My sister MW once told me that when we were teenagers she
had walked in on me while I was masturbating in my bedroom. Her mention of the incident some twenty years
after it had occurred shocked me twice:
once because I felt, even twenty years later, exposed and ashamed, and
twice because I had absolutely no memory of it having happened. One would think that such an emotionally
charged moment would be burnt into one's memory, but no: in that place is only oblivion.
Much of our identity consists of the story we tell ourselves
about our past. The story is built of
two types of materials. One type of
material is the memory of particular events, of our actions and reactions and
the consequences thereof. The other type
of material of comes to us from family lore and the memories of others: it is a
collection of traits which we share with our forbearers and which we believe we
have inherited from them.
To learn that I had no memory of an event that must have
shaken me deeply -- I can imagine the combination of humiliating shame and
painful surprise -- throws doubt on the things that I do remember. If I have forgotten that, what else happened
that I do not remember? And given that
uncertainty, how can I rely on the story that I have constructed about who I
am? How can I possibly know myself?
I puzzle over this instance of forgetting. I can understand why one would forget having
done something which one regrets, something foolish or cruel, but in this case
I was innocent. (I do not think
masturbation to be a moral failing or to be harmful in any other way.) If anyone's behavior could be judged wrong in
this case it would be my sister's opening the door of my bedroom and entering
without warning or any consideration for my privacy. Yet she remembers, and I do not.
I have in the years since her revelation come to think that
I have a faint, shadowy memory of the event, but I cannot be sure whether I
remember it or only remember having been told about it.
So how can I begin to tell the story of the past six or
seven years of my life, the story of my involvement with MRM and the havoc he
caused me, with any confidence?
MRM would not, I believe, feel any such compunction in
telling the story of those years. He
would gauge what kind of story would be most likely to get his audience to do
what he wanted them to do, and he would construct his story with a few somewhat
modified actual events and with a few completely fictional elements, i.e. lies,
thrown in. He would avoid making things
up out of whole cloth, since they could be easily found out and also because
they would be harder for him to remember if he should find it necessary to
repeat his story later. He would alter
things only slightly to serve his purpose.
And he would avoid using too many details, since doing so would be a
sure sign of falsehood, the fear of not being believed leading the amateur liar
most often into over-compensating by piling on details meant to convince. No, MRM would lie masterfully.
I know that he would operate in this way because he once
bragged to me about his skill at lying and explained these principles -- and
others -- with pride.
*
I hated P.E. class.
It was the only part of the school day that filled me with dread. I felt -- I was -- hopelessly awkward and
uncoordinated. I was always the last
person picked for any team. I would
stand in that line trying not to look at anyone, keeping my eyes down on the
gray macadam of the basketball court or the struggling little blades of grass
on the playing field. Then I would be
out in right field, counting the seconds up to sixty and then the minutes that
remained in the period. I prayed that
the ball not come to me, please God don't let it come this way, and when it did
I felt sick to my stomach as I tried to pretend to be trying to catch it. I ended up having to run after it as it
rolled away on the grass and, once I had picked it up, throwing it ineptly in
the general direction of the pitcher and the basemen, watching it never
actually fly directly toward any one of them and seeing it always -- like so
many of my efforts -- fall short.
There I am, standing in right field or shifting from foot to
foot while I pretended to guard a basketball player or never looking at
teammates who had the ball so that they would never choose to throw it to
me. If some fool called my name, and the
ball shot straight at me from his chest and arms, I always failed to catch it,
or if I did, I could neither hold on to it or dribble it or pass it without
seeing it fall into the hands of the opposing team.
It is 6:30 in the morning as I write, the end of a long
night driving a cab, and I realize as I tell you these memories that I have not
looked at them in detail ever before now.
I have referred to them obliquely in conversation with other men who I
know had similar childhood experiences, but I have never taken the time to get
this close to that shy and embarrassed little boy until now.
His memory makes me very sad.
*
I played right field because the ball is seldom hit
there. So despite my anxiety anticipatory
to every swing, I did, on the whole, have little to do while standing out
there. My imagination was free then, and
I would daydream about having magic powers, like the ones my favorite hero,
Superman, had. I devoured each issue of
the Superman comic books when they appeared on the rack at Sam's Market. I recall the smell of those pages now, as I
write these words. And as I lay in bed,
waking from a dream or perhaps beginning to dream before having fully fallen
asleep, I saw myself swooping upward, actually flying, as I caught a high fly
ball to right field. With all the
desperation of my clumsy, ball-fumbling shame, I wanted to fly. The ever-unsatisfied yearning hurt.
That right-fielder's aching heart may go a long way to
explaining my lifelong interest in the occult, in mysteries both spiritual and
scientific, and my insistence on rejecting simple, material, mechanical,
measurable accounts of phenomena. I have
a hard time accepting the obvious explanation of anything as a complete
understanding of it. Ironically, my attitude is both skeptical and
credulous: I always doubt
"facts" and am always willing to believe conjectures and appearances.
I had a neighbor in the Tenderloin who used to complain
about tiny bugs that were all around him and attacked him ceaselessly, jumping
and crawling and biting him. Sometimes
when we were talking, they would attack him, and though I never saw or felt
them myself, I never doubted him. From
what I could tell, everyone else with whom he interacted -- medical personnel,
social workers, friends and acquaintances -- told him that there were no bugs
and that he was crazy. Instead, I instinctively
sympathized with his plight. I told him
that the bugs sounded awful, and I asked him how he dealt with them. Though we don't see each other very often
now, we have remained friends, and I have noticed in the past year that the
bugs have deserted him entirely. What
has not been lost is the easy and open conversation and friendship that we share.
*
Throughout my youth we spent summer vacations at Lake
Tahoe. By "summer vacation" I
mean the weeks that my father had off from work. I had the entire three month period that
school was out of session as my summer vacation, but we had our summer
vacation, when the whole family packed up and left home in Walnut Creek to
reside temporarily in a different house.
When I was very young, that house was a small trailer that hitched to
the back of the station wagon and served as our home in one of the California
State Parks along the western side of "the lake" as Tahoe was called
by my parents and their circle of friends, just as Hawaii was called "the
islands." I was still young --
maybe five or six -- when my father started renting a cabin on the shore of the
lake from one of the secretaries in his office.
By the time I was eleven or twelve, my parents had bought a house on the
same street as the secretary's cabin, and we now had "a place at the
lake". By then my father's vacation
time had stretched to four weeks, and we spent the entire month of August
there.
Lake Tahoe was as yet unpolluted. Indeed, our drinking water came directly from
the lake through a pipe that stretched a hundred feet or more under the
pristine water and pulled that water directly into our faucets. The lake was icy cold; the days burnt with
the summer sun pouring through the thin air of a mile-high elevation. Later I would learn to appreciate lying in
the hot sun until I was almost panting from the heat and then diving into the
shock of frigid water, coming up gasping for air.
But when I was very young, say seven and eight and nine, I
spent my days at the lake reading in my little attic room, the sunlight
reflecting off the water and up through the tiny dormer window, its shifting in
arcs flying around the ceiling. I remember
the chill air, the heat of the sun, the ink and newsprint smell of the comic
books and the endless yearning to be Superman.
Think of it! What relief! What enormous burden of weakness and failure
would be lifted! Even if I remained
disguised as myself, and without any higher social standing or public pride, I
would have the satisfaction, the confidence, of my secret powers. I would no longer feel ashamed in my self.
*
I remember a night in Yosemite Valley during a family
vacation when we all stayed in tent cabins in Camp Curry. I was in my late twenties or my
thirties. Specifically, I remember doing
a Tarot reading for my sister, MW. I
asked her to begin by thinking of a question that she should not tell me. I then began laying out the cards and
describing the circumstances that gave rise to the question. This was the method by which I always began a
reading: if what I said did not seem
applicable to the querent, I would stop.
I would know that I was not at that time able to give a valid reading.
I do not know what year it was. I feel fairly sure that my sister's second
son was on the verge of adolescence. I
do not remember whether her third son had as yet been born, but I believe
so. She may have been holding him on her
lap as I worked the cards. If so, the
year was about 1987 or 1988. I do
remember that when the reading ended, she told me that her question had been
about her second son's health. He had
been experiencing seizures and she wanted to know how serious they were and
whether more difficult problems might develop from them.
My method with the Tarot begins with a ritualized shuffling of
the cards. They are divided into four
piles on the basis of which I describe the question as one of four different
types. If the querent agrees, I proceed
to lay out the cards in a way that selects a limited number of them and places
then in a sequence. Sometimes there are
lots of cards in the sequence; sometimes only two or three. I look at the sequence of cards and try to
tell a story made up of the figures and actions portrayed in the cards. I like to compare what I do to reading a
comic book in a foreign language. With
no clue what the text says is going on, you try to discern the story by reading
only the pictures.
Some of the cards seem to me to represent people; some to
represent actions or events; and some to represent forces or spiritual and
psychological attitudes. When some
particularly negative or even threatening image appears, I usually try to
ameliorate the sense of it by taking it as symbolic of spiritual or
psychological processes. On this
particular occasion, I remember turning up the card for Death. I dwelt on the symbolic sense of the card as
indicating a process of change and renewal.
I had no idea, of course, that my sister's question was one regarding
the future for her son, specifically whether the seizures he was experiencing
were the symptoms of a serious and perhaps life-threatening problem. I have still not mastered the truth of that
card, of Death. I shy away from its
meaning and fudge any reading in which it comes up.
As you can see, this memory is like a shard from a broken
piece of pottery. I vividly remember the
presence of that card and my difficulty in speaking forthrightly about it. The context -- what year it was, who was
present, etc. -- is vague. So little of
this memory is clear that I might not have remembered even the bit that I do,
except that within another year or two my sister's son died -- not the second
son who had been having the seizures, but the third son, who was or was not seated
in my sister's lap at the time of the reading.
This is the same sister, MW, who remembered walking in on
me. In the thirty years since her son
died, I have never had the courage to ask her whether she remembers that Tarot
reading.
*
During the fifteen years that I lived on the east coast, I
made a point of telephoning my parents every Sunday afternoon. The regularity of the schedule meant that we
could talk to each other without the annoyance of calling to find no one home,
leaving messages, and playing "phone tag" over a number of days,
pushing the weekly conversation into the following week. Although answering machines had come into
use, the things we had to say to one another could not be reduced to a few
words on a tape hissing with background noise, and even if they could, we would
end up only talking at each other in little bursts, like armies firing at
each another from trenches hidden in the blackness of a moonless night.
Conversation is not onanistic. One speaks, the other or others reply, the
one responds to the reply, or one or the other corrects something said earlier,
and the collaboration gives rise to living communication, the essence of our
common humanity.
I remember being struck, in the early and mid-eighties, by
the startling similarity of my parents' lives with my own. They were in their seventies, and I in my
thirties. Yet we seemed almost to be
contemporaries in that the events we talked about each week frequently and
persistently included funerals. My
parents' cohort, the friends and neighbors with whom they had grown up,
survived the Great Depression and World War, raised children, and grown old,
were dying off. And my cohort, the
energetic and ambitious and creative homosexuals of the east and west coasts,
were dying of AIDS.
I remember in particular one white-knuckled cab ride down
the old West Side Highway from the
Upper West Side to Chelsea during which I thought not only that all six of us
(including the driver) crammed into this little tin can barreling down the
length of Manhattan island, bouncing through potholes and sliding from lane to
lane were about to die but also that, if we survived, the rest of my life would
be the same thing anyway, over and over and over. The future I saw for myself was one of
attending funerals, sometimes as many as three or four a weekend, as the years
stretched into a lifetime.
Of all that I saw and felt through the two decades of the
scourge, I now find myself most affected by the realization that I am the only
one who remembers so many things: six
good looking men drifting through the Delaware Water Gap in an inflated rubber
boat, with a fully stocked bar in coolers and ravishing delicacies in baskets
(with the requisite plates, flatware, and stemware) laughing uncontrollably at
nothing because of the excellent LSD we had taken, being suddenly swamped and
driven to frantic efforts to reach the river's banks as an unexpected rainstorm
dumped its flood upon us, scrambling onto the bank and pulling the overturned
boat up so that we could all huddle under it for protection from the deluge,
and looking at one another only to see that the elegant David somehow still
held his lighted cigarette in one hand and his unspilled vodka and tonic in the
other. Our whoops and howls of laughter,
the great pleasure of our camaraderie, persists now only in me, in my mortal
flesh. We six are together here still,
but within only one of us. All perish
with me.
My first lover, TS, the medieval scholar, talked about the
oldest piece of written English that we have.
It is an account of a battle known as "The Survivor's Lament", and it appears in the middle of "Beowulf".
The hero has defeated the monster Grendel who had been attacking Anglo-Saxon settlements and devouring livestock. Everyone is enjoying the huge banquet served in honor of Beowulf. But among all the carousing warriors and civilians sits an elderly man who does not join in the revelry and instead speaks solemnly about a battle decades before in which he fought and which he and his people lost. So in the middle of an heroic epic, at the moment of victory and salvation, the voice of defeat and of suffering brings the celebration to a halt with the reminder of failure and of the inevitable loss of everything. The old
warrior ends his recollection of lost
youth and lost glory and beloved friendsalso lost -- heroes all -- with a line that has
haunted me throughout my adult life:
"And I alone am
escaped to tell thee."
