1.3.99
I'm finally coming up for air after what has become a fairly busy weekend. Nothing exiting, just the process of tying up loose ends, and doing a fair amount of thinking. I did do one thing which you might find interesting, however. I learned something, and that is always edifying.
I was approached at work yesterday by my friend Francis, who asked me if I had a fireplace. (which I do) She then suggested that I burn the kadamasu. Okay, pause for the cause. Kadamasu are Japanese (Shinto) gateposts. The idea is that this symbolic gate will filter out the bad stuff and let only the good through. If this is the case, obviously we needed a bigger stronger one at the blood bank last year. Because the kadamasu indicates good things, you can't just chuck the old one in the rubbish. That would be like throwing away your good luck. Instead, it has to be burned, to send, via the smoke, your good fortune to heaven.
All I had to say about that was "burn, baby burn!" I set it aflame while I read the morning paper today. Just to make sure I've done it correctly, I'm going to make one this afternoon from the bamboo that grows in my back yard. I'm not superstitious, I simply admit that I do not know all of the answers, and I don't want to piss off any gods that might be helpful. We can talk about that later, though.
I've been rolling something around in my mind for the last fifteen some-odd years, and only recently has it come to the top of my brain, and has been processed enough to come out of the "repressed memory" folder that luxuriates in the back of my brain. You may ask "why should I come out with a memory that is fifteen years old now?" Well, I'll tell you. The process started rolling around several months ago with an email that I sent to my friend James in Indiana. I won't go into the whole thing, but basically, I described what happened with a friend, Joe and I years and years ago. I think of it as one of the defining moments of my life, and one that has not been shared....well, with anybody.
My closest friends back then are going to scratch their heads and say "huh?" because I think I was fairly discrete in my actions. They will also think that I've made this up, which could be the case. I would love it to be one big happy dream, but unfortunately it is not. Parts of it I regret, and others I am so very happy that they occurred. Nonetheless, they have shaped me into the big blob of protoplasm that I have become.
The story begins years and years (almost 20) ago in Idaho, and with a guy named Joe. He was a couple of years older than I, and for whatever reason, we clicked. I took special caution to keep Joe away from my other circles of friends for one very good reason. Joe loved drugs. He was a junkie of sorts, but in a kind of Timothy Leary sort of way. He wasn't flighty, and could always maintain a strong path of conversation, which I hugely appreciated.
Joe and I met one night at a fairly notorious place, the City Park rest rooms. Growing up, there was a fairly tight group of gay men that hung out there, and I started to, also. Occasionally I would have a sexual tryst with one of the groupies, but never with Joe. He just never had sex. Not with girls, not with boys. He just didn't. Nobody ever asked why he was hanging with a swishy group of fags on the steps of the library. He was just Joe. I guess that makes him the original undefined str8 boy.
Fast forward to a time in Jr. high school. I was rattling on on night about how terrific I was in a chemistry lab that afternoon. Basically, I had recreated Priestley's oxygen discovery, and was quite proud of my accomplishment. It must have made some things rattle around in his mind, because he asked if I thought I could make other things, like amphetamines. Sure, why not. I had access to a fairly well-equipped lab in my garage, and most importantly, I had access to a huge pile of pharmaceutical texts, tanks to my unwitting mother. Her greatest contribution was a very heavy red book, the Pharmacopoeia of the United States. For those of you who are not compounding chemists, this is the much touted USP, and it is the standard of purity for drugs in the United States. It tells how to prove that drugs are what they say they are, and if you turn it around, how to manufacture them. That's what I actually did in my little chemistry lab. I manufactured a fairly crude form of methyl amphetamine. I also made bombs, and devices which created dense smoke that would blanket entire city blocks with odourless fog, much to the chagrin of my mother.
Right now, you are probably asking yourself if I ever used the stuff. The answer is an unqualified no. I did try it once, but felt quite uncomfortable with its effect. I do not condone the use of drugs, and even when I was making them for Joe and my selected group of friends, would not partake in their use nor allow their distribution beyond the group. Why did I do it? My thinking was this: They were going to use drugs. Period. My responsibility was to insure that the drug that they used was pure and of a fairly reliable strength. I kept them from ODing, or sucking into their lungs something that really ought not be there, like partially converted pseudoephedrine. I am also not a moralist. We respected each other's needs to remain straight or chemically enhanced. Was it right? Probably not, and in retrospect, I should have actually sought rehabilitation for the entire lot. What can I say? I was very young, and the statute of limitations has run out since then.
That's a long introduction to my thought pattern in the earlier part of my life. Now we come to the real balls of this essay, the "What would you do for a friend?" or the "What is a friend?" one that each of us defines independently. Joe, my little group, and I separated for a few years while I was in High School, but we bridged the miles on the phone, and thanks to the grand and efficient US Postal Service. As oddly as we came together years previously, we coalesced again when I was in College at the University of Idaho, in beautiful Moscow, ID. There was another group of friends that I had come very close to, and being happy smiley little theatre people, they were very touchy-feely, which I liked. For whatever reason, Joe and I started becoming really close, phoning every day, and on odd weekends, he would escape the surly bonds and visit me.
It was the summer that I worked for the Idaho Repertory Theatre as an electrician that he spent with me. Neil and I (my bf at the time) were on the outs, so I was all alone in my spacious suite in a 1910 dormitory. One night, we got really smashed on some fairly nice calvados (French apple brandy) and decided to have a picnic out in the hayfields. With some difficulty, we buzzed out to a likely spot just beyond Pullman WA, and spread our blanket on the purple soil of the Palouse. The area is a beautiful collection of rolling hills with various crops planted upon. Very pretty, with the stars and the moon above. We were sort of lying there, arms loosely around each other, when he started to sing the old Frank and Nancy Sinatra song:
We stayed like that, rambling on about things, a silly conversation that ended abruptly with his question "Is there anything that you would not do for me?" I answered "Of course not," and remember thinking of the Samuel Beckett book, Mercier et Camier. It is odd that such things stick in my memory. "Good. That's good to know." Again, he pulled me closer, and we sat and watched the sun rise without saying a word.
Dear ones, that was one of the greatest defining moments in my life, and I am frustrated that I am unable to describe it in such a way that everyone can feel the great feeling of warmth and camaraderie that existed on that hill. It wasn't a sex thing, it was far and above that, though there was one moment when I was quite aroused. I think doing the deed would have cheapened it, in fact I know now that it wouldn't have been the same if we had. At no other time in my life have I ever felt so close to another human being in my life, and I sincerely doubt that it will ever occur again.
We will move forward a couple of months. I had not heard from Joe for quite a while, at least not on the daily basis that we had enjoyed previously. One day, there was a call from his mother, saying that Joe had been in the hospital for several days, and was asking for me. I threw some things in a bag, called my advisor, and bombed the 400 miles down to my "hometown" of Twin Falls. Joe was a great heap of a man, yellow from a quite evil liver disorder, and being maintained by something called a morphine drip, which constantly delivers the strongest narcotic directly into the system. It is a last ditch effort to insure a relatively painless death.
Through it all, Joe was fairly lucid. Kind of soggy, but he could still think and converse in short bits. When I entered his room, he recognized me, and I held his hand, and kissed his cheek. His mother left, and we talked for a short while. What he had not been telling me was that his liver was trashed, and in a final effort to get rid of the pain, he had injected himself with a small hoard of my amphetamine, hoping that it would blow his heart up and kill him. It didn't work. (probably because they were close to 3 years old, and had lost most of its potency.)
Later in the evening, he awoke, and asked again if there was anything that I would not do for him. I gave a similar response to the one that night in the Palouse hills. he asked if I would end the pain. He asked me to kill him. Life had become such a burden, and he just couldn't continue to press on anymore. We conversed back and forth, discussing the pros and cons as best we could, but it soon became evident that his mind was set. The time for living had ended, and now was the time to die.
For another day, we continued our conversation, sometimes with other people in the room, sometimes not. The subjects were always death-related, which was just too much for the mother to bear, so whenever he was lucid, she would quietly leave the room and summon a nurse.
It was just before 6 am when the alarm on his cardiac monitor started beeping, and the telemetry nurse came running into the room. I had become so used to such buzzing, that I actually slept through it. It was the nurse that tapped me on the shoulder. Joe's hand, which I had been holding ws cold and clammy. The reason for the alarm was the fact that he had a short period of ventricular fibrillation, where the heart just kind of vibrates, and then stops unless it is restarted by dramatic injections of atropine and bretylium and electric shock.
That didn't happen, though. Some kind soul had taken a red magic marker and wrote DNR (do not resuscitate) all over his chart, and asked the next of kin to sign the order. That's just what friends do. It was the hardest thing that I've ever had to do, and god willing, I'll never have to make those kinds of decisions again. It taught me a lot, though. A lot about keeping things inside, and not saying how I really feel, because that only leads to hurt and pain. Now, in the last couple of days, I've learned that it actually is better to lose repressed feelings, and let them out to be thought about and processed. More than 15 years had passed before "the topic" came up in conversation, and when it did, I felt very emotional and didn't want to discuss it.
Then, Tommy told a story about he and his friend, Chris, and in it discussed the essence of friendship. Without any prior warning, my fingers started flying retelling the story of Joe and I to this neat guy in Toronto whom I'll probably never meet. It's funny how things work, isn't it. Three weeks ago, there was something that was so painful that I could never dream of reliving it. My most embarrassing events, and the most touching thing that ever happened to me all rolled into one, and here I am spilling my guts to anyone who cares to stumble on my entrails.
it's a thing that makes you go Hmmm.
I was approached at work yesterday by my friend Francis, who asked me if I had a fireplace. (which I do) She then suggested that I burn the kadamasu. Okay, pause for the cause. Kadamasu are Japanese (Shinto) gateposts. The idea is that this symbolic gate will filter out the bad stuff and let only the good through. If this is the case, obviously we needed a bigger stronger one at the blood bank last year. Because the kadamasu indicates good things, you can't just chuck the old one in the rubbish. That would be like throwing away your good luck. Instead, it has to be burned, to send, via the smoke, your good fortune to heaven.
All I had to say about that was "burn, baby burn!" I set it aflame while I read the morning paper today. Just to make sure I've done it correctly, I'm going to make one this afternoon from the bamboo that grows in my back yard. I'm not superstitious, I simply admit that I do not know all of the answers, and I don't want to piss off any gods that might be helpful. We can talk about that later, though.
I've been rolling something around in my mind for the last fifteen some-odd years, and only recently has it come to the top of my brain, and has been processed enough to come out of the "repressed memory" folder that luxuriates in the back of my brain. You may ask "why should I come out with a memory that is fifteen years old now?" Well, I'll tell you. The process started rolling around several months ago with an email that I sent to my friend James in Indiana. I won't go into the whole thing, but basically, I described what happened with a friend, Joe and I years and years ago. I think of it as one of the defining moments of my life, and one that has not been shared....well, with anybody.
My closest friends back then are going to scratch their heads and say "huh?" because I think I was fairly discrete in my actions. They will also think that I've made this up, which could be the case. I would love it to be one big happy dream, but unfortunately it is not. Parts of it I regret, and others I am so very happy that they occurred. Nonetheless, they have shaped me into the big blob of protoplasm that I have become.
The story begins years and years (almost 20) ago in Idaho, and with a guy named Joe. He was a couple of years older than I, and for whatever reason, we clicked. I took special caution to keep Joe away from my other circles of friends for one very good reason. Joe loved drugs. He was a junkie of sorts, but in a kind of Timothy Leary sort of way. He wasn't flighty, and could always maintain a strong path of conversation, which I hugely appreciated.
Joe and I met one night at a fairly notorious place, the City Park rest rooms. Growing up, there was a fairly tight group of gay men that hung out there, and I started to, also. Occasionally I would have a sexual tryst with one of the groupies, but never with Joe. He just never had sex. Not with girls, not with boys. He just didn't. Nobody ever asked why he was hanging with a swishy group of fags on the steps of the library. He was just Joe. I guess that makes him the original undefined str8 boy.
Fast forward to a time in Jr. high school. I was rattling on on night about how terrific I was in a chemistry lab that afternoon. Basically, I had recreated Priestley's oxygen discovery, and was quite proud of my accomplishment. It must have made some things rattle around in his mind, because he asked if I thought I could make other things, like amphetamines. Sure, why not. I had access to a fairly well-equipped lab in my garage, and most importantly, I had access to a huge pile of pharmaceutical texts, tanks to my unwitting mother. Her greatest contribution was a very heavy red book, the Pharmacopoeia of the United States. For those of you who are not compounding chemists, this is the much touted USP, and it is the standard of purity for drugs in the United States. It tells how to prove that drugs are what they say they are, and if you turn it around, how to manufacture them. That's what I actually did in my little chemistry lab. I manufactured a fairly crude form of methyl amphetamine. I also made bombs, and devices which created dense smoke that would blanket entire city blocks with odourless fog, much to the chagrin of my mother.
Right now, you are probably asking yourself if I ever used the stuff. The answer is an unqualified no. I did try it once, but felt quite uncomfortable with its effect. I do not condone the use of drugs, and even when I was making them for Joe and my selected group of friends, would not partake in their use nor allow their distribution beyond the group. Why did I do it? My thinking was this: They were going to use drugs. Period. My responsibility was to insure that the drug that they used was pure and of a fairly reliable strength. I kept them from ODing, or sucking into their lungs something that really ought not be there, like partially converted pseudoephedrine. I am also not a moralist. We respected each other's needs to remain straight or chemically enhanced. Was it right? Probably not, and in retrospect, I should have actually sought rehabilitation for the entire lot. What can I say? I was very young, and the statute of limitations has run out since then.
That's a long introduction to my thought pattern in the earlier part of my life. Now we come to the real balls of this essay, the "What would you do for a friend?" or the "What is a friend?" one that each of us defines independently. Joe, my little group, and I separated for a few years while I was in High School, but we bridged the miles on the phone, and thanks to the grand and efficient US Postal Service. As oddly as we came together years previously, we coalesced again when I was in College at the University of Idaho, in beautiful Moscow, ID. There was another group of friends that I had come very close to, and being happy smiley little theatre people, they were very touchy-feely, which I liked. For whatever reason, Joe and I started becoming really close, phoning every day, and on odd weekends, he would escape the surly bonds and visit me.
It was the summer that I worked for the Idaho Repertory Theatre as an electrician that he spent with me. Neil and I (my bf at the time) were on the outs, so I was all alone in my spacious suite in a 1910 dormitory. One night, we got really smashed on some fairly nice calvados (French apple brandy) and decided to have a picnic out in the hayfields. With some difficulty, we buzzed out to a likely spot just beyond Pullman WA, and spread our blanket on the purple soil of the Palouse. The area is a beautiful collection of rolling hills with various crops planted upon. Very pretty, with the stars and the moon above. We were sort of lying there, arms loosely around each other, when he started to sing the old Frank and Nancy Sinatra song:
I practice every dayWe were quite drunk, both from the brandy and from the moment. he was lounging between my legs, his head on my chest when we were singing. When it ended, he craned his neck up and looked me in the eye. "Can I say something stupid?" he asked. I nodded. "I love you." I kissed his forehead and said "I love you too." I'd not done that with him before, and he must have liked it, because he pulled my arms tightly around his chest.
to find the clever lines to say
to make the meaning come true.
But then I wait
Until the evening gets late
and I'm alone with you
...and then I go and spoil it all
by saying something stupid, like
I love you.
We stayed like that, rambling on about things, a silly conversation that ended abruptly with his question "Is there anything that you would not do for me?" I answered "Of course not," and remember thinking of the Samuel Beckett book, Mercier et Camier. It is odd that such things stick in my memory. "Good. That's good to know." Again, he pulled me closer, and we sat and watched the sun rise without saying a word.
Dear ones, that was one of the greatest defining moments in my life, and I am frustrated that I am unable to describe it in such a way that everyone can feel the great feeling of warmth and camaraderie that existed on that hill. It wasn't a sex thing, it was far and above that, though there was one moment when I was quite aroused. I think doing the deed would have cheapened it, in fact I know now that it wouldn't have been the same if we had. At no other time in my life have I ever felt so close to another human being in my life, and I sincerely doubt that it will ever occur again.
We will move forward a couple of months. I had not heard from Joe for quite a while, at least not on the daily basis that we had enjoyed previously. One day, there was a call from his mother, saying that Joe had been in the hospital for several days, and was asking for me. I threw some things in a bag, called my advisor, and bombed the 400 miles down to my "hometown" of Twin Falls. Joe was a great heap of a man, yellow from a quite evil liver disorder, and being maintained by something called a morphine drip, which constantly delivers the strongest narcotic directly into the system. It is a last ditch effort to insure a relatively painless death.
Through it all, Joe was fairly lucid. Kind of soggy, but he could still think and converse in short bits. When I entered his room, he recognized me, and I held his hand, and kissed his cheek. His mother left, and we talked for a short while. What he had not been telling me was that his liver was trashed, and in a final effort to get rid of the pain, he had injected himself with a small hoard of my amphetamine, hoping that it would blow his heart up and kill him. It didn't work. (probably because they were close to 3 years old, and had lost most of its potency.)
Later in the evening, he awoke, and asked again if there was anything that I would not do for him. I gave a similar response to the one that night in the Palouse hills. he asked if I would end the pain. He asked me to kill him. Life had become such a burden, and he just couldn't continue to press on anymore. We conversed back and forth, discussing the pros and cons as best we could, but it soon became evident that his mind was set. The time for living had ended, and now was the time to die.
For another day, we continued our conversation, sometimes with other people in the room, sometimes not. The subjects were always death-related, which was just too much for the mother to bear, so whenever he was lucid, she would quietly leave the room and summon a nurse.
It was just before 6 am when the alarm on his cardiac monitor started beeping, and the telemetry nurse came running into the room. I had become so used to such buzzing, that I actually slept through it. It was the nurse that tapped me on the shoulder. Joe's hand, which I had been holding ws cold and clammy. The reason for the alarm was the fact that he had a short period of ventricular fibrillation, where the heart just kind of vibrates, and then stops unless it is restarted by dramatic injections of atropine and bretylium and electric shock.
That didn't happen, though. Some kind soul had taken a red magic marker and wrote DNR (do not resuscitate) all over his chart, and asked the next of kin to sign the order. That's just what friends do. It was the hardest thing that I've ever had to do, and god willing, I'll never have to make those kinds of decisions again. It taught me a lot, though. A lot about keeping things inside, and not saying how I really feel, because that only leads to hurt and pain. Now, in the last couple of days, I've learned that it actually is better to lose repressed feelings, and let them out to be thought about and processed. More than 15 years had passed before "the topic" came up in conversation, and when it did, I felt very emotional and didn't want to discuss it.
Then, Tommy told a story about he and his friend, Chris, and in it discussed the essence of friendship. Without any prior warning, my fingers started flying retelling the story of Joe and I to this neat guy in Toronto whom I'll probably never meet. It's funny how things work, isn't it. Three weeks ago, there was something that was so painful that I could never dream of reliving it. My most embarrassing events, and the most touching thing that ever happened to me all rolled into one, and here I am spilling my guts to anyone who cares to stumble on my entrails.
it's a thing that makes you go Hmmm.
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