“Do you want to be sober?” She repeated herself.
On the side table lingered a day-old Shiraz in the coffee mug, a mosquito drunk on its surface. I’d be drinking that soon enough. All the half-drunk remnants, like pennies collected by a child from behind the sofa, become enough for an hour or so
“Right now, yes. As for how I feel tomorrow, who knows?”
Things were far from normal 5,000 miles and twenty-three years before.
I’d roll up notebook paper and smoke it.
While the other kids were using their fingers to make pretend guns, I was doing it to pretend to be injecting myself with heroin.
Hobbies weren’t pastimes for me. They were obsessions, deserving only of PhD level fixation.
I was an odd child who went to the bathroom in the garden.
Like David Sedaris whose opening chapter in Naked spoke to me in a way few books ever could, I was riddled with OCD, a disorder so lawyered up you’d be a fool to breach its contracts.
Walk this side of the lamppost
If you see another black car, you will be a famous musician
And, as the queer thoughts flooded in to a pre-teen mind: if you have gay thoughts while masturbating, you must go again.
I obeyed. My life a series of pauses to divine whether the gods were in a go left or right mood that day and extremely sore nether regions.
A British girl with four television channels, no internet, no YouTube, in a country inching its way towards thirty-years of legalized homosexuality. At that age, a thirty year old was a parent, a person with a job, maybe a kid. Only later, when I reached that milestone myself, would I realize how utterly all over the place a thirty year old is. Gay bars downtown, “private shops” with blacked out windows. That was all I had to go on. No on-screen positive storylines about trans people.
Freddie Mercury’s death was one of the first memories I have of actually watching the News. Capital ’N’, because then the News had seeming authority. Usually I’d climb inside the fridge for a sweet snack when it would come on.
That’s boring stuff for parents, I’d think. Not for me.
But Freddie was for me. I knew that deep inside. His story, extravagant, flamboyant, lonely, high, sick, dead.
Inevitable
That word burned into my mind as too did the image of the rock critic, Paul Gambaccini, interviewed outside a locked, grey stage door. A visual metaphor - if you don’t keep that private, this is how it ends.
“He lived his private life as passionately and flamboyantly as he did his open, professional life. This is a tragic consequence…which…for him was inevitable.”
Confronted with the stark reality of my potential future, I disappeared into my imagination, where the gayness could live alongside all those other parts of me that I was confident would be rejected.
Books, films, music, poetry I’d scribble down that would later become songs, essays, college admission infrastructure.
Through my dad filtered classic music of the ‘60s. Obsessed with John Lennon, Keith Richards, and Bob Dylan - I’d always thumb forward to the biography chapter where they use drugs for the first time. The idea of being passed out on a floor, artistic martyrdom by suicide, all seemed so romantic to me.
Hunter S. Thomspon, Bukowski, Plath, Camus. Lone wolf depressive punks of their eras. Role models. Gods.
The first toke on a joint was magical, but it was underwhelming. In the muddied edge of the forest, where we would smoke the Marlboro Reds Alex Kennedy has stolen from his parents, the Moroccan resin tasted sweet and earthy. Umami first encountered in combustion. Laughter and that sense that my mind - not just metaphysically, but physically too - was expanding, enrolled me in the school that would become my greatest education.
The underwhelm didn’t deter me. I knew the dragon was out there and that this one, sparks not flames in its belly, was only the beginning.
A few years later, however, when the miniature snow-capped mountain range glistened back at me from the CD jewel case, a hundred-dollar straw stroking my nostrils, I knew that I was about to arrive.
—
The urge is primal. It’s wolflike. Like wolves who go long periods without eating, then kill more than they need, this famine-minded feasting gluttony became my life with drugs.
The more secrets held - mentally ill, gay, trans, the abuse - the more wolves appeared.
The Puerto-Rican drug dealer in stretch limos, an armed guard by his side.
Hurtling down the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, hoping the acid and Molly don’t hit before we’ve parked, but feeling those tingles and imminent wood chimes. 70mph, 90mph, 100…
The celebrities crammed into bathroom cubicles, the four-legged toilet paper dispenser snort.
I could tell all those stories. In vivid, euphoric detail, I recall a time before the problems set in that was genuinely fun.
Drugs did save me.
From the pain of hiding myself, the mother in and out of psychiatric care, and so on, through the endless list of traumas which, while they did not cause addiction, did cast a light that caused it to grow.
Drugs did help me.
To seek, for brief moments, the glass-slippered “me” before midnight struck. To blaze phosphorescent trails in the video-game of potential futures.
And then, they tried to kill me.
Because…again, that’s what they do. Owe enough and you face a fatal passenger ride outside of city limits.
So I won’t bore you with the details of the mother’s suicide - more inevitable than any Freddie Mercury fade. I won’t talk about being first on scene at a motorbike crash, and watching blood bubble out of a mouth until the air’s gone.
These stories write themselves. And, lord no matter how boring, diverse, dramatic, jaw clenching - all the things, they may be, with that many typewriting monkeys at work in this vast human sea Shakespeare is also inevitable.
That word has heterochromia. It possess an undeniable, inescapable sense as well as a foreboding, brooding trilogy-box set aura. On the stage, where all of us are playas, slayers, atheistic prayers, something’s only inevitable when it happens - the story hasn’t ended yet. Within its unavoidable walls, a lot of sub-plots are possible but ultimately irrelevant.
Bad therapists might try to eke out causality, draw psychodynamic mind maps, but these jagged market panics, are when zoomed out, pretty consistently trending upwards. At least, - economy and world order aside - that’s been my experience.
“Yes, ok, yes, I do want to be sober.” I corrected myself, after a long discourse on time, responsibility and existential authenticity which I’ve no doubt she tuned out.
Another addict’s hopeless mission to evade responsibility, like Popeye punching the air between him and Bluto.
Something that day interrupted a pattern. Bullet-time held me long enough to step outside myself and see what I’d become.
Shadows climbing the walls. Imaginary feds in the corridor. My hands outstretched and waiting for those phantasmic cuffs. Cockroach corridors, sink dish spores, whisky, beer and crystals the only inhabitants at 1551 Echo Park Avenue. I was an undocumented sublet.
The bullet time - glitching between on and off - lasted long enough to commit to meeting her the next morning, at 730AM, at a support group door.
—
The things I heard inside crashed every theory I had about people.
Women admitting in public to being on oxy with their kids in the car? Sobriety expanded my mind more effectively than the joints ever did.
The unflinching honesty, accountability, wisdom.
The mad notion that asking for help is braver than saying nothing.
More than anything, the rigorous, Jungian shadow work like healthy-vegetables snuck inside a kid’s dripping burger, reminded me of that authenticity I was always romanticizing. That authenticity which I thought you had buy a ticket for, travel to, borrow, scrape and steal.
A process by which, beneath every grudge, every horrendous thought, word, or deed, lay fears. Fears and coping mechanisms beautiful in their fractal adaptation, were revealed and a whole new world opened up.
My questions about my sexual orientation, gender identity, purpose - all deferred to “one day at a time.”
Did those questions still burn with insistence? Yes, of course. One day is actually more than enough time to work some of this shit out, I quarreled.
But I did slow down. Enough to see the landscape that had previously been a blur from inside this derailed bullet train.
—
Almost eight years later, it’s clear to me now that the path isn’t straight. This is not a direct train. Many stops, pauses, changes, ‘out of service/fuego de servicio’ sighs.
It’s an adventure closer to Frodo’s than the linear symmetry of the hero’s journey. Sometimes we have to go through the thing, not around it, to get to the other side. Dead faces will rise from the swamp. Bony hands will clutch at your bruised feet. You will wonder why the eagle’s couldn’t come sooner. Maybe they too were taking it ‘one day at a time.’
I like the winding and meandering. Three, then five, now inching closer to a decade of sobriety, my world has changed again and again. Career, gender, codependence, binging/purging, and now purpose have been some of the many gifts bestowed upon me by the last thing I’d expect to celebrate Christmas - pain.
The joys and evolutions always come after another forest has burned. The paradox of the inner and outer worlds conflict, swords sparking as authenticity finally makes ‘fetch’ happen against the feudal lordship of capitalist empire.
People describe it as alchemy. Our life is the alembic vessel, our self is the base metal which burns into something new.
Pain contains so much power but anger burns it off with smoky, yellow inefficacy.
“It’s their fault,” I say as I scatter my mum’s ashes into the ocean on that cold, grey October morning.
The erotic chi could subdue volcanoes, but instead she cums to the sound of America’s Got Talent.
The hookups I chase for an impossible love.
Sadness is the pressure valve, which lets out steam so the whole thing won’t blow.
The tears I allow, rather than the self-pity I use as an excuse
The hidden places, where the private is finally accepted by the public and, in many rooms across the world, becomes the detail that causes another person to pull up a chair.
The rebirth, where Freddie Mercury struts the stage well into his seventies, and where
All this rotten defecate in our life either leads to an emergency plumbing call, or top-notch compost. It takes planning. It takes repeated replays of the tape to remind us how our way, is often the wrong way.
Until it isn’t.
Until the rebirth, where Freddie Mercury struts the stage well into his seventies.
Where the possibilities are endless.
And where, if you participate even just a bit, inevitable.
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Gorgeous, yoiks