Voices on Addiction: Anchor Point

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group glossary gives this definition of an anchor point:

 An advantageous location from which to start building a fire break or line. If done properly, this will prohibit fire from establishing itself on the other side of an unsuspecting crew who could otherwise end up being surrounded, with little chance for escape.

The first thing you learn at fire school is the acronym, LCES. LCES stands for Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes, and Safety zones. You will repeat it to yourself while sharpening your Pulaski and your chainsaw. You’ll say it again while wearing your stiff new boots into the shower, and later when you hike up steep trails with your new crewmates, each of you carrying around 40 pounds of gear strapped to your backs in 100-degree temperatures. It’s printed on the back page of every firefighter’s pocket guide, and on stickers handed out, which will later show up on helmets, bunks, notebooks, and water bottles.

Next comes the video you’ll sit through at the beginning of every fire season until you retire. Short, low-budget clips featuring interviews with survivors of tragic fires. Close-ups of haunted faces recall having spent interminable moments pressed tight to the ground in their foil shelters taking shallow breaths, breathing prayers against the dirt to their families and Gods while roaring flame fronts consumed the oxygen outside.

The camera pans away from the faces of the survivors to several small, white, weathered crosses high on a lonely mountainside that soon fade to black, and you can practically taste the ash and smell the faintest whiff of burning flesh coming from the bodies of firefighters who lived just long enough to stop thinking or feeling anything.

 

You are going to need a mantra. Throughout your career, you will have many. “LCES’ is as good as any to start with. The “L” in LCES stands for “lookouts.”

Post a lookout, whenever there is a need for one. There is always a need for a lookout.

Now, if you can, imagine another kind of fire; the kind of fire that starts within a human being. Alcoholism is that kind of fire.

Trying to control alcoholism is as complex and harrowing as learning to fight wildland fire, and because I happened to undertake both labors at the same time, the lessons I learned from each informed the other until I eventually rose from the ashes of my former self.

Barely into my first fire season, I began to notice I was no longer able to rocket out of bed in the mornings after nights spent drinking with the crew, no matter how much water I drank or how hard I exercised in an attempt to sweat it out. I was tired all the time. At thirty-six, I was the oldest firefighter in a close-knit fire crew of twenty and thirty-somethings. Maybe I was just too old to be playing with fire.

Older though I was, I was the happiest I could remember having been because I had finally stumbled into the work I was born to do.

Still, the beginnings of more serious health problems related to my alcohol consumption began to show themselves and by autumn there was a persistent hollow ache in my stomach.

When you decide to stop drinking only to discover that your willpower can’t keep you stopped, posting the analog of a fire lookout is a good idea. Survivors of tragic fires and late-stage alcoholism each told me in the early days that retreating into a survival shelter to wait out the fire is a tactic one should never rely on. Sure, you might survive fire or early sobriety by insulating yourself from the world in a hot, airless cocoon, but the ultimate goal is to expand your world by developing healthy interdependence with others. Together and connected, everyone increases their chances of surviving whole and resilient, instead of suffering alone beneath a heavy blanket of smoky darkness.

The first step I took toward sobriety was accepting that the fire had been there for a long time, quietly burning my life down.

 

The “C” in LCES stands for communications. Many tragedies could have been prevented had supervisors listened to lookouts’ warnings, or if someone—anyone—had spoken up in time to retreat from oncoming disaster.

Similarly, many alcoholics could have avoided lost time and opportunities, and later grave injuries to health and relationships, if they had only listened when their friends and family told them, “we’re beginning to worry about you.”

Abstinence isn’t sexy, no matter which social media influencer decides to take a public journey on the wagon. Although moderating is no big deal for a person whose alcohol problem is minor or temporary, for a real alcoholic, “dry January” is edge play.

When I fully removed alcohol from my life, I suddenly felt skinless, with all my nerves exposed to the air wherever I went. My body and mind felt like riverbanks being overrun by waves of unprocessed grief and trauma. It was necessary to find or create alternative escape routes and safety zones until new pathways developed through my interior moonscape of fading fire scars, which at some point miraculously began to fill in with new green growth.

 

The “E” in LCES stands for escape routes. What is an escape route? In wildland firefighting, it’s simple: Pick two directions. Face the danger. Make sure your pathway is clear, even if you have to cut your own path through chest-high brush with your saw. When first becoming sober, finding an escape route seems impossible: Alcohol is everywhere, and it feels like a social mandate. Work, sports, vacations, and activities of every kind involve the ever-present friend that one must now treat like the traitor it has become.

At first, sobriety feels at once like a death of a best friend, loss of comfort, and a beloved version of one’s self. On some level, it is exactly these things; it is also another kind of deceptively simple escape route from the need to use a substance to deal with life’s pain. You’ve probably known people who have ultimately chosen one of the others; sickness, insanity, or death.

Phone numbers of friends who can be counted on to call back, and taking my own car to social gatherings were among the first and most effective escape routes and safety zones I developed early on. Years later, I still rely on them although recovery no longer is about the fear of drinking again. These days, I use my tools to help remain steady in a world that is often on fire and in an upheaval of its own.

 

The “S” in LCES stands for “safety zones.” Safety zones are meant to be large, well-considered areas easily accessed from the fireline, but in reality, they rarely are. On the ground and in life, crews learn to prepare the best they can with the resources and time they have.

When fighting fire, the last step is called cold trailing. I learned to take off my thick gloves designed to protect firefighter’s vulnerable hands from burns and feel for any remaining heat around the blackened edges of the former blaze where it bumps up against the green. Where heat is found, the hot dirt is dug up and spread, allowing it to cool. Unbelievable amounts of heat can be found sometimes in deep pockets of warm soil. All it takes is a breath of wind and one spark for a drowsing fire to be reawakened.

While I still occasionally stumble upon hidden hot spots in my sober life, it’s been many years since I’ve stopped trying to put my own fires out with alcohol. I regularly invite other seasoned sober people to help me cold trail the edges of the old burns. Together, we take up our collective tools and legacy knowledge to open up the haunted ground, exposing our still-smoldering secrets to sunlight and air. Somehow, this is how we stay sober.

It took years from the time I realized I wanted to be a wildland firefighter for me to begin to walk toward that goal, while also leaving the biggest obstacle to achieving it behind.

 

 

 

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Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.

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Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen

Speaking to Men at Parties

“The thing you love most when you are thirteen is the thing you love forever,” Adi says. He has his leg crossed over his lap, hand on his knee in a scholarly position.

“You’re bound to it,” I add, leaning forward. “You can’t put it down.” I am drunk and twenty years old and my voice aches—I have been shouting for most of the night, but the music isn’t really that loud. I tilt my body toward the group to understand them, a hand around my ear in what feels like a theatrical gesture. The boy Adi and I are chatting with is soft-spoken mumbling-drunk, with dark eyes that scrunch up beautifully when he smiles. “Say again?” I repeat over and over. He stands up to grab a beer off the table between us, jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and Adi and I look at each other with our eyebrows raised. I giggle and he glares back—we are always passing sly glances back and forth like handwritten notes between school desks.

The boy’s name is Alan and he is disarmingly handsome, the kind of man I would have avoided in high school out of shame and fear. I am fascinated by beautiful men, their ease of movement, the carelessness of their limbs. I watch them and think of Margaret Atwood: “When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss…My love for them is visual: that is the part I would like to possess.” A desire that stems from a sense of possession; I would like to inhabit them, to take up space and know that everyone around me feels grateful. To be a beautiful white man and never know fear—how simple and glorious.

 

There are moments when the light passes just right over the high point of someone’s cheekbone and I imagine my whole life as it would have been in a different universe, tracing the events of this imaginary life from that spot on their face to my death. In another world, I fall in love with this boy who shares my taste in music and laughs generously at my less-than-clever drunken commentary. In another world, things are easier. In this world, we dance and sing Talking Heads to each other across the kitchen as we spin in circles: I guess that this must be the place. In another world, I do not go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, watching my reflection careen across the glass. In another world, I do not make myself sick with want and worry at every turn.

Alan sits back down beside Adi and we talk about California. Whenever I meet someone who’s left California for New York, they can never shut up about being from California and how much they miss it, as if they hadn’t chosen to leave. Alan tells us that in California he met Paul McCartney once, and I clutch my hand to my collarbone in a mockery of a swoon because that is what I loved when I was thirteen, what I am bound to forever, the thing I cannot put down. There will always be a part of me that starts at the mention of The Beatles, that blip of recognition when you come across your own name in an unexpected place.

“I know this sounds corny,” he says, “but I swear to God he just made the whole room brighter.”

The enthusiasm in Alan’s voice strikes me. He tells me he saw Arctic Monkeys seven times in one year because he was in love with Alex Turner and again I am envious of him, this time because I never allowed myself to notice any women as a teenager. I instead fixated on male celebrities and characters, as if I could convince myself that I loved them the way I was supposed to love them. I want to know, suddenly, if he went to those concerts because he knew he wanted to see the lead singer, or if he had convinced himself it was because he just really liked their music. But I do not ask. Instead I stare at the mole on his right hip, made visible by his low-slung trousers. The mole is largish, about the size of a dime, and raised slightly. I try to imagine myself putting my mouth on it, on this bit of flesh which has so captured my attention, and am immediately repulsed.

This is where it always stops, the insurmountable stutter of my fantasies. This is the part I find difficult to explain even to myself, the way I can simultaneously want and so clearly not want. I picture the thoughts in my mind as a strip of film: reversed, softened, made grand by my drunkenness, mimicking how things are always beautiful onscreen. I can desire this boy as if from afar rather than with the blistering intensity I feel when a girl sits too close to me on a stranger’s bed at another party as she speaks to someone else, the air soft with smoke, my insides folding in on themselves. The universe is reduced to the point at which our hips are touching and I cringe at the clichés this meaningless contact inspires in me.

I think about Paul McCartney, his boyish features still apparent in old age: wide, down-turned eyes and full cheeks and always that charming smile. My favorite Beatle fluctuated between him and George, whose quiet demeanor intrigued me; I have always been inclined toward the fantasy of quiet men. I would watch videos of early performances for hours, unable to tear my eyes away from George’s legs, how dreadfully slender they were in his dark slacks as he stood off to the side of the stage. Ringo was about as attractive to me as a post (though darling) and John looked far too much like my father, so my desire, or what I thought was desire, had to be cast onto Paul and George. This was how I amused myself throughout most of my early adolescence: poring over photographs and watching footage from decades earlier of a half-dead, long-fractured band. Maybe The Beatles were easy to love because the group had already run its course—I could discover new information but nothing new would actually happen, and there was a comfort in this impassable distance. I cannot say that if, in another world, I would have been reduced to tears like all the girls in A Hard Day’s Night, wordlessly mouthing George-George-George as the crowd around me fell into hysterics, or if the illusion would have been ruined by seeing them in the flesh.

I think about the sightless stare of a Roman bust in a museum, terrifying and opalescent, made lovelier by the fact that I cannot touch it. In another world, I step past the line on the floor of the gallery and run my fingertips over the marble despite the docent’s protests. In another world, I tell Alan the truth: I will never be happy with what I have or what I am.

Says Alan of Alex Turner: “I don’t think I even realized who he was, the first time—he walked right past me, in those fucking Chelsea boots, and I was just so turned on,” and I laugh because it’s always those fucking Chelsea boots. The Beatles wore them, too.

I tell Alan that I’ve been in the same room as David Byrne, white-haired and gracious, those darkly intense eyes gentle with crow’s feet and laugh lines, and Alan concedes that this is indeed “very, very cool.” In high school, I would have recorded such a statement from a hot boy in my journal. Now it just seems obvious. It was a screening of a documentary about competitive color guard that David Byrne had produced, with a Q&A afterwards. My friend was a huge fan of Talking Heads and I came along because I was a huge fan of her; I barely paid attention to the the Q’s that David A’ed because I was swept up in the thrill of watching someone I love watch something she loves. Her sardonic voice was made sweet as she described her enjoyment of the evening, tucking herself into a red raincoat ill-suited to the frigid March weather. Now whenever I listen to Talking Heads’ bizarre, frenetic music, I think of her with a twinge in my chest not unlike heartburn. People sometimes ask me about her, mention her to me in passing: didn’t you know—? weren’t you—? I smile, tight-lipped, and nod. In another world, I tell Alan that I buy the shampoo she used because I miss the smell of her dark hair as it wafted toward me, head on my shoulder.

“Stop, don’t talk about it,” I say to Adi when he mentions her. “If I talk about it, I’ll cry.” I’ve been saying this for the past few months, begging friends to help me maintain the illusion that I wasn’t deeply hurt by her decision to return to Texas. The less we say about it the better.

We talk about how it would be nice to leave New York, but none of us stay away for very long. We all have our reasons. Mine is a sense of obligation to my younger self, the anxious, dirty-haired creature who collected postcards from Manhattan and watched The Beatles with a thumb-sucking compulsion and dreamt of someday ending up in a different body in a different place. She needs me to remain in this city, for at least a little longer, regardless of the people who come and go and the women I watch and want and the men I may or may not speak to at parties.

Most people have left the party by the time Adi and I declare mutiny and claim the aux cord for ourselves. Alan stretches as he makes room for me on the couch. His grey sweatshirt again rides up across his belly and I think about Saint Sebastian: his long, muscled torso, the agony and eroticism of his death as it is depicted in art. How I should like to be an arrow and glance off the flesh of some beautiful thing before falling, unbroken, to the ground. I think about Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of Saint Sebastienne as a martyred pregnant woman, the same sketch repeated over and over in a monotonous procession of bodies, smudged and headless: the grotesquerie of gestation. How awful is the practice of becoming alive.

Weeks later in Boston, my friend Laura and I discuss the dreams we’ve been having since we were little girls, nightmares in which we are pregnant despite never having had sex and everyone tells us we should be grateful to be so immaculate. But Laura is Jewish and I was never baptized and neither of us believe in anything beyond the miracle of blood and tubing that is the body itself. The nightmares persist as a reminder of what that body may be capable of, both within and without ourselves.

Hours past midnight, Adi and I walk to my apartment from the party. “Do you wish you were straight?” I ask him. He shrugs. I say, “I do, sometimes. I think it would be easier. Don’t you think it would be easier?” I hope he knows I mean easier just in the simple act of existence: would it be easier to be alive? Would I hate myself for something else if not this?

Adi doesn’t answer, but his gaze is warm behind his glasses, his jaw set in the near-pout he wears when he considers something seriously. He is a dear friend, one of the first I made at college, and one of the first people I heard utter the word “lesbian” with a gravity that implied strength and meaning rather than disdain. I lean into his shoulder and we stand like that, quiet, until Adi’s Lyft arrives.

A month and some weeks later, I stand in the living room of another apartment, once again speaking loudly over the music to an acquaintance. The theme of the party is blue, as in Maggie Nelson’s seventh book, as in Derek Jarman’s final film, as in Nina Simone’s debut album Hey, blue, there is a song for you. My acquaintance’s eyelids are a bright teal, in lovely contrast to her copper hair that falls into her face as she leans in to hear me. I feel a touch at the back of my neck and I turn around and it is Alan once again, tucking the tag back into the collar of my shirt. This is an urge I have to resist when I glimpse a misplaced tag or loose thread on a passing stranger, the same compulsion that makes me check the locks on the front door nightly before bed, a desire for security through control. Alan has not shied away from this impulse to put things in their proper place. His face, cast in cobalt, grins back at me when I turn.

 

Already I can feel the sense of infatuation ebbing away as I greet him, repeat my name, raise my arms around him in a clumsy approximation of an embrace. Names are important, and it bothers me on a primal level when people forget them. Alan is still handsome with his watery-drunk smile and half-lidded eyes. The man asleep, like the man in quietude, was another adolescent fixation of mine: a feral animal tranquilized to be observed more safely.

The apartment is so small and so full of bodies that we can hardly do more than shuffle in time with the music. While waiting for the bathroom, I get into an argument with a man about Kate Bush, and how would he understand the anguish conveyed in her warbling falsetto, anyway? I don’t know what’s good for me I don’t know what’s good for me.

 

I spend the next two years moving farther away from my body. I try to date casually and discover that I am perhaps incurably afraid of intimacy. I become catatonic in the presence of my own desire, though I spend a summer trying to convince myself that it’s the heat and humidity rather than the rush of blood in my ears that makes me nauseous every time someone tries to touch me. I sit across from a man on the subway and stare at the soft curve of his jaw as he tilts his chin downward; his dark eyes rove across the pages of a book whose title I can’t quite make out. In another world, it is the 1950s in the United States of America and I am engaged to this beautiful man whom I will never love and this is better, somehow. It’s a mid-century sitcom marriage where we sleep in separate beds and only ever kiss on the cheek. I am miserable, but it’s better than being miserable in reality because in this dream I have what feels like a justifiable reason to be miserable. My life is unfulfilled, uninspired. I see East of Eden at the cinema and masturbate to the thought of James Dean the same way I did as a teenager, silently rocking back and forth in a chair, disgusted by the idea of actually touching myself. In this world I never figure out that I’m a lesbian because I could barely figure that out in 2016 with contemporary resources. It’s easier anyway, following an assigned path, filling a prescription month after month at the pharmacy—doctor’s orders. In another world, my sadness has sharp contours, clear edges that I can press into my skin. It is not amorphous and it does not expand to fit every space I inhabit.

I try to describe some of this world to Laura in a taxi, drunk and newly twenty-two on the hottest night of last summer. “Do you ever wish that’s how it was?” Laura tells me she doesn’t—she’s tired, and she turns away from me to look out the window as we arrive at my apartment. “It’s almost light out,” I say to change the subject, waving a hand in the direction of the sky.

I am glad that I didn’t tell her the extent of my dreams, the tragic details that lull me to sleep. It is so perversely appealing to me, this fantasy of a loveless, sexless, meaningless existence in which I am freed from any expectations of self-possession or choice. In another world, no one asks me what I want to do with my life because they do not assume that I will ever do anything. I know this way of thinking is self-indulgent and wildly privileged, and that Laura’s reaction to my modest proposal was appropriate: a snort that went from surprised to scornful, a firm “No.” And yet I greet sleep that morning with dreams of pin curls and bathroom tiles scrubbed clean and never being touched by my beautiful imaginary husband, asleep beside me in his bed across the room.

 

Adi and I watch A Hard Day’s Night and he touches my arm when he notices I’m crying and we can pretend, briefly, that we knew each other when we were thirteen. Laura tells me that she is a lesbian, too, and this more than anything makes me feel like I may someday be able to overcome my shame because Laura is someone who did know me when we were thirteen. Through my love for her I may be able to forgive myself the trespass of being who I am. She tells me she sometimes still dreams of having children, but since realizing she is a lesbian she is no longer so afraid of the possibility.

I see David Byrne again and this time he sings. I wonder what it’s like for him to play those songs from another time when his band all lived together in the same room, cutting each other’s hair, muddling through waves new and old only to end up estranged forty years later—no talking, just head. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were dogged by other people’s hopes of a reunion from the day The Beatles broke up until that night at the Dakota, and I wonder if it bothered them to know that the best thing they ever did was be part of something beyond themselves. In another world, rooftops are only for concerts, never for leaping. In another world, I am not afraid of heights or the way my body moves through time and space, toward the ground or toward another body.

 

 

 

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Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde

From the Archives: The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Bad Blood

This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on April 30, 2017.

Sophomore year of college, on my school’s monthly blood drive day, I was seduced by a sign outside of a Big Red Bus that decreed, “You can be a hero! Donate blood and save three lives today!” The sign was written with hot pink dry eraser marker in cheery, swirly letters as if advertising today’s lunch special: Destiny. Of course. I have always known that I’m destined for greatness—a triumph so epic you could hear my name drifting in the winds if you simply stood still and tuned your ears to history: Edgar Gomez is a hero. Or maybe: Edgar Gomez, the hero. Whichever is easier on the winds.

I had skipped breakfast that morning and wondered if they were offering anything more substantial. On the back, in case being a hero three times over wasn’t enough of a draw, the sign continued: “Free small pizza and movie ticket with every donation.” A small price to pay to save three lives.

Giddy at the arrival of my big break, I climbed aboard the bloodmobile, vibrating with the knowledge that this was finally my chance to prove to everyone what has been so obvious to me my whole life. I had been waiting for a sign for so long, and here it was at last, so satisfyingly literal. Inside, I was promptly greeted by the check-in nurse in the customary heroic way.

“We don’t have time for you,” she said, shifting her eyes to the packed bench where a queue of students sat waiting to be harvested. I stared at her blankly, my mouth struggling to find the words that would communicate to her how vital it was that I be allowed in, that this wasn’t just about donating blood, that this was larger than the both of us, her rejection could very well likely forever alter the fabric of history and space and time.

“I have time,” I said.

“Okay,” she shrugged. “You can wait if you want.” At that, she turned and disappeared behind a thin screen door. Another nurse motioned to a rack on the wall stacked with clipboards.

“Fill out one of those,” she said, gesturing with a Ziploc bag stuffed with a foam rubber ducky. “Try to be as honest as possible. Oh, and fill the boxes out completely,” she added as an afterthought. “The machine doesn’t recognize partially filled out boxes.”

On a nearby donor bed, a pale woman nodded off with her hand raised like she was asking a question in her sleep, a dark purple spot bleeding through the gauze where the needle had punctured her skin.

*

To give blood in the United States today is like joining an elite, profoundly uncool, hyper-exclusive club. If you are under seventeen years old, depending on the state, you must have your parents’ permission. There are cruel limitations as to where and when you may have travelled. For example, you may not have spent more than five years at the Sorbonne in Paris getting your doctorate degree about French movies about trains. You may not have had a tattoo done within the past twelve months, even of a really tough looking anchor on your chest. You must weigh a minimum of 110 lbs. As per American Red Cross eligibility requirements, there is no upper weight limit for donors “as long as your weight is not higher than the weight limit of the donor bed/lounge you are using.” To give blood, you must be able to fit on a donor bed. Add to the reasons you might be denied at a blood donor center: the summer you spent in Ireland in 1993 looking for Bono, the lip piercing you got after your last break up two months ago because you desperately needed change, the pill you took this morning.

I scanned through my donor questionnaire, making sure to answer each question as honestly as possible.

“Feeling healthy and well today?” There was no box for “Sometimes I feel like I died 400 years ago and every now and then my right arm has a strange spasm which makes me suspect that I may be a demon who took over some poor kid’s body and he’s desperately trying to get out one limb at a time,” so I shaded in the box for “Yes.”

“Have you taken anything with aspirin in it within the last twenty-four hours?” No. Demons don’t need medicine.

These requirements are not particularly stringent, yet still only an estimated 38 percent of the population is eligible to donate. Of that, less than ten percent actually do, and that is in part because to give blood in the United States today, you must answer the question: “From 1977 to the present, have you had sexual contact with another male, even once?”

I was wearing cut-off jean shorts, an extra small plain white tee that bordered dangerously with crop top territory, and dollar store glittery nail polish chipping at the edges. No, I decided, my pencil carefully outlining the box, thoroughly shading it in so the machine would have no trouble understanding. Not even once.

*

On paper, I know why gay men are not eligible to donate blood. The rationale for these regulations is straightforward. Aside from making sure we don’t find thumbs in our chicken nuggets, it is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration to minimize the threat of the public contracting through blood transfusions infectious diseases such as human deficiency viruses or hepatitis. Men who have sex with men are the population most heavily affected by HIV infection. Among the nearly 50,000 new cases of FDA reported by the Center for Disease Control in 2012, more than 30,000 were transmitted from male-to-male sexual contact. In order to keep as few contaminated donations from entering the national blood supply as possible, several safeguards have been set in place, from rigorously testing donations for everything from syphilis to West Nile Virus, and beginning with the initial donor screening process, which takes the form of a mini-physical and a questionnaire that is designed to weed out potential risks.

Despite the dozens of tests performed on each unit of donated blood—to establish blood type and test for infectious diseases—the FDA stresses that these tests are not foolproof. However, to put your potential exposure into perspective, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), “your risk of getting HIV from a blood transfusion is lower than your risk of getting killed by lightning. Only about one in two million donations might carry HIV and transmit HIV if given to a patient.” Though the source of these infections are not always linked to gay men, it is the policy of blood centers, under current FDA regulation, to place all gay men who admit on their questionnaire to having had sexual contact with other men within the past twelve months on a one-year deferral list, which is a way to soften the reality that gay men are simply not permitted to donate. While ostensibly this is an improvement on their previous ban on gay men, it’s still less “come back next Wednesday,” more, “we’ll call you when you decide to move to the Andes, shave your head, and take a vow of celibacy.”

Besides the FDA’s implicit verdict that two gay men in a monogamous relationship pose the same threat to the national blood supply as a heroin addict, or the propaganda ingrained in children at birth that only gay people contract HIV when, according to the Center for Disease Control, most new HIV diagnoses in women are attributed to heterosexual sex, not to mention the outright homophobic logic couched in the idea that the nation cannot trust gay men to know their own status, the FDA fails to account for one crucial fact: I am a hero. I am special. I am destined for greatness.

*

How my greatness will manifest itself is unknown to me, a mystery that has filled every moment with a sense of sweet, mouthwatering opportunity. Even as a kid I knew the world needed me. Whenever I was out in public, I would openly exhibit my karate skills, demonstrating perfect horse stance for the passersby outside of the mall JC Penney’s, waiting for my choice sensei to pluck me from obscurity and launch my career as the martial arts champion of the galaxy. In my fantasy, I told myself he had only planned to stop by Yankee Candle to shop for candles for his dojo, a quiet masculine scent like Motor Oil or Sports Tears, yet seeing me and my ability to stand with my legs splayed and bent at the knees, my arms akimbo, my fists locked tight at my waist for over fifteen minutes while my mom perused the clearance racks inside, he would instinctively know, like a mother penguin can pick out her chick in a colony of thousands, that we were lost kin.

“Is it really you?” he would ask, recognizing something ancient and powerful within me. Without waiting for my answer he would sweep me away to someplace majestic where he would rededicate his life to teaching me how to snap two by fours in half with my palm. Initially, my mother would be devastated by my disappearance, throwing herself completely into her job at Starbucks where she would make crude drawings of my face with the foam in her customer’s lattes, but over time she would grow to accept it, knowing deep down that I was out there being the hero the world needed of me.

As a teen, I would stalk the aisles at my local bookstore with my eyes opened as wide as I could hoping that something would irritate them and I would be reduced to tears. Sobbing, I would sink myself into the nearest seat with an intellectual looking book, something like The Diary of Malcom X, and squint my eyes, letting the tears roll down my cheeks, imagining that an agent would see how emotionally raw and unguarded I am and, unable to control himself, yell, “Look everyone! It’s the next Nick Jonas! I have to sign him immediately!” I would be plucked from my humdrum life and become an overnight celebrity and an ambassador for UNICEF, traveling around the globe teaching children the value of environmental sustainability through interpretive dance.

“Life on land is finite!” I would shout into the crowd of kids gathered around to watch one of my performances in a remote village in Nicaragua. “Return to the sea is inevitable!” My work done, I would hop into the back seat of my Hummer limo and speed away to my next humanitarian destination, listening as the chorus of applause trailed off in the distance.

*

My blood pressure was too high. Classic superhero—always overachieving.

“It needs to be below one hundred for you to be eligible to donate,” reported the nurse taking my vitals. She had her hand wrapped around my thumb, squeezing it in a python grip so that my blood dripped onto a glass slide.

“One hundred and seventeen,” she droned, holding my limp hand like a jaded psychic fed up with telling her clients how old they would grow to be. I imagined her tracing her sage fingers down my palm, stopping dramatically to investigate a fine line.

“Just as I suspected!” she would announce, pulling me in with an all-knowing squint. “You were really good at basketball in a past life!” Then, rolling her eyes to the back of her head in a state of supernatural bliss: “Oh, and you’re totally gay.”

“Wait a little while and we’ll test you again,” she interrupted, throwing a glass of ice water on my fantasy and forcing me back to reality. Five minutes later, she tested my other thumb, pricking my finger with a medical tool that resembled a mechanical pencil. She squeezed more of my blood onto a fresh slide. Now it was too low, meaning that my blood pressure is in a constant state of flux between extremes.

“You can go ahead and donate,” she concluded, then turned around to tune her radio dial until she landed on a breezy R&B station. She hovered there for a minute, mouthed along to a few words, and gave me a this-is-my–song look. Maybe my blood pressure would just even out.

*

According to the official American Red Cross website, the average process of giving blood, from arriving at your local Big Red Bus blood drive to stepping off with your complimentary cranberry juice cocktail and sugar cookie, takes approximately an hour and fifteen minutes. They also maintain that every two seconds, someone in the US needs blood, meaning that for the national blood supply to remain sustainable, in the amount of time it takes for one person to give blood, enough of the stuff must be collected nationwide to meet the demands of over one thousand people. The most alarming aspect of these figures? They get it. In a year, the American Red Cross and similar organizations collect 15.7 million donations in the US, over 700,000 more donations than needed. I imagine a nurse splayed out in a blood bank vault making blood snow angels with the amazing surplus of donations she collected that day, which is to say, they are very good at their jobs.

Why, then, are stories such as “The Nation Has a Major Blood Shortage” being relayed on major news outlets like ABC? One ominous headline from Wisconsin Public Radio’s website alerts: “Urgent Donations Encouraged As Nation Faces Looming Blood Shortage.” Another, from Georgia’s Albany Herald, reads: “American Red Cross facing possible emergency blood shortage.” These headlines stand in stark contrast to the Food and Drug Administration’s claims that “the blood supply in the US has been very stable.” So, which is it?

Technically, the FDA is not incorrect. The US blood supply is indeed stable. The catch: the blood supply is just about the only national resource that is, in fact, stable. With decreasing mortality rates, a rapidly growing population, and a rise in complex therapies such as cancer treatments and heart surgeries that require large amounts of blood, the public doesn’t need the blood supply to be stable, it needs it to flourish. This is because the national blood supply is constantly, literally, hemorrhaging. Not only are approximately 41,000 blood donations used every day, but donations are expiring. Red cell donations, for one, have a shelf life of forty-two days, so they must be perpetually collected for the supply to remain “stable,” which leaves the nation’s blood banks playing something like blood whack-a-mole. Every time they block one hole—the 41,000 donations needed each day, a new natural disaster that requires the acquisition and distribution of thousands of new donations—another emergency threatens to deplete their resources, which brings us to not-too-optimistic headlines like U-T San Diego’s “Local blood shortage worsens,” a close cousin of “Blood Good, Supply Bad.”

*

One by one, the donors in line in front of me were escorted to beds, plugged into blood sucking machines, and ejected back into the wild with a soft drink and their free loot. When it was finally my turn, I asked my nurse if I could have a juice.

“We have apple and orange,” she said, then, in a sudden, manic twist, added: “But we just got Pepsi and Mountain Dew!” She plugged me into her blood-bot and I lay back and drank my Pepsi in a napkin cozy, watching my blood travel through a silly straw into a bag on the floor as she explained the new donating procedure I had volunteered for.

“All we’re taking is your platelets,” she said.

I nodded in understanding. Of course. My platelets! Who needs those? I pictured a cabinet in my dining room full of fancy dishes, my platelets, withering away unused.

“The blood we extract today goes into this machine,” she continued. With her foot, she tapped what looked like a miniature crib on the floor rocking my blood back and forth, lulling it to sleep. “Once the machine is done separating your platelets, the rest of your blood will be returned back to you.”

I tried to hide my horror at this new revelation with my impression of an easygoing, I’m-not-freaking-out-at-all smile. Inside, I tried to process what she meant by your blood will be returned back to you. They were taking my blood out, sending it to a bag on the floor, then shoving it back in where it would touch all my important inside parts. This had to break the three-second rule.

Passing me my very own rubber ducky in a Ziploc bag, she instructed me to squeeze it every five seconds and left to help out other donors. Every few minutes she would come back, look at the bag that was slowly filling up with my blood, and ask, “ARE YOU OKAY?” as if she’d seen a spider crawl out of my veins, or just discovered that instead of blood, I was running on red Jello.

“I’m fine.”

Ten minutes would go by and again I would be pulled out of my phone’s trance by a shadow hovering over me.

“YOU STILL OKAY?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, thank you.”

I thought she might call an ambulance, but then I remembered that I was already in one.

*

After the procedure, I called my best friend, Arthur, and we drove to the pizza place twenty minutes away to redeem my free voucher. Over cheese slices and Coke, we played “Would You Rather?” It was the middle of the day so we had the restaurant all to ourselves, him in his Christina Aguilera t-shirt and me picking at my nail polish. A vaguely Italian song chimed in through the speakers. Would you rather have spaghetti fingers or always look like you just came back from a long, grueling run? Would you rather only be able to bathe in soup or be Osmosis from Osmosis Jones? Arthur phoned his in: Would you rather be an octopus or a squid?

“If I choose squid, is someone hunting me?” I asked, attempting to add drama to his scenario.

“Why would someone be hunting you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a monster?”

He told me that when people are cremated, most of the ashes they give to the families belong to someone else. I told him that when I die, I want my ashes scattered over an ant-hill. I confessed that I lied on the questionnaire.

“It’s so weird that they make you choose,” he said. “You can either save someone’s life or you can check that you’ve had gay sex and let them die.”

“I kind of wish I was cool enough to tell them I’m gay,” I told him. “Like, as an act of revolt?”

I wondered what that might look like. Putting myself first.

A little boy named something devastatingly cute, a name only a kid can pull off: Max. As an adult, he will go by Maxwell, but for now, he’s just Max. He has a gap tooth and freckles, the kind of kid you can see on the cover of an off-brand box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. He has a rare cancer, so rare his parents are considering an experimental treatment that requires huge amounts of blood. We share a blood type.

“Sorry Max,” activist me would say. “I can’t donate. I’m making a political statement.”

*

Back on campus, it was still too early for my night class, so I made my way to my favorite quiet spot on the third floor of the cafeteria to read. Usually I have no trouble lugging my body up three flights of stairs, but this time I felt nauseated, so I gave up my original plan and saddled myself into the nearest seat I could find. At the table next to mine, an athletic couple studied silently from a mess of books and papers laid out before them, the man pausing every few minutes to take a gulp from a Herculean gallon of water.

I looked down to the first floor where I could see hundreds of students dashing in and out, a few daring ones riding their skateboards right through the cafeteria, late to class again. Another hurried student stepped on a corner of the Pegasus insignia printed on the floor. University legend warns that stepping on the Pegasus ensures that you will never graduate from the school, which is why it’s usually partitioned off by velvet ropes. An icy shiver passed through me. Rubbing my hands for warmth, I noticed that they were a shade lighter than usual, and suddenly they shifted into a blur and I couldn’t discern what color they were at all. I stood up to go to the bathroom, hoping I could make it to a stall before throwing up.

Sometime later, I woke up on the floor crumpled up in a ball and blind. I could hear two girls exchanging feverish words next to me, but we were separated by a wall of black.

First one told the other: “He’s waking up.”

Then, to me: “You passed out. Are you okay?”

I closed my eyes, figuring it wouldn’t make much of a difference because I couldn’t see with them open anyway.

“Don’t go to sleep!” a voice ordered, shaking my arm back into existence.

“You’re probably dehydrated,” someone speculated. A red-headed blob gradually came into focus.

“Can you bring me water?” I asked, feeling self-conscious.

Was I being too demanding?

I once heard on the radio that people regularly die choking alone in restaurants. Instead of asking anyone for help, they rush to the bathroom not wanting to bother anyone. They pretend they’re just having a run-of-the-mill teary-eyed, claw-at-your-neck coughing fit, and once inside they choke quietly by themselves.

People don’t want heroes. We want to be able to save ourselves. I closed my eyes again.

You’re not going to die in such a wimpy away, I told myself. If you’re going to die, it better be being hunted as a squid.

A third girl came up to me with water. I snatched it from her hands, but within seconds she took it back.

“Actually, if you’re dehydrated, you shouldn’t be drinking water,” she said.

I now saw that I was surrounded by a swarm of white girls. Maybe I was already dead, I thought, or in limbo: an infinite series of white girls bringing me water and taking it away.

“Are you sure?” I wanted to ask, gazing longingly at the cup of water in her hands, but I was too confused and out of it to reason with her. Instead I just curled back into my ball. Maybe she’s pre-med or something.

Soon, the paramedics arrived. They measured my blood pressure and told me I was dehydrated. They told me I needed water.

“Have you had any water?” one asked. I looked at the cup the girl brought me, still full on a table too far for me to reach.

“No.”

They plugged me into an IV. An Evil-Dead quantity of blood squirted out of my arm. The paramedic wiped it with a tissue.

“Why did you donate blood? For the movie tickets?” he asked straightaway, maybe not his first time doing this.

Partly. But don’t forget that I’m a selfless hero.

“Was it worth it?” he asked, not waiting for a response to his first questions.

I leaned my head against the wall and felt the cool liquid from the IV travel through my veins, a million microscopic glasses of ice water splashing along the insides of my limbs, gradually waking my body up.

“You have two options,” he went on. “You can go to the hospital or you can stay here and drink a lot of water.”

I am asked to monetize my life. I could probably survive if I stay, I calculated half-conscious. This wasn’t my first time fainting. A few months before, while staying at my mother’s house, I sliced my thumb trying to open a can of tuna. I woke up a few hours later in her bed. I had passed out. Not sure what to do, she had simply dragged my body to her bedroom and resumed cooking dinner.

“I’m really poor and have really bad insurance, so I think I’ll just stay here,” I said.

“You will almost definitely pass out again if you stay,” he countered, more stern.

Then why even give me the option? Is this some kind of fun game paramedics play: put the patient in a life or death situation, ask them to choose death, then force them to live anyway? Still, I thought I had a shot at making it on my own. There was a water fountain a few feet away. I was lucid. I said out loud, “I’m lucid,” figuring that anyone who can remember the word lucid must be it. Besides, if I couldn’t afford breakfast, I sure as hell didn’t have money for an emergency room.

“I think I’ll stay,” I repeated.

“We’re taking you to the hospital.”

*

In the ambulance, I discovered that my phone’s flashlight feature would not turn off. Thank God: I had broken my fall with my new cellphone I’d saved up for months for. I turned it around in my hands, not really sure what I was looking for. A hidden magical switch that would help me in exactly this kind of situation? I didn’t care about the phone. I was worried the battery would die and I wouldn’t be able to call anyone to pick me up from the hospital. I had twelve percent battery left. I called my mom. No answer. Eleven percent. Again. No answer. I called my brother and went straight to voicemail. Nine percent. I called Arthur. He’s coming.

Later, I will find out that after my call, he rushed out of bed and ran out of his parent’s house, frantic to see that I was okay. His mom was maneuvering into the driveway, coming home from work, and parked an inch from the driver’s seat of his car thinking it would be funny if she made it hard for him to get inside. Assuming he was overreacting over her innocent joke, she roared into her steering wheel laughing hysterically as he flailed his arms and shouted at her to cut it out. Meanwhile, I was in the back of an ambulance plugged into an IV with a computer printing out a series of zig-zag lines quantifying my life. I still think she’s funny.

I went back to trying to fix the light.

“You trying to take a selfie in an ambulance?” the new, younger paramedic riding with me asked, disapproval thick in his voice.

My eyes jumped from the tribal tattoo on his arm to the hurricane of wires coming out of mine. I didn’t answer, not wanting to explain myself to him.

“You got a girlfriend?”

Again, I looked down at my cut-offs and painted nails to what I thought was an obvious declaration of what type of boy I am.

“There’s lots of girls around here,” he continued.

I folded and told him that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Not really a lie. A part of me worried that if I told him I’m gay he would purposely mess something up. I was plugged into a lot of tubes and they all presented an opportunity for an “accident.”

“Is my water level thing better now?” I asked him.

“Your water level thing?”

“I don’t know what it’s called,” I said, “but the first paramedic told me I was dehydrated and needed water and he kept looking at a measurement I think might have been my blood pressure. I’m not sure though.”

“Are you pre-med?” he asked.

“No.”

“Thank God.”

“Well, how is it?” I asked, caring less and less about the possibility of an accident now.

“It’s fine.”

“What kind of tests will they do on me at the hospital?” I went on, running up the tab in my head.

“Are you anxious?” he asked.

“Only when I’m in an ambulance.”

*

It had been over an hour since I had fainted. Even so, the paramedics insisted that I be wheeled into the hospital on a gurney. A nurse behind the reception desk looked up at me.

“There’s my sixty-three,” she smiled.

“I’m your sixty-three,” I said back, then turned to the young paramedic. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re her sixty-third patient today. You win a prize.”

“Like an Olive Garden gift card?” I asked, or free healthcare?

Her eyes flashed to my hands as I fumbled with my phone.

“Need a charger?” she asked.

“Yes! Please!”

“I’ll go get one for you,” she said, getting up from her station. She pushed through a set of double-doors and moved into the room next door. I never saw her again.

Classic hospital prank.

From there, I was wheeled into an emergency room about the size of a walk-in closet.

“Do I have to do these tests?” I asked my doctor. “I feel perfectly fine. There’s no way I

can afford this.”

“You look fine,” he said. “I’ll just give you another IV and you can go.”

My mind flashed back to the water fountain that was only a few feet away, the cup of water probably still on the table. Arthur arrived just as my doctor was about to go, his curly hair still matted down in the back from his nap. On his way out, the doctor warned me, “Watch out. The person you least want to see is on her way.” Minutes later, an Ursula-like woman entered the room pushing a laptop on a cart.

“Name?” she asked by way of introduction. Date of birth. Social Security number. Religion? At this, I felt myself losing my temper. Why did it matter what my religion was? In case you die, a voice whispered in my ear. The winds were betraying me. What do they do for agnostics? I wanted to ask. Throw their ashes on ant-hills?

“None.”

“Health insurance card?”

“How much is this going to cost?” I asked, digging through the several-month-old receipts and expired coupons stashed in my wallet.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “You’ll get a bill in the mail.”

But I’m right here. Let’s skip the middle man.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, I can tell you your health insurance kicks in after $900. After $900, you pay ten percent.”

After $900? Ten percent of what?

“Don’t worry, though,” she said. “You’re on your mom’s insurance. She’ll pay for it!” I smiled politely, again doing my impression of someone who’s got it all under control. Of course, my mom will just hock one of the diamonds she bought with her glamorous, high-paying gig at Starbucks. No worries.

“It’s fine! I’ll just sell some more of my blood for money!” I yelled, but she was already out of the room.

Arthur, who has had cancer and been through the hospital bureaucracy before, explained: “Your health insurance only kicks in after the first $900. Anything before that, you have to pay.”

We waited ten minutes. Twenty. I could hear the nurses in the reception area talking about Game of Thrones. A main character had died, apparently. They were distraught. Thirty minutes. The monotonous beeps prompted by the wire connected to my finger started alternating their rhythm. Beep. Three seconds. Beep. Sometimes two consecutive beep, beeps—no intermission. I tore the wire off, feeling like a bad-ass action movie star, except twenty-two and puny. The same tired, limping woman walked back and forth down the hallway. There was a glitch in the Matrix.

“If you don’t go to the reception area and bring me a doctor, I’m going to get primal,” I told Arthur. He hurried out.

*

Driving out of the hospital, it was finally okay for me to be gay. Arthur blasted our best friend song on his CD player, B*Witched’s “Blame it on the Weatherman.” We listened to it when he was first diagnosed with cancer, now when I was released from the hospital, and years later driving by our old club, Pulse. Each time, we blamed it all on the weatherman, pleading at the top of our lungs for him to leave us alone. We stopped at a convenience store to pick up a bottle of water, my total coming out to a little over two dollars. I winced at the idea of paying for water. A week later, my bill would arrive notifying me that I owe $3,412.67 to the hospital for donating blood. A measly sum to a hero.

We talked about boys. I slowly came back to life describing Zac Efron on the cover of whatever magazine was in the checkout line, laughing in hindsight at the paramedic’s girlfriend comment.

“I asked the paramedics to let me stay,” I told Arthur, taking a massive swig from my water. “Even if it meant I would die.”

“Well, now neither of us can donate,” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

“In high school, on our blood drive day, I tried to donate,” he said. “But when the nurse handed me my questionnaire, I didn’t really know any better, so I marked that I wasn’t a virgin.”

He told me she informed him he would not be able to donate. When he asked why, she explained that it was because his blood wasn’t safe. The bus was packed with other high school students, jocks who agreed to be heroes so long as they could get out of fourth-period Biology.

“Everyone heard,” he said. “So I hid in a bathroom stall until the end of the blood drive so I wouldn’t have to go back to class.”

I watched as his grip on the steering wheel tensed, his knuckles white.
“Did you notice how all the guys that worked at that hospital were beautiful Aerie models?” I asked.

We played Would You Rather all the way to the university parking lot where he offered to drive behind me till I made it home. I accepted, letting him be the hero this time. I didn’t want to choke alone in the bathroom.

*

In the grand scheme of things, gay men donating blood might rank as a low-stakes issue, especially when compared to high publicity causes like marriage equality, the right to serve in the military, and LGBTQ bullying. After all, donating blood is inconvenient and time-consuming. Shouldn’t gay and bisexual men be grateful to have their hour and fifteen minutes spared? Why, that’s enough time to watch a couple episodes of Golden Girls and have a quick round of high-risk sex!

Amidst the controversy of whether gay men are too great a gamble to the nation’s blood supply, it’s the less overt threats that come with current discriminatory eligibility requirements that have largely gone ignored: that of supporting the false belief that heterosexual people who participate in high-risk behavior are at low risk for HIV infection, the danger that comes with reinforcing negative stereotypes about gay and bisexual people. When the American Red Cross cites that the two most common reasons people choose not to give blood are “never thought about it” and “I don’t like needles,” it suggests that gay and bisexual men are not interested in helping others and don’t particularly feel like being heroes, which is problematic, particularly when blood drives occur in workplaces, high schools, and colleges where donors may worry about the employment or social implications of not donating, all because needles hurt.

This battle isn’t Stonewall and the small victory that will come from gay men being eligible to donate blood will not drastically improve the lives of the LGBTQIA community. Yet, despite the near triviality of this issue, if anything, because of it, because lesbian and gay marriage is now a reality and because gay bullying is gradually becoming more of a taboo, it is the small battles that need to become a focus of the gay civil rights movement. It is the institutionalized homophobia, like that of a gay Iowa teenager who took his life and was not eligible to donate his eyeballs because his mother could not answer whether he was sexually active, that is the most insidious of all, because it hides under its apparent insignificance.

What’s most nefarious of all is that the FDA revising its policy on gay men to a one-year deferral as opposed to its previous lifetime ban is being heralded by many as a courageous move, as if the perception of equality is just as meaningful as equality itself.

 

 

 

***

Original art by Eva Azenaro-Acero, an artist, writer, and musician living in Chicago. Their work has appeared in Fanzine, Witchcraft Mag, The Parks Exhibition Center, and more. Find them on Instagram @birdlets or online at evaazenaroacero.squarespace.com.

Voices on Addiction: Washed Clean

When I was a kid, our house flooded. Twice. During heavy summer rains, water from the creek in our front yard flooded the basement and then the first floor, ruining almost everything we owned. Soggy couches, mud-encrusted carpets, and moldy mattresses filled our manicured front lawn. It felt like weeks that my family spent our days breathing moldy air and sitting on the floor, surrounded by buzzing high-speed fans and gurgling dehumidifiers hammering at floor tiles till they cracked and came up. Everything was mold coated and had to be removed. A few years later, when I was in high school, I was home alone for what was almost a third flood. My parents were out of town when it rained hard for two solid days. On the third day, the creek began creeping slowly toward the house. I felt sick to my stomach as it rose above the front step and lapped at the front door. I was planning my escape through waist-high water when the rains miraculously stopped, and the creek receded.

So I know a few things about how we humans deal with an impending, slow-arriving disaster. When the water first begins to rise, we tell ourselves it’s not going to happen. We are firm in our disbelief. Thirty minutes later, as the water rises higher, we tell ourselves it will stop. When the water is a foot away from the front door, we think about leaving, but we wait. We deny. We bargain. We hope. Maybe we pray. Only as the water crosses the threshold and begins to consume our furniture do we decide that now is the time to leave. But the water is now so high that we must wade or even swim to safety.

Deciding to be honest with ourselves during hard times is like watching floodwaters rise. We don’t face ourselves when we should, but we wait, deny, bargain, hope. By the time we’ve run through these feeling states, the only remaining option is to act; if we don’t, we will be subsumed in our own psychic floods, forced to swim through the muddy water of our minds, desperate for safe shores. We will flail.

As I drove across the golden moonscape that is the Judean Desert, with its wide-lens views of the barren Judean Hills, resembling massive breaching whales, the water of my life was lapping at my door. Having waited too long for a calm and sensible self-rescue, I was scrambling desperately for high ground. Every time I blinked, I saw Paul’s dead body lying on the hallway carpet, then my own. Blink. Paul. Blink. Brad. I couldn’t touch the memory of our last conversation, when Paul told me, in so many words, that he planned to end his own life. I couldn’t face the seven years I’d just wasted in a miserable, drugged-out haze. That floodwater had filled the basement, and I was terrified to open the door and look down into that watery darkness. It was time to swim to safety. I needed hope. I couldn’t say exactly how traveling across Palestine, how following in Jesus’s footsteps, how baptizing myself was going to lead to my healing. I just knew that this was what I needed to do. Some deeper part of my psyche—my soul?—was guiding me. Perhaps it was steering the car. Was the road back to me out there somewhere in this moonscape?

At the same time, I did feel ready to get real with myself. I knew I had to make corrections in how I was moving through the world, but I didn’t know how. I was confused about my life, particularly my experience with my own family. As I drove, I fell into melancholy self-pity. I felt like an orphan. It’s painful not having the support of family; it’s worse when they really don’t like you. After I grew up, my outspokenness about my family’s issues made me their enemy. Slowly, I was pushed out and treated like a pariah. When I did return home for an occasional holiday visit, I faced a family that seemed to see me and my desire for openness and honesty as “the problem.” I had been in weekly therapy since I was twenty-five, and I’d read countless self-help books about how to heal my codependency and other effects of growing up with my dysfunctional family. But the one thing I didn’t learn—or I was in denial about—was just how reluctant dysfunctional families can be to look at themselves. And how in denial I was about my family. I get it now. Most people don’t desire radical honesty. But that more naive Brad, who came home at Thanksgiving or Christmas hoping for a different family experience, couldn’t fathom that they didn’t want to talk about feelings or relationships, let alone discuss a path to healing ourselves. And although my father had learned to drink less, he still drank, and, in my experience, he never did a thing to face his own emotional issues or to repair the damage he’d done to our family. At holiday dinners, I sat at the table, sipping my sparkling water and listening to everybody present blather on about trivial things I didn’t know or care about, feeling unseen, frustrated, and angry at the lack of emotional intimacy. By dessert, we had all removed our gloves. Insults flew freely, and my mother cried.

And yet I knew I couldn’t heal all by myself. I needed community—even advice, maybe fatherly advice. But there was nobody I trusted. My father and the rest of my family was off the table. They treated me like a fraud as if I’d never led the life of a successful magazine editor and adventure writer, though that’s how I’d made my living for fifteen years. They laughed and rolled their eyes when I said anything about my successful travel-writing career.

I now understand the dynamic better. Or I think I do.  My family needed to see me as a Walter Mitty, the ordinary guy who fantasized constantly about a more adventurous life than the one he lived. When those Dos Equis beer commercials featuring the Most Interesting Man in the World appeared on television, they laughed and said that’s you, Brad. In my family’s narrative, like the Most Interesting Man in the World, I was a raging narcissist, a ridiculous liar, and my years of success as an editor, adventure travel writer, columnist, and author of a collection of my nature writings by a major publisher was a figment of my imagination.

This narrative, as hurtful as it was, later became an essential piece of information in my reaching an understanding about what had happened to me: to my life, my spirit, my sense of self. It also highlighted the denial, the dysfunction, the extreme masculine power struggle, and perhaps the toxic narcissism that formed our familial paradigm. Later still, after Donald Trump became president, I found more insight. Trump and his supporters referred to facts as “fake news,” which was exactly the way I felt my family had treated the facts of my life and, essentially, who I was as a person, as a man: in their eyes, I was a fake. Whatever was going on with my family, I appeared to have become fake news to them. My stories became fake. I was fake. Ironically, they cast me as the family scapegoat to avoid looking at themselves, their own patterns of behavior. s

And yet, looking back on this time, I can see that I was causing myself more suffering by not accepting the reality of this family tragedy. Perhaps they wished they had a different son–and I wished I had a different family. I couldn’t yet accept this about them–about me–and save myself from the toxicity by walking away.

By the time I arrived in Palestine, I was struggling to regain my own story. I had been willing to abandon myself, my own truth, and the memories of the things I had accomplished. I had believed others’ version of me more than I trusted my own. Now, in this holy place, I wondered, What was the true story about my life? I honestly didn’t know. Coming here to walk in Jesus’s footsteps was my way of seeking a new model, a different paradigm, a solid story to lean on. Jesus was a vital figure from my youth. When you take away the religious aspects of the story, he was the ideal man. He was accepting, generous, kind, and sought justice for all. He was someone that we imperfect humans, driven by impulses and fragilities beyond our control, could strive to emulate. Jesus was strong, compassionate, merciful, outspoken, and he wasn’t a pushover in the face of powerful men and social organizations. He spoke his mind, and he faced the ultimate consequences. Who wouldn’t want to be like Jesus?

With all of this in my mind and heart, I drove across the Judean Desert. Could this weird journey through history, sacred religious scriptures, and my own past show me anything useful about how to rebuild my life? I had to find out.

I saw the turnoff for the baptismal site at Qasr el Yahud on the western bank of the Jordan River, slowed down, exited the highway, and pulled into the parking area.

I was mesmerized—not by the meaning I believed I was about to experience but by the red sign posted on the barbed-wire fence to my right: “Danger Mines!” Beyond the sign and fence was what you’d expect a minefield to look like: acres upon acres of dirt built up into little gopher-like mounds. After the 1967 war, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the army placed four thousand explosive devices in the ground to prevent anyone from taking back the land.

Qasr el Yahud was also the site of significant Old Testament events; this bend in the river was the place where, according to Jewish tradition, the Israelites crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land for the first time. It’s also the place where tradition says the prophet Ezekiel ascended to heaven.

Wow, I thought as I stepped out of the car and onto the hot pavement. A minefield next to the site where Jesus experienced his spiritual rebirth and where the Jewish people first entered the Promised Land?

I walked toward the cluster of palm trees that lined the river. The pavement stuck to my flip-flops like chewing gum. The minefield disturbed me deeply, even if it was on the other side of a fence and I could easily steer clear. That wasn’t possible with another frightening thing, parked under a palm tree: a massive bus with a sign in the windshield indicating its passengers were members of a church in Dallas, Texas.

I couldn’t help but smile.

The church folks from Texas mobbed the visitor’s center, though I admit they were less scary in person than in theory. It was a quiet, sweet, multiracial group of men and women huddled on the wooden steps, all descending to the water. I smiled and waved to an older woman who looked so ecstatic—as if she’d just won the Texas Powerball. I kept moving to the far side of the steps to sit and take in the scene.

That’s when I noticed John the Baptist standing chest-high in the middle of the narrow, easy-moving river. A heavyset, blond man with a matching goatee, I figured he was the pastor, playing the part for the group. He wore a white robe that exposed his hairy chest. It wasn’t a camel-hair shirt like the original John the Baptist was said to have worn, but this modern John fit the part perfectly. His face beamed.

A middle-aged woman with a boyish haircut stood in the water next to modern John. His hand rested on the crown of her head, and he was reciting a prayer that I couldn’t make out. She was crying joyfully and appeared to be in a state of blissful spiritual overwhelm. Then he looked her in the eye and seemed to ask, Are you ready? She nodded. He placed one hand on her shoulder and the other against her lower back. He pushed her back gently until she disappeared under the water for a full second. After helping her resurface, he cupped his hands and poured three successive palmfuls of water over her head. By now, she was weeping loudly. He hugged her, and then, with one hand resting on his own heart, he gestured with the other hand that it was time for her to wade back to shore. She climbed out of the water and back onto the wood steps, at which time another church member—an elderly man with short gray hair, wearing horn-rimmed glasses—stepped gingerly off the riser into the water and waded out.

The baptisms continued, but I had seen enough. I moved to a dry patch of grass far enough away that I couldn’t hear the others. I reflected on the story of Jesus’s baptism, which I still knew quite well a good thirty years after I’d studied it so intently.

Sometime around his thirtieth birthday, Jesus left his home in Nazareth and traveled on foot roughly a hundred miles to Jerusalem. It was there he learned about John the Baptist, a renegade, wild man figure who had made a reputation for himself performing a new type of spiritual cleansing in the Jordan River, an adaption of the longstanding Jewish ritual of frequently purifying oneself by bathing in blessed water. Jesus walked east, toward the Jordan, to receive this purification. John doused him and blessed him. Then, according to the biblical narrative, the heavens opened, and the Holy Spirit descended “like a dove,” landing on Jesus. It was then that Jesus fully embraced his identity as the Son of God.

Now, thousands of years later, I was sitting on a patch of grass at the location where Jesus received his first hit of divine inspiration and launched his world-changing spiritual crusade. I had felt a pressure in my body, a necessity, to see this place with my own eyes and to experience it in my own body. I hoped it would help me see something new about myself or remember something—I wasn’t sure which. Could I find divine inspiration here, too, like Jesus had? I was no savior, I knew that. Far from it. I lacked a job, let alone purpose. But I was still a seeker, and I came here seeking something. I’d been housebound for so many years, slowly trying to rid myself of all that ambition and ego that had driven me to be an adventure writer.

The word “ego” is confusing. In Eastern spirituality, it has a negative connotation: it is the selfish part of us that gets in the way of achieving enlightenment. But the ego has a far different meaning—and purpose—in the Western psychological tradition. Ego is how we relate to the world. We need a sufficiently strong ego to earn a living, negotiate relationships, live with meaning and purpose, and so on. Many people who show up in treatment for mental illnesses have an undeveloped or fractured ego. Our ego is the part of our minds that must face the bumps and curves of the real world. After my collapse, all that high-test ambition drained away, revealing the truth that ambition and grandiosity overcompensating for my toxic shame and unworthiness had functioned as my ego. What was left of me when you took away the career, the relationship, the family, the pills? I felt as murky as the muddy Jordan.

I wouldn’t have described it like this in 2012, but I now see that I needed to build a healthy ego, which had been squashed during my childhood years. I needed to rebuild myself, but there was no map because I was unsure of starting point—me. I knew I did not want to become just another asshole American man, overly focused on achievement, money, acquisition, competition, woefully disconnected from his feelings apart from anger. I had played that game, and I wasn’t interested in rebuilding my life, only to fall back into the same traps that led to my breakdown in the first place.

The only thing I knew—a small, quiet part of my gut knew—was that spirituality might play a significant part in what I needed to structure a life that mattered to me. Every spiritual path I was aware of asked the same thing of its followers: humility. I was ready for that. I didn’t have any reason not to be humble. I had very little going for me. Everything I’d done to try to feel better had failed: sex, travel, drugs, self-help books, relationships, psychiatrists, life coaches. How was it that I was forty-six years old and felt no better than I did during those sleepless nights of my youth when I remember reading the Bible after walking my drunk dad to bed?

Full of self-pity, I tossed a small stick into the river and watched it float southward toward the Dead Sea. I knew it would never arrive there. I’d read that the Jordan River was drying up; a few miles from here, this gently flowing stream slowed to a trickle and eventually became sandy riverbed. I felt like doing a disappearing act myself.

I had hoped I would feel differently here; I’d hoped to feel inspired, invigorated, ready to take on the next chapter of my life. Even if I didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, I’d hoped that if I sat by the Jordan, maybe I might feel the Holy Spirit entering me—or some kind of spirit. I’d hoped for so much, but writing this now, I understand that hope—is useless. On that day, I was still leaning too heavily on hope.

As the stick I’d tossed disappeared around the bend, I noticed that it was quiet and I was alone. The Texans had left the river and were back at the bus waiting to board. I felt a little prickle of heat move through me. A small sense of excitement about being alone in this popular sacred spot pushed through the lethargic, deadening weight of my hopeless thoughts.

I don’t think I consciously decided to do what I did next.

 

I looked around once more to make sure I was truly alone. I removed my sandals and shirt. I pulled my shorts up around my waist and removed my sunglasses, setting them on top of my sandals. Then I turned my gaze to the center of the river to the deep spot where the contemporary John the Baptist had just been standing, blessing his flock with gentle dunks in the water. I stepped off the wooden stairs and into the river. Ankle high. I took another step. Knee high. And another. Thigh high. And then waist high. Until I was standing in the middle of the Jordan River up to my chest. The water was tepid and murky, unlike the fresh, cool streams from Colorado near my home. But at this moment, that didn’t matter. It felt deeply cleansing, even life preserving. Unlike the floodwaters of my youth, I welcomed the murkiness, too, as the water rose against my torso. Instead of fleeing these waters, I wanted the stream to fill me up, replace my own blood.

I looked up toward Jerusalem. I was still alone, which felt like a small miracle in and of itself. I inhaled. I exhaled. And then again. I felt nervous. But why? What was the point of any of this? And then I took a breath so big I thought I might float into space. I bent my knees and let my feet off the river floor. My head dropped under water. I stayed there. I paused, my eyes squeezed tight against the muddy water, my breath slowly exiting my nose.

Do I have to come up? My mind drifted back to that May afternoon of my childhood on the White River in Arkansas where I almost drowned, and my father made no motion to save me. I felt the hard, rough log against my skinny-kid torso. I felt the broken branches dig into my skin. I felt the upriver current pushing me hard into the log. I felt the downriver current pulling at my spindly limbs. In that weird way in which so much can happen in an instant, I found myself wondering how big a container I’d need to hold all the pills I’d stuffed down my throat over the years with the hope that they would save me, make me different, make me whole. A pickup? A dump truck? A garbage truck? Then I imagined the drugs, which still were in my bloodstream at a disturbingly high level, being washed away downriver. I imagined my sins washed away. All of them.

I found my footing on the sand and stood up. As my head emerged from the water, I felt a wellspring of emotion rise from my belly through my chest, neck, and jaw, and then tears burst from my eyes. I wept loudly.

Jesus Christ, where the hell are you? Where’s the love? Where’s the kindness? Where’s the fucking grace?

As I stepped out of the river, a new vitality pulsated through my body, warm and full. It moved like energy but felt solid at the same time. Strong, too. This current streamed through my legs and then my torso. It felt like hot, liquid steel was being poured into the mold of my body. It felt like power but without the edge. It was directed at nobody. It simply was. I tried to make sense of it with words: it felt like survival. I was here. Still here. I was alive, in this body, in this river, in this moment, right now. I had made it through the darkest days when I was convinced that I might not make it through the night, too confused about who I was, why I felt so alone. At times, I had felt like I was truly dying from the inside.

But I didn’t die. And I was not going to. Not now. I was going to find my way back home. Not to Kansas. To me.

Back in my car, the hot vinyl seats seared the skin on my legs. My clothes felt swampy after the river dunk. I started up the car and drove slowly past the sign “Land Mines!” How enthusiastic, this sign, and how deeply sad. I rolled past the barbed wire and mounds of dirt and rejoined the highway.

I was confused about what I’d just done, and yet I felt hopeful that it had been more than a silly recreation or a passing moment of folly or fear. I desperately wanted it to mean something more, to mark what I craved to be true: No more chaos. No more shame. No more suffering. Admittedly, I was a little too hopeful. I was again placing my hopes on something external that might save me, contain me, heal me. But this time, that thing wasn’t a pill or a woman or a promotion or a hot story or an accolade. That, I knew, I believed, was a start and a deeply important one. The trance of my life—the shame, the avoidance, the escapism, the cocktail of medication—hadn’t been washed away. I was still in that trance. The difference was that I’d spotted the exit. Now the only question was, How do I open the door?

 

 

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An excerpt from Into the Soul of the World, forthcoming later this month.

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Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.

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Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen

The Last Book I Loved: Took House

 

Fall, 2020

Took House was one of the first books of poems I’d read since the start of the pandemic. One of the first and only poetry books I could read, for months. In the middle of the night, anxious and insomniac, I read one poem, read it again, read another. The poems knew something about me, something I myself didn’t know, or couldn’t articulate. The poems did the saying, the impossible saying, for me.

That fall I walked the dirt road between the house in upstate New York where we were staying and the larger, paved road that led to the post office and to an old cemetery. Evenings, we often heard coyotes call from the narrow valley between two mountains, as clear and close as I had ever heard them before. I read that coyotes call to their packs after hunting alone. I felt the poems in Took House calling me. There, in the words and the silence surrounding them, a kindred wildness. The way they said, You do not have to be alone.

I’d never met these particular poems before but immediately felt, Oh, I’ve missed you.

 

“Set the dark to hushing,” the poem “A Brief History of Coyotes” begins. This oddness of diction—strange but somehow familiar, startling, touching a truth that feels unsayable otherwise—is a hallmark of Camp’s poems, one of the first things I loved about her work. “Set the dark to hushing”: in my mind, a dial, tuning the night to a frequency only just audible to humans, turning our ears toward the mysterious beings near and within us. In conversation with Camp, she said, “It’s where I want to live in a poem, where the language makes sense but isn’t predictable.”

The poem “Beyond our house, their muzzles” contains the gather and surround of wildness, the way the humans, “listening through the wall” to the coyotes’ howls, feel both protected and not by those walls, and seem to long for the world outside, even with its violence, as inside they have “knuckled back to silence.”

I wanted to read the poems in Took House in two opposing ways. I wanted to read and keep reading, to read the book like a novel, turning page after page in the small light of my lamp in the middle of the night. And I wanted to read slowly, to read each poem over and over, to take into my lungs the richness of their language and imagery, their capacious selves.

Among the many things I love about this book: its focus on a heart in extremity, and the way—though the circumstances are different—the poems bring me closer to my own interior life, show me something necessary and hidden about myself in their startling language.

Took House is composed of three braided strands: poems centered on a relationship, compelling and un-refusable and doomed; poems speaking with and to pieces of visual art (in a former career, Lauren Camp worked as an artist, and her knowledge of visual art is wide and deep); and poems responding to the more-than-human world of the southwestern U.S., raptors in particular. The poems comprising the different strands stand next to each other without overt explanation of their relationships, allowing those relationships to be intuited.

Another of the many things I love about this book: the way the poems question the relationship of art to suffering help me to ask that question myself in a new and urgent way. A question without an answer, or maybe as many answers as there are poems. “Find the Color of Survival” begins

I want to talk about what I believe
is beautiful, and this is complicated by all the oil

of that year.

What is, or can be, beautiful in the midst of anguish? How does art help us to hold our brokenness, the brokenness of the world? The poems of Took House use art—making it, being with it—to think and feel toward a way to contain, absorb, and make meaning of the overwhelming feelings the speaker’s relationship calls up in her. From “Find the Color of Survival”:

… at home I lifted a broad brush to each sorrow.

One day soon every form will be transparent—
but first, with you I’m looking

at even what I cannot stand to see.

Another of the many things I love about this book: the wild beings that inhabit it. Of course the humans, who bring their own wildness, but also the birds and trees and huge sky of the desert Southwest. The raptors of the poems, like the pieces of visual art the speaker loves, are real and true, dimensional, alive. And, too, they hold up the speaker’s inner being, her wildness, to herself. The raptor poems seem to ask, how do we understand desire, the sometimes-violence of it? What is “natural” to us, in terms of want, and how can it be honored? Where are its limits? In “Golden Eagle,” the bird’s

narrow awful face

quickens on perishable landscape,
everything in the open—

In the very next lines, the poem swerves, much like an eagle tilting suddenly toward prey:

At the table, was I greedy?
I hardly ate. Only what I needed.

This vertiginous shifting, present in so many poems, also feels wild to me, and thrilling, and disconcerting, and real. The elements of Took House’s world—sky, wine, paint, desert, desire—exist in such proximity, sometimes colliding, their connections inexplicable but revealed in the way Camp places them as they are: side by side, appearing and disappearing and returning.

From the restraint—conscious, willed—of “I hardly ate,” to the next poem, “Flavor,” which begins “I’d been careful all my life” and then shows us what happens when care and restraint can no longer be maintained:

the taste

of punishment
as strong and sweet as pardon.

Wildness both compels and repels. The speaker doesn’t always want to look but can’t help seeing. She wants and doesn’t want the wildness that overtakes her.

One last thing, for now, that I love about this book: its willingness to dwell, despite everything, in beauty. And beauty in the widest, deepest sense: beauty that encompasses desperation and need as well as “the bones of roses” and the desert sky. Perhaps this is joy rather than beauty, a desire to open to all of life. Or not a desire: the speaker cannot help herself. She can’t not look, can’t refuse immersion. But the wild world, the capaciousness of art, the poems themselves—all these help in their ways. From “Perennials”:

Because I was opened

by another, I will always carry these remnants of pouring light

in my body.

The first time I read this poem, I read “another” as the lover, but now I read it as all the beings that inhabit this pulsing, expansive, and wildly alive book: the lover, the coyotes, the hawks and eagles, the paintings and sculptures, the mountains, and the moon and sun.

 

 

 

 

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Voices on Addiction: The Churn

Nothing mattered but the churn. Enough chaos and you didn’t have to feel, only panic. I knew the cycle well because my family was always moving. Though only swapping one Rust Belt suburb for the next, we might as well have been time-traveling. This was before the internet. There was no scoping out a place on Instagram. Instead, I was dropped into various environments, a sea turtle hatchling fleeing predators in the dark till I could find camouflage among the waves. The one constant was the other kids. Everywhere, kids were vicious.

I was in third grade, Wilson Elementary, shaking spitballs out of my Dorothy Hamill (read: bowl) haircut during recess when Tracey – the goddess of third grade – floated past with her perfect hair and perfectly-matched Garanimals outfit. As she ignored the smiles and waves of her eager classmates, including mine, it occurred to me that popularity wasn’t about having friends or being friendly. It was about not looking like the kind of kid who had spitballs in her hair; it was about looking and acting a certain way, like Tracey. Already cafeteria poison in Reading, Pennsylvania, I set my sights on the next crash landing. Eventually, I’d get it right. Float.

At Bangor West in Bay City, Michigan, bell bottoms and a pookah bead necklace made me the kind of kid the other kids saved a seat for at lunchtime. The following year, despite adopting the uniform of Mountain Brook, Alabama’s Cherokee Bend—Oxford cloth/Levi’s/penny loafer uniform—I faltered. Unable to decipher the southern accent, I was placed in the slow learners’ classes.

By eighth grade in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, Franklin Regional, thanks to liberal adoption of Aqua Net and Bonne Bell lip gloss, I made cheerleading. But soon I had a new problem — we didn’t leave. Instead, my father quit his corporate job in steel to buy a gym, and the constant upheaval came to a screeching halt. Overnight we became a working poor family living in a middle-class suburb.

I’d been drinking for years by then, alone. I never suffered the delusion this behavior was normal. My parents weren’t drinkers. That I acquired the habit is a mystery, but if I had to guess my motivation, it would’ve been that alcohol was for grown-ups, and adults stood taller than any school’s shallow waters.

With only library books to guide me, I learned to steam and reseal liquor bottles, replacing what I took with water. Although my parents didn’t drink, it was the 70s. A bottle of Cutty Sark was a standard Christmas present and, oddly, Mom and Dad carted their full bar and ever-paler stash from state to state.

I began to babysit when I was ten, though I looked all of eight. “There is wine on the counter,” the Germans in Birmingham invited. I always said yes when Europeans asked me to watch their kids. They always had booze. And later, the hippies. They kept weed.

When we stopped moving, my cohort started throwing parties. This was where the complications arose. No longer pushed around by external circumstances, I drank the chaos. “Kirchner, do you know what you did last night?” was a refrain I came to dread. The answer was no.

The other answer was more.

By the third summer at the same address, I was assigned split shifts at the gym, eight to eleven and six to eleven. This was not churn but total submersion. Less than two weeks into “summer break,” my partying got in the way of this schedule.

“Come on, lazybones,” Dad yelled into my bedroom.

Did he yell? My head was pounding. Lying in bed to keep the world from toppling on its axis, I wondered why I’d painted the ceiling the same sky-blue as my walls. I rolled over and moaned, “I don’t feel well. I’m not coming.”

Suddenly my dad was in my room. The air had to have been heavy with the stink of unmetabolized alcohol and cigarettes. Even he couldn’t ignore this evidence.

“You’re a disgrace.” He was definitely yelling. “You’re never going to amount to anything the way you’re ruining your life. You disgust me.”

He slammed the door on the way out, but thanks to the vagaries of architecture, the door didn’t close but puffed back open. Fury licked at my insides as I rose to shut it, pulling the hallway phone into my room.

Mark answered on the first ring. “Fuck you.”

This was before caller ID, and though Mark had left me at the end of our driveway two hours earlier, I knew he’d answer. He had his own phone.

“My dad is such an asshole,” I started right in. “Why do I have to work all summer?”

“That sucks.”

“I hate my life. I can’t take it,” I whined. “Let’s go to West Virginia today and get shitfaced.”

West Virginia, the next state over, was our go-to place for partying. The drinking age there was only eighteen, which made Mark legal.

“Fuck that,” Mark said.

My heart sank.

Mark and I weren’t lovers or even close—I was fifteen-year-old a virgin without a driver’s license—but I knew he was into me. Between always having money, a car, and a crush, he’d always been willing to drive the hour and a half to get to Wheeling. If he’d tired of me, I was screwed.

“Let’s go to California,” he said. “I have an aunt there who’ll put us up.”

Not what I’d been thinking, but YES. “I have five hundred dollars in savings.”

Our plan was hatched.

While I waited for my mother to leave and join my father at the gym, I stuffed a garbage bag with clothes, my camera, and my journal. I’d miss my cat, Tiger, but I wasn’t going to lose heart. I couldn’t stay in this drudgery another moment.

Mark rocked up our driveway in his bright orange 1972 Pontiac LeMans convertible. Knowing what else was in his parents’ eight-car garage, I was disappointed. Besides lacking in stealth, all that eyesore had for sound was an 8-track player. The only three tapes Mark had were about as old as the car — Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath’s, Paranoid, and Rush’s 2112.

“Where’s the Porsche?” I asked, attempting to glare at Mark. He had wiry red hair, pale skin, and a right eye that liked to wander, so looking directly at him during a conversation was near impossible.

“My dad would kill me if I took that,” he said. “Besides, this is big enough to sleep in if we need to.”

Both excellent points. Our next stop was the bank, where I closed the account that contained all the money I’d saved since I started babysitting, five hundred dollars.

“We’re going to have to get creative,” I said as we walked to the car. “If we want to shower.”

Mark smiled and looked at me sideways, pulling a credit card from his pocket. “We can use this for at least a couple of weeks,” he flicked the plastic. “Till we’re far enough away they can’t catch us.”

Since technically I couldn’t drive, Mark did most of the driving with me as the navigator. We got lost a lot.

It took us days just to reach Illinois. By the time we hit Chicago, I couldn’t listen to Rush for one more second. Mid-song, I pressed eject and threw the tape out the window.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mark asked. This wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question, just the first time Mark had asked. He hadn’t asked when I’d popped the clutch on his car while he was driving it, or when we’d taken off and left my friend Missy in the Monongahela River with cops on her tail, or when I’d thrown up all over the people seated in front of us at the Foreigner concert moments after our arrival.

What’s the matter with you? was the darkness, the exact question I avoided with the stupid shit I was always doing. What if Mark dumped me on the side of the road?

“We’ll get another one,” I assured him to fill the dead air. As far as I knew, the 8-track tape was extinct.

As we meandered across the country, somewhere in the middle, we discovered that the 8-track lived, but rock ‘n’ roll did not. Country and Gospel tapes abounded, but we could listen to that sound on the radio. I’d lost interest in fitting in. My sights were set on the promise of whatever was coming next.

We stretched our money by camping—the Badlands, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone—and by stealing. We’d drive up to someone’s tent, act like it was ours, and pretend we’d forgotten something—food, a stove, beer—or that it was time to decamp.

The charge card we’d used for gas was canceled as we hit California. Mark’s aunt was willing to put us up, but we had to talk to our parents. Fine. Though it had taken a month, we’d made it to California. Mark was eighteen, so he could do as he pleased anyway. My family was another story.

I’d never heard my father cry. “I love you more than your mother,” he said. The words made my skin crawl.

“I’m not coming back,” I said. Vicious.

We found an apartment in Pleasanton at the end of the BART line. The place was cheap and had a pool. Though I wasn’t yet sixteen, I got a job at a nearby McDonald’s. The restaurant didn’t open until after my September birthday, so we had to get by on what money was left till then. We weren’t drinking or partying at that point. Legal age was twenty-one, and no one was willing to share their “crystal,” which I only learned much later was homemade methamphetamine.

While I worried over our dwindling cash, Mark sat in his car for hours, day after day. Maybe he was frustrated that our relationship never developed. I wouldn’t know; we didn’t talk.

I furnished the apartment from yard sales, an upholstered chair, a folding table, and my prize—a black and white TV molded into a space helmet. The visor was the screen.

By then, I’d become adept at portioning my meals from a can of soup. My final triumph was scraping breakfast, lunch, and dinner off a single .19 can. If I could keep this up, the money would last until I could start eating at work. I didn’t know what Mark was eating.

As summer was ending, I walked to the local high school. There I discovered something called transcripts. These records of grades and classes were necessary if I wanted to enroll. My parents refused to allow my high school to release them. I could either get a GED or legally emancipate from my parents.

I believed a high school diploma was necessary and didn’t know colleges accepted GEDs. I found a lawyer in the classifieds who told me that emancipation would cost five hundred dollars, which I no longer had. The prospect of living off McDonald’s wages until I turned eighteen loomed, promising a stagnation I feared rather than the chaos I craved.

Hunched over my lunch portion of chicken noodle soup, I watched The Guiding Light. A mother/daughter duo was discussing a marriage proposal. The prospective fiancé was not the baby’s father. My future did not include sitting on a couch with my mother talking about anything. I couldn’t even envision a couch. I needed to rattle this trajectory before it stuck.

I went to the street pay phone and called my mom collect.

“Get to that airport this instant.”

That was the longest discussion I had with my family on the matter. I abandoned Mark in Pleasanton, but I know he stole my diary because I heard about it when I rejoined my class. The rest of high school passed by in a blur.

“Kirchner, are you always high?” the star quarterback asked me junior or maybe senior year. Not that the year makes any difference; the answer was yes.

 

 

Four years later, at nineteen, I would check myself into rehab. If anyone asked, I’d credit running away with giving me an early start on recovery because it had shown me a terrifying future. I would stay sober on that belief for more than seven years. But then I’d pick up again.

That first hit felt like taking off a wetsuit two sizes too small. My entire being unfurled into vast stillness, swaddling the bruised and ragged edges inside with a tenderness I hadn’t felt since the last time I’d found this oblivion. I was floating. Until I wasn’t.

Eventually, I dragged myself back to the shores. Not because I minded the wreckage—that was never what mattered. Destruction was the goal. But I did need to get off all the psych meds.

I was at a meeting sometime in June of 1996. Looking at the graying heads around the room, I panicked. Was this future better?

Then an Irishwoman in her forties started to talk. “I was just at home over Memorial Day, and while my family sat silently around a meal, I realized that this was why I drank.”

I’d heard similar comments, but just then, a spring inside uncoiled. A weight I didn’t know I carried shifted from my shoulders, and I saw how I’d landed here. Without turmoil in my environment, I had no choice but to feel everything. The only way to survive was to keep up the rotation of fear, shame, humiliation, and remorse. For as long as I’d been “sober,” I’d been taking whatever drug would get me there—food, shopping, sex. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the churn.

Seeing this vicious cycle in stark relief, at last I learned to float.

Recover.

 

 

 

 

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Rumpus original art by Liam Golden

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Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.

The Muralist 

The thing about living with my ex’s mural of his own ex about two hundred feet from my apartment was that I loved it. She looked out sideways, lips parted as if she were about to speak. The first time I saw him, a year or two before we began dating, he was painting daisies in her hair. I found more images of her while I sat in his studio. He didn’t pay rent. A family had offered him the carriage house above their garage for free, and in return, he gifted them black-and-white paintings of birds. The studio was a small room, layered in indecipherable spray-painted phrases. He used the pointed ends of finished X-Acto blades to pin photos to the wall. There was no heat and no air conditioning, and I always suspected that, even if other families had offered other studios, he would have chosen this one anyway. Once, he asked what my type was, romantically, and the only unifying factor I could find between the people I had slept with was that a disproportionate number of them had jumped into frozen ponds for absolutely no reason at all. 

In his studio, he told me I could ask him anything. I’d decided beforehand that I wouldn’t ask about his murals. Murals weren’t the only thing he made—he directed the occasional music video and had once appeared in the Daily Mail holding a disturbingly intricate hand-cut map of Amsterdam, where his family was from and where he lived half the year. The map was cut in the shape of a leaf; the canals converged into veins. There are machines that can replicate this result infinitely quicker, but he looked upon them with disdain. I never understood this, but if I’d spent hundreds of hours tracing tiny lines with an X-Acto knife, then I, too, would have to look down upon the alternative.

Murals occupied a relatively small amount of his working time—they were completed in a few exhausting days—but they were what people knew. They were impossible not to know if you lived in Richmond, a small city that prided itself on being the artsy part of Virginia. When I moved there, I had wanted to be an artist too. I’d come for an illustration program, but I had also loved the city for its physical beauty, which he had, in part, created. His ornery black-and-white faces showed up in the background of maybe 10% of Richmond dating app profiles.

And still, I felt that asking him about his work drew too much attention to something vulgar. It made me pause on his Tinder profile, but it wasn’t what made me swipe. Of course, I knew who he was; I followed him on Instagram; I knew his painting of a twenty-foot topless woman on the side of my neighborhood diner; I knew that it was originally supposed to be a portrait of a girl who was tangentially connected to my group of friends. 

***

The story went like this: after the photos were taken and the design approved and the muralist had set up to paint, the girl changed her mind. Her boyfriend had teased her because the design was recognizably her and exposed her nipples. At the last minute, the muralist had to find another model before his lift rental expired. My roommate and I talked about this often as we passed the diner, the breasts distorted up close. We asked each other whether we’d want our own nipples to bless the town, if we’d see it as an honor or a liability.

Art was the muralist’s full time job. He’d received a grant that paid his expenses for six months after college, and in this time, built enough of a following to live off his work. He often bartered: a print for a new fish tank, a quick brewery wall for a few hundred dollars and a year’s supply of beer. He was usually lonely and disoriented. Some mornings he’d wake up and plant a hundred tulips. Once, in his studio, the muralist said something like, “I don’t consider myself famous,” and I laughed, because I hadn’t called him famous either, and maybe also because I assumed that he’d be more interested in me if I didn’t take on the role of fan. 

I didn’t want the power imbalance that might come from acknowledging that, for me, the muralist existed in both a personal and mythologized capacity: the artist I’d always known, whose career I’d followed, and at times, envied, as well as the guy I met the summer I turned twenty-four when we split a bottle of wine in a sculpture garden and stayed up talking about the ways in which our childhood pets died (my cat had pancreatitis; his parakeets went “the normal way”). I couldn’t be the same for him; I was stuck as a regular person in my dumb mortal body. 

We first kissed beneath a large sculpture of a woman whose face was designed to distort and flatten as you circled it. We broke apart when a man walked by with two poodles who started shitting a few feet away from us.

On our second date, we drove out to the country to get fireworks for a photo series. He told me that there was a nearby aquarium he loved, which he soon revealed was actually just a fish store. I thought of a friend, who had once said that she imagined the purpose of her life was to live in a way that made a good story, who imagined herself in a book in lieu of a world with a god. It was easier to leave one observer behind if you submitted to another—it was much more lonely and existentially frightening to wake up every morning in a world where you felt unwatched. Years later, the internet would dub this “main character syndrome.” We squeezed through the aisles, reading handwritten labels beneath glowing shrimp. I thought: This is a person who knows how to enjoy the world. 

Strangers would send the muralist unsolicited critiques of long-finished paintings, as well as deeply personal messages about their own lives. One woman asked if he’d paint her friend because the friend’s husband had cheated on her, and she thought he deserved to pass her face every day. Some people would send unprompted nudes of themselves, in hopes that he’d be so moved by their bodies he would have no choice but to memorialize them. A Belgian guy sent a DM about drunkenly peeing on his mural at night. The muralist thought this one was pretty funny.

His generic message responding to compliments used the term “very kind.” I thought the boilerplate reply was distant. Overall, he said he genuinely felt separate from his work. The walls didn’t even look like faces to him anymore in any meaningful way, just a mess of values.

I understood this, to an extent. I used to think I’d work in art too—I met the muralist not long after letting that go. Once, my high school French teacher asked the class to go around and write compliments for each person. When I unfolded my slips of paper, nearly all of them said that I was a good artist. I was crushed. I wanted to hear that I was funny or beautiful, or that being around me felt good. Drawing was a skill linked to practice and elongated visual memory. It was like being told: The best thing about you is how well you juggle, or, The best thing about you is that you run really fast. 

I’d picked up art as a kid, because I was horribly shy and spent a lot of time alone. As I got older, I learned that if I doodled an eye in the margin of my homework, then someone would notice, would come over and talk to me, would ask me to draw them and sit still and spend time with me while I did. Even if I had no idea how to start a conversation, I could lure people over by offering a vision of themselves. Years later, I wondered if I’d ever really liked drawing, or if I’d only liked being good at something.

I couldn’t say if I truly liked making art or not, but around the muralist, I did feel a heightened love of beauty. In the grocery store, I picked up Meyer lemons to show him, and he knew when I presented him with them what I was saying: that they were the absolute perfect yellow; the yellow I felt closest to; one of my favorite things in the world. This was all real, but it was also something he drew out of me. While driving, he’d point to an orange field under the clouds, and I would know what he was saying as well. We laughed about people who treated artists like they were conduits to higher powers, but we’d also have sex and he’d scatter a jar full of petals over my naked body afterwards, and we’d say to each other, Isn’t this art, too? I couldn’t tell if we were being sincere. He carried me on his back through a yellow-lit cobblestone alley, an alley which we referred to as Paris. In the car, he’d look over while I was going on about a guy I knew who never wore blue jeans because he hates the color blue, as if there’s anything to dislike about blue besides its mildness. I saw him turn to me like I was the orange field disappearing into sky. 

It wasn’t until a New Years party in a Richmond backyard that I understood the muralist wasn’t making it up, the way the city’s gaze followed him. Sometimes he complained about how this manifested in his day-to-day life. Artists, he claimed, would treat him differently: like someone who it was beneficial for them to know. I knew this change was stressful but, also, I obviously thought he was humble-bragging. At the party, we stood together as hundreds of tea candles reflected in metal buckets. I considered that I might be cooler than I had previously thought. I imagined that I was no longer a girl who once had to bribe people into friendship with colored pencil portraits, that I never had been. If he painted me right then, this would be the version of my life on the official record.

A guy in the circle began gushing to the muralist about how his work was transforming our city, how it gave this man pride to share a hometown with him. I knew he was making the muralist uncomfortable; I knew he wouldn’t know how to reply. I thought: I am too high to be here. I thought, Has nobody told this guy about being cool? I squeezed the muralist’s hand and tried to psychically transmit: I’m watching this happen, too. 

This is why I couldn’t be a fan, couldn’t be the guy at the party waving around his praise for anyone to see, whose attention solidified both the muralist’s position as artist, as describer, and his own position as viewer, as receiver, as the one who wanted more.  And still, there was a choice: remaining the main character in a life where I walked around and went to work and didn’t do much, or becoming a side character in a much more interesting story—in something people might actually read.

A girl at the party—a muralist with a smaller following—went to get a beer. On her way out, she ran her hand down the muralist’s back, like an early 2000s movie villain— even though I was right there, holding his hand inside my pocket. I hated her in that moment, with a pleasurable type of rage. She was looking at him, and he was looking at me. He’d made a career out of his gaze—one that people followed, their attention making him a rarefied observer who they looked to to tell them what was real, what belonged to the world of art and ideas. I wanted to live inside that world, and when he looked at me, I did.

When the muralist came to my apartment, I used to sneak him through my bedroom window, not because we had to, but because I lived on the first floor, and because we could, and because he was a person who understood whimsy and fun. When he left for Amsterdam, we tried to lucid dream so we could still be together. There is still beauty, I want to say, when no one is watching, but I could never stop watching him, watching myself, evaluating our dreams, praising them.

Maybe it was all worth it. When he broke up with me for vague reasons—something about an artist residency in Berlin that he hadn’t even been accepted to yet—I was wrecked. The following morning, I woke up too sad to get up to pee, even though I really needed to. I couldn’t rise and meet my new reality, a world where I couldn’t be the Meyer-lemon-yellow version of myself anymore. 

Why we broke up and I went back to him, over and over is a lot like the story of how every emotionally unavailable couple ebbs and flows. He wanted to move to Amsterdam; I wanted to go to grad school. He panicked whenever the intimacy of our relationship reminded him of previous relationships and the hurt they caused. And I must have panicked at the thought of real closeness too because I kept choosing someone who couldn’t offer it. 

That autumn, he painted an enormous portrait on a building that had once held an ice plant in a nearby town. At this point, we were quasi-back together. A week earlier, we’d swam naked in the river, but we’d been down this path enough to know it wouldn’t last. The ice plant project had started years before, and so he was painting a design he’d planned a long time ago. The woman looking mournfully over the field was his ex: a woman who was an artist herself, who had chosen to leave this man and this town, who, I assumed, would never write herself as a secondary character. The muralist referred to me as a writer, which was true: I wrote content for websites about drug trial recruitment and marketing copy about focus group incentives. I wanted to write something bigger, but I wasn’t sure what that meant or whether anyone truly wanted to read poems about finding dead birds at my grandmother’s house, and why I kept writing them if they didn’t. Sometimes I wondered if the muralist forgot that I painted too. His ex-girlfriend’s bangs were wet; tulips emerged from her hair. How ugly a desire, to want the exact gift he’d given her. How badly I wanted it anyway.

He had given me one mural-adjacent thing. First, it’s important to know how his mural process worked: he would begin by spraying a haphazard array of neon pink doodles on the wall, which he would then photograph and upload onto his computer. At this point, he’d select and overlay the doodles on his design, as a type of grid to help orient him. Once, back when we were dating, he flew to Germany to paint a man who had been killed in the Holocaust. The grid beneath the man’s face is full of squiggles and Xs and hearts, but there’s also a doodle of my first name hovering somewhere beneath his eyebrow. It was an outlandishly inappropriate romantic gesture, but I figured, at least I was actually Jewish. I’d take what I could get. 

In the months that we were broken up, any time he painted a new mural in town, I’d pass his grid and look for myself in it, like a code. How could I not? The ice plant portrait of his ex-girlfriend was disparaged by locals who thought she looked too sad, but also chosen by a street art organization as their favorite mural of the year.

***

In truth, I loved the gaudiness of it all, opening my door every morning and seeing her face hovering around me, her enormous, beloved eyes upon my sad little body. I had experienced romantic disappointment, but before the first time he ended things, I had never been truly, truly dumped. I had no idea what to do besides Google “break up physically hurts” and look up timelines for when my chest would release. When I entered coffee shops, it took all my might to prevent myself from marching up and announcing to the barista, “I have been dumped!” And still, when I’d walk in the cold, flicking through songs with my numb fingers, I took some pleasure in how everything felt much sharper, more present, how the world had never felt so bright and clear. Maybe this is what my exes found in the bottom of frozen ponds. It felt good to have her face so large and ostentatious, his presence in my city so palpable, the paths he walked traced by shrunken-down images of his murals on stickers. I would have felt this way anyway, I told myself. I’d have seen his car, or a child holding a parakeet; I’d feel haunted as long as we shared this town. But this was another level, legitimized and grand, a story to top all stories, a break up to top all break ups, glorious and terrible. I would stomp around and shout at the world, My heartbreak is forty feet tall, and I pass it every day. People come from miles around to see my raw, bleeding hurt.

The muralist had one primary career goal and it was simply to paint as large as possible. It wasn’t because these walls would be seen by more people, he said, but that each escalation felt like a challenge, a game. He began at the start of adolescence, and has never stepped away. Every night before bed, he put his X-Acto-blade-wielding wrist in a splint. 

He was generally ambivalent about the idea of fame, and tried to avoid appearing in his own social media. Recently, a friend and I were talking about whether or not we’d ever want to be famous. It seems obvious that being watched by a great number of people is bad for you, that fame reliably harms those who achieve it. A former reality star we follow on Instagram, we agreed, would probably be much happier if she weren’t constantly justifying her parenting choices to strangers and lived anonymously as an artsy mom. The influencer’s toddler recently started teething on an unused vibrator and everyone was upset. Wouldn’t it be better to just avoid that?

And still—how could I say I don’t want this regard when I’m doing what I’m doing? How can I act like I don’t think that being watched by a large number of people offers my life some legitimacy? When I’m still trying to put my mind and face in the public sphere, longing for murals and readers and proximity to fame? I’m still actively trying to be under that gaze, watched by people who haven’t met me. How do you separate the desire to make art from the desire to be seen? I have to believe there’s more to it all than this, but if I painted a billion foot wall, it would only be so that nobody could ever look away from me. 

***

On Instagram, the reality star posts her morning banana to half a million followers. She preemptively adds a link to the headband she’s wearing, because she knows people will ask. I imagine how it feels to know that someone thinks that the way you arrange your refrigerator is, somehow, interesting. When the muralist popped a seltzer for me before I came over because he remembered I prefer them half-flat, I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world.

During one of our break ups, he said to me: This is how I’ll always think of you, how you look right now, with your face half in a pillow. I can never tell what you’re thinking about. This is obviously what I wanted my mural to look like. I wanted to not only be seen, but seen through the eyes of someone who was at least halfway in love with me—even if I felt most desired in the moment he told me he didn’t understand me. My idea of love depended, and to some extent, still depends upon this distance, this unbridgeable space in which to throw our longing, the inaccessibility that surrounds everyone who has ever captivated me, every lover, every star. I wanted to grow old and tell this story to my grandchildren and show them this mural, this monument to what my face looks like when I’m trying not to cry. I wanted to walk around in a gown saying, “You know, I was once very beautiful,” because it’s of crucial importance to all children that their grandparents are formerly hot. Anyway, I actually wasn’t thinking about anything at all. The only thing on my mind was a primal want for him to stay.

I never got my mural, although I tried. Over the years, I lost patience with my cool shtick, and just asked. He said he’d paint whatever I wanted if I found a wall for it. This past summer, I wrote a proposal in response to a call for muralists, explaining to a committee why I needed him to come paint my face really big on the side of a bar I go to often. We made the final rounds, but the design wasn’t accepted. Nothing has shown up in its place. Before the rejection, friends asked if I was sure I wanted my face so huge, right where everyone could see it. I couldn’t even imagine not wanting that, although I did feel embarrassed by how swollen my desire had grown. I haven’t stopped hoping for this mural, and if I heard of an open wall, I’d take it today. If you know one, tell me.

In the depths of my melodrama, I’d walk around Richmond under the gaze of his murals, and remind myself: This isn’t the whole world. One day, I told myself, I’m going to move somewhere new and nobody I’ll meet will have heard of him. I’ll climb a big hill and sit at the top with friends I haven’t met yet, and I won’t be able to imagine caring about what I care about now. I will half-heartedly disguise his identity, as if fame retains value when stripped from its context. He’ll still be a character, but smaller. I will be the one committing him to page, gazing at him, gazing at the shape I took around him: an outline, a portrait, a mural, a single shot with our faces mostly turned away. The story will continue without him. I’ll stay in a cabin in the darkest part of Iowa and watch a meteor shower in the damp grass until a cloud obscures what we drove out for. I’ll fall asleep in my contacts. I’ll bite into an apple and find that it’s smushed from the car and think of a tree he once planted that never bore fruit. I’ll think of him carrying me through the yellow alleyways. I’ll think of our arms outstretched from either side of a snowbank and it will light up very little in me or maybe nothing at all. These friends will have to take my word for it when I say there’s a place where all of this matters. This trust will be a kindness.

 

 

 

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Rumpus original art by Peter Witte

When Craft Becomes an Act of Love: An Interview with Gayle Brandeis

Gayle Brandeis is glowing on my screen, talking about the body’s part in her creative process. That same morning, she and her friend, Rebecca Evans, led a class called “Musings and Movement,” where participants were encouraged to wear comfortable clothes and “have something to write with, and something to write on.” This made me think of Brandeis’s new essay collection, Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss (Overcup Press, 2023), which is a celebration of the things we are taught to keep hidden, especially our bodies. Movement and dance have always been a big part of Brandeis’s creative process: “I listen to that part of me that wants to move, wants to write,” she says. “It leads me into an intense place of focus.”

This focus has served Brandeis well. Writing across genres, Brandeis is a prolific author, respected teacher, and beloved mentor. Her nonfiction books include a hybrid memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press, 2017), and Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (Harper One, 2004). Her novels include The Book of Dead Birds (Harper Collins, 2009), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt, 2010), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award. Her recent novelette in poems was the terrifying Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony) (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), which was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. My personal favorite—maybe because it contains one of my favorite poems, “Jacaranda”—is her poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press, 2017).

Drawing Breath is Brandeis’s newest offering: a collection of personal essays examining our breath and breathing from different perspectives. From birth to adulthood, Brandeis’s life, loves, losses, and tales of writing about it have been ordered into sections (Eupnea: Quiet Breathing; Hyperaeration: Increased lung volume; Ponopnea: Painful Breathing . . . ). Fluctuating from humorous to horrifying, the essays are honest depictions of what haunts us, helps us, and heals us. A couple of the essays originally appeared in The Rumpus, including, “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” published in 2012, a groundbreaking essay for Brandeis. It was the first time she had published anything about her mother’s suicide, and the supportive response she received was instrumental in giving her the courage to write other essays about her mother, and, ultimately, her memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis—a book that changed my life.

Brandeis and I exchanged a series of emails before our Zoom interview, where we reconnected and talked about Drawing Breath, the book’s examination of the grief and sadness associated with loss and trauma, the writing process, and this marvelous container we call our body.

***

The Rumpus: Your collection of essays has been described as a love letter to your readers. Maggie Smith says, “This collection draws inspiration from form—form of the body and form on the page.” I completely agree. How did this collection come together? Did you breathe in the air of your world, and breathe out these essays?

Gayle Brandeis: I didn’t have this collection in mind as I wrote each essay—each had its own sense of urgency and wholeness within me. I get a bit of tunnel vision when I’m in the thick of an essay, and it feels like the only thing I’ll ever write; I don’t consciously think about how it connects with my other writing, or how it could be part of a larger body of work (though my process is always evolving; perhaps someday I’ll write an essay collection with the bigger picture in mind along the way.) At some point, I realized I had more than enough essays to pull into a collection, and as I sifted through my files, I could see the underground rivers that flowed between them, the subconscious threads that stitched my work together. These essays were written over the course of more than twenty years, and I clearly have a stubborn devotion to subjects I keep returning to in my work, including breath, which became a meaningful organizing principle for the book.

Rumpus: You write: “The word ‘essay’ shares the same root as ‘assay,’ a verb used in metallurgy, chemistry, alchemy, meaning to test or weigh a substance to determine its composition. I think back to childhood collections, my intuitive groupings of pebble and shell. I similarly tested and weighed these essays as I put this collection together, tracing their origins of heat and grief and heart.” Your scientific curiosity, combined with an unflinching nerve, is beautiful alchemy. How did you find the perfect balance of science and heart?

Brandeis: Roxane Gay gave a guest lecture at Antioch several years ago called “In & Out” that was such a revelation to me in this regard—she spoke about the importance of looking both inward and outward when we write creative nonfiction; that’s where the alchemy happens, she said. It later occurred to me that I had being looking both directions in some of my work without articulating it as such, starting with the title essay, “Drawing Breath,” that’s divided into Inhales, where I look inward toward my own experience with breath, and Exhales, where I look outward toward the literature and science of breath. Her talk inspired me to continue to try to find this balance, to look both directions in a way that can both ground my work on an embodied level and make it more intellectually capacious (of course I don’t always find the ideal balance.)

Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. This really is a book about writing through our lives, isn’t it, and writing about the body?

Brandeis: Yes! It has been a lifelong interest of mine, the connection between writing and the body, a connection that really came into focus for me in college, where I created a degree in Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation, and Healing. Dance and writing are both forms of expression, both forms of language that spring from and find interconnection in the body. Looking back, as I do in my essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Young Girl,” I realized that when I was a kid, I was already writing about things like mental and physical illness. Things I still write about today. So, writing the body has clearly interested me since I started writing. It’s one of my most long-standing devotions.

Rumpus: “Portrait of the Writer as a Young Girl” is also haunted by the desire to be seen, to be known—a setting that feels both sad and familiar. How did your emotional neglect (like so many of us) feed the desire to create art?

Brandeis: I should preface this by saying I had a wondrous childhood, overall, and certainly a privileged one. My sister and I had a lot of freedom to play, to roam, to explore, to create, and we were exposed to art and culture and other enrichment, all of which I’m so grateful for.

At the same time, I recognize the deep wound I carry from having a narcissistic mother who instilled a lot of shame and guilt—sadness, too—in me when I was a child, and made it hard for me to express some of my deepest, truest thoughts and feelings. Writing was (and continues to be) a place where I could give those deepest, truest thoughts and feelings a voice, where I could truly be seen and heard, even if only to myself. It feels like an act of both resistance and joy that I’ve built a life around writing, around the place where I’ve felt most free.

Rumpus: “Drawing Breath” is a shaped essay that explains the desire for cohesion, as a person, as an artist, as a female, as a mother. What was the inspiration to craft the essay into (seemingly) hour-glass and bee-hive shapes?

Brandeis: I have to give credit for the visual shape of this essay to Jenny Kimura, who designed the inside of Drawing Breath. She had the idea to shape the essay so that it expanded and contracted like inhales and exhales, and I was delighted by this idea, by how the text breathes on the page, thanks to her genius. This essay is one of the older ones in the book—I wrote it over twenty years ago as my critical paper when I was getting my MFA at Antioch. I was fascinated by the connection between breath and writing, and am grateful I had an opportunity to explore that connection in such a deep way through the critical paper component of the degree (and am grateful to my amazing mentor Alma Luz Villanueva, who supported my unconventional approach.) I love that this essay has new life all these years later, and in its beautiful new shape gifted by Jenny.

Rumpus: The language in “Thunder, Thighs” is informed by a research questionnaire you made for women participants, one for a project about the cultural history of the thigh! It includes various sources: ancient texts,  the Indo-European etymology of the word “teu,” a diet booklet from 1953, and even Mad Magazine. Are these sources, from the serious to the flimsy pulp of pop culture, complicit in shaming of women in their bodies?

Brandeis: Most of the sources in this essay are indeed complicit in the shaming of our bodies, other than the sources that celebrate our bodies, like the ancient Egyptian prayer for abundant thighs. The advertising industry, the diet industry, etc., are arms of the patriarchy and capitalism and white supremacy, which all benefit from making many of us feel bad about ourselves. There’s always a product or service we can buy to try to fit unrealistic beauty standards—products and services that keep us from loving ourselves as we are. I’m glad the piece made you laugh as well as cry—I’m a pretty silly person, but I tend to skew towards seriousness in my writing, and I’m happy when some of my humor finds its way into my work.

Rumpus: “The Women Who Helped” is an incredible essay, all about an assault you had to endure. You address the power in the supportive sisterhood that helped you afterward. What was it like to revisit this trauma, including what you call “the most important part” of the ordeal?

Brandeis: The way the women in my dorm supported and nurtured me after that experience of assault was life changing. I’d always had small groups of friends growing up, usually just one or two friends I was close to at any given time, and I hadn’t experienced being part of a larger circle of women until that moment. My mother was distrustful of other women, competitive with other women, so I didn’t have the model of communal sisterhood growing up (though I had the most beautiful and profound direct experience of sisterhood with my own sister.) The #MeToo movement prodded me to take a fresh look at many experiences of my life, and I was startled to realize how when I’d told the story of this assault over the years, I’d completely left out the women who’d helped me afterward.

Writing this essay felt like an act of repair, of honoring, of healing. I was able to read it publicly during a college reunion (or “renewal” as the alternative program I was part of calls them) and found myself literally embraced by a circle of women after I read, some of whom had been part of that original circle, all of us crying and hugging each other, holding each other up.

Rumpus: The collective ‘we’ in “We Too” is mega-powerful and a masterpiece in language. Peppered with science, it is a fabulous, factual romp into our power. You end with the encouragement to “find our wider voice.” How did this essay evolve?

Brandeis: I wrote this essay around the time my novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, was released. When I started writing that book back in 2009, it came to me in first person plural, a collective voice for the girls and women allegedly murdered by Countess Bathory around the turn of the seventeenth century. The only work I had read in first-person plural at that point was The Ladies Auxiliary, by Tova Mirvis, about ten years prior; I remember finding it really energizing and inspiring—it likely helped me find the collective voice in my work. I ended up setting Many Restless Concerns aside for many years—I was pregnant in 2009, and writing about torture and murder felt unsavory in that condition. Then my mom took her own life a week after the baby was born, and that was what I needed to write about over the next few years. I only returned to Many Restless Concerns after I finished writing my memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis—I felt ready to write about a grief bigger than my own, ready to access a voice bigger than my own. In the intervening years, several other books and shorter pieces had been published in the first-person plural—it became a bit of a hot craft choice, in fact—and I thought it would be interesting to investigate what the point of view could accomplish on the page, especially for women-identifying writers. It made sense to write the essay itself in first-person plural, and it became a fun choral experience, merging my voice into a collective voice made of other collective voices.

Rumpus: Of all the essays, I enjoyed “Joy” the most! It was your mother’s fragrance, and the sense memory seems to match the relationship you had with her. The fragrance of the essay transcends language and lingers long after the last words (the haunting “Don’t Go Don’t Go Don’t Go,” repeated over and over by a little girl chasing her parents to the elevator). Why is smell so important to memory? Important to recognize as a trigger for an emotional response?

Brandeis: Thank you so much for these beautiful words! To get a little science nerdy here, smell is deeply entwined with memory and emotion because it accesses the same area of the brain—it bypasses the thalamus, which processes all our other senses, and goes straight to the primary olfactory cortex, near our limbic system, hippocampus, and amygdala, the parts that process memory and emotion. That can make scent such a powerful trigger, and the scent of my mom’s perfume (even just the memory of that scent) certainly causes our whole relationship to well up inside me, which made this essay both challenging and meaningful to write (it was also challenging because scent can be difficult to pin down with language, since it’s so evanescent—a word I just realized has the word “scent” embedded inside it, which feels so fitting!)

Rumpus: “Self Interview” was the essay that made me fist pump the air! It’s a post-memoir interview that reminds me how important it is to write our family stories, and how life changes after we write them! How has Gayle Brandeis, post-memoir, dealt with the sneaky grief that lingered after that cathartic book was written? After this one was written?

Brandeis: I asked myself the same question—“How did writing your memoir change you?”—so many times because I realized I could give many different answers. Writing The Art of Misdiagnosis profoundly changed me in some ways and also didn’t change me at all in others, and I wanted to try to capture that contradiction, that gamut. As for how I’ve dealt with that sneaky grief—such a powerful question!—that seems to differ from time to time. Sometimes grief still catches me off guard and feels like it will strangle me, and other times it arrives more like a soft cloud, a gentle passing pang. I guess I’ve gotten better at knowing grief will pass, even when it feels violent. I try to sit with it and feel it and breathe my way through it as best I can until it subsides. Enough time has passed that appreciation comes on the wake of grief now, and I can feel grateful for all I shared with the ones I lost instead of just feeling the ache of that loss. I’m thankful to be able to access that sweetness.

Rumpus: “My Shadow Son” was fascinating! I wrote, “Maybe this is a book itself?” I the margin. How does this essay speak to grief and the body for you? What was the reason for including it here?

Brandeis: It’s cool that you could see “My Shadow Son” as its own book; I had considered expanding this story into a book project after I wrote the essay, and was really excited by the idea—there’s so much more I could explore, and this is the most viral essay I’ve ever written, so there’s clearly interest out there—but the man who thought I was his biological mother for so many years (and has since become a friend) was worried any further digging would be difficult for his family, so I’ve let the idea go. I decided to include the essay because I felt it fit the type of breath I was exploring in that section of the book (Orthopnea: Breathlessness in Lying Down Position Relieved by Sitting Up or Standing). The essays in this section look at moments of relief after difficulty, and being able to find my shadow son’s real biological mother proved to be such a relief for both him and myself.

He had been pouring so much pain and grief and anger towards me because he thought I was denying him connection to his roots, to his true story. It was painful for me to carry all his grief on top of my own. Once we could let go of that grief between us, we could find real connection.

Rumpus: Another fascination was “Anniversary Gifts” an essay chronicling your separation from and reunification with your husband. The grief that caused havoc in your marriage proved to be a lousy, impermanent substance compared to the titanium of your union. What does this say about the stubbornness of life? Like the cover of your book: roots cut and blossoming, despite their death sentence.

Brandeis: I love the phrase, “the stubbornness of life” (and love the connection you found with the book cover!) Life is so beautifully stubborn, indeed, and I’m grateful that my marriage proved to be beautifully stubborn, even after I selfishly blew it apart. The love was clearly still there, underneath all the resentment between us and the chaos I had wrought, patiently waiting for us to acknowledge it and nurture it back to life. I love that our marriage grew back sturdier than ever, and love that we both cultivate it mindfully now. We both know how lucky we are to have this second chance, and we want to do whatever we can to help our marriage, and one another, thrive.

Rumpus: You’ve said that when you start writing, “It’s like this is the only piece I’ll ever write, the only piece I’ve ever written.” Can you talk about that?

Brandeis: When I write something that’s meaningful to me, it tends to pull me into a hyper-present state. I get into a zone and get hyper-focused. I try to come to my writing fresh each time and give all of myself to the piece in front of me—body, mind, heart, soul. All of my energy is focused on the point of the cursor as it moves forward. There’s a place within me where the work comes from, and everything else blurs and falls away. Of course, I get distracted by my own thoughts and worries sometimes, but it’s a desire of mine to be as fully present as I can be.

I try to do this in other areas of my life as well—to be as present as possible with what is in front of me—even though I may not be able to do this one hundred percent of the time. I want to be fully present for whatever I’m doing, whether it’s teaching, or writing, or being with people I love.

Rumpus: Is this a discipline that you’ve learned through the years?

Brandeis: I’m a pretty undisciplined person. It’s kind of amazing I get as much done as I do! I’m always really happy to hear about writers who have specific disciplines, and specific schedules for their writing. I’m not like that at all. But somehow my various practices, as unruly as they are in my life, have always naturally taken me to a good, focused place.

I was a dancer and figure skater when I was young. I would learn these routines in my figure skating, but then, when it was time to compete or perform in a skating show, those routines would fall away, and I would let the music move me. I would improvise, much to the chagrin of my coaches. So, there’s always been this stubborn part of me that is following its own creative impulses. That part of me wants to move or wants to write without rules or routines. I get to that intense place of focus, and from there, it’s just a matter of listening to what needs to come through me at the moment. Once I tap into that, it kind of pulls me forward.

Rumpus: Your work is marvelously relatable. Do you focus on connecting with the reader?

Brandeis: I think that happens in revision. With writing, it helps to think no one’s ever going to read it, so I’m not holding myself back. When I revise, it’s very much focused on connection with the reader. I want to make sure what I’m writing will make sense to other people. I want people to be able to feel it in their bodies.

That early draft is really me getting out of my own way and then, with each successive draft, it’s just to connect more and more with the reader. I want to make the work as clear as it can be, as potent as it can be, for others to take it in. It feels like a sacred relationship, the connection between writer and reader, and I want to honor that through craft as well as through love. When it’s in service to that connection, craft becomes an act of love.

 

 

 

***
Author photo by Asher Brandeis

What to Read When: You Want to Think Kaleidoscopically About Place

I wrote the first sentences that appear in Wolfish almost ten years ago, during the summer of 2013. I was about to be a senior in college, and I was doing my best to blink away the pending maw of where-to-go, of what-comes-next.

I had left my family in Oregon to attend a college in Maine. It was there that I learned who Joan Didion was, and about how it had taken her living in New York City to turn her gaze back home. “I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs . . . and wrote myself a California river,” Didion later said about Run River. Her words seemed like a decent writing prompt: to write about the place I had left, a place I was not sure I would ever live again. I remember sitting beneath the peeling wallpaper of my summer sublet, listening to the rumble of the tenant below, a man who, we later learned, was breeding pythons. Oregon, I wrote at the top of a new document. A place, like so many others, where white settlers had killed all the wolves. A place, as I was researching for my Environmental Studies thesis, where wolves were coming back.

“Visit someplace you have ‘roots’ and it is easy to encounter the landscape as a strata of story,” I write in Wolfish. Beneath the crust of one’s lived, sensory experience sits the fossilized lore of family arrival. The thickest part, that bedrock of environmental and social history, underlies everything but is too rarely glimpsed. The best writers on this subject dirty their fingernails as they move between the layers. I am interested in place because I am provoked by the experience of being a body in the current of time. What does it mean to be me, here, now? One node in an ecosystem of not only species but stories, mythologies of belonging and fear and love. My favorite writing about place moves kaleidoscopically between art and science, past and present, humans and non-humans, internal and external lives. The author’s relationship with place is not always the explicit subject of the following books—nor is it in Wolfish—but it’s a thread that runs through the pages. A stitch that sews both self and world into being.

***

Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala
Deraniyagala’s memoir is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read, about the author’s unfathomable grief of surviving Sri Lanka’s 2004 tsunami while losing her husband, children and parents. I’ve returned again and again to the book for how lyrically Deraniyagala writes emotion into landscape, calling attention to the ways we project ourselves into the natural world, and vice versa. “I spurn its paltry picture-postcardness,” she writes at one point about Sri Lanka, where she was born. “Those beaches and bays are too pretty and tame to stand up to my pain, to hold it, even a little.” How to write about an ocean full of beauty, which has taken so much beauty from you? It is both “our killer” and a place of sunset calm, a sea coated in “crushed crimson glass.”

 

The Second Body, by Daisy Hildyard
In this book-length essay, Hildyard posits that we have two bodies: one contained by skin, the other the sprawl of one’s biological life as it overlaps with other species. “Your body is not inviolable,” she writes. “Your body is infecting the world—you leak.” She strives to understand this ‘second body’ by probing how humans define and interact with animal life, interviewing both a Yorkshire butcher and a criminologist who speaks to silver foxes kept as pets. This book put language to feelings I’d sensed but never been able to articulate, redefining the ways I think about intersections of human and non-human lives.

 

Small Bodies of Water, by Nina Mingya Powles
Powles’ mother was born in Borneo, where the author learned to swim, but Powles herself was born in New Zealand, and grew up partially in China, then moved to London. Moving between modes of memoir, art criticism, and nature writing, Small Bodies of Water is like swimming through a dream populated with the crystalline detail of both “the Atlas moth with white eyes on its wings” and a viral Twitter clip of “flame being whipped into spirals by the wind.” She writes beautifully about migration and belonging and girlhood, and as a writer, I felt particularly attuned to how carefully she pins her world to the page: “Our language for colours shifts according to our own experiences and memories: the blue of a giant Borneo butterfly’s wings pinned in a glass case; the yellow at the centre of a custard tart.”

 

 

Cold Pastoral, by Rebecca Dunham
Weaving elegy, lyric, documentary, and investigation, this poetry collection holds at its center  the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, confronting the question of how to witness a world that is both natural and unnatural, simultaneously mangled and tended by our touch. After the explosion, workers jump off the rig into a “sea stirred to wildfire,” while miles away, in her own yard, “lilies / startle [the] garden pink / and gold.”

 

Bright Unbearable Reality, by Anna Badkhen
I bought this book on the perfection of its cover alone, then swiftly fell for the roaming logic of Badkhen’s essays, which unspool themes of communion and human migration, often while the author herself is on the road, in Ethiopia or Oklahoma or Chihuahua City. “The travel I witness often happens under duress,” she writes. “I have spent my life documenting the world’s iniquities, and my own panopticon of brokenness comprises genocide and mass starvation, loved ones I have lost to war, friends’ children who died of preventable diseases.” So much heartache in these pages, but I was persistently buoyed by the tenderness she brings to the world and its inhabitants. Even a pronghorn on the horizon, Badkhen tells us, is related to a giraffe.

 

In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, by Etel Adnan
Made up of lyrical vignettes, this genre-crossing memoir is testament to Adnan’s transcultural and nomadic self, as the text moves between Lebanon, France, Greece, Syria, and the U.S. Her translingual research and progressive activism underlie her observations about self and world. “I reside in cafes: they are my real homes,” she writes. “In Beirut my favorite one has been destroyed. In Paris, Café de Flore is regularly invaded by tourists.” I’m perhaps most compelled by how she writes about rootlessness: “feeling at ease, or rather identifying with drafts of air, dispersing dry leaves and balloons, taking taxis just because they were staring at me.”

 

Groundglass: An Essay, by Kathryn Savage
Full disclosure: because I overlapped with Savage in my MFA program, I’ve been admiring this hybrid project and her lyrical research process for years, but this book would have jumped off the shelf at me regardless. “Could there be something humbling and revolutionary in understanding myself as a site of contamination?” writes Savage. It’s a book about illness and grief and motherhood and U.S. Superfund sites (they appear like “confetti flecks” on the map), but also, implicitly, about the act of trying to understand pollution while, “Upstairs, Henry laughs, playing video games.” The book made me think not only of the porousness between earth and self, but between elegy and ode.

 

White Magic, by Elissa Washuta
“When I felt myself shredded, I used to wade into Lake Washington…The land put me back together,” writes Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe indigenous to the region. She now lives in Ohio, where “the land and I talk like strangers,” and tensions around place animate this hypnotic memoir. “I love living in Ohio, I love my forever house, but my missing of Seattle feels almost violent inside of me sometimes, and that is probably the real heartbreak the book is about,” Washuta said in an interview. Moving from the colonial history of Columbia River land treaties to Twin Peaks and the Oregon Trail II video game, Washuta makes visible that which is too often unseen: the modes by which place is created, inherited, metabolized.

 

 

River, by Esther Kinsky
Translated from German by Iain Galbraith, Kinsky’s novel constellates the life of a woman who, for unknown reasons, moves outside London near the River Lea (“small…populated by swans”), reminiscing about other rivers from her past while she goes for long solitary walks. The novel moves essayistically, which is to say, like a river, “constantly brushing with the city and with the tales told along its banks,” ebbing with ecological observation and memory.

 

Borealis, by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
An expansive collage encompassing soundtracks, flashbacks to past lovers, conceptual art, and snippets from nature documentaries and overheard dialogues, Borealis is a constellation of observations about queer relationships, blackness, and Sabatini Sloan’s life in a small Alaskan town. The animating pulse of the book could be the quote Sabatini Sloan includes by Renee Gladman: “You had to think about where you were in a defined space and what your purpose was for being there.”

 

Of course, you’ll also want to scoop up a copy of Erica Berry’s Wolfish—preorders are like gifts to your future self <3
— The Eds.

“This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.”

So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.

As Erica chronicles her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.

 

 

 

***

An Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera

Whiptail Lizard | Come night, burrowed in the same hole, they curl, beat to beat. When one is in estrus, the other jaws her abdomen, her neck. Rings her, touching cloaca to cloaca. No gametes are exchanged—the offspring will be clones of the mother—but they are nonetheless in co-creation. The one in estrus receives—a blessing, perhaps. A promise of support. Reason to begin the work of reproduction. A whiptail kept from her female[1] mate—for they are mates, without question—will hatch only a third as many young. A day later, even two, the bite marks remain, visible on her skin.

 

The first time I talked to my family about queerness, I spoke only about mice.

I was maybe thirteen, on the beach near my childhood home with my mother and her cousins. They were talking about the serenity of the beaches and the tourists who disrupted that serenity. A common topic of conversation, which I mostly ignored, until one of my mother’s cousins mentioned that some tourists came specifically to our beach—from all over the country—to spend a few days in the surf with people like them.

“Like them?” I said.

“Gay.”

I felt a thrill at the word. Not the thrill of recognition, but the thrill of the unknown, even the forbidden. As the conversation moved on, I considered how I might direct it back to that word, that titillating subject. My options were limited. I’d never met a queer person. None of the books I’d read were queer. I knew exactly one thing about homosexuality—When overcrowded, I said finally, mice turned homosexual.

I don’t remember where I’d learned this. As a teenager, I was always reading about animals, watching television about animals, spouting animal facts at the dinner table. Maybe I’d read about those mice or heard about them on Zooventure.

I didn’t know I was referencing a 1962 publication by John B. Calhoun, in which homosexuality—along with increases in aggression, infant mortality, and anti-sociality—was considered indicative of social collapse. I understood my statement as a defense of queerness: queerness as an altruistic act, absenting oneself from reproduction, a practical response to a crowded world.

I didn’t connect the mice with myself, hadn’t begun to think of myself as queer. At the time, those mice were the only model for queerness I had.

 

 

House Mouse | She ignores the courtship and provocations of male mice, but even near the end of her life, having raised her pups to self-sufficiency alone, she pauses when she encounters—amid the shavings and the pellet food and her own waste—the urine of another female. She takes her time, attempting through scent and moisture to pinpoint the location and readiness of this nearby mouse. If she finds her, she will mount her to suggest they nest together, raise future pups as a couple. She is a mutant, the successful deletion of her FucM gene signaled by her agouti coat. After her death (anesthesia and beheading) her brain will be sectioned, stained, and searched for an answer to one question—how did desire for a female mate survive the gene deletion when desire for a male mate did not?

 

In college I kept them in a folder on my desktop. The PDFs were sorted by scientific name—Larus argentatus, Thalassoma bifasciatum, Rattus norvegicus. Calhoun’s mouse observations. A description of female co-parenting in owls as an “Abnormal and Maladaptive Behavior in Captive Raptors.” An article observing that captive white ibises exposed to high levels of mercury became more likely to choose same-sex mates. An article detailing the activities of husbandry scientists who locked rams in a stanchion and presented them with male “receivers” (males frequently mounted by other males) and female sheep, killing rams who showed interest only in males to remove “dud studs” from the gene pool. An article from 1987 titled “A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera,” which described mature male Mazarine butterflies approaching and mating with male butterflies newly emerged from chrysalis, grasping the new male with their clasper and touching abdomen tip to abdomen tip before his wings were dry. The articles skewed toward vertebrates and, within vertebrates, toward mammals and birds. This reflected both the skew of research on same-sex animal pairs, and my own preoccupation.

I told only one person about these articles, a stranger at the manatee health checks in Crystal River, Florida. She was working the nets, spent her hours waist-deep in muddy water, trapping manatees and beaching them, ensuring the capture didn’t harm them. I was on the veterinary side with the faculty advisor overseeing my undergraduate thesis. I squatted in front of each manatee, counted their breaths. If the manatee went more than forty-five seconds without a breath, I splashed their nose with a cup of water to trigger the surfacing response, watched the nostril plugs retreat as the manatee sucked in air, a low roar.

I had noticed her quick-dry khaki shorts, the bunch of her shoulders, her competence with the nets, and so when we were both on break, eating granola bars in the shade of a canopy tent, I tried talking to her about queerness. I told her that seagulls exposed to DDT were more likely to wind up in lesbian pairs, that atrazine disrupted endocrine functioning in frogs, causing male frogs to have lower levels of testosterone and to take male partners.

She gave a little shrug. She said, “Manatees are gay.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I hadn’t known this, hadn’t yet encountered the articles describing male manatees nuzzling each other, mouthing each other’s genitals, thrusting against each other, penises erect, as they sink from the water’s surface into the mud, uttering snort-chirps upon ejaculation.

She said, “I’m gay.”

I had, I realized, known this.

“Whatever’s in the water, we’re getting it, too,” she said. Her tone was flat, almost a shrug, but I thrilled at the pronoun. On that sweltering summer day, as manatees were dragged up the beaches for weighing and stool sampling and blood draws, I received the word we as an offer of community. I, too, might have been poisoned to queerness. We lived in a toxic world.

 

Razorbill | When she returns to the arena after feeding, the waiting razorbill runs toward her, a repeated squawk signaling intentions, which the returning female can accept or decline. The returned razorbill lifts her chest, extends her wings, an invitation. The two hook necks, bodies close, then one mounts the other. The returned razorbill does not lift her tail. The other does not insist she lift her tail. They are both paired. Each has an egg secure in a nest in the colony, brooded now by their mates. What matters isn’t the tail-lift, the cloacal kiss, but the mounting and the squawks that advertise the mounting, the show of it which benefits them both, insisting to the ones packed on the rock sheer, beaks to the sky, heads swiveling to attend to the activities of the arena, that they both belong.

 

 

By grad school I had put lesbian seagulls and effeminate frogs behind me. I understood stories about homosexuality in animals to be the terrain of conservative pundits and right-wingers on social media. Besides, I no longer needed those stories. I was sunk deep in the pleasures of a close friendship, an agape I believed the province solely of humans.

I called her my best friend, a label that made our connection legible to everyone except myself. We spent hours together in cafes and city parks, read books side-by-side. We took a summer road trip together, sharing a tent. One night, we camped just off the road in a coniferous forest where bats crowded the evening sky. There, she said she sometimes wished she were queer, which surprised me. I said I thought I was queer, which surprised her. The female bats calling above us were pair-bonded. In these nonsexual relationships, they share food, sometimes share a roost, grooming and huddling together. Animal behaviorists call these partnerships. They last five to ten years. We shared food, sometimes shared a roost, huddled together that summer, never had sex. We called it friendship, though at times I felt frustrated by the word and would propose that we change it—to partner, to sister. The last time I proposed this—after it had become clear that my desire for closeness, for contact, outpaced hers—she said, “I can only ever be a friend to you.” She said this as though it settled things, but the word remained opaque to me. In an attempt to understand it, I asked my housemates, my friends, my colleagues what was the difference between a friendship and a partnership. Sex, most of them said. But other than sex? I asked.

I charted their responses in a notebook—friendship on the left, partnership on the right. Beneath were categories: time spent together (friendship, episodic; partnership, continuous), traveling to see each other (friendship, rarely; partnership, often), help in medical emergencies (both), physical intimacy (friendship—hugs, sex possible but frowned upon; partnership—sex), celebration of successes (both), good conversations (both), and mutual love (both).

I sent her the chart, asked for revisions, comments, edits. This didn’t fix anything. Our friendship ended soon after, and for a time I wondered if it might have lasted if I’d just had better words—the word, or what passes for a word among bats, that brown bats use to describe their bonds; the word queer as I understand it now, as an orientation not about sex but about intimacy; a word for family that doesn’t mean blood.

I no longer think a lack of language alone spelled the ending. Rather, it signified a larger lack—my lack of experience and understanding of human relationship patterns. I moved, after the friendship ended, toward sex as a marker of romance, and toward romance as a sign of closeness. I created relationships that fell clearly to one side of my chart. I updated the chart occasionally, adding a row, adjusting a definition. I remember feeling, each time I worked at it, hopeful and productive, as though I were finally getting somewhere, as though with enough time and data points, if I worked with real precision, I could chart a taxonomy of love, as I’d once charted a taxonomy of cetaceans.

 

Bottlenose Dolphin | His species does not wuzzle, so when the spinner dolphins begin—the roil of water, the clicking which speeds as they move faster, the light shattered by the waves the pod creates, he approaches with his partner of thirty-two years. Their partnership began in adolescence. Their sex, then a daily and gymnastic undertaking, has long since subsided to an infrequent and brisk occurrence. The wuzzle offers them the stimulation of that old adolescent pod. They notice a small spinner at the wuzzle’s periphery and swim to the spinner, one on each side. His partner, soft-eyed, sinks slowly, log-like, a seduction the spinner refuses with a tail kick. The bottlenose swims upside down, locates the spinner’s slit, sends clicks, a genital buzz, acoustic foreplay. He pokes the spinner’s slit with his beak. The spinner shifts away, toward the wuzzle. His partner cuts in front, shifting the spinner up toward the surface. Each breathes. He and his partner become erect at the same time, taking turns rubbing against the spinner, the spinner dodging first up again to the water’s surface, then deeper, deeper, an attempted avoidance, but the two bottlenose dolphins can’t be avoided. They are far from the wuzzle now. The spinner emits pulsed squeaks. His partner nudges his beak into the spinner’s slit and swims forward, propelling the spinner. The spinner speeds up to break contact, but the bottlenose cuts in front, forces the spinner low, low in the water near to the bank of sand. His partner penetrates the spinner’s blowhole—a second, less than a second, then the spinner escapes in a scatter of sand, and the two of them are left alone. His partner beaks his slit and they swim until he tires of it, spins belly-up to detach, surfaces, watches languid as his partner, erect again, drags his penis through the sand.

 

For most animals, queer sex is loud. Female Kob antelopes whistle to other females. Female koalas bellow. Female coupled red foxes gekker—mouths wide open, teeth nearly touching, paws on each other’s chests, throats working around a sound somewhere between a keen and desperate laughter. Female gray foxes snirk. I was silent. Silent during sex, a silence from which my first partner attempted to coax me with direct questions and frequent check-ins, a silence from which I tried to coax myself, reading books for humans—books on sex with women, on sexual communication, on liberated sex, on healing sex, books which didn’t help.

Having exhausted the resources of my species, I eventually turned again, for the first time in years, to other animals. Wasn’t sex, after all, the one thing that could be left to that older cortex, to the lizard brain, to the animal of me? Hadn’t the bacteria in my gut and the fungi in my ears and the mites on my eyelashes been copulating and procreating since I was a child, and weren’t those creatures in some way a part of me, and shouldn’t I, on account of their prowess, be able to tap into some sexual instinct, some deep and formidable desire? I still didn’t need other animals to justify my queerness, but I needed them to teach me how to be queer. Instead of searching for homosexuality or same-sex mating, I searched for articles about sexual communication in animals. I found Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance, which offers dozens of examples of queer desire in other animals—in bottlenose dolphins and whiptails, razorbills and bonobos. In these descriptions, there’s no talk of poisoning or genetic mutation. Queerness was natural.

Bonobos have more than twenty-five gestures to specify sexual intent and desire, sexual requests. I memorized these gestures. I extended my arm, bent my hand inward toward my belly, and made rapid vigorous circles to tell my (nonexistent) bonobo partner to turn around, one way of initiating a sexual interaction. I made come-hither motions with my fingers to invite approach. I had no desire to have sex with a bonobo. Even if I had, bonobos inhabit a single remote and densely forested area in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, accessible only by boat or plane. Most scientists estimate there are fewer than 20,000 left, and these estimations are probably too high. My likelihood of ever putting these gestures to use was nil. But I clutched my hands at my belly, then opened them to say, Spread your legs. I flicked my hand side-to-side to suggest that my bonobo partner position their genitals for sex.

Using hand gestures combined with facial expressions, eye contact, and body language, bonobos communicate sexual interest, negotiate positions, and describe desired types of sexual contact. The gestures are used in a specific order—they have syntax. A female bonobo might indicate to another female, “I want to finger fuck your front-hole.”

Biologists speculate that these gestures evolved because bonobo sexual contact is complex, diverse, and varied. Female bonobos regularly have sex with other females, rubbing their clitorises against one another. Marlene Zuk has suggested the bonobo clitoris is frontally placed, away from the vulva, as is the human clitoris, “perhaps because selection favored a position maximizing stimulation during the genital-genital rubbing common among females.” Female bonobos have sex lying down, standing rump to rump, hanging from tree branches. In a troop of ten females, female bonobos have on average five sexual partners. These sexual partners are also emotional partners, creating the multiple pair bonds that form the core of bonobo social organization.

In English, when I attempted to tell my partner what I wanted, I experienced a temporary aphasia, but it was easy to be obscene with my hands. In the bonobo lexicon, for the first time, I was fluent in desire.

 

Red Fox | When the breeding one has that smell of wet mud, she approaches. On first approach, the breeding one boxes her away. On second approach, she gekkers. On third approach, she snirks, opens her mouth in a V, showing teeth. The approaching fox opens her own jaw, calibrating the angle to match that of the breeding one, presses upper gum against gum, lower jaw against jaw, that click of tooth, that ache in the cheek muscle. The mounting, when it happens after, is brief, almost a formality. The bond comes of clicks and gekkers, noise-making together, and from the whelping, the after-whelping, when on first approach the lactating vixen might nudge away the other’s pups, but on second approach, exhausted, will let them suckle, and on third approach might even nudge the pup, not hers, with one paw, positioning their small body, facilitating the latch.

 

When my partner and I first discussed the relationship we wanted to create, we described it as asexual. Neither of us wanted the pressure of physical intimacy, the ticking clock of the first kiss, the difficulty of navigating desires in a framework of romance that structured and insisted upon them.

Six months in, we tickled and wrestled each other. A year in, we pressed our bodies together, put our fingers in each other’s mouths. “Is this sex?” I asked them. “No,” they said. We touched each other’s stomachs, thighs, clits. “Is this sex?” “No.” “Is this sex?” “No.” “How about now?” “Maybe.” “I think so.” “Probably.”

I could find no corollary for this phenomenon—an asexual relationship morphing into a sexual one—in the nonhuman world. I searched in mollusks, which fill oceans with their milky sperm, and in galliformes, the most gender-fluid and socially complex of birds.

When I brought this concern to my partner one evening before bed, they said, “Of course you can’t find one. Animals don’t force themselves to have sex, they don’t need those labels.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. I reminded them that people are always underestimating the sophistication, intelligence, and diversity of other animals.

They said of my approach to relationships—the chartmaking and the writing and the searching for models, the attempting to explain and rationalize, to taxonomize and codify—“It’s the most human approach I can think of.”

“The most human?”

“Red squirrels,” they said, “aren’t studying seagull mating habits to justify their poly relationship structures.”

“Seagulls aren’t poly,” I said.

“Regardless,” they said, an edge of impatience in their voice, “we’re specific.”

That word with the same root as species. We were human, they meant.

I said, “Cephalopods. Cephalopods might switch from asexual to sexual.”

They said, “This. Lying here, doing whatever we want, calling it whatever we want, not feeling ashamed of it, this is animal.”

I learned later that some octopi do live asexual lives, having sex only toward the end of their life cycle—the male dying immediately after, the female living long enough to lay eggs. Not an especially useful model, but still it comforts me, because when I think about my partner and I, our future, I can’t imagine us human. Instead, I imagine the anis, in which two couples share the avian equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment with a crib, or the wrasses who spawn in trios—one male, one female, one a third gender for which English offers no easy word (the wrass has a word). I imagine us as stumptail macaques or harbor seals or even cliff swallows, building our cozy mud nest onto a polycule beneath some bridge. Never as humans.

 

 

Tree Swallow | One lays eggs. The other does not, but she broods the laid eggs. The eggs will not hatch, what matters is not the hatching, what matters is the warmth of the eggs, the graceful passing of those eggs from one parent to the other, the folding of her partner’s bib of fat over those eggs, a slow unfurl which sometimes, like now, causes her cloaca to tighten, so that she mounts her partner as her partner broods the eggs, everting her cloaca to touch beneath her partner’s lifted tail, both of them overcome.

 

 

 

 

***
[1] In this essay, I will use “female” to denote non-human organisms who make large gametes and “male” to denote organisms who make small gametes.

 

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Rumpus original art by Iris L.

Challenging the Length and Notion of Storytelling: A conversation with Davon Loeb

My introduction to Davon Loeb was his essay, “Breakdancing Shaped Who I Am as a Black Man and Father,” a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2022. I was captivated by the vulnerability and relatability of Loeb’s writing, and quickly pre-ordered his debut lyrical memoir, The In-Betweens (West Virginia University Press, 2023). The book explores his growing up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as the son of a Black mother and white Jewish father. Loeb’s experiences growing up Black in a predominantly white-suburban neighborhood are often painful, yet not without joy. While the memoir is masterfully told—Loeb employs a variety of craft techniques that have a powerful effect—what makes The In-Betweens so special is the thoughtfulness Loeb brings to his work. Grappling with accountability and authority, Loeb leaves the reader wrestling with an important question we should all be asking: What is our culpability in systems of oppression?

I spoke with Loeb via Google Docs to discuss the transformation of the lyrical voice in The In-Betweens, developing trust with the reader, and the stickiness of relatability.

***

 The Rumpus: I noticed in the acknowledgements how many of the essays have been previously published. It made me wonder about the genesis of the book. At what point did you know these essays were part of a larger work?

Davon Loeb: When completing my MFA at Rutgers-University Camden, I submitted many of the essays I workshopped to literary journals, partly because of literary affirmation. I wanted to get published so badly, which at times, trumped why I wrote. I think there’s real danger in that, submitting work just to get published versus writing good work to better your craft. However, the chapter, “Alabama Fire Ants” was first published in Portland Review, and when this happened, I felt like my writing succeeded, as if I reached a new level. “Alabama Fire Ants” was the chapter that inspired the entire collection, and that chapter can stand alone. Because of that, I wanted the rest of the book to mostly feature standalone pieces. I wanted to build context on a micro and macro level—that you could read The In-Betweens in medias res or from start to finish.

Rumpus: These read as individual essays, and there’s a strong narrative arc, but the book is described as a ‘lyrical memoir’ rather than an essay collection. Is that how you see it? As a memoir?

Loeb: I do see The In-Betweens as a memoir. I think the ultimate goal of writing this book was to explore the story of a boy trying to find himself throughout specific time periods. The lyrical voice is stretched, as if a muscle, in each chapter, and each chapter challenges the length of storytelling—challenges the notion that storytelling can be only a five-hundred-word paragraph or a two-thousand-word essay. This book is as much of a memoir of arrival as it is an exercise on craft, on how a book’s structure can be narratively and, concurrently, lyrically driven.

Rumpus: You use the first-person plural in many of the essays that explore childhood. Can you share what was behind that stylistic choice?

Loeb: Using the first-person plural was my very intentional attempt to tell an individual story universally. While my experiences as a person of color, as a person of color who is half white, as a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied man, as a college-educated teacher, as a middle class American, as someone with privilege but also without privilege, I wanted readers, regardless of their subjectivities, to see themselves in my book—that my story was their story. And so much of this is done with place, with summers in Alabama, with riding bikes in the Pine Barrens, with tropes of trying to fit in in middle and high school—all of which is purposeful, stylistically. The “we” is a syntactical choice to bind your story to mine.

Rumpus: Another compelling craft decision is the use of direct address, and the person being addressed varies. Two in particular have a chilling effect: “For My Brother,” in which the narrator addresses your brother who struggles with mental illness, and “On the Confederate Flag,” in which the narrator addresses a former friend who comes to school wearing a shirt that alludes to lynching. Why was it important to use direct address?

Loeb: The narrative voice evolves throughout the book. When we’re reading, “For My Brother” and “On the Confederate Flag,” there is a change in the narrator, a maturation. I wanted this redirection to reflect the narrator’s growth, to reflect his coming of age, and what better way to do that than to redirect how I told the story? That being said, these chapters use a direct address because I am more sure of myself, of how I tell the story and who I am talking to. Will my brother read this book? Will that friend feel racist guilt? There is no ambiguity here because I want you, whoever you are, to feel something, to feel an intimacy.

Rumpus: The growth of the narrator, including their growing confidence, is part of the narrative arc that creates intimacy, and brings us to a vulnerable space. Was this your intention?

Loeb: Writing a memoir is writing with authenticity rather than just the authority of the narrator. Because of this, I have a responsibility to write people accurately. These characters, often my family and friends, are as vulnerable as I am, and to be authentic is to write them fully—that they are never just one thing, and that was really important for me to prove. This book is not a collection of pointed fingers. This book is not to blame wrongdoers. This book never takes me off the hook. This book is about the hurt I have done and the hurt that has been done to me. I am accountable and should be—and that is the intimacy I am after.

Rumpus: How do you manage to center love in your work? Even when you’re writing about difficult topics or hurtful things?

Loeb: The In-Betweens is very much about love, and love is where the book starts, at the chapter, “A Love Story,” which is a retelling of my parents’ relationship. It seemed pivotal to begin my story here, before I’m born. My mother and father’s love story is an in-between—an in-between of age, race, culture—that “…he was white, and she Black, and this was America.” Love marries all the chapters, even if love is a criticism, even if love is a celebration. We can love our family but still be in conflict. We can love where we grew up but still criticize it. In “Something About Love,” my mother tells me that love instinctual, is an undeniable trust, is a comfort in knowing undoubtedly that you are safe and wanted and accepted, an irrefutable thing, like the sun coming out tomorrow, and there’s nothing more or less you can do on any given day to be unconditionally loved. Love is this, something unconditional, but love is not this; love can be a father’s inability to love unconditionally—and yet, love is also a man who is a verb, is an action, is a doer, a giver. Experiencing the duality of love, on many levels, is imperative to understanding the driving force behind my work.

Rumpus: Our society often takes a binary approach—you’re either this or that—but your work resists that. Why is it important to explore liminal spaces, or make room for the in-between places?

Loeb: I was raised in a Black-Latino family, my mother is Black, my stepfather is Panamanian, but I was half white, half Jewish. I grew up in a white town but was half Black. My culture and my ethnicity have always been in juxtaposition. For my entire life, I have always been in the in-between—not Black enough, not white enough. Society demands categorizations—demands our blood to be defined, whether we like it or not. I want to challenge that, the rigid belief that we are defined by one thing, one identity—because we are so much more than just our race, though, for many people of color, we cannot simply shed race, for we will still be Black, still be whatever thing society tells us we are.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the town where you grew up. There were some very disturbing abuses you and your family were subjected to. One example is your brother’s teacher asking him to be O.J. Simpson in a class project in 1995.

Loeb: The town I grew up in is often the setting of both my creative nonfiction and fiction. I absolutely loved my experiences as a kid growing up in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I spent my days after school riding bikes on backyard trails, playing basketball on neighborhood courts, chasing ice cream trucks down quiet suburban streets, drinking beers at parties in the deep woods. Growing up here, I was seemingly safe and wanted for nothing. I had a freedom that felt absolute. My writing celebrates this place with consistent image-driven narratives that intend to draw the reader in, from chapters like “The Settlers Inn” to “A Backseat and a Fire Pit”, my intention is for you to be here with me, with all of your senses. When I write about place, it is very poetic; however, place serves a greater purpose, which is to juxtapose joy with trauma. In the chapter, “On the Confederate Flag,” I am especially troubled by this, by loving my hometown, even though my classmates sported Confederate flags on their trucks at our football games. It’s the same when writing about Alabama: As a person of color, I think, “How can you write about the South without including racism?” Those years as a boy coming of age were joyous, but I was still an outsider to that place, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, to that culture. So my family and I absolutely encountered racism, like my brother did in “O.J. and the Wax Museum,” and yet, we had a good life, and I am so grateful for that.

Rumpus:. How do you balance writing about hard things while allowing room for pride, joy, and love?

Loeb: My life is not just hardship. So the pacing of the book follows joy and trauma shared in the same space, within the same chapters. Good memoir can marry joy and trauma because that’s how life is, and my book wants you to believe this marriage can exist in a literary form. On a craft level, many of the chapters embrace fragmented storytelling, whereas, I structure the narrative in vignettes, challenging traditional storytelling. A paragraph will celebrate while the next paragraph will critique, and this back-and-forth structure is a consistent thread that weaves all the chapters. Joy, love, trauma, rage—it can all exist together, in the same breath. My readers need to trust me, even when I will not tell them the entire story, even when details will be excluded, even when time has elapsed, even when the endings are ambiguous simply because memoir is life-writing, and life is messy but still demands balance.

Rumpus: That brings up interesting questions about the relationship between the writer and the reader—how is trust inherent to our engagement with a person’s story? How do you build trust on the page? By making it an invitation rather than an imperative?

Loeb: I think the invitation is when the reader sees themself in my memoir. Relatability is a power force, and I hope, as that happens at whatever point, the engagement intensifies. Once they’re on my hook, the stories resonate more, and we can approach the uncomfortable, like when readers experience the N-word, which is an experience, and the response, for many readers, is visceral and should be. I think getting there, when the -isms accumulate, takes trust. Readers will learn something from me, if they are not of color or of whatever thing I am and they are not. I believe, undoubtedly, there is learning, there is nuance, and there is growth happening between my narrator and my readers.

Rumpus: Does good storytelling challenge the idea that “relatability” comes from experiencing  similar circumstances and events?

Loeb: Relatability is clearly an important narrative tool in The In-Betweens. But good writing and good storytelling has to exceed the relatable. As much as I want my readers to connect to my work because they can relate to it, I also recognize the danger here. Relatability can devalue and diminish a writer’s work. Just because a reader cannot relate does not mean the work is not important. Publishing can absolutely operate like this, using relatability to solely dictate what is publishable and what is not, which marginalizes already marginalized writers. Having a book that is relatable is great but saying a book is not relatable padlocks it. Relatability, especially for marginalized writers, is an exclusionary term that further narrows an outsider’s viewpoint on a literary work. “I cannot relate,” is synonymous with “this story does not matter to me.” Therefore, I think relatability is necessary and is demanded for non-white writers.

Rumpus: That reminds me of recent debates about empathy in writing, specifically who carries the burden of relatability, when it comes to feeling others’ pain.

Loeb: I was really adamant about not writing trauma as guilt-reading, but writers of color, especially, cannot write our histories without including trauma. My mother is Black, and we are a people from slaves, and it is impossible to tell you my story without including the traumatic history of Blacks in America. I do not need or want readers’ guilt, however I do expect readers to understand that my history is indefinitely tied to Black trauma—that I cannot tell you this story of being in between apart from it—that guilt is not required but respect is. And that is honest writing—writing that cares about the readers’ but cares more about the story it is trying to tell.

Rumpus: You write that your mom said you should always take injustice personally. Did your mom’s words fuel the heartbeat of much of the book?

Loeb: In the acknowledgements, I refer to my mother as the orator of our family history. Her role in my memoir, as the narrator, is as significant as mine, but she has a greater purpose that exceeds our relationship. My mother represents the Black voice where there is none. I do not have the authority to tell all parts of my story because I am only half Black. So I relinquish storytelling control over to her, and in many of the chapters, she takes narrative ownership and teaches me about my Blackness, about where I fit in America as a boy and young man of color. This is my mother’s duty and how she tries to protect me, which is a universal quality of most mothers, one that is as much about race as it is about survival. My mother’s omnipresence is clear and constant, and as we transition towards the end of the book, my mother and my voice become one, and I take injustice personally, like she taught me. The In-Betweens wants you to take injustice personally, to take my story personally.

 

 

***
Author photo by Frank Apollonio

Stripped: The Novel Didn’t Work

The year my baby turned sixteen was the year my novel died.

The manuscript lies in a drawer now, after multiple revisions, it is over-processed sausage meat.

It’s time to tell the truth about my years making a living selling the sexy promise of my female body. I am embarking on a memoir.

In writing group I share that it’s hard to write how I profited from my body, that sometimes I feel ashamed. A colleague writes in the margin of my pages, Your story is not new; people have written books like this before. She tells me to own it. She’s not wrong that the story is familiar. Although I’d love to own it, I haven’t felt that I’ve owned my body since before I had words. After the groping, the grabbing, the detailed critiques, the payment, and the assaults, I’d come to understand that my body was public property.

I’ve defined and judged my body and my self exactly as I was taught to do. I’ve been a good subject of the patriarchy, wearing my role like one of the many sparkly, lowcut, synthetic gowns I used to wear onstage at the club.

When I’ve told people I worked as a stripper, their eyes swoop over my breasts, my legs, my ass. I become sex. My female body is all of who I am.

There is the assumption that I worked in strip clubs as a lark. Because I was raised middle class, because I’m white, because I have straight teeth, because I’m articulate, because I have a college education, because I was able to get out, because I’m writing about those years. Because of all this, wasn’t it just a fun, sexy little adventure?

Did your parents know? has morphed into, What about your kids?

I imagine my son explaining the book to friends: My mom was a stripper when she was young and hot. He won’t want to picture greasy dollars being offered to his mom so she will bend over, shimmy, strut, and toss her hair.

As I rework this piece, my smart and articulate editor wonders why I have mental dissonance about being a sex worker and a mother. They tell me that there are plenty of strippers and escorts who are open with their children about their work. I want to find these humans. I want to know where they live. Where is the supportive community that allows this conversation? Can I move there?

Most of the women I shared the dressing room and stage with said that they could not tell their families; some did not tell their partners; several had small children, and they said that Mommy works at a bar or Mommy works at a restaurant. Compared to my coworkers I was more open about my employment, although after being stalked, I learned to be more careful with who I told. My parents knew, as did select friends. When I was in legal trouble and I told the sweetly paternal gay couple who owned the restaurant where I used to work, they clicked their tongues at me, expressing dislike for my highlighted hair and sculpted nails, but then referred me to their lawyer.

I’ve tried to raise my son to understand consent, to respect female voices and bodies, to recognize that pornography is an industry. I never mentioned my personal experience with sex work.

 

The pandemic kept the local high school remote for almost a year, which meant that my son was in class five feet away from where I worked during the shutdown, at a built-in desk in our kitchen: taking client calls, emailing market analysis, writing up opinions of value. In stolen moments I wrote the memoir about my years as a stripper. My son was there as I excavated memories of how I started at the club and then how my boundaries were erased and the work bled into everything.

I write about my addiction to the money in the forms of lists—where I kept my money, what I bought with it, how much I made. I write about the warm light of the unending attention, what the men offered me, what they said about my body. I write about the camaraderie in the dressing room, the fights, the unwritten rules. I write about my body, the things I did to myself to look just so, the rituals, the routines, what I ate and couldn’t eat. I write about how I finally weaned myself away from that life.

In remote school, my son wears his hood up, his face partly obscured. Covid has meant there is less socializing. He is quiet. He used to laugh and talk loudly and quote baseball statistics. During his Zoom classes, he slumps in his seat, making a letter C with his body. C for caution. C for Covid. C for cancel. He is far away from his peers, untouched and untouchable while everything and everyone is distancing. Touch is dangerous.

When I was sixteen I was constantly touching and being touched. Sometimes wanting to, sometimes against my desires. My body was always in proximity to another body. There was no separation, or maybe I just didn’t know boundaries could exist. Arms intertwined, legs entangled, a hand on my back. The sensations of the body were amplified and sometimes dangerous. Scary, strange, and electric.

My son’s body ought to be with other teenaged bodies. His being thrums with energy. Speaking from behind a mask, words are pushed back into the mouth. Conversations happen on a screen with a swish and then disappear. My son is alone.

I’m here, but I don’t count. I’m a mom. My boy sits in science class, tiny faces in a grid on his laptop, sharing the overwhelming knowledge that climate change is real but none of the adults seem to give a shit. His morning toast is on an orange plate left on the floor, the butter has congealed. The dog hovers nearby.

My desk looks out the kitchen window, behind me the fruit bowl, to my right the refrigerator with the juice, the countertop where the toaster sits. This is where I meet my writing group, a mosaic of faces on my computer. We read our work aloud. My son must overhear, but I’ve assumed he doesn’t listen. We’re boring, middle-aged writers reading our earnest drafts.

 

Once upon a time, I was writing a novel, a fictional account of my non-fictional life as a sex worker. The book was gestated when my teenager was a tiny infant, raw and new. Home alone with my baby, on a maternity leave that I stretched to the limit, the time felt strangely similar to our quarantine isolation. When every hour of the postpartum leave was used up, I quit my administrative job and embarked on a series of frantic side hustles to pay the bills, I wrestled with the transformation from sex goddess to mommy and mourned the self-absorbed glitter girl with a flat stomach and fake tan.

Each morning I changed my son’s diaper, cleaning the tender folds of his skin, a love-wild mother with a soft belly and raccoon eyes. At night, the ghosts in stiletto heels haunted my broken sleep.

When my bald-headed creature with dimpled cheeks napped, I would write. A flowered mug of Hu-Kwa tea at my elbow, the laundry overflowing in the hamper, my breasts leaking. A strip club manager had once referred to my tits as happy balloons. My body, previously featured spotlit and centerstage, was now utilitarian.

 

My fingers tapped the keys frantically in our Washington Heights one-bedroom apartment, hands cramping with the aching need to let it all out. I told funny stripper anecdotes at Mommy and Me yoga. You’re so flexible, said the teacher. My past life as a show girl, I replied. The mommies wanted all the details: You should write a book, I’d buy it.

Stripper me wore thigh-high boots for ten hours shifts. She could lift her leg over her head. Stripper me had been skinny, powerful, and numb, living on cigarettes and diet coke, gaunt poker face, paying cash for everything. Stripper me could exit her body at will. Stripper me was disappearing.

Mommy me wept in the shower exhausted, overflowing with love and worry, my son in his bouncy seat chirping to be fed. Rocking and nursing in an endless loop, twenty minutes on, forty minutes off, reminded me of the relentless dancing schedule at the club, legs and feet cramping, back aching, belly concave with hunger. The postpartum body I inhabited was marshmallow flesh, heavy with fatigue, quivering nerves on high alert.

I thought that if I could commit Stripper me to the pages of a novel, I wouldn’t lose her toughness, strength, or bravery. The dialogue was lean, the story sleek and fast. It needed to move. Where was it going though . . . I hadn’t figured that part out.

My desk in that apartment was against the wall, next to the building’s trash chute. As I wrote, I’d hear the bags of garbage falling, cans rattling. My boy slept for hours, the white noise machine making a sound like distant surf.

I made it fiction because I was ashamed I’d monetized my body. I didn’t want to hurt my partner, my parents, my tiny son with this ugly knowledge that my body had a price tag. At the edge of the black-lit stage, money in hand, men recounted violent fantasies and requested acrobatics. I floated above the scene watching my body perform their wishes for the reward of another handful of cash.

The novel didn’t work.

Apparently the dialogue and setting were excellent, but the manuscript was missing something at its core: The sense of danger inherent in telling the truth.

Make the main character more sympathetic, literary agents advised. They wanted to make sure she had a justification. Dire circumstances or desperation. Suggestions included: college debt, sexual assault, a surgery she can’t afford, an abusive lover, and needing an abortion. These are reasons that could make the narrator likable.

Instead of one compelling motivation I had a jumble:

Reason number 1: I love to perform.

Reason number 2: My best friend wanted to do it and I’m competitive.

Reason number 3: I was bored, and often I worried that I was boring.

Reason number 4: I was cracking open my feminism. My college journal reads, My body is my body and no one can tell me what to do or not do with my body.

Reason number 5: The revelation that I was sexual and afraid of being sexual.

Reason number 6: The money was plentiful, much better than waitressing.

Reason number 7: I visited the strip club and was spellbound by the naked goddesses. I wanted to be them.

Reason number 8: I wanted the work to make me tough enough that no one could hurt me.

Turns out, those reasons are not believable in fiction.

Now, with memoir, I feel like an overripe plum. I’m trying to tell the truest truth. First comes remembering, then writing, then doubting. Write it all; this is my mantra. I’m ripping open bags of garbage and inviting readers to wade through my soggy trash.

 

My son toasts a raisin bagel, spreads on cream cheese, then spoons pesto on both halves while standing at the counter behind my desk. Betsy, who is writing about her work as a rabbi, and speaks with a hint of a New York accent, says that she liked the description of Bobbi, the dancer with the sequined hot pants and double-D plastic titties. Bobbi paid for law school with her tips, meanwhile a customer paid for her boob job. Bobbi had long legs and played only country music. She wore a cowboy hat onstage to cover her thinning hair.

What sixteen-year-old boy can tune out the phrase, double-D plastic titties? I glance at my son. His face is passive and partly dark in the shadow of his hood. I unplug my laptop and move into the bedroom where my wifi cuts in and out and I have to sit on the edge of my bed, but at least there is privacy. My writing feels like a too-tight pair of pants. I don’t want to keep secrets, but I want to protect my child. What is the balance between truth and comfort?

He knows something, I think. And he will fill in the rest with his imagination.

What will this piece of my past do to my son?

I worry that he will wish he had another mother. He might want a mother who is more like other mothers. He might long for a mother who loves baking and beach reads, who plays tennis and paints her nails pink. This is a mother who doesn’t write at 5 AM with hopes of sending her words out into the world.

A week passes, and I’m driving my son to a doctor’s appointment. He’s getting a physical before baseball season.

“You know that I’m writing a book?” I ask.

“Yeah.” His chin lifts and lowers.

“Do you know what it’s about?” Inside I cringe. I’m doing this.

“Not really,” he says.

“First I was writing a novel. I started it when you were a baby. It was about this time in my life, this real thing I did when I was in college, but I was writing it like it was fiction.” The muscles in my body are tensed and braced, as if I’m skiing a little too fast on an icy hill. “When I was in college, and for some years after, I worked as a stripper.” The end of the sentence dangles, a bent wire hanger alone on an empty coat rack.

There is quiet all around us in the cavern of the car, even though the tires on the road make a hissing whisper and music plays from the radio, a Motown mix that he has chosen.

 

Spring of 1993, I was getting ready to graduate. I’d just started working as a dancer. We called it dancing, not stripping. No one referred to the job as sex work. I did an “amateur’s contest” at a small club on a rural highway in New England. I won. Later I moved to Washington, DC, for an internship at a non-profit theatre and continued to dance. I could fit it in around my internship hours. The money was good, much better than waitressing; the managers gave me the shifts I needed and the customers were sometimes worshipful and other times creepy. I’d told myself I’d just dance through the end of that summer then I’d quit. A year passed. Then more time.

I don’t share with my son the memory of a hazy day that first summer when I drove to my parents in Vermont and met up with girlfriends at a diner. We squeezed into a booth with dented napkin dispensers and sticky vinyl seats. They were buzzing with something important.

“Jimmy told Porter that your brother said you were working as a hooker,” said Kira.

I don’t tell my son that I stared into my coffee feeling the heat rise over my skin like a burn.

“He’s mad,” said Lizzy. “He doesn’t like what you’re doing.”

“I’m not a whore,” I told her. “I’m a dancer. There’s no touching.”

It felt important that my friends knew that I was not a prostitute. I showed my naked body and took money, but there was no touching. Of course there was touching, though there were rules against it. If everyone knew that I wasn’t being touched this could allow me to feel superior.

I was angry at my brother. He wasn’t even supposed to know.

My parents knew. I’d told them about my summer job over the phone. There’d been a long silence. Then, my mother’s fear: You’ll be raped in the parking lot. My father took a tone of reason, a lawyerly tact: You said you were a feminist, isn’t this choice hypocritical to your ideals?

I’d already been raped. The year I graduated high school, a drunk boy took things beyond what I’d wanted. I’d never called it rape. I didn’t name it because that made it easier to mute. It was bad sex that I hadn’t agreed to have. Rape in a parking lot felt unlikely whereas bad sex I didn’t want had seemed inevitable.

In a controlled voice, I tried to explain to my father about the third wave of feminism. We are sex positive; we control our bodies. This could include participating in pornography. I might’ve compared myself to Madonna.

I didn’t talk to my brother or to my sister about my job as a stripper. It wasn’t a conscious secret, just an omission. It’s only for a summer. They’re too young to understand.

My brother had been a teenager when he told his friends I was a hooker. He was approximately the same age my son is now.

In the novel, I wrote the main character as an only child.

My son will not find out that his mother worked as a stripper from someone else. It must come from me.

Sex work is part of my body’s story. Why is there shame in this work my body has done?

“The novel wasn’t the real story,” I say to my son. “I’m writing about those years in a different way. I’m trying to understand.”

“Yeah,” he says. He is looking straight ahead at the road.

“Maybe it’s not a surprise because you’ve overheard parts of my writing class.”

“I don’t really listen.”

Surely some words have seeped through? Or maybe he didn’t know anything, and I’m confessing and it’s selfish. Will I scar him for life because I’m writing this thing? Still, I forge ahead, dragged by my own momentum.

“I’m telling you the truth because I don’t want you to feel you have to hide parts of yourself. We do things, we try things.” Words are coming out one after the other. I can’t keep up.

“Uh-hunh,” he says.

In college, I idolized the performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Vallie Export, and Marina Abramovic. For a Smith College theatre major in the 1990s, steeped in the classical male literary canon of Shakespeare and the Greeks, Ibsen and Chekhov, these women were aspirational and radical. Chocolate syrup smeared and crusted on the naked female body symbolizing the shitty treatment of women. The female body inside a cardboard box, the audience stared into the eyes of the performer as they inserted their hands into the box and did what they wanted. These performers elicited rage, headlines, and congressional hearings.

Stripping was performance art with decent pay and an enthusiastic audience. The first night I danced I dressed as a bride with pearls and a silk bouquet. The other dancers wore bikinis. The audience went wild when I stepped onstage, cheering for the virgin on her wedding night. They all wanted to be my first, I wrote in my journal, the more nervous I acted the more money they gave me. Another night was braids, a short plaid kilt, and knee socks. Every man loved the little school girl. That’s so fucking disturbing, I wrote. Later, I tried a set dressed as a nun, using my graduation robe, fishnet stockings underneath, a plastic crucifix around my neck. I rapped men’s knuckles with a ruler. Customers told me the nun was offensive. They said, Act normal and just take off your clothes. I didn’t want to act normal, I wanted to reveal my weird self. Now in the midst of another big reveal I feel on the verge of grief and regret.

“Are you ok?” I ask.

“It’s not what I expected.” The sun streams through the windshield, bright stripes of light over his arms and shirt.

“What matters is that we can be honest. Both of us. I’ve tried things. Succeeded, failed. You will, too.”

As a baby he smiled often, slept soundly and hardly ever fussed. The other mothers in my neighborhood, exhausted and pushing strollers up the steep incline of sidewalk that led to the park, often remarked on how lucky I was that he was easy.

We are crossing the bridge. The harbor is filled with boats and the water is calm, the same blue as worn denim. Outside, the day buzzes with heat and the anxiety of vacationers trying to cram it all in. Inside, we are in our cocoon of mother and son. The air is cool, and our world is shaped like an oval that fits just us two. I carried this human inside my body. All I wanted to do was sleep until he was born, so nauseated, sucking on lemon popsicles, throwing up on the subway tracks.

“I’m sure I’ll do things,” he says, “that you don’t like.”

I know that he will. He already has. A bubble of love lodges in my ribs. “Just as long as you don’t murder someone.”

He chuckles and pulls on the rim of his baseball cap. “That’s kind of a cool life motto, As Long As You Don’t Kill Someone.”

“There are a few other things you shouldn’t do.” I think of ogling, catcalling, assault. I think of being a bystander. These are things we’ve discussed in the past, but how much can I lay on this teenaged boy in one car ride?

“I know thaaaaat.” He stretches the last word out like taffy and rolls his eyes.

I put my hand on his warm brown thigh covered with golden fuzz and pat his leg. He lets me. Occasionally he still allows hugging. I’m grateful.

“I don’t need you to keep it a secret.”

“I’m not gonna tell my friends.” He looks out the window.

“I’m not embarrassed.” That’s what I say, but as I imagine his gangling, slack-jawed friends digesting the idea of me as stripper mom, my mouth tastes of metal.

“Neither am I,” he says as we pull into the hospital parking lot. He’s confident in a way I never was as a teen.

As I age, my skin and my past have become loose and soft, like a worn tee-shirt that slides over my body. Not flattering, but familiar. I park the car. There are tents, warning signs, Covid check-in protocols.

“Good talk,” I say.

He flashes a dimpled grin and reaches to open the door. He hates doctor’s offices, but he is probably eager to get out of the car.

“Wait.” I hand him a thin blue paper mask from the console and take one for myself.

We cover our faces, though I feel bare. This is my weird self, kiddo.

As he turns to open his door, I realize that he does not see me differently.

Powerful and skyscraper tall, glittering and tough, love-wild and soft bellied. I continue the striptease as I remove more layers. I write the next chapter, hands cramping, heart opening.

 

 

***

Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen