In Twilight Regalia

(even if you didn’t know)…..

Douglas

Douglas (he was not a “Doug”) was the first boy I laid eyes on and actually fell in love with from afar. What was remarkable was that it occurred at such a young age for me. Most people I’ve talked to don’t recall being attracted to anyone until far beyond first grade, which is where we met, or rather where I pined in silence for a time. In a sea of pink-marshmallow midwestern faces, Douglas was dark skinned and had huge brown eyes with giraffe eyelashes and a slim frame. I was completely smitten by his mystery: His last name was French, his looks were perhaps from India, his parents were never seen, and as I recall, his intellectual stance in class was pretty high (as much as one could be in a chorus of little brains learning to spell words). And he was Quiet. Sitting there across the room, never near me, dammit, so Quiet. It was a good thing spelling came easily to me. I’m sure I spent most lessons looking off to my right, where he sat.

I had completely forgotten by high school days and a new city away, however, just HOW I had expressed my love to him.
I mentioned him in a letter to a high school-aged pal I hadn’t seen since those days how I had adored him.
To my surprise, both she and he still lived in town.
She spoke to him about my letter and he remembered me, she said.
“He says he remembers you kicked him in the shins on the playground a lot.”

Allan

At 7 years old, Allan was not a crush - but one of my two first actual friends that was a boy. It was second grade and he sat near me and we talked too much constantly. We did everything together for a short time. He was quick-thinking, likeable right-off, and we ran rampant in the neighborhood group of …girls. He was FUNNY. He made me laugh until my sides hurt. He was good looking and spryly thin. It wasn’t until my mother basically told me I shouldn’t be hanging out with a guy who liked hand-sewing so much that I realized there was any difference between him and the other boys. Mom said he definitely had a weird attachment to his mother. I didn’t see why this was important at all.
But then we moved away. I have always missed knowing what became of him since.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized I was quite happy to be a fag-hag at such an early age.

Paul

When you’re in fifth grade there’s always a class clown. This guy will do ANYTHING, even to over-the-top practical jokes, to make fun of a teacher and get a laugh from the group. He’s the kid who just can’t behave for the life of him, because he’s bored out of his mind. He may also just not be all that sharp, missing the interest-level that some of the smarter smart-mouths would have been able to sustain. He above all others in the social spectrum, dares to throw out convention. For sheer bravado, and for some of his better retorts to our boring teacher, I loved Paul. But I also feared for his life. He seemed absolutely unable to tone anything down, could not stop a rebellion when he could add one more punch line, even if it sent him to the principal’s office, even if he were corporeally punished. He was severely yelled at on a regular basis and treated like the class dunce by this teacher. He also had a stroke against him before he’d begun: His brother had been a notorious trouble-maker. And he was IRISH. They said his family had the whole set-up of old Irish entanglement: too many children, a father who drank and hit them, etc. Whenever he was punished, Paul was a pack of matches ready to fume into catastrophic rage. I actually prayed for him to not be punished again in class, hating to see his dignity lowered again and again.

Five years later, as a teen, I met him again. He had dropped out at 16, and his father in punishment had made him join the Army. He had gone through bootcamp and had just returned. And there was no trace of the former Paul at all. His humour, his wit, his antagonism had all been artificially supplanted with the proud rhetoric of a fine military brainwashing. I tried to find even the slightest shred of individual thinking in him, but the floor had been swept clean of anything in his former life. He was part of the group now, he was proud to be integrated with the best fighting machines in Our Great Country.

I never found out if he went to Vietnam, nor whether he got home. But I called it a death all the same somehow.

Sheldon

Sheldon was a Math Genius in my 7th grade math class. He was everything a girl could want: bright, soft-spoken due to embarrassment over his recently-descended baritone voice, good-looking in a blond European way, of statuesque height, and came from a family of 50s-style motor-jacketed Grease-y older brothers. Sheldon was the perfect mix of good student and bad boy: He had learned well their thug-slouch and disinterested coolness, and had been caught smoking once. But he was the bright one in the bunch, always answering correctly in geometry, where I was helplessly lost.

Perfect for me!, I thought. The heart-stopping item, however, was a strange bit of detail: He had the most lovely forearms. He wore white shirts (which no one did in those days) with the cuffs turned back just so, exposing a very large silver ID bracelet on his left wrist with heavy chain link on the back. I coveted that ID bracelet. I coveted his wrists. I wanted to stroke just the four inches of his arms and wrists above his long hands. That would have been enough. But he never noticed me, and I never approached him; we went to different high schools, and I never saw him again. What would he think now knowing a girl fell in love with his wrists?

Ralph

My best friend from 8th grade French class was Leslie. We giggled and aced our way through most classes, and wrote notes in French back and forth about how jolie our professeur was, even if she was old. When I went to her house, ever in our cloud of pre-pubescently annoying constant chatter, I found a piano and began playing, since I played every chance I got. Her older brother played guitar, she said. Really? Eventually I even jammed with him one afternoon, he being a tall Czech type guy with the family’s characteristic cowlick of dark sleek hair hanging in a lock that fell over his eyes like an anime-cartoon. He had a great electric guitar, a Fender Strat, he announced to expect a raised eyebrow. But Leslie and he argued in a constant sibling spat, and once fought over my attention; so I backed away.
“But I like your brother,” I said to Leslie. “He’s neat.”
“Eeeewwwwww.” was all she registered.

It wasn’t until my 8th grade graduation, at the graduation dance, while dressed in my best party dress and fake-dancing with some guy who agreed to go with me because neither of us wanted to be left unpaired, that I saw Ralph as Rockstar, on stage. There he was with his fledgling band, playing a tune he’d written, a slow-dance number with two haunting minor chords, as I swayed slightly back and forth, and I kept peeking over the unfamilliar shoulder to my friend’s brother, now turned idol. CLUNK. My stomach sank. I suddenly realized the only way to his heart. I had to become a rockstar myself.

Gary

My friend Mary’s family took me on the two best vacations of my teens, out camping in the lakes and forests of Wisconsin. Bill the Marine Dad would gather up his wife Georgette, elder brother, Mary and I, and youngest brother into a van pulling a pop-out campershell trailer and away we’d go to someplace So idyllic, and So full of mosquitoes and deer flies, as not to be believed. We camped on a ridge to avoid the pests. I went off for what I’d said would be a short walk to the lake’s edge before dinner, and in those days, they figured I’d be fine. Serial killers didn’t figure in the psyche much in America then.

So I manouvered down the cliff to a rock ledge just above a fantastic wide green lake with trees of every kind framing both my vision and the opposite shore, and where the late summer sun baked its orange dusty warmth into my soul for a few minutes… when I was suddenly aware of the sound of crumbling rocks and approaching tennis shoes. And down plopped a boy my own age, with longish brown hair and and the greenest eyes and a slightly crooked smile. He must have seen me first and come down, I realized in later years. But I was too naiive to think of that just then. Then he began to talk about things. He talked about things that he’d done on this lake. I told him my childhood and he told me his. We talked about the importance of beauty and nature and good smells and life. We talked like poetry back and forth together. Then he took my hand and we sat there together, electric with each other in the midst of a non-electric experience at last, and when we looked in each others’ eyes we felt like we had made love already. And finally we had to part hands.

It was sundown when I returned and dinner long over and Bill had been looking for me for a half hour. They were PISSED.
The next morning there was a large rock with some chalked words on it left for me.
Gary had gone back home. If the rock had been smaller, I’d have kept it.

Freeman

At seventeen, pushing hard to become the folk-rock star I thought I was destined to become, I discovered one could not make a living by music alone. I had to get some kind of job, and I was untrained at anything business related. I had tried to wait tables and failed miserably, not being able to remember who-ordered-what whenever, let alone do math to figure out how many ingredients on a pizza or a half a pizza added up to on any given day (and it was different on different days due to sales and promotions)…

So I found a job in a hotel. Will Train, it said. It turned out to be janitorial. Not a MAID, a JANITOR. I was the only white and the only woman. There were three black guys, and a couple old white guys, and me. We cleaned the main areas. Appalled at the orange maid’s uniform they gave me, I braided my long hair and tied feathers in the tips. Freeman asked if I was Indian or something. He was only the second black guy I had ever really talked to. He was brown-skinned, pleasant faced, afro-d, and would have been stylish if money had permitted. We talked several times. I liked him. I was just getting interested in him because he seemed so …. gentle. Those were days when Black Power had hit the streets, and I thought I’d be in for a fight, but he was nothing like that. He was just Freeman. We talked about guitar and parents and things. Nothing much.
I invited him to see me sing.
He didn’t come.
I asked if I could come visit him once. He said it wasn’t a good time that weekend.
I asked again later to visit him, but he declined.
I suddenly realized that, at least to his family, it would never be a good time.

The Romany Gypsy

I can’t recall his name now, for the life of me. But when my sister was living in a house with her new husband and I was perhaps 15 they invited a guy-friend over to dinner, and he’d brought with him a nephew, the boy I now call Romany Gypsy, because that was his background. We all had dinner and sat around on the floor in the living room playing scrabble and other stupid things, laughing and talking, the elders having a drink or two. Those days were very loose days — society being questioned in all kinds of ways, and when the adults noticed the boy and I eyeing each other, they went off to bed (probably half high) and left us to chat over a bottle of some kind of wine. Who would do that now in this Republican era? (beside crack heads perhaps….)

He was just my type. His hair has well beyond his shoulders, long and dark; with enormous brown eyes and a sad, shadowed, iconic look to his long face. I couldn’t stand it!! I was hopping up and down inside!! He was GORGEOUS!! He apparently thought the same of me, because we immediately began a game of taking sips of wine and kissing each other until we were both spinney headed and extremely dangerous.

Oddly enough, that was also a more innocent time, and all we could bring ourselves to do was kiss passionately, over and over and with TONGUES which was a new thing to us then. We kissed for what seemed like hours and then kissed more until our mouths were actually sore and DELIGHT became snuggling and suddenly the wine took us in like a viper poison and we passed out on the couch, clothed arms and legs entwined.

I had no idea what vile thing had transpired in sleep. When we awoke, we kissed again.

OH GAWD, he tasted awful! 0-0 so bad I nearly winced.
I must have tasted horrible as well….
But it was impossible to stop! and so we kept assaulting each other, practically wretching inside with the smell of drunken food-alcohol breath. Ohhhhhh. We stank! We REEKED!
ACK!!! But I want….
Mmmmmmmm
ICK!!!! OH GOD!! YUCK!!
oh kiss me again…
EWWwww ok okok stop. I think I’m going to puke.

And that was the last of it…. and we didn’t see each other again…. but I still laugh hysterically every time I think of the dreadful, inexplicable pull to something both delightful and unbearably foul at the same time. Whenever I have such a dichotomous schism in my experience, I think of the Romany Gypsy and think, how like life.

When I was a kid, Easter used to be a fresh spring day with white lillies, green grass and a new dress. And then we’d hear about the gorey dying and triumphant rising of the Messiah, of life out of death, of a way out where there was none. Into peace and harmony.

It seemed a bit magically charged to me, even as a child — both good and bad, complete and incomplete. Later I viewed it as growing toward the spiritual and away from the material. But all the while the things I viewed in harsh life around me puzzled me. Where was God about then?

Every time I look over things that I have had to adjust to, I’m really struck by how even my most sincere, high-intentioned large-life altruistic plans have collapsed — practically every time. I just can’t seem to do it, to rise from behind a rock. It’s come to where I don’t know if I will ever bother again. At this stage in life, is there a point? It’s as if I’m being told to try something else. And then I pick up and think, hm. Should I listen to that? Maybe I’ve been accomplishing things all along…. just… not in the circle I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t think that’s all. Maybe I should just keep working?

Lately I aim into the field of what should generally be a good direction and hope for the best. I don’t mention efforts to change things in myself or others anymore. I just wait to see if they work. If they were the right thing. I am still longing to achieve a triumph over evil at pretty much every step of my existence — evil being: that which wastes or destroys or devalues life and true growth. If we could just attack that, that would create heaven, I think.

I now rest in the hope that this is the mindset I actually should have begun with at first. I don’t know if that’s right; but being the sort of person who’s 100% in once I make a decision, I am trying to relax and gamble with it here. Maybe this will move the stone.
Loosen up, fahggetaboutit.
But don’t forget to keep looking. Keep looking out as everything spins.

Looking at other people’s lives — they seem so ….. easy at first. But are they? I remind myself to look at the three strata:

THE RICHES

Some people seem destined for an assured, calm tour of life. On the wheel of life they’re on the slower outer edge and never step out of the material wheel –they grow up with focused, driven, monied parents in an affluent era, choose their scope on life early and with plenty of good counsel, and attack it like a game of chess, leaving only something as unforeseen as war to scatter their dreams. A high number of people in American society seem to manage that kind of life. I have met and lived with a number of people like this — born into good homes, good families, rich uncles or trust funds, multiple properties…. and they all have had problems. Serious problems. It’s not as if they were simply blessed — but rather as if they were blessed enough to get simple things out of the way and let them work on larger disasters.

Take my friends W & R. W&R were married in the 80s, and had everything at first glance. W was the granddaughter of a magazine mogul. She had her funds in trust until she was old enough. She had the choice of attacking the world from the jet set launch, but chose instead to be more in step with the generation of hippies she was born around. She veganized and groovified herself with clothes that were garnered from designer boutiques and specialty diets from upscale groceries, lopped off and threw out nearly half of a strawberry when eating it, went to the school she chose rather than the ivy covered halls of her predecessors. And then she married R. But life had lots in store for them. R., who loved to photograph, was slowly going legally blind, W had bad posture, possibly due to osteoporosis. Various other health problems made them decide children were out of the question for them. And her early history wasn’t pristine either. Mommy and Daddy had been so far into their martinis that they hadn’t really noticed her while growing up, which left her with a giant unfillable ache. Things were never easy for them. Not really.

In fact, three families I lived or worked closely with had incomes in the several hundred thousands, lived in over fifteen rooms, and had obscenely spoiled children. In each case there was the business exec mom, burnt out, exhausted, guilt-ridden; and the ambitious oblivious nearly absentee dad. All of them used money and orchestrated activities to placate their own guilt and carpet-bomb a cloud of happiness over the short periods of time they could spend with their children. All of the children became problems of one sort or another. Demands that were unmet went screaming into the wee hours of the night. Later it was fighting and antisocial behaviour. Then it was delinquency, wrecked credit, drugs, promiscuity — anything they could find to figure out what the world had to offer them in place of the centered comfort they so lacked. None of it was a surprise to me. But it was a huge surprise to them. They were all tumbled down castles inside. But still they go around.

“Nobody in this world ever gets what they want
and that is beautiful….
Everybody dies twisted up inside
… and that is beautiful.
They want what they’re not
and I wish they would stop….”

THE REST OF US

If those folk seemed to have everything in place (with the center dissolving), I see the opposite about me. The ones I am surrounded by most of my life, diligent honest people who are left adrift to rise and sink and float in the economic vortex. We’re in the CONSUMERS bin of the Higher Being’s grocery, dished out by the scoopfuls like penny candy. A vast blank majority, but so diverse in all our mediocre methods and talents that we’re a viral phenomenon — clueless perhaps, but with such potential. We’re the Las Vegas gamblers of our own futures, our positions never assured, inebriated and running loose in the hotels of the universe, where life is just a big psychodelic merry-go-round with God playing a less-wasted Hunter S. Thompson, beckoning us off onto safe landings with,
“Come on! Hop!
Quick, like a bunny!”

Those less entangled in the glittering world will just jump on a count of three. They know they’ll sink deep, but they rise back up eventually. They even laugh now and then. They remember the great Him (or it or her). The rest of us are still looking at God whizzing by in our bleary whirl and buckling knees saying,

“What???.”

“A dead man says What,” he says suddenly sporting a fierce black afro.

“What??.”

The Hunter S. Thompson hat and glasses return; he sighs and waits for us to come round the next time.

THE OTHERS

BUT,
if you look,
no matter where you are, there are those who have shit happening to them,
I mean just -
shit,
that shouldn’t happen.

There is something unforeseen in each day for these people.
Teetering off balance on a sharp slope is a daily norm.
They’re the ones we have questions about. We look round the merry-go-round then and can’t see a thing. It’s black void. Silent.

They’re the ones on our TV screens whose neighbors are taken away in the night by militia in black and white clips, or appear as the “exotic” faces of the other in social commentary films with Phillip Glass scores, rag picking their way through life, malnourished with large bellies among flies and dust, or sometimes helmets, bags and shopping carts. There they are bending over in the fields of chemical dust, or standing on a bus stop with no means to get anywhere and a baby in arms, or or moving from each bombed part of town to the next, losing someone they know
each
day.

Do their beliefs bring it on themselves? Is is our fault?
Are they helpless victims? Are they trapped in ignorance? Or just hapless pawns of those who could save them but refuse?

Does it matter why?
Because here they are, the frayed zig-zag lives that never should have been, or never should have become so, and yet we always have them with us.

If you look at the one that would have thrown the money changers out of the temple, it would seem that it’s US he’s waiting for to get off the damn merry-go-round since there are others behind us, waiting, sick with the spinning.

Now go,
quick,
Hop!
Like a Bunny.