Real Problems

In 2001, my grandfather decided he could no longer manage on his own and moved into a nursing home. At that point, we moved into his house. It was a small, modest house, but it was a nice house in a nice location. We were beside a large church with stained class windows. We were a block away from the Fayette County Court House. There were even a couple of mansions in the neighborhood. We were lucky, and if you judged from appearances, you might think we were middle class.

But the truth was we were living close to the edge despite our luck and living conditions. The house didn’t belong to us. It didn’t even belong to grandpa. It belonged to the husband of my father’s late sister. He could have told us to get out any time the notion crossed his mind. In fact, he did ask me to leave when my father died.

My mother had schizophrenia. She was unable to earn a living, and she lost her insurance when my father retired in 1991. She wasn’t usually eligible for Medicaid, so she went without regular medical care. At some point, breast cancer attacked her, and it wasn’t discovered until it was stage 4. She died about 10 weeks after her diagnosis. She was 63.

We had a car, a nice car, a little Toyota Camry. But Dad was afraid to travel far from the house. Most of the time, he didn’t have money for a tow or for repairs. So he worried about breaking down and being stranded in some far off location with a car that wouldn’t run. And the car was repossessed by the bank when he died. He worried about the upkeep of the house and all of the appliances in the house. Sure, it was nice we had those things. Many people in the world don’t. Even my parents didn’t have some of those things when they were young. But living as my parents did when they were young was no longer tenable. There was no well at our house. An outhouse would not have been permitted. So we needed plumbing. My father’s family used to store their perishables in a cool springhouse, but we didn’t have that on Maple Ave., so we needed our refrigerator. If it went out, and we didn’t have the money to fix it or buy a new one, we would have been shit out of luck. Our house didn’t have fireplaces as the houses my parents grew up in did, so we couldn’t burn coal or wood if the furnace went out and we didn’t have the money to repair it.

Many liberals in this country are well educated, and they live comfortable middle class lives, and I can tell by the way they talk that they assume nearly everyone is as fortunate as they are. Car repairs and replacing appliances might be a mere inconvenience when you have the money to take care of those things, but many don’t. Car problems aren’t “first world problems” for many. Try going without a car in a country that’s built around the assumption that everyone has a car. Sometimes it’s difficult to even get across a road because there’s no where for a person on foot to get across. Imagine living in a remote rural location without a car or a small town without public transportation. How would you get to work, or the store, or to a doctor’s office?

Many in this country have legitimate worries about essential needs, and you can’t always gage a person’s situation by a cursory glance at how they’re living right now. The Democratic party would have a broader base and wider appeal if it took those worries more seriously and did more. Obamacare was the first major program to help the poor in this country since the early ’70s, and even that was only half measure.

Refuse to be silent.

Even though Hitler and the Nazis gained power through the democratic process, they never achieved majority support before turning Germany into a totalitarian state. Even after outlawing their most significant political rival, the Communist Party, they got less than 50% of the vote in the mid ‘30s.

They gained total control gradually. At first they focused on silencing dissent. They took control of the media. Germans only heard happy news. Then they started sending out the secret police in the middle of the night. Those who questioned the Nazis received a knock on the door at three in the morning when they were at their most vulnerable, and when their neighbors were asleep. The Nazis began to threaten the wives, husbands, children, parents and friends of those who refused to toe the line.

People stopped talking. They stopped criticizing. They stopped making jokes. So if you were troubled by Nazi policy, you were isolated. Who could you tell? You didn’t know who might be sympathetic or who might turn you in.

The people who did not support the Nazis were forced into the closet. LGBTs know something about the closet, and many of us know the joy of coming out despite the risk.

We can resist fascist impulses in our own society by refusing to be silent, by standing up and sticking together.

Piss President

In the late 1980s, when I was still a young pup, Republicans and the Religious Right had a conniption fit when Andres Serrano received an NEA grant for his eerie photograph Piss Christ. Serrano insisted that his work was not irreligious and claimed he meant to convey how modern society has commercialized Jesus. The conservatives were having none of that. They were sure their beliefs had been denigrated, and to add insult to injury, the artist was rewarded with taxpayer money. They were outraged.

However, rather than shunning Serrano’s photo from then on, it seems they have co-opted it. They have replaced Christ with a clown who lives in a gilded penthouse. He tweets about how everyone is being mean to him. Rather than displaying him in a museum, they put him on a pedestal and will soon claim he is chief among us.

Many can hardly believe their eyes. What is this strange creature with the fading yellow cotton candy hair that no sweet tooth would ever crave? Its lips are often pursed as if to kiss, but they are not used to express love.

Is it a ventriloquist’s dummy? Maybe he is the voice of millions of American men who harbor bullying 12-year-old boys inside them who feel wronged, so wronged because smarty-pants bitches and know-it-all darkies and fags refused to take their shit. The dummy speaks for them with an unexpected Russian accent. There is something not quite right about the orange tinged leather face and the white circles around the eyes. It has been left too long in its ammonia bath.

Sanctimonious Power Grubbing Phonies

This is a bit raw, I know. Like many, I found some humor in the latest bombshell. But it also made me mad. Many of the same people who have judged us, belittled us, besmirched us, thrown us out of our homes and places of worship, made us feel unsafe, unwelcome, unloved, unlovable and defective are the same people who have foisted this thug on us. And they’ve done it without shame or apology.

We all know that in years past—and it wasn’t that long ago—it would have been shocking for a president (elect) to brag about pussy grabbing and to hire sex workers for any purpose much less to engage in water sports, but, true or not, the Religious Right gleefully owns Trump. They claim him, and they’ll likely go on saying “God raised him up” and other such bullshit. Even though what Trump has done and allegedly done is, strictly speaking, against their rules, it is within the bounds of patriarchy. He is a powerful white man who has put “nasty” women in their place, and that’s easily forgivable in their eyes. They’ll slap him on the back and tell him that’s okay while they go on judging the hell out of young women who find themselves pregnant and men who engage in consensual cocksucking. They’ll go on hinting, suggesting or even boldly proclaiming that the poor deserve what they get, and the wealthy have been “blessed” by God. I hope anyone who has ever been harmed by these sanctimonious, power grubbing phonies now realize that they don’t speak for any god. American fundie Christian extremists are the grossest pieces of shit that have ever walked the earth.

November 7

Bill reached into his mini fridge for another beer. The only thing other than beer in the fridge was a package of cheese—American cheese, damn it!—and a jar of Miracle Whip that had probably gone off. He believed he deserved another beer after getting a phone call from Ms. Hadley, an assistant principal at his son’s school. She had rang him up, again, to complain about his son’s “behavioral issues” or some bullshit. This time, nine-year-old Josh had called his classmate Timmy a faggot. At first, Bill explained to Ms. Hadley that Timmy needed to toughen up and that his son was doing the boy a favor, but Ms. Hadley didn’t acknowledge the soundness of his argument and merely reiterated the school’s zero tolerance policy for bullying. Bill then told her that his soon to be ex-wife, his soon to be third ex-wife had custody of his son, and he only saw the kid one weekend a month. Which was fine with him. At 55, Bill believed he was too old to look after a nine-year-old. Besides, he already had three children—two from his first marriage and another from his second. All of that should be behind him now. His soon to be ex-wife number 3 should have done a better job at preventing the pregnancy or taken care of it without bothering him when she dropped the ball.
Ms. Hadley reminded him of a woman he knew twenty years ago when he still had his janitorial job at an office building downtown. Alice did the books at one of the law firms. She got herself a degree and probably made twice as much as Bill. Alice came all the way from Florida for the job. When an early snowstorm hit in November, she came rolling in with her car covered in snow and ice. She had managed to scrape off a peephole in her windshield with a credit card, but that was it. After paying Bill five dollars to take care of her car, she promised she would be prepared for the next snowstorm. Bill believed he was just as smart as Alice and Ms. Hadley, and it pissed him off that women like that had good jobs and he didn’t.

He had worked at the office building for fifteen years. His first wife was a nurse, and she made more money than he did. So they did okay, financially, but still, Bill sometimes complained that as the man, he should make more. Linda would remind him that she had gone to school to be a nurse, and she worked hard for her money. Bill believed he worked just as hard and was just as capable as Linda. He didn’t need a piece of paper to prove that, and if his employer needed him to learn a special skill, then he should pay for it and set the whole thing up. That’s how they did it in his grandfather’s day, Bill imagined, before this country turned its back on white men.

The janitorial job was the only steady halfway decent job he ever had, but when the owners of the office building let him go and hired a janitorial service, Bill blamed the illegal aliens that he imagined worked for the outsourced service rather than his employer. Bill still complained about the Mexicans who stole his job. Bill didn’t think he was racist, even though his oldest daughter had been accusing him of that for years, but the way he saw it, white men made this country, and now the Mexicans and blacks thought they were entitled, and he was tired of seeing them get breaks he never had.

When he started drinking heavily and refused to look for a new job for almost a year, Linda left him. Since then, Bill has worked at several fast food places, a grocery store and a couple of convenient stores. He’s never held a job for more than two years since working as a janitor. Sometimes, Bill daydreams about what life must have been like for his grandfather who had a factory job. He imagines the job wasn’t too demanding. Most of his coworkers were probably white. Hardly anybody was a faggot back then, and if they were, they had the good sense not to tell anybody and act like a regular guy. The men his grandfather worked with were probably all like buddies. All the bosses back then were white, too. Most of them were probably decent men. Maybe a couple of hard asses, but most of them were probably like one of the boys.

You couldn’t have close friendships with men like that now. You couldn’t count on a buddy to look after you anymore. Bill lived in the basement of an old friend from high school, a plumber, a regular guy, but even he complained when the rent was late. When Bill told him he couldn’t find a good job, even his old friend told him he should have learned a trade when he was young, and the friend told him he needed to learn to take a bit of guff from his bosses even if they were women or black or both.

Bill set his alarm clock for the first time in two weeks before passing out. He wanted to get to the polls early.

The Torrents of Hemingway

You don’t hear much talk about Sherwood Anderson these days, and it seems his only work that’s remembered is Winesburg, Ohio, but in the 1920s, he was, apparently, a respected and well-known literary figure.

In the early 1920s, Ernest Hemingway was a young man with literary aspirations. Although he didn’t have much to show for it. He wrote a few boys’ adventure stories in high school, and that’s about it. However, Hemingway got to know Anderson in Chicago by chance, and Anderson did something that set him on the road to becoming a literary star.

Hemingway’s young wife had a small trust fund. In today’s dollars, it amounted to less than $30,000 a year. Just enough to get by on if you lived modestly. In those postwar days, the exchange rate meant those dollars would go a lot further in Europe than in the U.S., and Hemingway and his wife were up for an adventure. They initially thought of going to Italy. Hemingway had served as an ambulance driver in Italy during the war, and got a lot of attention by the newspapers when he was wounded. Hemingway liked the attention, so I suppose he had a fondness for Italy. However, Anderson suggested the Hemingways head to Paris. Anderson was even nice enough to provide Hemingway with letters of introduction to the famous expatriate writers such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. These letters were gold to a young would-be writer. It wasn’t easy to break into that crowd.

Hemingway learned a great deal from these people, especially Stein. He admired her modern style, which aimed to reveal the inner life of her characters through more direct and simple vocabulary and less florid descriptions. The trouble is, Stein used a kind of stream of consciousness approach, which made it hard for the average reader to follow her. Hemingway spent several years attempting to perfect a more accessible version of the modern style.

Just before Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises—his first popular success—he wrote a mean-spirited, snide and completely unfunny parody of Sherwood Anderson’s latest novel Dark Laughter. Hemingway’s hit piece was titled The Torrents of Spring.

Hemingway might have ushered in a new modern approach to writing, but given that the style was being tinkered with by several influential writers, I think it was only a matter of time before someone came up with something many readers might actually want to read. In any event, Hemingway’s hyper-masculine themes were hardly modern, and his fascination with bullfighting was ugly. Hemingway was a sexist, bigot and homophobe, and it turns out, he was a pretty shitty friend.

Nice Butt

Rendezvous by Gary Cottle

In 1999, twenty-six-year-old Shane still lived in his parents’ house. He had done some renovations to the basement a couple of years after graduation and moved in down there, so he had some privacy. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. He got the job stocking shelves at the local Lowe’s store when he was still in high school, and he had been saving up. He wanted to leave his hometown in Tennessee and head to the west coast or New York or someplace where gay men lived openly. He had enough money by the time he was twenty-one, but he didn’t have the courage to make his dreams come true. By accident, he discovered he could occasionally trade blow jobs with men late at night at a nearby rest stop out on the highway. It wasn’t completely satisfying, but it was better than nothing. When he got a computer, he discovered gay chat rooms. It was mostly men talking dirty, and it was even less satisfying than the sex at the rest stop. But the connection to other men like himself, no matter how tenuous and shallow, kept him coming back. He dropped in every few days for nearly a year before he ran into someone who wanted to engage in a real conversation.

Shane learned that Russell was a small town boy, too, and although he didn’t live in his dad’s Nebraska farmhouse, he did stay in a camper setup behind the barn. Russell was completely closeted, just like Shane. Neither dated girls or made much of a show of being hetero. Everyone assumed they were loners. But they weren’t, not naturally. They both longed for companionship. Russell admitted that a few years before, he started sleeping with his childhood teddy bear again, but when the bear started coming apart, he placed him on a shelf in the camper near the bed so he could, at least, see him as he drifted off. When Shane read this admission, tears rolled down his cheeks because he understood the loneliness, and he promised Russell that one day, he’d get him the biggest teddy bear in the world.

Shane and Russell communicated online every day for months. Shane was sure he had fallen in love, but it seemed silly. He had never laid eyes on Russell. Never touched him. Never heard his voice. But all he could think about was Russell. Finally, Shane asked Russell if they could meet. Russell was reluctant at first. He said he was afraid it might ruin what they had together. Shane was sure it wouldn’t, and he kept telling Russell he needed to see him and hold him, kiss him and make love to him.

They each agreed to drive six hours and meet one another half way. There was a park that would be the perfect spot for them to come together in real space.

At the last minute, Russell asked, “How will I know it’s you when I see you?”

Shane said, “You’ll know. Trust me, you’ll know.”

Russell made it to the park later that day. He looked around in desperation for a few minutes. A part of him feared Shane wouldn’t show. But then he saw a dark-haired young man sitting on top of a picnic table. He wasn’t exactly by himself. He had a teddy bear with him. It was the biggest fucking teddy bear Russell had ever seen.