Category: Family

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Hopin’ and Prayin’ and Sniffin’

I’ve not been very successful in finding a mouth wide enough for my next grid. I photographed Dean twice already, and even with my new extension tube, couldn’t get quite close enough. Ted has recommended a friend to me, who in college used to brag about the large bottles and such that he could accomodate, but he has some sort of flu-like thing, and so I must wait out his illness. I’m so consumed by this idea that I’m finding it difficult to move forward on a new piece. Does anyone out there have a really big mouth? Surrounded by fur? Call me…

Tonight the parental units come to visit. Oh my god, I forgot to tell you, my brother Mark and his wife, Keith, had a baby, a serene and beautiful little girl, named Cassady Blue, in keeping with Keith’s family tradition of naming the girls after boys. (Keith’s mom’s name is Joe, “Joe Mama.”) Mom and Dad will be here for a week, so get ready for tales of sibling wierdness.

Ted is trying to make me more outdoorsy. I’ve been hiking and running, and next comes skiing and biking. Could you imagine? I am a card-carrying sissy. I just want to hear about people breaking legs on the slopes, and pass in my car those guys in those stupid black biking shorts biking UP (??) Mount Tamalpais. Someone help! Or send me a stand-in. In theory, Ted is supposed to accompany me to some sort of cultural event/activity for balance. Really, I’d rather be in a museum on a sunny day, or passed out in a field in Sonoma County after wine tasting and sex.

Which reminds me, we were talking last night about facades, while dining at the fine Firewood Cafe, and questioning authenticity and gay identity. When lesbians who dress up like little gay dudes were brought up, or maybe it was lesbians who call themselves “bears” and dress up in boots and plaid shirts were brought up, I forget which, and accused of not being authentic, adopting the look and sexual persona of “another,” I blurted out that I feel a sense of estrangement and amusement every time I go to the Lone Star for precisely the same reason, wondering if the appropriation of stripped-down blue-collar masculinity is accompanied by any sense of irony? I hear a lot of bears say, “Anyone can be a bear, it’s about a sensibility,” which I think really means that you, too, could dress up like one. It’s all about what we wear, isn’t it?

Which reminds me, my daphnes are blooming right now. For the next few weeks, I will roam through my garden and weep gently and happily as the most intoxicating fragrance this side of a sweating man wafts through my larger-than-average nostrils and hits some kind of deeply hidden nerve center connected directly to Mount Olympus. Come sniff with me, and be my love…
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Little Eshter and Bob’s Book-Release Party

I just got back from Bob’s reading and book-release party at Modern Times. Bob began by playing Little Esther’s Love Will Break Your Heart on a portable cassette player, pointing to the tape to emphasize the truth in her pained denunciation of romance. I kept my composure through most of it, although he didn’t look at me at all during his performance, and like an idiot I sat in the front row so that I could greet all of our friends. He read from his Purple Men 2002 story, which is basically the story of our relationship, with details of this or that friend and lover tossed in–our tea and paper and waggling his pee-pee at our neighbors in the morning, our asparagus-scented cum fests, my stalker, our goldfish Francie and Cleo. I lost it after Francie and Cleo, used by him allegorically, relating the fishes’ mortality and domesticity to that of the central characters, Darrell and Trent. Bob’s a great writer, and there’s so much lyricism, humor and histrionics in his narcissistic explorations of the character, “Bob.” I complained for years of having to listen to story after story about L’s asshole at reading after reading, or having his new book named after his former lover, Denny. “When are you going to write about me?” I’d wail, like Lucy, eager for my turn in the spotlight. “You’re going to have to hurt me first,” he always replied, “and you’ll be sorry.”

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Gratitude

It looks like the holiday season has muscled into my birthday season again. I saw a brilliant production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the SF Opera last week, with a very humpy Sergei and a minimal constructivist set, striking social realist tableaux, and interesting music. Dean and Emily came over for the first birthday dinner, which Bob made, including his close interpretation of the tomato tarte tatin that we had in Paris this summer and a super rich cheesecake. Big Chrissy treated me to a nice dinner at Watercress, formerly Watergate, which has moved to the Gramercy Towers, where Le Bistrot used to be. Watercress is notable for the consistently mixed-race couples that mirror its East/West fusion cuisine. I had the family over a few days later when sister Sue arrived from Florida, making my Linguine Seafood Bolognese for them. We’re getting together later today at brother Mark’s for the big Thanksgiving dinner. I’m making brussels sprouts with chestnut–in perhaps a maple butter glaze. Not sure yet.

I have been working, on this new video, which I’ve re-edited several times already, but I think I’m on a good track. Still not sure of the sound, though. I’ve been experimenting with breathing sounds, lapping waves, purring, and the orchestrated beginnings of Dean Martin’s Italian Love Songs. Nothing is quite right, but I’ll figure it out. Suggestions welcomed. Remember the plan to borrow from the visual structure of the cropduster scene in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest? Well, things have evolved in a different direction, quite. Although I will come back to that idea for the next video. This time, the camera pans slowly across the surface of super furry D’s super furriness, up and down his neck and arms, the nine-second pans dissolving slowly into each other so that you get only one-second of clarity. I want to maintain a dreamy blurry intoxicating closeness, but frustrate the desire for consummation. I’d love to present this in Smell-O-Rama.

On this day of thanksgiving, I’m very grateful for all the backs out there that have escaped depilation. And dihydrotestosterone and male pattern baldness. Thank you also for Nicephore Niepce and silver bromide. And cheese.

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Life After Bob

Life after Bob is pretty much the same as life with Bob. We still live together, still sleep together, watch Lydia together over lunch, and talk of our next trip to Europe. Well… it looks like the song’s right. Breaking up is hard to do. No sooner than we decide to call it quits than we start having wild breakup sex and communicating beautifully. At one point I tearfully tore Bob away from my special place and said I needed to talk with him about why we were breaking up, that I needed to understand that more was happening than just my wanting to be with someone younger. After all, we’re such good companions. There is the basic communication pattern–to misinterpret, get resentful, and then withdraw.  Although the age difference is a factor, if we communicated better, it wouldn’t matter, right? Bob asked if I wanted to give it a try, to work on the relationship more. I couldn’t promise anything. We’d already worked this out in therapy three years ago, our basic communication challenges, and have since slowly slipped back into old unhealthy patterns. There’s something in our union that produces this way of relating to each other, some assertion of ego that refuses to back down. I don’t think the age difference is really as big a deal as how we’ve defined ourselves in relation to each other. He wants to stay the teacher, and I want to feel like I’m with an equal, not my professor. I asked him if we could play it by ear. All of the talk over the past while has produced very little, while our interactions over the recent while were producing quite interesting and enjoyable results. So back to limbo, for a while anyway.

Bob and Reese have flown off to New York for a few days, to stay with the Rockefeller, who is taking them to see Bernadette Peters in Gypsy, and Avenue Q. Reese will come back belting out “I have a dream…” The other parents must think we chain him to Judy Garland videos.

Meanwhile, back at the Coco Nest…

D has been coming over every Monday, after his shock treatment, to nap in my studio while I work at my desk. I trim his neck hair, give him a shower, lunch in the garden, and then drive him back to the halfway house. I’ve been seeing a lot of him lately, taking him to movies, drives along the coast… Last week I shot 50 scenes for a video, extreme close ups of his extreme furriness. No tracking, panning, or zooming–just looking, Ozu at the Lone Star. I turned a fan on him, so his fur swayed gently in the breeze. He’s developed a tremor, too, from the shock treatments, so the images are not only blurry, they’re also quite jiggly. Tomorrow I’m recording the sound. I’m going to call the video Tremor.

The past few weeks haven’t been very eventful, except for a visit from Gail, the Canadian writer, who stayed with us for a week and gave a knock out reading at Small Press Traffic, and a drive down to LA for Dean’s opening at Christopher Grimes and the Lee Bontecou show at the Hammer–both shows sublime, really unique visions. You have to stop for lunch next time you drive down there, in Los Banos, at the Basque restaurant in the Sheep Farmer’s Hotel. Lunchers sit at long tables with rancher dudes in ten-gallon hats and dusty boots. The waitress asked if I wanted lamb, pork, or chicken. “Lamb” I said, and she brought me a green salad, vegetable bean soup, lamb stew, french fries, two giant lamb chops, beans, cheese, dessert, and a carafe of very fruity, light, but delicious and slightly bubbly house-made wine, all served family style. I know I’m forgetting something. $12.

Nayland’s videos in the Yerba Buena Center anniversary show have been a high point in art viewing this month, although the other work in the show, except for Barry’s, is generally dismal, unimaginative and just stupid. In one of Nayland’s videos, two hands tightly clasp a bunny toy against a furry belly, which fills the frame, the bunny slowly torn apart by the clawing paws, as a voice repeats over and over “You… are… my… lucky… star.” A very simple piece, but a powerful, erotic, and queasy distillation of longing and loss.

So I don’t know. It seems likely that Bob and I will indeed separate. But then it doesn’t. I love my life with him, but I’m loving having this big bed to myself this week. My chaotic relationship polygon will eventually work itself out. I do feel closer to resolution, although chaos has become something more manageable than grief.

Nighty night.

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Mary Shelley’s Coco

CHORUS OF THERAPISTS: “Coco, you’ve got to be alone for a while. Your happiness shouldn’t be contingent on whether you stay with X, Y, or Z.”

LITTLE BUNNY COCO: “But I want all of them.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“They don’t want each other.”

“Perhaps you need to be with yourself for a while.”

“You mean to eat in restaurants by myself? Are you insane? I can’t even walk into a singles bar by myself. Why would I want to be happy by myself? Am I going to be like Garry? Forever the first person on the list of available San Francisco Bears on ‘bear.net’? Always looking for that perfect mate? And always single? I am not a single person.”

“Exactly, you’re half of one. You’re already married, and have a wonderful boyfriend, and you flirt with anything with hairy shoulders. You’ve never been alone, and you’re driving everyone crazy with your partial commitments.”

“You’re the ones who are missing the point. I want to live in cro-magnon South of France and breast feed my furry clan of hus-apes.”

“You’ve defined yourself since age 16 as the ingenue, and your erotic life has revolved around struggling against the inequities inherent in such a dynamic, gaining power through your sexuality, and pushing yourself to match the achievements of your mentors/husbands. Through your art, you’ve stumbled into a different relation to your erotic life, one not dependent on power struggles, but rooted in physical desire.”

“Here we go with the transition, again.”

“Yes, you’re growing up. But you’re almost 38. Most people go through this stage in their 20’s.”

“Almost 38. And this is different. I started early. This is a mid-life crisis.”

“It’s going to be if you keep it up for another 3 years. You’re piecing together a relationship with men who don’t add up to what you want from one man. Mary Shelley’s Coco. You don’t need the structure of a relationship to be complete. You aren’t able to feel complete in your relationships because you are not complete.”

“But I’m afraid to be alone.”

“But you’ve never been alone, how do you know?”

“I was alone for a whole year after Manny died.”

“You mean the year that you dated Christian, Alfonso, Garry, David, Will, Bob, and Luis with the ‘husky football player-type build’?”

“They were part of my grieving process. Wasn’t Alfonso cute?”

“…”

“What? Just tell me what to do?”

“We’ve already told you what to do. You hear what you want to hear. When you’re ready, you’ll do what you need to do.”

MONTHS, YEARS PASS…

Bob came home Sunday night to say that he had a little evening romp with someone on Diamond Street. “Bob? Who’s Bob?” Bob’s my partner. We’ve lived together for 10 years. He’s the father of my stepson Reese. I don’t talk about him much. Since the commencement of my blogging we’ve been in a strange purgatory, inititated by my announced need to be with someone my age (he’s 18 years older) and my less than successful attempts at integrating that need into our otherwise quite successful relationship. (Successful except for the essential core.) I was upset (“Hippocrite,” cried Big Chrissy, with whom I’d spent the evening), not so much because Bob had finally taken steps to get some much needed physical attention, which we’d actually negotiated months before, but because I’d put my partner in a position of needing to do so. Something clicked. This isn’t the kind of relationship that I’d like to be in, where we’re both grabbing here and there to piece together a completeness that eludes us.

I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the next few days, but I’ve turned a corner, tossed out of the car, actually, and it’s bright and clear, but a long walk to the next town.

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Sunshine State Highlights

So Florida was pretty fun, with relatively little family drama, save for June’s hysteria and everyone’s varied reaction to it and hypothetical meanderings as to its source. I stayed with my sister Carol and her husband Bruce, and niece Megan (who went with me to Paris in June, remember?). I eased comfortably into the position of Cabana boy, cleaning their pool every morning in my ribbed suit, and floating around on a matching blue raft before meeting the rest of the gang at the beach house. We sent Megan off to college, everything covered by scholarships, plus a stipend, and free high-speed internet access in her dorm. Early in the trip Megan took Mark, Keith, me and Paul to Weeki Wachee for the mermaid show, and a beautiful boat ride down the crystal clear river, where we saw egrets, blue herons, wood storks, otters and creepy giant spiders. No manatees this trip. The mermaid theater is perched on the edge of a natural spring, extending some 20 feet below the water’s surface. The mermaids performed a loose interpretation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. They refer to each other as “mermaid sisters” and sang a fabulous song that seemed a parody of a mermaid show tune, with the lyrics “We’ve got the world by the tail!” I met the mer-man, Justin, who seemed starved for human interaction and eager for more than fishtail. We celebrated Sue’s 50th birthday a little early with a party for her and a shower of 50 gifts. Each sibling gave her 7 gifts (plus a few from mates and parents), mine compressed into a promised 7-course kaiseki ryouri meal when she comes to visit in November. Dad had his prostate and bladder removed last year (please, God, not me) and provided a vivid description of the ease of inserting and using a catheter. Who would have thought?

The plane back to San Francisco flew over a rainbow, way up high, back to the land that I heard of once in a lullaby–the land of no more heat rash.

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Letters, Thunder, and a Pearl for Coco

Well… my parents, who recently officially retired, and who are great organizers (read “ones who need to toss out their children’s childhood beloved sentimental detritus from time to time to satisfy their need for order and space”) have unearthed letters written by their children to them over the past 30 years or so, and are in the process of archiving and organizing the letters into a chronological narrative of our family history, as seen from the perspective of the kids.

The few gems of mine brought down as samples include my coming out letter (“I am a homosexual”), a 5,000 word essay on my summer at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and travels around China, and a letter written shortly after graduating from the SF Art Institute, full of despair and manipulation (I had put myself through one of the most expensive art schools in the country and was apparently very resentful, hostile even, of their lack of support). The letters are so cocky and confident, and written in a florid style that I’d find hard to emulate today, but fun to read, especially my adventures in China, extensively detailed and illuminated.

Tampa is called “The Lightning Capital of the World.” Yesterday evening we watched lightning for hours, the west coast siblings thrilled by actual weather (we don’t have it in San Francisco). Our screams competed with the lightning and claps of thunder, we were so excited, like watching 4th of July fireworks.

Tonight we celebrate Sue’s 50th birthday, the second eldest. I’m on the edge of tears all the time here. I love my sisters and brothers so much, I don’t want us to ever be without each other. They’re what I want to be and what I’m not, my aspirations and envy contained neatly in 6 dynamic and fun-filled packages–Carol, Sue, Diane, June, Paul and Mark.

The pearl that I found in one of my oysters yesterday….

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Pink People

Florida, Day One:
It amazes me that there is life here, that everything doesn’t shrivel and burn up. One moves from air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space, in heavily air-conditioned vehicles. Since arriving this morning I dipped my little Chrissy in the Gulf, had my first grouper sandwich–blackened and grilled, and accompanied by a dozen oysters–and now am reclining with my expanding belly and my siblings in the cottage, most of them, anyway, their offspring, our parental units, and our friend Vicky. The prime directive for the next few days will involve the gentle blending of my farmer tan with the vast white spaces of my body suddenly thrust into daylight.
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Sweets

So we celebrated Reese’s 10th birthday this weekend. I don’t want him to get older. I don’t want to get older. Double digits already, he’ll be wanting the car keys in no time. The party that we threw for him in Golden Gate Park could have been thrown by Dario Argento–yellowjackets stung all the screaming kids, a seagull tried to eat the cake, several bees became embedded in it, and Angie and Megan forgot the table. Reese came through with a surprise pop quiz which he passed out to everyone titled “How well do you know Reese?” He even designed his cake this year, which always takes several days for us to execute, based on his own “Uffy Club” comic strip, destined to be a classic, starring Fluffy and Ruffy (a cat and a dog), and Muffy BeautyButt (a poodle). Fluffy and Ruffy are holding hands on the top of the cake, their friendship a source of the fountain, which rains down on poor Muffy, holding the umbrella, and spills down the levels of the cake. Ever the sissy daddy, and an easy target, I quietly slipped out during the water balloon toss.

I sent a little note to Andrew Sullivan after his bear “outing” on Salon.com, inviting him to check out my studies of the bear body, and he wrote back! with a concise “how beautiful.” Wasn’t that sweet?