More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part Two

 

This story does have some looooovely humans in it, but I think it’ll be mostly a love letter to Basement Rave Place (Not its real name! The real name was like something a sitcom would name a gay bar, and I loved the name a lot!) As soon as Pagan Boy and I hooked up, the club (and the classically-decorated Greek diner across the way) was like our whole thing. (I mean, besides making out on his living room floor in front of Mystery Science Theater 3000) The dance floor (and couches, and stairwell, etc) at Basement Rave Place was where we were most beautifully, sexily, ridiculously ourselves.

As I flailed about (How to dance to techno, if you’re not a skilled pop-and-lock kind of person? It’s sort of a cross of aerobics, hippie dancing, and the Running Man. Above all, one always must move as though waving a glowstick, even (especially?!) when you don’t have one) and Pagan Boy gothed around, (See: dancing to techno except slower and slinkier and probably more dignified.) our relationship was the exact opposite of my (not so) dance-y night with Perfectly 1993 Guy—no frozen-with-self-consciousness anywhere for miles!

When I talk about being a raver, you might assume ecstasy, acid, shrooms. I WAS very good at acid, but not until years later. But every time I went to Basement Rave Place with Pagan Boy, and this will be the corniest thing I’ve ever said a million times, I was only ever high on dancing. I’ll never be anything like a good dancer in any other context (Okay except maybe in general ass-shaking terms.) but my body was absolutely MADE for dancing to techno. The only things I ever ingested there (broke as I always was) were little clear plastic cups of ice water, the most delicious and life-saving things in the world.

Or sometimes, okay juice. And my BELOVED Camel Lights, god rest their (Quit in 2003) souls. I was 19, the place was all-ages after eleven. Pagan Boy and his friends were all early-to-mid twenties, they could’ve bought me drinks, but I don’t think they did.

The club was small but it was everything I wanted in the whole world. Above all, it was SO SEXY in a queer, liberated way I’d rarely ever seen before. (It was temperature hot too. I sweat SO MUCH into my chokers and Thrifty Shopper polyester minidresses.) Statuesque, androgynous women danced on platforms wearing only teensy shorts and X-es over their nipples. (Oh boob tape, I do love and miss you so! Maybe someday I’ll be almost naked in semipublic again…)

The dance floor was checkered and the walls were doodled-upon psychedelically. Blacklight lit up everyone’s teeth, the occasional rogue piece of non-black clothing. It’s a tribute to how in love with the place I was that I wasn’t put off by the presence of blacklit dandruff. Maybe it just registered as so much more glitter?

In the club light, even more than he’d been in the coffeehouse, Pagan Boy was just the dreamiest of dreamy goth dreamboats. To my love-dazzled eyes he looked like a plush version of Robert Smith from The Cure but with better-kempt hair and naturally fluffy eyelashes. He looked even better with my blackberry lipstick constantly smeared all over his mouth.

I don’t remember when the first kiss was with Pagan Boy. I think there was a brief moment when I wanted to be just friends, but it was pretty quick that I shrugged and submitted to his kind and all-encompassing embrace. Our bodies, our mouths, fit so perfectly together. He could hold ALL of me, no problem. Every one of our showoffy dramatic kisses felt like a fully-formed work of art.

More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part One

Word choice note! I’m usually only comfortable describing myself as “fat”, meaning it in the most up-to-date, celebratory, body-positive way. (For very good writing about body positivity, see The Body Is Not an Apology: https://thebodyisnotanapology.com Sonya Renee Taylor is such a treasure.) I don’t think Pagan Boy would mind me calling him a hot fat man, so I’m going to learn to write that way. Wish me luck!

 

A draft of this entry has been in the to-type pile for a couple of weeks. I lost Pagan Boy to Covid at the beginning of this year, so every sentence, no matter how cheery, is a little molasses-step through grief. I hope I can do justice to this miraculous on-again-off-again friend and the lust for life (and pop culture!) he helped me to cultivate. In my own, snotty, irritable way, I loved him, and I hope to make that clear.

 

After Perfectly 1993 Guy broke up with me, I had even more room in my working-at-Burger-King-and-getting-ready-for-photography-school life for…something? That roller coaster summer, I’d started making poems in a black-and-white speckled notebook with doodle-y lilies drawn all over it. I don’t remember anything except one of the poems had a reference to Blondie’s Heart of Glass. (#onbrand)

 

I fully fancied myself a beatnik, so the early-Nineties coffeehouse craze was EXACTLY the thing for me, even pre-Friends! So I dressed in a polyester turtleneck day-glo psychedelic maxi-dress and headed to the newly minted Cake Place (not its real name) with my no-doubt melodramatic poems. (Side note: The featured poet that night became my mentor ten years later post-California. Magic night! Synchronicity!)

 

I sat down next to Pagan Boy after my poem and he said something catty-complimentary, reminding me of Perfectly 1993 Guy’s best friend. I looked at him and my heart said OF COURSE.

 

Fat, expansive, queerish, a little goth. So. Much. MAN. Plus, these really fluffy dark eyelashes. Pretty and handsome and musky in a way that went perfectly with the buckets of patchouli I used to wear. (Okay I bought some a few weeks ago. Still smells SO GOOD. Gonna put some on now.)

 

Jeez I really miss him. I always wondered if we should be together and kinda took our friendship for granted, even let him become a Bernie-bro facebook casualty through most of the Trump years, but he came back. (The ONLY man in my life who apologized for Bernie-and-Russia-fueled madness! He gets all the stars,)  It was like he never left, and right before he died we were texting through bad movies together. I miss him so much, and I hope I can make these paragraphs the reunion we deserve. Of heart, wish me luck.

 

 

Oh Quarantine Crush, Ugh Anniversary Effect

Maybe no more “On This Day” in the fb for me. I’ve been curious to see if the poems I wrote in last spring’s quar-madness/denial/crush mode were any good so I’ve been dipping into the OTD maybe more than I should.

 

The post that gets to me doesn’t seem like much. Just me having a whole face, dressed up in red for Zoom poetry, one pic of my face and one of my for-no-reason pretty shoes. But my face is full of love and hope (or at least full of having-showered-that-day!) and he is tagged. Of course, the link is broken because I blocked him in my heartbreak panic later on that fraught year.

 

It isn’t new to me that everyone who was ever dear to me is still dear—even my awful Q-a-mom is still in my dreams every night, trying to drive me crazy and/or give me virus hugs.

 

But the PANGS about Quarantine Crush. They’re probably not surprising at all. We were friends for 20 years before I had the following thought at the beginning of lockdown (COVID lockdown, not the police-are-terrorizing-our-cities curfew in the summer):

 

“Now seems like a good time to just go ahead and fall in love with (Quarantine Crush).”

 

He was my friend in my mid-twenties, a powerfully prolific few years, sunshine-filled and dramatic as the Pacific Coast Highway. I walked up hill by the beach with him belting out Ani DiFranco songs. He held me and I wondered why I couldn’t just fall for him, the best one.

 

And then he was there for me in those first COVID months, when everything was dark and impossible and I was crying into Zoom and wondering what life could even BE anymore.

 

My “Liked Songs” list on Spotify is still kind of a monument to those quick/forever 2020 months, though of course I’ve added songs since. The only solution to the pangs is to put the songs on and walk around looking at spring trees, or sit around doodling/perfecting my Animal Crossing island, letting the feelings just exist with me.

 

So many people live in my heart forever, there’s plenty of room for him to stay.

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Ten: The Long Goodbye

 

After I put him on that birthday afterglow bus, I lived in the glow for a few days or a few weeks. I sat in my post-high-school job at Burger King (I would pretty much do anything to avoid a challenging job interview. Plus I’ve always loved tedium and discounted snacks!) daydreaming about his warm skin and soft hair and to-be-continued mixtape, looking out the drive thru window in a happy haze between customers. But then, just as the word “temporary” had derailed a lovely afternoon of our visit, three little words out of my face closed off whatever I thought might come next with him.

 

“I need you,” I found myself saying into my yellow landline phone. I would very much like to go back and unsay it, even if the results would still have been the same.

 

“You need me?” he wasn’t being harsh, just a little incredulous. “I can’t be…needed right now.”

 

His reasons were sound and to be expected, but that didn’t make the conversation any less devastating. He had just started college. There were girls there with purple hair and he wanted to be free to live his college life. Totally valid! But my heart both deflated and exploded into a fine, sad, messy mist.

 

For some reason, his guilt or my sentiment or both or just love, we decided to keep my planned visit a couple weeks after the breakup. To say goodbye I guess. I met the purple-haired girl there—I remember her name being Sloane but it’s possible she had only recommended the BAND Sloane to him. (“She was underwhelmed if that’s a word, I know it’s not ‘cause I looked it up, that’s one of the skills I learned in my schoooooool.”) She left Perfectly 1993 Guy and me alone to lay in his tiny dorm room, on a pleasingly narrow twin bed.

 

We stayed spooned up in that bed for a long time. I looked out the window at the pretty campus feeling romantically achey. The Get Up Kids wouldn’t be invented for two more years, but it was maybe the most emo weekend of my life. That is REALLY saying something.

 

We decided to go see a Dead Milkmen show a couple of hours away from campus by train. The club was at the beach so things did NOT get less emo despite the very silly music. As we walked from train to club to beach, he got grumbly because I was walking too close and kept walking into him. Nonetheless, I put my head in his lap and rested on the train ride back. I wanted him to be hard beneath my sleepy cheek so I would know his desire for me had been real. I was vigilant for it but don’t remember the results being decisive. What a sign to look for.

 

In his dorm room he had a childhood teddy bear named Clyde and I decided to take him home with me for consolation. He was a pretty big bear, dark brown with one of those really sincere faces that stuffed animals sometimes have. Perfectly 1993 Guy told me years later that he hadn’t wanted me to take Clyde, he just hadn’t known what to say. I feel such a longing to know what happened to Clyde, to hug him tight. (Confession: For the past few months I’ve slept with a stuffed peacock named Nancy, a platonic I-was-having-a-hard-day-post-attempted-coup gift from Sweetie.)

 

We tried to be friends, especially when I came that winter to a school a few hours away from his. I knew every day of my short photography school life (With darkrooms! And chemicals! Glad I tried it while I still could.) how close Perfectly 1993 Guy was by train. My first night at school, I used a big handful of change to call and let him know I had arrived. After a couple of will-we-or-won’t-we visits (More chaste, longing spooning with a little wrestling thrown in? Odd.) things got too snitty and he stopped taking my calls.

 

I called him a truly reprehensible number of times for a couple of months, including on Valentine’s night surrounded by the mylar balloons of my roommates’ more successful relationships. I imagined the phone ringing and ringing and ringing in that tiny room, knowing purple-haired girl would think I was pathetic. I definitely was.

 

Aside from nicely saucy letters from Pagan Boy, (RIP) my loneliness that winter and spring was abject. Eventually, by some miracle, Perfectly 1993 Guy did pick up the phone and we went comfily to a fantastic King Missile show where I got to hug John S. Hall and accidentally poke him with my spiky bracelet. (Another object I’s just LOVE to have today. Wonder how it’s doing?) We saw each other a few more friendly times but he was one of the few old friends/flames who didn’t make the real-life-to-MySpace-etc transition. I looked him up on LinkedIn a couple years ago. Without his Eddie Vedder hair he looks like a regular person, a regular BEAUTIFUL person.

 

I never won’t miss him. I’ll never forget that Bee Girl moment of being loved by him, of being wanted. It both went by so fast and lasted my whole life, like so many of the stories I tell you here. Thanks for listening dears, I’m all wistful and grateful.

My White Supremacist Mom, The End

 

Seriously get this book!

 

“God.” She said defiantly.

 

Mom said that the reason the country was so far astray (besides, presumably, Socialism) was that we’re “no longer” a Christian nation. (I remember seeing this “One nation under God” idea in second-cousiny Facebook feeds before I blocked them, but the violence of the sentiment never truly hit me until I started writing this.) I wish I had said something coherent about the founders or the Liberty Bell or Catholicism under Hitler, but I did not. I wish I’d said that forcing everyone into the same religion was not only counter to the values of Christianity (well.) but part of the very definition of fascism.

 

So that was the conversation that finally propelled us out the door. On the way out, I told mom not to contact me, not to send cards or anything, a directive that she (vexingly and also sort of touchingly) has ignored. In the car, I horror-movie screamed. Back in the Nineties, I was in a housefire and the small comfort of that day was that I got the line “Screaming like a David Lynch movie” on the news. This wasn’t that, wasn’t any aesthetically tortured wail, it was full horror. It was a scream of a lifetime of religious oppression, of standing in front of police cars, of friends boxed into riots when the street-fires were starting. It was a scream for the then-200,000 dead and those who were vicious and scared and stupid enough to deny the loss. Because it was a scream, I’m embarrassed and ashamed, but I can’t actually think of a more rational response.

 

As Sweetie (Never, anymore, afraid of a panic) drove us down the country roads to my sister’s, I did that five senses thing to quell the panic: I see mailboxes, road, a sparrow, a yellow stripe, my purse. I hear the car, my voice, Sweetie’s voice, my breath. I can touch the door, my scarf, my jeans. I can smell coffee and peach-pear fizzy water. I can taste gum.

 

By some miracle of compartmentalization, a skill that has never come naturally to me, we spent a lovely day with the niece and nephews. Our regular comic shop was closed, but we did thoroughly enjoy our traditional thrift store run. I bought way too many random things.

 

By the time Sweetie and I were picking up road trip coffee in our nearby old hometown (SO many feelings of love and beauty and loss there) I was posting through my feelings and starting to make estrangement official. I told my sister, brother, and dad the next day that I would be avoiding all mom-related activities for the foreseeable future.

 

For now, it’s not so bad, except those nauseating prayer cards on which I need to remember to write “refused”. I run the family Zooms and the Liberal Cousins Side Convo has been great at keeping in touch. I’ll feel guilty adding extra logistics to the family routine, but I’ll figure it out as I go.

 

I’ve never understood how people with Trumpian relatives can feel safe around them, even pre-Covid. I don’t know how anyone avoids feeling the violence of their beliefs all the way in their bones. Do they think that the violence the seditionists marinate in won’t come for them? Do they interpret violent beliefs toward black and brown and queer bodies as somehow not a real threat?  Or are they just too scared to do something about it? At any rate, I’m glad of these miserable years of trying to do something about it, even when that something is only to try and get myself safe.

My White Supremacist Mom Part Five

I used to think that the bigoted things Mom and Aunts said were just madness or ignorance, but I think the truth is worse! Their racist talking points are part of a centuries long tradition, an organized movement meant to undermine our nation and terrorize people of color. Do they know that? (The audiobook for Bring the War Home is really good! I got it on Libro.fm) 

The conversation, or whatever it was, turned to The Uprising, when she’d used all her comment time to defend herself from I-don’t-know-what and blaming me for taking part in what she saw as only riots. (“I taught you to believe in peace,” she said. “You should know better.” No justice etc.)

 

Sweetie, who Mom once let slip was her favorite, told a story about her own family, and for a few sentences’ worth of time, the mask of contempt left Mom’s face. Sweetie said something like:

 

“My parents and I don’t agree on things. They’re conservative. They’re from Texas. But a few years ago, when I got hurt and needed help, my dad dropped everything and came. Nothing else mattered!”

 

Mom left her guard down another moment and allowed that she should have checked on us during the fires, etc.

 

“I just assumed you were okay!”

 

“I was NOT okay!” I sobbed, and her faced twisted with condescension again.

 

“Oh, you mean emotionally.” In an eyeroll of a voice.

 

I guess to give her an idea of what we’d been through, I told her about the time (During the “Wall of Moms” era across the country in Portland) that Sweetie and I joined a handful of other protesters standing in front of police cars to keep them from getting too close to a students-and-teachers protest against police in our city schools. This was a fairly standard bit of privilege-leveraging, but I was proud of us! Mom’s disgust made it clear to me that she thought I should have been mowed down. This whole conversation was about how thoroughly murderable she thought I was. Being rooted so deeply in her own fear made her bloodthirsty.

 

Navigating bloodlust is part of the terror of having Trump relatives, but it didn’t feel entirely new. She could call me a “baby killer” for being pro-choice, but any threat to her own grown-up baby was just fine.

 

“Oh, they have police in schools? How many kids have they killed?”

 

As with COVID-19, she demanded a body count before acknowledging any suffering, though of course she was ready to discount any body count given. She was conversational quicksand.

 

The breaking point came during her litany of the terrible things she imagined the Left had in store for the country.

“Reparations would be HORRIBLE!”

(Of all the things?!)

When I asked her why, she said it was because it was really European immigrants who built the country’s wealth and because slavery was exaggerated in the lying and corrupt public schools.

Sweetie, who has WAY more tolerance for futile discussion, cut Mom off there.

 

“Just…don’t. Just stop.”

 

 

My White Supremacist Mom Part Four

(After Beach Aunt had her Trump-renouncing moment last month, I let myself hope a little that Mom would do the same. That’s why I opened her Valentine card over the weekend instead of writing “refused” on it an putting it right back in the mailbox. It could be, I thought. It could be an apology, a pledge to do better, a request to be mailed a copy of The Mueller Report. Hope is dumb sometimes. What WAS in the card was information on the masses my mom had paid for, to be said for me and Sweetie. I know that Mom would have seen this as a kindness, but this card honestly made me sick to my stomach. My mom thinks we should have a national religion, that we’re off track as a nation because not everyone is Catholic. So, in addition to donating to her child-raping church in my name, it was also a donation to fascism. And always, always, the feeling sorry for us—as queer folks, as fat people, as liberals, as people who believe in science and history and truth. She thinks that makes us less-than. She thinks the only thing that can save us is donation-funded prayer. And because the card was pretty, she can feed her idea that she is a good, loving person instead of a sinkhole of narcissism and pain. So I took the “I miss” off this series of posts. The shittiest-Valentine-ever made me let go of just a little more denial, a little more stupid hope.)

 

Anyway, back to that apple picking weekend back in early October. Mom and Stepdad are grousing about masks. I’m just trying to stay out of it and play Animal Crossing, but Mom asks me what I think.

 

“I’m on the side of the TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE WHO DIED. I want to help in whatever way I can.”

 

And I’m yelling. Sweetie rushes in from the other room to help out. I don’t want to be yelling, I know it’s wrong, I know I’m bad but six months and also a lifetime of gaslighting brings up the same awful childish helpless horror I felt when I was eight and Mom was beating up my doll Cindy with a wiffle ball bat because she knew it would make me feel worse than getting hit myself. I know I’m 46 and not eight. I know it’s all wrong. But I’m yelling.

 

It’s hard to track the conversation on my end or on hers, so here are some points she made:

 

-“Some people HAVE to die! Wouldn’t the world be a terrible place without death?”

-But also “masks make people sicker” and she wants to save us.

-Russian disinformation doesn’t exist or have an impact, but she might be willing to see what Mueller has to say because he was appointed by Trump.

 

-“Do you actually know anyone who has died from coronavirus? Because I don’t.”

 

(Apparently, Sweetie’s at-that-moment-hospitalized sister was not evidence enough.)

 

“At least I’m not a baby-killer.” I sort of wish I’d asked if she meant this in the Lizard People/Qanon way or just in the regular misogynist sense. Maybe both!

 

Next time: So much racism.