I remember waking up in that tiny bathroom of my apartment on Angeleno. I had passed out next to the toilet and as I was waking up my head was throbbing, and my tongue felt like a huge dry sponge in my mouth. As my vision slowly cleared I saw the first of the blood. Shit, it was everywhere! On my hands, my nightgown, my legs, the toilet seat, the sink, and even the mirror. I panicked. I had no idea where all this blood had come from and who's it even was, although a little tiny voice in the back of my head was trying to tell me something. I ignored it, stood up carefully, and looked in the mirror. It was all over my face, too. I became convinced that someone must have broken into my apartment and accosted me. Again, the tiny voice was nagging. Again I ignored it and went in search of this assailant. Now some part of me must have been sort of listening to that nagging little voice or I imagine I would have been more afraid to charge out of the bathroom and confront this ominous stranger.
I walked, actually staggered would be more accurate, out into the living room and looked at the front door. It was locked, deadbolt on, safety chain securely in place. That was weird, I thought. How did he get in and/or out? Now the voice was anything but tiny, and was very insistent that I listen. I still didn't want to hear it. I glanced around the living room and saw the empty pint of Cuervo Gold. Now I was beginning to listen. I went back into the bathroom and saw what I now knew would be there. Little pink pieces of the Good News Shaver all over the bottom of the sink. And the two little mangled razors I had managed to free from their plastic home.
I was scared. The cutting had always been very minimal. I had only done it a few times before that, and they were always very small cuts, and very controlled. I knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it. OK, not really why, but I knew that it would help ease whatever pain seemed to be too big for my head, or my heart, or my soul, or whatever. This was different. I couldn't remember doing it, and I still didn't know exactly how bad it was. The blood was everywhere but I still hadn't deciphered where on my body I had actually cut. I took a wash cloth and wet it. Started with my face, praying that there were no marks there. Any marks on the face would mean that people would find out. And that just could not happen. This was my dirty little secret.
The face was clear. No marks, no cuts. Thank God! The first cut I as able to uncover was on my upper left arm. It was very angry looking, and seemed pretty deep. Really deep. It was hard to tell because it was already so crusted over. There were five or six large trails of blood leading down the rest of the arm. I followed their trail with the wash cloth until I got to the cluster. A group of cuts at the wrist. Fuck! I had never cut anywhere near my wrists before, and the thought of having done so without even being able to remember it was making me cry. Accidental suicide could have happened, and that was never the purpose of the cutting, damn-it! It was a way to avoid suicide. It was how I.....coped, sometimes. As I cleaned those wounds, and the few others I discovered on my upper thighs (I had never cut myself so many times in a single episode before that) I was racking my brain to try and figure out what in the world could have caused me to do this to myself. Then suddenly I remembered. It was the fucking steak and rice thing.
I remembered Dan and I walking over to his house from work that night. He was holding my hand and as we neared the street where he lived a car came down the road. As soon as it approached, he snatched his hand away, ostensibly to show me something in the sky, or in a tree, I can't remember. But I knew the real reason. We'd been going out, or whatever it was we were doing, for 5 months, and some part of me must have already known what was going on. Although he was very loving and kind in front of my friends, who were the only people we ever seemed to hang around with, and although he seemed to love to have sex with me, and vice versa, he had never introduced me to any of his friends, and to his family I was just his friend, Tracy. Now the fact that his mom walked in on him and his friend Tracy, naked in his bed, apparently wasn't weird. In the back of my mind (again, the nagging little voice that I kept telling to shut the fuck up) I was aware that he was always taking me to out of the way places, like Disneyland, and movie theaters in far away towns.
I don't know why I picked that night to just force him to tell me the truth. I remember we were sitting in the room off of his kitchen. He was across the room in the armchair and I was on that couch against the wall. "Why did you snatch your hand away, Dan?", I asked him. "Why don't you ever introduce me to any of your friends. Why doesn't your sister, or your mother, or your dad know that we aren't just 'friends'?" He was getting really pissed and telling me to just shut up and drop it. I really wish I had listened, but, no, I had to keep grilling him until I could force him to say it. And then he did. Finally it just erupted out of him like he had no control, like the words were bitter on his tongue.
"I love you, Tracy, but I can't have you as my girlfriend. I have this image thing that I need to uphold, so I need a girlfriend who is thin and blond by my side, and that's not YOU!" Then he shouted at me, "Why did you have to make me tell you this? Why couldn't we have just gone on hanging out as friends and sleeping together?" I remember all that clearly, and then he went on to say something about being fat as a child and how disgusted he was by it and how he vowed he would never be fat again and some more stuff that I couldn't hear because my head was buzzing. I definitely heard the words "fat" and "disgusted" but most of the rest was lost. I might have imagined that part about him being fat as a child. I was so stunned. I think it must have felt like getting stabbed through the heart....it didn't really hurt, it just made me dizzy, and nauseas....and just, as I said, stunned. I was also confused by the fact that it seemed to be he who was so angry, when it should have been me. I can't remember what or if I said anything during his initial tirade, but I do remember what finally prompted me to speak. He made an analogy, then, I guess to try and help me understand where he was coming from (although I think it was pretty clear where he was coming from). He said, again very angrily, "It's like I am steak and you are rice, Tracy." That's it. That was the analogy (again this is all my subjective memory--maybe he elaborated some). As analogies go, it was pretty pathetic, I thought, and yet it hit some target deep inside of me, and the arrow must have broken clean off. I finally said to him, "No, Dan, you're wrong. I AM steak. I may be steak with some fat around the edges, but I am definitely steak. Steak is the main course, the thing you eat and it sticks by you. You remember it long after wards. Rice, on the other hand, is the secondary side dish that you barely remember after you eat it. That's you, Dan, not me. Take me home." (Now, I may not have been nearly that eloquent or composed, but that is how I remember saying it.)
Sounds like I was really strong, huh? Standing up for myself in the face of that kind of brutality? It was all bullshit, though. I felt like a big, fat, ugly pile of rice. I couldn't get that stupid analogy out of my head. He was basically, in my mind, saying I was too fat to love. Only one other person had ever said anything like that to me and she said it to me my whole life....my mother, and she's a psycho. I knew he wasn't a psycho. So the only logical conclusion was that it had to be true.
After I cleaned myself up that night, I started to clean up my head so I could actually go out in public and not feel like a pile of rice, or whatever. I neatly tucked away every feeling and every experience I had ever had with Dan, along with the wonderful things he had made for me, like the orange paper mache giraffe (which I busted into pieces in a fit of rage), and the beautiful E.T. piece he had made for me that Christmas. I tucked them all away with the memories of riding the pirate ship at Disneyland, late at night while we kept sneaking sips of Blackberry Brandy, and how he stroked my head all the way home as I was lying next to him in his car, because the Brandy had given me a migraine headache. I tucked away the memories of him taking me to see Gandhi, and forcing me to read Siddhartha (which I loved) so we could discuss the idea of Nirvana, and I tucked away the pregnancy and the miscarriage, and him sneaking into my room through the window at Burbank Community Hospital, after visiting hours, with a single red rose. I tucked Dan away. It sucked because he was the first, and you know how they say that you never forget the first person you made love with? I knew I wasn't his first (not by a long shot), but why did he have to be mine? That made him harder to tuck completely away. But I did it. He didn't exist in my mind for so damned long. Not in my conscious mind, at least. And I made a vow to myself, never to fall in love again, so that I could never, ever be hurt like that and so that I would never, ever cut myself like that again. Too bad I broke that vow.

BRU-HAHAHA

I'm bored, sick, and lonely...

Sporadic? Yes, but I'm just outlasting the next panic attack. Did I wish I could this far, sitting here in a bar, not drinking, but thinking, about the life I could have had. No, I'm contiplating my next move, a lyrical type groove, a way to improve my status in life. Through an art, or an act of inspiration. The torch is in my hands, I can hold. But for how long? I don't fit the mold, everything I do is "wrong". So step back from this reflection, and see the reaction, ten year later, when life is greater. When you have wings to fly away, when you can look back at this day, and say, "It wasn't so bad the things that were. Maybe this was just the lure." to learn humility, to express through creativity. To use the written word as a weapon, not to destroy but to exception, of hate, rape, murder, jelousy, theivery, exploitation, and phallucy. And when the clock turns, and I see myself, will I react how I want, be by myself, or will it haunt?! Is this an echo in to the future, or just a lame excuse to hide the shame of an unpainted picture?

When, at the hospital, they said to me that I was to find somebody with residence if I wanted to turn over to the house, I saw myself AD vitam eternam in this gray room to share my life in four hours section and to discuss with which is in the bed of opposite, a friend without fasteners which leaves without saying goodbye, just at the time when me examinations are made. And then the idea to be dependent somebody, of a person that I do not know, whom I must pay and for which I will have doubtless furies and sournesses, rages and meannesses. This idea does not have any attraction for me. But to leave from here. To leave this cocoon, this malodorous protection, this vast usurpation where it is believed that to look after wants to say to cherish and where one is quite simply réifié. This one, of idea, leaves me, more, never. Badgering small resonant old story in my head. Small notes, bitter and dissonant and insistent. But as I do not know anybody with whom to give the responsibility for my carcass, I asked to the nurse in at if her place, she knew somebody, if she knew quite simply how to make to leave from here. It was turned over, and, of back, said to me that it would reflect. That she would say to me later, and she left the room. There is nothing to take at this woman. Four months that I see it, two, three times per day and nothing with saying not more than four word, nothing, not of idea, and nothing to show either. A large stiff body, a a little dry skin and tight fair hair in a chignon of dancer nested above her long neck. When it does not speak, it so extremely serves its lips which they bleach and disappear completely. This face without lips effrait me almost. Any white, between the white blouse and the fair hair. And I had acquired during these four months a rather Asian design of death. It was first of all the duration of my stay, and the white which points out it to me, and the ether, the odor of died and the blouse of the nurse as a chief on his skin diaphragm a kind of reaper which would make its trade without joy. And then one day, the large dry woman returned with a kind of smiling on the face. She says to me that she perhaps found a solution. A free-lance nurse seeks a work more implying, it arrives of overseas and does not have housing yet and that does not disturb it food at, with and for me. Temporarily. I mouse and I insist, obviously that that will be provisional, obviously and it his, of smiling, solidifies, constrained. And in spite of the white, the disappeared lips, the sad odor and the dry gestures, this woman becomes to me sympathetic nerve and even pretty and finally completely adorable. And as I see his smile breaking down, I want to tighten the hand, to cherish the curve of his jaw, to go up this single straggling lock of hair behind his ear. A tenderness surprising, a sentimental start after four months of fog, greyness in my head. I should not remain any more but one week at the hospital, and, the ones after the others, all the people who côtoyée me, looked after, cleaned, forced and struck sentences in the variable term come to see me and wish things which they regret as soon as they pronounced them. And me, I mouse. They amuse me with their fears and their compassion, I them lime pits a little to thus suffer, by procuration. But, for the nurse in at, it is different. She changes. This woman, that for four months, I tried to be unaware of, becomes a beautiful object under my glance. And I wish. And I feel. And I want. It released there which tells me its humanity, the softened chignon of the end of day, a strap of bra fuschia which she reassembles when she believes that nobody looks at it, and discrete roundness of its centres, and the furrow pronounced between them, and its way of turning the foot when she goes. With the result that one always wonders when it will fall, unbalanced by its own leg. And its lips which it tighten until they disappear. The nurse as a chief has vulnerabilities which create my dreams, which it blottissent there in my arms and which fill with wonder me more than of reason. With the result that when I left, and that it carried to the taxi my gray bag, I had a pinching in the heart, and its last smile fissures me as its glances which tell me tendernesses of the last time. And I cry when the taxi turned to the corner of the street, a little also frightened by what waits to me now, far from from now on the familiar metal bed, and of television to the ceiling, and industrial looking after, and the odor strong and cherished, and the noises in middle of the night, and the doors twice broader than elsewhere, and of the toilets higher, and then. And then all the remainder too

Goodbye, RayI don’t have a television here in London - no radio stations or newspaper subscription either. I have CNN.com and try to check it on a regular basis, but this morning, it was on Make Mine Mike’s site that I learned about the passing of Ray Charles.I’m not overly religious, but I’ve always hoped that when I die, if I’m lucky enough to walk through those pearly gates, there will be a jazz, blues or R&B band playing on the other side. The house lights will be down and the room will be electric and filled with a back-slappin, high-five giving kind of soul I so wish I had. Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Ella Fitzgerald – if I’m really lucky, one of them (or so many others) will be on stage, doing what they do best. I also sort of hope my God in heaven might greet me with a hearty, "WHASSUP!?!" and inform me that my new heaven-name will be "Mookie Jones," and that people will probably call me "Mook" for short. But that could be pushing it a bit.Ray has a special place in my heart. Whenever I hear his music, I’m in awe of his voice and soulful style. It’s ironic that just the other day his rendition of “American the Beautiful” belted its way out of my iPod and through our house speakers and left me thinking, “Man, no one could sing that like Ray Charles. Who else could make you want to get up and dance to ‘America the Beautiful?’” Ray was a genius. For a man who couldn’t see, he had a lot more vision than most.From the movie “The Blues Brothers” I fell in love with the song “Shake A Tail Feather.” It’s like a little surprise party every time it comes on. That song always brings a smile to my face and I have to hold myself back to keep from hopping up and dancing right there in the street or on the tube or wherever I happen to be - and I think we all know that for a white guy, this is a bad idea. When I hear Ray Charles, I wish I could somehow turn myself into him and bang away at the piano, rocking back and fourth, stomping my feet and howling at the top of my lungs, truly “experiencing” the music. Truth be known, I've tried, but that's one of those secret moments we all have. It's my moment of standing in the shower, screaming out "TWIIIIIST IIIIT, SHAKE IT, SHAKE IT, SHAKE IT, SHAKE IT, BAAAABAYY!!" looking like I'm having a seizure and sounding like a dying parrot (don't tell anyone, okay?).It’s been interesting here in London to look around at all of the fantastic architecture and history. I find myself thinking, “Yeah, we don’t have anything like that” a lot. We don’t have Stonehenge or ancient architecture or a history that dates back a bazillion years. The Romans didn’t help to forge our country and we don’t have portraits of kings and queens. But we can claim Ray Charles, and that’s something to be proud of.So, I pause for a second, remove my hat and say my “goodbye” and “thank you” to Ray Charles. Heaven just went up a notch in the music department. I'm sure the stage is set and there's a great big piano ready and waiting. Don't be surprised if there are thunder and lightning storms tonight, baby. I hope just a little bit of his soul rubbed off on me in some way - I should be so lucky. Oh, and you can call me "Mook" if you'd like... or "Mookie."“Well I heard about the fella you’ve been dancing with, all over the neighborhood… so, why didn’t you ask me, baby? Ah, didn’t you think I could?”

welcome

welcome to my new blog, I don't have time to post now, but stay tuned for more info..