the piece. And now, sitting in this office of cancer patients, the dapper couple snuggling cutely just across from me (she wears black gloves, a hat, and bright red lipstick—she is 80 years old, at least), I open up the magazine to the photo of Heinz-Kerry, looking stunning, really, in a simple, white, button down blouse, staring straight into the lens, and something happens, something drops out of the photo,and I suddenly recall the feeling I had when I first laid eyes on the photograph, that day back in September in Kevin’s office, out in the waiting room just before Sam called me in to take blood, when it seemed inconceivable to me that this beautiful, smart, famously rich woman would not be the next President’s wife and that her presence (along with her husband’s, of course) would usher in a whole new era, allowing us to graduate out of the pimply adolescent miasma of the George W years (all that defensiveness, all that name-calling, all the rah rah rah rah, as if the country had been reduced to some little American town cheering in unison for its highschool football team) back to a future where the adults are in charge and speaking a foreign language is a good thing and now, well, what’s dropped out of the picture is it’s timeliness, it’s become a kind of instant artifact of a failed election, it isn’t what it was to me, it’s merely evidence, now, like the Time and Newsweek covers of Howard Dean, of what didn’t ocurr, and what might have been. How different that photo would look to me now if Kerry had one. Just like the Kerry profile on the cover of the Believer. How quickly the sobriquet "former Presidential candidate" was fastened onto John Kerry, and how sad the whole thing is.

I think the country needs to go on Oprah or Dr. Phil and confront the abusive relationship it’s got itself entangled in, confront the self-esteem issues, find the strength to stop the cycle of masochism that leads depressed milltowns like Pottsville Pennsylvania to vote overwhelmingly in favor of a man and a party that has done nothing for them in the past thirty years but drug them with god while stealing every last dime they have.

But–hey–I read the article anyway, with pleasure, and then more waiting, looking at Irving Penn photos and the other Judith Thurman piece on the photos–and this—she writes:

"(Walter) Benjamin, like Penn was smitten by Paris and French culture as a young man, and a central figure in his work is that quintessential Parisian, the flaneur. This idle stroller is adrift in the city, his passive senses exquisitely attuned. His greatest luxury is to have no purpose. Like the photographer and his subjects, he is a solitary figure. Even when the mud men of New Guinea, the sublime and enigmatic Mrs. Penn, the stunned children of Cuzco, and the wary old Colette return his gaze, it isolates them completely. Their mutual contemplation is that of the ambler staring----with the impartial gall of an infant or a predator----at passing strangers, one of whom may be himself, fractured in a shopwindow. There is probably no more impersonal, yet no more concentrated, distillation of intimacy." (italics mine—this is, I think, the theme of my novel.)

Finally, after finishing up the New Yorker and flipping back through a few times, and going back and reading the poems, and making sure I’d read all the cartoons, and then pulling out Proust and reading a dozen or so pages, the nurse finally called me. I’d waited nearly three hours.

And it was worth the wait. When I saw Sara, that day when he explained to me the very limited options he saw for me in terms of treating the cancer, it felt to me as if he’d just thrown the whole ball right into my lap and just got up and left. He did, in fact, leave the office, before I was finsished, he had an important phone call, he said, leaving his nurse practitioner to finish things up and hold my hand, though I’m sure I was far more reasonable than most–I didn’t cry–I was trying to grab onto anything at all, just one lousy piece of hope, anything at all, but Sara was just bleak bleak bleak, and I felt as if I’d suddenly been cast in a Lifetime movie and the plot was all laid out and all that was left for me was to be in that series of scenes showing the protagonist making the most of his final days, the last Thanksgiving, the last Christmas, a final birthday, sacharine music over top the whole thing, and then, well, death, and release, bittersweet, it would be, since, well, he had the time to make things right, to come to terms, and happy music at the end, somehow, because he would be remembered or whatever and oh my god I had to get the fuck out of that movie.

And Wadler, I have no idea how he did it, managed to pick the ball up out of my lap and bear it like a great doctor. The ball was in his lap now. There are questions about the August petscan–the hot spots are in the mediastynum (sp?), not in the lungs, so what did Baskin biopsy, anyway? Good question, he said, so another petscan is in order, and he’ll talk to Baskin. There’s a possibility that surgery is still an option, and radiation, and of course, then, chemo, all with a total poker face, he said it all with a poker face, which I liked. (And he wore no wedding ring) The beginning of a plan emerges, and with that some tiny seed of hope, and for the first time in three weeks, the world stops rattling, and I can breathe.

I know it’s still grim. But it’s less grim. A doctor seems to think he may have a plan. And right now that’s just awesome.

2004-11-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

3:47PM

It was a gorgeous fall day, warm, breezy,clear, and I wasted it in bed, forcing sleep with codeine cough syrup. I was out late–to the Boiler Room, Urge, The Hole, Unicorn, and had a lousy time, finally throwing myself into a cab on 8th at 22nd Street at around 3:30, a bag of chips and dip and a can of Campbell’s tomato soup in hand.

Julie King (I’ve forgotten her married name) is in town and Jay had mentioned that people were gathering for brunch today at Scratchers at two. It was just what I needed–a chance to get out of myself and socialize a little–and I’ve always been so fond of Julie so I kind of planned to go with Jay. But then, around noon, when I woke to Jay’s showering I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go. So I took another hit of cough syrup and crawled deeper into bed.

Now it’s close to four and instead of sitting at Scratchers in the East Village with all the Brits and Jay and maybe Charles and Dave Levy and Cara I’m sitting in Jimbo’s Hamburger Palace (Since 1970) at 162nd and Amsterdam, eating a cheeseburger deluxe off a styrofoam plate, alone.

When I woke again, about an hour ago, I tried to figure out just what it was that kept me from going. The word that popped into my head first was embarassment. I thought that odd—and didn’t trust it—but then I put it in context, put it in a sentence, actually, and it made a kind of wacky Greg-sense: I’m embarassed about being sick again. I’m embarassed by my illness.

Back in 95, I remember being at a big party at Matt and Julie’s, and then at that party out in Brooklyn at Graham and Sara’s (the party I based "The Last New York Party" on) and telling everyone about going to Key West and how excited I was. I’d grown used to my very, very thin face—I couldn’t see just how sick I looked until years later after I’d recovered and gained the weight back, and I looked at the photographs from that party—and now, well, it just seems like I’ve been dying for such a long time. And it’s just so tiresome. And I just can’t bear the idea of of being "the dying person" any more. This is so self-centered of me, really, when I think about Jay’s illness and Guy Bates. It’s just that right now if feels as if my mortality is so close to my skin, as if I’m wearing death on both sleeves, that I don’t trust myself to be chipper, hopeful, up-beat–I’d be a party pooper, frankly. I’m like a walking blob of sensitivity, unable to make sense of just about anything, monstrously angry one moment, deeply fatalistic and sad the next. Still, what I always fail to factor into the equation is just how being with people tends to lighten all this, to let me get out of myself for a few moments and engage in the world. As it is, I might as well be one of those men that must leave the group because he’s dying, forced to go off into the forest alone to die for the larger good of the group.

2004-11-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

9:30AM

There was Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, there was virtually a whole week, and I don’t know why, but I couldn’t bring myself to write. Something to do with the blog–sensing all those eyes, all that judgement, and worse, feeling disappointed that some of the people closest to me hadn’t even taken the time to read it. Fred and Bruce being the great exceptions, of course, and I should say that Mom did give it a go, though she found it too difficult. When she told me this I said I understood, and I did, but there was something unacceptable about it.

And, oh, the sky fell as well. Bush was re-elected, and now all the hand-wringing—what did the Democrats do wrong? which is, I think, the wrong question. The question is–what has gone wrong with the country–that it should so easily be manipulated by fear, that it should it allow itself to be hi-jacked by a group of people who value faith over reason, who feel that my being allowed to marry another man is a greater threat to the nation than our ruined reputation around the world, than our stale economy, than our enormous blooming national debt, than the incompetant handling of an unprovoked war that has left over a thousand Americans dead and tens of thousands wounded and countless (countless because no one can seem to agree on a number) Iraqi civilians dead as well? Gary Wills op-ed piece in the Times---
http://www.the-brights.net/post_election.htm http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/opinion/04wills.html?ex=1100592981&ei=1&en=806f25bb8addc950
---hit the nail on the head, and there doesn’t seem to be any possibility anymore to bridge the gap since both sides are so obviously working from an entirely different set of assumptions. Last night on Bill Mahr (the show was some of the most interesting television I’ve seen in a very long time) this gap was crystallized by a defensive (and perhaps slightly batty–what’s the word we used before Alzheimer’s?–senile, that’s it) Alan Simpson who seemed to lay the blame for Kerry’s defeat squarely at the feet of Mahr himself (and people like Susan Sarandon, who also made an appearance, and was eloquent). These religious folk are just sick and tired of all these New York Times-reading, latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, Hollywood elite types, making fun of them. Well, if they didn’t insert their beliefs so boldly into the public square they might be less likely to be made fun of, they might be less of a target. They’ve made themselves fair game. And yet they still insist on some of kind of immunity since, according to them, their beliefs are based in religion and should therefore be respected. I’d respect it if they kept it in their church and stopped trying to foist it into my government, and, by extension, because I’m part of the group they target most virulantly (where would they be without gay people?), into my life, into my own home, in fact. They're working actively to deny me my rights and yet somehow I should be more sensitive to their religious beliefs? If I stopped making fun of them would they get off my back? I don't think so.

After the Simpson and Sarandon interviews Mahr went to the panel and Andrew Sullivan seemed to be on the same page as Simpson. All this whining about respecting religion, about recognizing that the country was built upon a belief in god and so on. Well, there may be references to god in the founding documents, but it’s always been my impression that more than anything the country sprung from the Enlightenment, not faith. And that’s the country I want to live in.

I missed S–on Monday. Just completely forgot about the appointment. Jay and I were on the bus coming back from Warwick. I was so confused by having gone up Saturday night rather than Friday that I kept thinking it was Sunday. I’d even made a mental note to myself Monday morning to talk to him about something–tomorrow, I said to myself--- after Dave pulled the bus schedule from my hands in a spasm of control-freakishness and I didn’t say anything, pushed all my anger back down, and found myself rushing to search out Jay’s stash of cigarettes, and some faint flickering of my father ran through me as I stood outside, sucking on my first cigarette in days—the vague aura of "I’ll show him" clinging to me as if I were twelve years old again.

S—was understanding and we re-scheduled for Wednesday and by that point I was a full blown smoker again and the session was a big waste of time–I put on a show.

Films and scans and reports to Wadler, who I’m seeing on Monday for the second opinion. And I received the new will and health care proxy and all that in the mail and had Jay look them over so he’d know what I was asking of him and we dealt with it in our typical WASP-ish fashion, acting as if we were looking over car-insurance documents or something. And filed for unemployment and contacted AHIP so that the state can take care of my insurance premiums.

Spoke with Robert, after having not spoken for at least a month, I think, and I knew right away that something had changed–his voice was so clear, he sounded so present. Turns out he’d just returned from yet another month-long rehab. And he brought a boyfriend back from rehab, a recovering sex-addict who he hasn’t been able to have sex with because the guy is still coming off medication that reduces sex-drive. I wondered about the wisdom of such a move but didn’t say anything. I do hope the sobriety sticks this time, at least, if not the boyfriend.

The galleys had to be back on the 4th and Jeff hadn’t made time to sit down and read his book so I spent all day Thursday reading it and correcting errors.

Need to write about all my "things." And lunch with Bruce. But not now.

2004-11-01T19:24:00.000-08:00

Warwick

It was a place I’d always wanted to visit—a place in the city where the river narrowed and people swam and men cruised. The dream was baroque, an extravaganza, one of those settings that seem to simply be infused with desire. The water was brown and people went in and out, didn’t spend much time. It was a secret New York place—but it wasn’t New York, really. It felt much too old for that—Rome—it felt more like Rome. Two boys—kissing–each other and kissing me–and the one boy isn’t interested in me while the other one is. The uninterested one dives in and I give up but the interested one makes a comment to get me to stay. It’s dark, it’s the middle of the night, though very, very warm, humid–it’s hot, in fact, and the place is crowded with shadows–stone steps rising up on either side–nothing green–and sex–sex–everywhere.

Then later–the private beach the Chinese have taken over—with a floating shanty town–and the sand painted red—communist red—some intricate, elaborate communist design, beautiful, stunning, in the sand–and it’s Canadohta Lake but not Canadohta Lake and I’ve always missed this place—and my phone rings–Gary wants to know if I’m coming and I say, no, no—and there’s much noise, firecrackers, screaming, and he asks me where I am and I say I’m at the Chinese beach.

Earlier dream—the long bus ride and the enormous labyrinth of a cruising spot—like some super video store–with many, many booths—packed with men—and I’m out of money and take the bus home, thinking I’ll come back but then can’t. Sex, it’s all sex–these dreams are just desire flung over a moving body that happens to resemble my own.

2004-10-31T08:25:00.000-08:00

8:25AM

Warwick

An Isabel dream--Isabel, my grandfather’s second wife–the woman I called grandma. My daily life has been rearranged so that I find myself in the area of Fremont and Lincoln in Bellevue, where she and my grandfather lived in a big, old, three-story house, more often—daily, in fact. Am I shopping at the big grocery story across the street? I think so—or I’ve had to come to the area for cancer treatment and I end up going to that grocery story afterwards. I decide that I should take the opportunity to help her out. She’s very old and not quite all there mentally. (She died several years ago, in a home, none of us having seen her for years. The last time I saw her—oh—in the early nineties?—she was already suffering from alzheimers—she’d repeat stories over and over again—the story of my grandfather’s death, in particular.) Apparently, Isabel is well known at this particular cancer center, I have no idea why—maybe it wasn’t just cancer—she had a reputation for being a little nutty, of running away and disappearing. Levine was in the dream. And at some point the whole place morphed into a publishing house of sorts—and Isabel had published this lavish picture book about—I want to say stamps but I don’t think that was it—maybe dolls?—and I guess we’d moved back in time since grandma seemed to owe them money for the project—but only 27 dollars, which they treated as a serious sum of money. I said I could pay the 27 dollars and they said great but then Isabel disappeared again and I ended up finding her face down floating in the flooding river. There was a sense that she wanted to kill herself, though I don’t remember ever having a conversation with her in the dream. I dragged her from the rocks but as soon as I turned around she leaped into the swirling river, though it was so clean I could see straight to the bottom, could see her white hair swaying beneath the surface. I pulled her from the flooding river, said I was trying to help her, I wanted to help her. Everyone at the cancer center seemed very upset with us—especially with Isabel—and I think they just wanted to get rid of her.

There was another dream—some kind of book fair in Paris—and I was showing my mother around—but it’s much too blurry now–can’t remember a thing.

Jay and I took the 6:30 bus up to Warwick. Chelsea picked us up at the park and ride and when we arrived back at the house Dave nearly had dinner ready—excellent filet mignon and scalloped potatoes and a salad and a really good red wine. They’d got the steaks from the steak man, who stopped by the house earlier in the day. We toasted a healthy baby and a Kerry victory and ate. Jay and I were starving. Played "Cranium" after dinner in the living room with the fire going–and then watched a little TV then to bed.

Feeling OK–no smoking–still some discomfort in my belly–and can’t figure out what is scar pain and what might be "other."

It’s a stunning autumn day. All the bright reds and oranges and yellows of the changing trees up against a sparkling clear blue sky.

2004-10-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

Noon

They said there was a plane heading straight towards the house and it was a kind of mid-century modern ranch, somewhere in the desert, I think, and I’d been fixing it up, I think, I’m not sure, and there was a man with me at the end, though at the beginning there were quite a few people, as if we were having a party, and this man was my boyfriend, I think, or I was in love with him, one or the other, or both, and we could hear the plane coming, it was a a big one, a 767, white with red trim, and we rushed to the lowest part of the house, hid beneath furniture, big overstuffed chairs that didn’t make sense in the context of the rest of the house, and for some reason we were able to see the sky, the roof of the house became transparent, and we were able to see the huge machine lumbering towards us in the sky, and I thought: we’ll be OK as long as it’s not a direct hit and the fire’s not too bad, and it seemed to be veering away from us, it seemed almost certain that it was passing us by, that it would crash somewhere slightly behind us and to the side. And then, suddenly, at the moment the plane got so close we could actually see the writing on the nose and wings and sides and shadows in the cockpit and in some of the passenger windows, the moment it got so close it seemed like all we had to do was stretch out our arms to scrape the underbelly of the thing, it veered quickly off to the left, as if someone had abruptly grabbed the steering wheel and pulled the plane away from us. I broke through to consciousness before the crash, shook the dream from my head.

There was another one, before or after, I can’t remember the order now. A big party, a fancy event, at an exclusive restaurant, and I was a guest, though it often felt as if the event was in honor of me. Everyone seemed to know me. Cara was there with people I was supposed to know, a boyfriend, other friends, though I didn’t know them, I mean I don’t know them, I didn’t recognize any of these people, they were all men. Everyone was dressed up and there was several rooms being used for the event, a big dining room, a bar, a few other rooms that seemed to be a combination of both, and I was pretty sure we were at the 21 Club, but I wasn’t completely sure, I just knew we were at a very famous, old exclusive kind of restaurant in New York. Meryl Streep walked by, alone, looking lost and insecure, and I felt sorry for her, and made a mental note in my head to strike up a conversation with her later on, to buy her a drink, at least. I remember thinking how strange this was, that I should feel so comfortable passing a nervous Meryl Streep wandering around unescorted at a big, exclusive party. What had happened to me? Just how had I gained admission to this exclusive world? I was pretty sure it had something to do with a book, and I didn’t dwell on the strangeness of it for too long, that was something I’d done, apparently, when it all first happened, and I was used to it now, jaded, known, I was famous, I guess. Cara had said something about going outside to dance with her boyfriend and I think she was wearing a kind of sheer flapper dress, bright green, bright lime green, it was stunning, the dress, and I’d said I’d join her in a few, and then wandered over to the bar and sat down and had a drink. I was alone though I didn’t really feel alone because everyone kept looking at me as if they knew me. After I finished the drink I noticed that people were starting to file into the dining room to eat, so I thought I’d go find Cara and her boyfriend and we’d get a table for dinner. I walked by Kevin, looking really very good in a suit, and he smiled, and we shook hands, I think, and then hugged, and I wanted to spend more time with him because I’d suddenly recognized a side to him that I was immensely attracted to, but someone came over and said I had a phone call. This seemed like the height of special treatment to me, and again I wondered just how I’d reached the point where I should have the maitre-d’ at the 21 Club searching me out to tell me I had a telephone call and then taking me to a special place and handing me a special phone. I don’t remember the phone call. I only remember hanging up and feeling panicky about finding Cara, suddenly feeling terrified that I should have to eat alone, and that the truth was, as much as everyone seemed to sort of know me here, the only people I knew well enough to sit down and eat with were Cara and her boyfriend. The search became frantic after I couldn’t find them on the dance floor outside. I kept looking for the bright green flapper dress, no matter where she was it was always the brightest thing in the room, and I don’t know how but I managed to get lost and end up in the bowels of the club, rushing through unfinished hallways leading past the kitchen and and storerooms, the floors painted shiny grey, and I suddenly felt out of place, ridiculous, in my tuxedo, it hadn’t felt like a tuxedo until that moment, and I pushed through some big swinging doors and ran up a couple flights of steps and walked through another swinging door, this one much smaller, and was outside, above ground, standing next to a subway entrance.. I’d just come out of the subway, apparently. But I didn’t recognize anything around me. I looked across a pretty big parking lot and saw what I imagined was the restaurant I’d just run out of, and it looked sad and tacky, a place for cheap wedding receptions and highschool proms. I hurried towards the place and then stopped and looked back. The subway entrance looked absurd, like those posters in the subways a few years ago showing an entrance letting out into the wilderness–though this wasn’t the wilderness, this was a strip mall, an old strip mall that had clearly lost most of its lustre long ago, when the bigger malls has taken over, leaving these little ones left to struggle to stay alive with cheap restaurants and liquor stores, new-to-u shops and adult video stores. But it was the classice subway entrance, the thick iron railings painted green, the lightposts rising up on either sides, with the big bulbs on top. It occurred to me that this was actually Brighton Road outside of Pittsburgh, or McKnight Road, I wasn't out on Long Island or in Jersey, I was outside Pittsburgh. I stumbled over crumbling asphalt in the parking lot, hurrying to get back to the restaurant, hoping that Cara had waited for me before eating, and wandering just what on earth Meryl Streep was doing in such a place, and it was all such a disappointment, maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing—and I had—and I woke up.

Put down the cigarettes again today. Feel better already.

Bill Mahr a bit of a disappointment last night. Kevin Costner is a little bit crazy, I think, and Mahr just let him go on and on and on and I thought: Muzzle that guy, Bill, please. Ann Coulter seemed particularly pathetic this time around, up on the screen—Richard Belzer called her the Right Wing Party Doll, or something like that, and Mahr said be nice, and Belzer said why on earth should anyone be nice to this awful, lying right-wing hack? The best she could come up with was something about Kerry flip-flopping on gay marriage. She’s just downright despicable. Speaking of despicable, I’ve just about had it with these former New York City mayors (Guliani, Koch) supporting the Republicans. It’s a little more understandable for Guliani (though any respect I’ve gained for him over the years he’s now squandered by kissing his party’s born again, right wing, flabby ass)–but Koch? It’s insane. I just don’t get it.

Trucks passing by now with people yelling through megaphones over hip hop music, "Vote Democrat!"

Chilly and grey. Up to Warwick around 5.

2004-10-29T18:20:00.000-07:00

7:13PM

I finished chapter nine. It’s the first sexual encounter in the club and I’d felt stuck on it for awhile. Why is it that writing all the idyllic childhood stuff is so easy and trying to write down a nuts and bolts adult sex scene seems nearly impossible for me? Well, that’s a question for S– I suppose. But I know the answer, though I don’t think I can articulate it. Let’s just say that it makes perfect sense to me that it should work that way. Still, I don’t know WHY. Well, Magdalena is really a fantasy, isn’t it? The whole Pestas thing is a kind of fantasy—it’s fiction, really really fiction. What’s fascinating to me is that I think the main theme of the book is about resolving this very dilemma. That’s what’s really going on. I’m trying to work all this out in the book, expecting the answer to appear at some point within the text. No, not the answer—the right set of questions, properly framed.

I feel the book. I feel the novel as one thing now in my head. Though when I look over the pages I’ve got so far (roughly 150) the whole thing just collapses into chaos and pretense. It’s too much and it’s not enough. Where am I going? What will I leave out? A part of me keeps thinking that I’ve got to see a direct line running through the book, that the narrative has to be clean, straight, that it has to read as if it’s come from the mind of a kind of rational god–who knew all along just where he was going, just what he was doing, just how this would lead to this and that would lead to that. But I know that’s not the way it has to be, not the way it should be, in fact. I do, after all, want to write a Modern novel. I’m pretty much convinced now that the truth of the book must remain hidden from myself until the very end, that the moment I think I know the truth, the moment I think I know the direction, the moment I have a clear plan, is the moment the book will cease to even approach being a work of art. It shouldn’t even become clear to me at the very end, it should never be clear----if the truth of the novel can be articulated then it’s not truth, then the novel has failed. I want it to be known, felt, like a symphony, not explainable, like a puzzle, or a piece of genre fiction.

I am in pain, still—my scar just never seems to heal. Every few weeks I get it into my head to start doing situps in the morning. I was told that part of the problem with the scar is that the muscle’s been cut and it’s weak and it needs strengthening. But every time I do ten or twenty baby sit-ups I suffer for days.

And we seem to have an infestation of flies. I’ve been killing flies all day long. And they just keep coming.

I went uptown to the bank late this afternoon and I felt like shit and the day was already growing dark and it was chilly and tomorrow we switch the clocks back, which always feels to me like sliding down some black chute to oblivion, all those squat November days, and then into December as the days grow even squatter, as if all the extra light has been wrung from the world. It’s like a kind of brutal rationing—of hope—as if, as our part of the planet spins away from the sun, some sort of war has been declared, and we must make do with what we have, and there isn’t enough, really, to go around, so we try to compensate with our holidays, we light the world ourselves, but it’s not the same, of course, and I am always so happy, so immensely relieved, to find myself dropped into the blankness of January, when we stop trying to match the sun, and face the darkness ourselves, knowing that we’re spinning back naturally, as we do every year, into the good graces of our hot, bright, dying star.

Would that be Scrooge speaking? Or simply a man desparately in need of Prozac?

Wait—listen. T.S. Eliot knew what I was talking about.

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down
With smells of steaks in passageways.
Six-o’clock.
The burnt out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of your feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling;
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Oh, but the bus ride back downtown, one baby was balling, she just wouldn’t stop, and then another mother came on with three and one of them, or all three, I have no idea, of course, needed changing, and the bus filled with the mild smell of baby poop, and I had to get off a stop early, I just had to get off that bus.

We may be going up to Chelsea’s tomorrow, Jay and I, where it’s even darker, and there isn’t even the comfort the city provides, with its illusion of clarity and permanence.

Speaking of the illusion of clarity of permanence the city provides, here’s a part of an entry from January, 2003

1/4/03

There was Pittsburgh, a snow storm that left me stranded there an extra day, then back to New York and that suspended-in- mid-air week betweeen Christmas and New Years. There was a New Years Eve party on the UWS. There was one particular night online that left me feeling, briefly, that the "becoming" had at long last ended, and that I was, finally, something.

I’ve been dreaming of Las Vegas, of apartment houses with 400 dollar studios near the Strip that look like cheap motels and all have separate entrances----with little pools and gyms and parking. I’ve been dreaming like I dreamt on 12th Street about Key West, of shedding all the bonds that seem to keep preventing me from becoming the person I want to be: I’ve been dreaming of running again. This apartment, this Jay, this New York, all feel like a quagmire into which I keep sinking deeper and deeper and deeper. And I just keep becoming the same person over and over again. I dream of that desert air, of that false world flung up across the sand, of all that transcience, as an anecdote to the apparent permanence of New York.

I am thinking of The Dakota, One Fifth Avenue---those two buildings that never fail to inspire the same thought in my mind----they look like rock formations, having erupted when the last glacier pushed through---they look like part of the earth, like mountains chiselled to our purposes—they seem absurd and opressive in their determination to appear eternal. No such determination exists in Vegas, I imagine (I’ve never been there). No, in Vegas, I imagine those cheap apartment buildings designed like sleazy motels along a highway, appear as evanescent as tents in the desert, serving merely the purpose at hand, namely temporary shelter for our short time as conscious beings. The Dakota, One Fifth Avenue, in contrast, seem, in their lasting self-importance, to hold some claim to truth, to the eternal—they cling to the illusion of permanence, as if God, after all, actually existed.

They are two of my favorite buildings. They are two of the most glorious buildings in New York. But I’m tired of all that sobriety, of all that constructed purpose, meaning–such grimness–its like morality really-----as if we matter, as if we matter!

So I’ve been thinking about Vegas, about going out on disability and living freely. Vegas, without books—without books!

2004-10-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

8:43PM

There was a hole in that day (yesterday) and I’m faced with the conundrum of public journaling. Is this all just tacky? Hell, that woman is out there promoting her book about how anal intercourse changed her life–Tina Brown stumbling around for tasteful ways to ask, "So what was it about taking it up the bum that led to such a profound personal transformation?" Still, it all seems so uniquely and grotesquely American. But what about that French art critic and her gangbang memoir? Do I want to write a gangbang memoir? I don’t. Though I could.

So it isn’t all here. It won’t all be here. Still, S– suggested that a certain amount of fearlessness is in order—and I sense it–and I want it—but a part of me still wants (or needs) to keep the separate boxes sealed–so perhaps it will take time, though time is not, as they say, on my side, so...

We can write about today, about the bright, crisp, fall morning and the meeting with the lawyer and his assistant at GMHC, helping me revise the living will and health care proxy and all that. Good advice, very helpful. We even laughed. It wasn’t morbid, it remained theoretical, just words on a page, to be tucked back into the filing cabinet where the first set sat for the past ten years. He was charming and straight and I love lawyers because they love talking for the sake of talking. I went downstairs afterwards, into the cool shadows of 24th Street, and had a cigarette (yes, I’m smoking), and listened to a voice mail from Mom, overwhelmed, sitting in her new apartment amongst unpacked boxes, convinced the place is too small. I called her back and and she seemed determined to make the best of it, to make the place home, and she will. I filled her in on the second opinion info and disability crap and told her I’d send her copies of the living will, etc. once they’re finished. Phil–the lawyer–had made the point that I should acknowledge Mom and Dad somewhere in the will, since I’m leaving everything to Jay. Since I have virtually nothing of real value, I figure I’m saving her the thankless task of having to go through all my stuff.

In the original will, drawn up back in 93, I stipulated specifically that Lisa should be given all my journals. That was still when I believed my journals had real value, that hidden genius lay buried in all those Mead Square Deals, but I don’t suffer from that illusion any longer (hmmmm---well, I still suffer enough to to do this blog), and Lisa pulled herself out of my life a long time ago, so I wouldn’t want her to have them anyway. I will admit, though, that it still hurts me immensely to imagine them tossed into bags, thrown into the the garbage cans downstairs, lifted up by the strong, sure arms of a sanitation worker (on a hot summer day, perhaps, and he’s imagining a beer, a swim, a fuck, a whole new life) and hurled unceremoniously into the great, filthy maw of the garbage truck, and one of those strong arms then (his wrists are wide, solid, hairy) pulling down hard the lever that sets the compacting apparatus in motion, and the big metal tongue comes out and scoops up my whole life, made anonymous now by the green plastic bags, and crushes them into oblivion. Honestly, the way I feel about those journals, it could be own body in those bags, my own body crushed inside that truck.

Anyway—enough. After talking to Mom, I phoned Jay upstairs and he said come up so I went back into the GMHC building and up to the 9th floor and filled him in on the meeting. He introduced me to his boss and we talked about the show Monday night—the thrill of Stephen Bogardus singing from "Falsettos" (my whole adult life flashing in front of my eyes—I first heard him sing the song in 81 at Playwrights Horizons)—his long night at "Aida" recently—my love of "Another Hundred People,"----the film about the making of the original cast recording-everyone smoking cigarettes and Elaine Stritch slowly getting drunk—

When I got home I made a few phone calls–TIAA-CREF (retirement money) and unemployment and filled out the short term disability form and then Jeff called and said he got the galleys and could I meet him downtown at Tea and Sympathy at 4? I did. Squashed into that little room Jeff ate sardines on toast and I had the prawn cocktail and green tea and it was thrilling to see the book finished, to see the words on the page, in real print. We talked about the publicity they’re planning for the book and at one point I found myself staring at Jeff’s face, watching his lips make words like Chris Matthews Show and O’Reilly and Jane Pauley and 5-city tour, and I thought: This is the same face I knew in 1985. His face has barely changed in the twenty years since I first met him, and then I had to look away.

Later, I met up with Torie at French Roast and we talked about my health and her job plans and our respective novels, and then we walked east across 11th Street, over to Union Square, hugged meaningfully just beyond the turnstiles, amidst the bustle of the crowd, and then she went upstairs to get the Q and I went down for the L.

2004-10-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

10:15AM

In the dream there were boat rides on the lake. It was Canadohta Lake but it looked like New York Bay mixed with Hong Kong, perhaps. Jeff was there. There were elevator rides with a group of people and the whole thing had the feel of a reality show, as if we would have to vote someone off the elevator or out of the boat at some point.

Kevin yesterday and we talked mostly about disability and the second opinion. I’ve given up on the first doctor since the one Kevin originally recommended doled me out to some other doctor who wasn’t on the New York Magazine best doctors list and since they couldn’t seem to find the time to even call me back. I called Wadler’s office, and the secretary actually took all my information and told me exactly what they needed, all the stuff I’d have to have Kevin and Sara’s office fax to them, the lab work, and scan reports, the surgical and pathology reports from the gall bladder operation. Hopefully we’ll finally be able to get this moving.

Kevin seems to think I should be able to get the permanent disability right away and suggested that I talk to a lawyer who knows about disability. It pisses me off that they make it so difficult to understand. Honestly, I should be able to understand this. But the language is so twisted and the sub-clauses so plentiful that I keep getting lost. I also applied for unemployment online and I thought it would be a piece of cake, but apparently there was a catch, something I marked that raised a flag, since at the end of the long process a message came up saying I had to call the office and speak with someone in person.

As I was leaving the office yesterday Kevin gave me the letter he’d written about my condition. I knew there would be a prognosis in it somewhere, most likely towards the end, and I warned myself when I took the piece of paper, folded it in half, and put it into my date book, not to read it. Survival numbers have been thrown around a little bit, 2 years, a year, but they’ve mostly been theoretical, median survival rates, that kind of thing, nothing specifically aimed at my particular case. And I’ve made a conscious decision to muddle it all up in my mind in order to keep it blurry, in order to avoid feeling beholden to one or the other—in order to avoid mistaking some doctor’s prediction, words from a man’s mouth, words on a page, with the absolute truth. But I couldn’t help myself. Things like that are like getting a photograph of yourself—it’s impossible not to look at because it’s all about you. So, stupidly, as Jim went through my chart looking for all the stuff Wadler would need for the second opinion, I pulled the letter out from my date book and unfolded it and read it:

"Mr Torso is a 42 year old man with a history of AIDS, Hodgkins lymphoma, and gall bladder carcinoma. He had a surgical resection of his gall bladder with a partial liver resection in December 2003. He subsequently received radiation therapy and chemotherapy. In August 2004 he was found to have new pulmonary nodules and in September had bile duct obstruction and bronchoscopy. These procedures confirmed recurrent, metastatic gall bladder carcinoma. He has experienced increasing fatigue and dyspnea, and his prognosis is poor, with an estimated survival of approximately 6 months."

I ran my eyes over the "6" again, over the "6 months," then over "estimated survival of approximately 6 months," again, and found my stomach dropping out from under me. Sam was taking papers from Jim. Jim was thumbing carefully through each page of the chart, a phone was ringing—there was a real world in front of me, still, lumbering through the mundane procedures of the living, and there was no place for death here, no space for it, so I shook the words from my eyes, tried to keep them from lodging too solidly into my mind, folded the paper and jammed it quickly back into my date book. Surely, I thought, he’s got to write down the most pessimistic prognosis, not the rosiest, but this didn’t comfort me, and I wasn’t even sure I believed it, so I distracted myself and tried to feel the reality of my experience at that moment, my body in air, my body in the world, my body and mind alive, now, standing, not in pain, not tired, not sick, healthy, really, I felt perfectly healthy, and eventually the reality of this was able to trump the theoretical nightmare that my doctor had written across the page now tucked away out of view in my datebook.

What matters is what is, not what can be, not what will be, but what is, now, at this very moment. And the sun was shining when I walked out onto 57th Street, it was a warm autumn day, late afternoon, 9th Avenue teeming with traffic, and scores of people waiting for the light to change, and I crossed the avenue with them, and walked into the shadows of 57th Street toward the subway, looking intently at the city all around me, the African violets in the window at the florist, the new cell-phones in the window at the wireless place, the sausages smoking on the grill at the corner food cart, the skeleton of the new top they’re putting on the Hearst Building, and the fullness of the city, the sheer, audacious insistence of its own reality, took me back in, and allowed me, at least briefly, to feel, not like a dead man walking, but simply like a man, a man like every other man, very much alive, walking down one of the most exciting streets in one of the most exciting cities in the world.

2004-10-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

11:15AM

It’s so hard to start the days. When the cough medicine drags you down and the morning seems so bereft of promise and the bed is so warm and the cat is tucked into the crook of your arm, his little head resting softly on your hand.

There was a dream–which I said out loud, a little bit, in order to remember it, but now it seems to be gone, as if the sketch beneath one of those children’s toys has vanished again after the child pulls the plastic sheet up to begin again. No, no, there it is, I’ve still got it. A Doubleday dream. And it isn’t quite Doubleday, of course, sort of like the Doubleday that has appeared before in my dreams. And I’ve been working there for a very, very long time. And for some reason we work in the nude. Yes, all the clerks are naked. And it’s something that seems preposterous, later, after we move away from the specific context of an era when it was normal for store clerks to work in the nude. So, everyone has begun to wear clothes, except me. And suddenly, one day it ocurrs to me that I’m the only one who is still naked, and I’m like Adam and Eve, recognizing (or inventing) shame for the first time, I feel it in my body, all that shame. The smallness of my frail body, my skinny arms, my inverted chest, my sloping, non-existent ass, the strange tilt my body takes from the scoliosis, which is so slight that it registers on the eye as something just off-kilter, though without a specific source, something strangely modern, abstract, even, mildly Piccaso-like, perhaps—that the body pulls up out of the space, assaults the eyes with it’s oddity. And Jeff is there, and Marc Bojanowski, and they seem to be great buddies, and Marc is working at the information desk and Jeff says something to him about the three of us getting together later.

Oh—well, it was a fantastic dream but much of it is gone. Paul Kozlowski made an appearance as well. I don’t remember if the naked situation was resolved. I pulled up out of the dream, into consciousness, because I think I realized I was dreaming and the only way to remove myself from the embarassment of nakedness was to return to wakefulness.

S-- says write. S-- says even if you just do a stream of consciousness thing, write. And so, even though this morning was not unlike most mornings lately—a pale, blank morning into which I entered with the reluctance of–with the reluctance of (I can’t think of anything—I wanted to say with the reluctance of a criminal going off to jail, but that didn’t seem right, not quite it). And so even though this morning was not unlike most mornings lately, I did manage somehow to push the cat away and drag my sorry ass out of bed and put on some clothes and go downstairs to the bodega and buy two cups of coffee and return here and avoid going online to jerk off to bukkake girls and the possibility of having sex with someone on Manhunt.

Oh–dying is so dull. So I won’t go into all of that. I’ve tried to make it clear to S-- that I’m trying to maintain a reasonable amount of denial in order to simply make it through the day. The first things he mentioned during our first session after I told him the news was that it was important to take care of the details, like the living will, and having in-home hospice care set up, and a stash of sleeping pills on hand in order to have the option to end it if things got really bad. On that last he did say that of all of the people he’s known who’ve done this (had the seconal, or whatever, on hand) only one has actually gone through with it. People like simply having the option because it provides a sense of control in a process over which they otherwise have virtually no control.

But when I brought up the hospice care to Kevin he said it was too soon, that no company would even take me as a patient at this point. I did make an appt. with GMHC to re-do the living will and update the will and health-care proxy but that’s it. It was all just too much anyway, it was all too, um, frank–S-- had over-estimated my strength–my willingness to be entirely rational.—and I found myself resenting him for this----and so, at the next session, when he asked me if I’d made plans to make sure the cat was taken care of, I dismissed the idea, and told him straight out that I couldn’t do all of that yet, I couldn’t talk like that yet (though I knew that Mr. Grant wasn’t an issue, really, that Jay would take care of the cat)–that I still needed to employ some magical thinking–the magical thinking that all of us live with every day----the thinking that tells us we’re going to live forever—or, if that was asking far too much from a person with AIDS and metastatic gallbladder cancer, at least the thinking that tells me that I’M NOT GOING TO DIE TODAY. S-- understood, of course, and has been more sensitive to this.

About half-way throught the third or fourth paragraph above it ocurred to me that I’d like to start posting these journal entries online as a blog. Because I don’t want my death to go unwitnessed. Of course it won’t—Mom and Jay and Fred and Jeff and Cara and Chelsea—all the people close to me will, in fact, have to watch–and yet, I’ve always been a performer of sorts—a show-off—I’ve always carried with me that heightened actor-sense, that heightened self-consciousness (Ken Sorkin said, years ago, "The difference between you and Lisa is that she watches herself while you watch yourself watching yourself.") that is, in so many ways, unhealthy, or, if not entirely unhealthy, at the very least, too simplistic for the condition of being human—the sense that I don’t exist except through the eyes of others–or through my own eyes, twice, as Ken suggested, as if I can only see myself in the third person, as the creation of a narrator. And I think the great quest for me as been to shake this off, to approach something more Zen-like—since, someone is, after all, the narrator.

But as soon as the idea to blog this journal entered my mind I found myself fighting constraints, I found myself suddenly aware of an audience, and I’ve spent the last several paragraphs doing my best to shake that awareness off. I may or may not do the blog. Ken always fought relentlessly against his urge to be an artist, because he suspected his own intentions, he suspected the motives of his ego, and he knew that no artist can, in the end, really tell the truth, or save the world, or, even, save themselves, that it was all, finally, just a kind of show, and I always respected Ken enormously not only for his talent (he was from day one a far better writer than I was) but for his willingness to face his motives squarely, and to not be afraid to chuck it all if he found those motives wanting. I was never that strong, and I’m not that strong now, so I may go ahead and begin posting this anyway, since it might provide me with, at the very least, a kind of solace in my last days, it might provide me with the sense that I am, after all, not entirely alone in this room, scribbling messages into a small spit of sand quickly being overtaken by the incoming tide.