= July 28, 1982 (Day Ten) =



I wake up contemplative. I was probably delving into interesting territory in my dreams, and then I came up from there still turning these thoughts over.

Mark Raybourne wants me to think about whether my tendency to not give a shit whether or not other people approve of my behavior is a tendency that has unhealthy components. Okay. You can consider it a defense mechanism, but you can also consider it the necessary attitude if you’re going to move forward. I couldn’t afford to care. I was under attack. I had to believe in me. They had to be wrong. Yes, that installs the worry that this is a coping mechanism. Yes, I’ve worried about that. That maybe my default assumption that I was right to believe in me and reject them as wrong was...incorrect, and I...for some reason...deserve this.

I can’t talk with Mark about this, because he’s Mark and he’s not good at this. Yeesh. I think he means well but seriously, inept counselor-person. I don’t feel at all understood by him.

But still, back to his question.

Them. There’s a “them”. People not approving of me. I didn’t get why. I was a conscientious kid. I remember being in second grade and this girl in our class said something had been stolen out of her desk just now and several people in desks next to her said this one guy, who sat in front of me, that they’d seen him steal it. I knew he hadn’t done it, not in that time frame. I didn’t like him. He was nasty and he was stupid. He was one of the kids who picked on me whenever he could. He was mean. It wasn’t him. I’d have seen him do it. I’d been staring at people in my vicinity for the last ten minutes, just thinking about what would happen to each of us as we got older, became older kids. Anyway, I said so. My word didn’t carry much weight. I thought it should, because I thought everyone knew I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me, so I wasn’t coming to his support just because I was one of his friends.

People were mad at me, but I remember thinking that I could choose not to care what the other people in the classroom thought. I felt like I’d done the right thing. I also felt like it was important to do what you think is the right thing. To care, and to act.

Yeah, so now at the age of 23, I want to reach out to people. Communicate. Share a concept, a set of thoughts, a model that they, too, might find helps them make sense of their experiences. Stuff about gender and sex and sexual orientation. Changing people’s map of the possibilities.

This is 1982, the modern sophisticated world. We all know there are gay people. And we’ve heard them say we all should stop thinking there was something wrong with them. They liked who they were. They weren’t hurting anybody. They found how to seek out each other, and that’s who they wanted, others who were like them. They told us we should quit being all paranoid about it being a way of life that’s somehow stalking the rest of us. The lesbians in particular have explained that being on the constant never-ending receiving end of sexual interest from people you aren’t sexually interested in is not an experience that only hetero males might ever have to wade through. Yeah, fucking hell, sometimes there are people who get hot for you and you aren’t so inclined. Learn to deal with it, get used to it, unless they’re coercive it’s not the end of the world. Even the coercive ones don’t get to define our lives.

We also know there is transition. It’s in the media, part of the news. I’ve read Conundrum: From James to Jan. And also accounts written by that tennis player, Renee Richards. Oh, yes, of course I’ve thought about it. Things written by transsexual women resonate with me. A lot of them do. Some of them do not. The notion that it’s the wrong body, that does not. I often feel like I’m rejecting that notion the same way gay guys reject the notion that in order for it to have ever been okay to find male people sexually attractive, they should have been female.

Yeah, it finally congealed for me. That I’m a male person, essentially one of the girls, in the same way that transsexual women know it, but in my case the male body is okay. I’m saying that there exists an identity of malebodied people who are girls or women, whose attraction is to female people. So they’re neither transsexuals nor gay guys. It’s something else.

Yes I’m describing it as a category of people, an identity, but I defined it, by myself, in isolation, not as part of a community of such people. Exactly how plural does a valid sense of identity need to be? I get to speak for myself, don’t I? I didn’t start the conversation. Other people calling me things, sticking a hostile label on me, they started it. I should get a chance to answer. I’ve examined the content of what they call me, as well as the hostility attached. I’d rather not be hated...but I’d rather be hated for who I actually am if I can’t be accepted for who I am. At least that way I’d be known for who I actually am.



So... joining other people... I’m open to advice on how to be the most open listener and still stick up for myself, and especially how to find people who would want to have this conversation.

I’m not just trying to join them to have a close community. I’d like that too, of course. I’d be pickier about who I’d try that with. But for the message stuff, I want everybody I can get.





* * *





Psychodrama has Ellen in the hot seat. Her situation is a lot like Emily’s: she really wants to get back to her family, her kids in particular.

“C’mon, yell at him. Put him in his place!”, Jeremy encourages her.

“What kind of representative are you?”, Ellen yells. “I could have just represented myself!”

“But you don’t know what you need!”, I yell back at her. I’ve been drafted to be her assigned legal representative and I’m trying to incorporate her description of the guy. Gary, who is subbing for Marie, who is out today, tells me to probe Ellen for ambivalent feelings she may have towards being with her kids. “So you should listen to experts like me, I’m here to help you.”, I append.

“Oh, do go fuck yourself”, Ellen yells at me.

“Yeah, that’s good”, Jeremy yells, “but now let’s channel that attitude and energy into what you really need her to hear.”

Ellen scowls at me in my role. “I know what I need better than you. You’re supposed to represent me. Are you going to? Or are you gonna keep helping the other side?”

I’m only learning about Ellen’s situation from her descriptions here in psychodrama, but this seems like a healthy attitude to me.

Jeremy and Gary reframe the camera. The others change some of the chairs and paper-mache decor to make it into a new space. A conference room. Ellen and her ex, or estranged husband. I’m there again, advocate and mediator.

“You can still see Andrew. I’m not trying to take him away from you”, says Ronald, playing Ellen’s ex.

“You say that, but you keep yanking him away anyhow. You’re just using him to try to get me to agree to stuff”, Ellen as herself proclaims.

“Now play nice”, I say, making a parody of the kind of thing Ellen said she’s actually heard from her representative. “You can’t expect him to be the only one to make concessions.”

“Oh shut up and fuck off”, Ellen snaps at me. “You are totally not on my side.”

I like this. I hope it helps Ellen. She sounds good.

Psychodrama is my favorite class.

I’m still wondering about my own interest and reaction to Ellen.


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

In psychodrama, Valerie opts for the hot seat and wants to dive into how she gets treated at her doctor’s office.

Jeremy puts his chin to his palm for a moment, then suggests, “From what you’ve been saying, doing your conversations with the nurse at the office desk seems like a good place to start. Noelle, how about you be the desk nurse?”

“And like I said”, Valerie adds, instructing Noelle, “you know I’m in recovery, you know all about my relapses and all that...”

“Yeah, been there myself”, Noelle grins.

Marie raises the VHS camera and frames the two of them and starts filming.

“Hi, Phyllis”, Valerie says, playing herself, “I was wondering if I could get renewals with extra refills on these prescriptions because I’m going to be away for awhile.”

Noelle braces her arms against an imaginary desk, thumbs through a couple pages of imaginary chart. She bites her lip, glances at Valerie, then shakes her head. “You think this time it’s gonna turn out different, huh?”

“That’s none of your business! Can I just get my meds renewed?”

Noelle rolls her eyes and pantomimes scribbling an entry in the chart.

“How was that?”, Marie asks, glancing up from the movie camera. Valerie says she wants to switch roles and play the desk nurse.

“So, umm, I need these prescriptions refilled”, Noelle begins, “and can I get extra refills for these? I’m out of town for awhile.”

Valerie-as-nurse does a wry one-sided smile, then shakes her head. “It’s hard to believe that somebody with all your advantages would just throw it away. Look how your sister’s doing!”

Noelle puts her hands on her hips and snaps, “Hey, like, invasion of privacy! How about you spare me the lecture, Phyllis, and just do your job.”



After psychodrama is over, I get back to the piano and this time I have the space to myself. I launch into a sonorous atonal composition I haven’t named yet and then shift into “If Only To Wonder” and I like the sounds I’m making. Which is the reason I play. Not to show everyone. Not to be a star. Not to get rich or make a career out of it.

Admittedly, I’d like to amaze everyone and get a huge audience. That would be so cool. And I don’t have a way of supporting myself, as my parents are so fond of reminding me, so it would be convenient if I could do this professionally.

But if I’m not good enough or lucky enough for that to happen, I still get to sit here and produce this tapestry of sound, and it makes me feel better. It expresses how I feel on the inside. So part of wanting an audience is about that, wanting to express myself to people.

The piano I crave, the one I wish I could talk my parents into buying for me, is a Yamaha CP-80 electric grand. A portable piano you can take apart and put in a car. Take to places where people are gathering, the way other musicians might bring a guitar with them. But when you get it there, it has real strings and hammers, it’s truly a piano, unlike that popular portable keyboard, the Fender-Rhodes, which sounds like doorbell chimes, a round translucent sound that isn’t at all like the sound a real piano makes.

I can’t buy it for myself. I have no income. It’s a frustrating situation, but it’s actually unusual that I find myself craving one of the world’s expensive toys.

For the most part I don’t feel deprived despite being sidelined from the world of money.

It’s frustrating being sidelined from having a respected contribution to make, though. God that sounds self-righteous and pretentious, but it’s true. I don’t like being painted as a failure but I still worry that maybe I can’t just blame everyone else and that’s another conversation. All through my school years I figured that when I got to adulthood, I’d be snapped up for the same reasons I got good grades. I mean, I take assignments seriously and I’m smart and I dedicate myself to doing a really good job. Earn the approval strokes, you know? Take some pride at what you can do and contribute and feel good about that too.

That’s not how it’s worked out, though. I’ve mostly been yelled at by employers. And fired a lot. It isn’t because I’m too stupid to understand the work. Or because I don’t try. I don’t think I’ve fallen short of doing what was being asked of me, either. Most of the time, anyway. A couple of times it’s been because they assumed I already knew something so they didn’t bother to explain. But really, most of it has been unearned anger and criticism. Basically, they don’t like me. Teachers mostly did. Classmates mostly didn’t. And now that I’m an adult, employers mostly don’t. Why?

Before my parents asked me to take care of Grandpa, I spent the year out in an oil field town, Rangely Colorado. I’d been told it was a place where, if you were willing to work, there was plenty of work available and a person could make some money. It was initially true, too: itinerant laborers like me occupied a public campground and lived out of tents all summer and fall, and employers would drive in with pickups and ask for any available people willing to do this or that type of work, and we’d hop on and they’d take us to the work site. While it lasted, I worked day jobs and socked away as much as a third of the price of the piano I wanted, that Yamaha CP-80. I worked as a hardbander’s assistant, helping him weld lengths of pipe for the drilling operations — for one day, because he didn’t want me back. I worked a day as a roughneck in training, at the actual drill site, getting sprayed with oily water and handing equipment to the operator when requested, but they didn’t want me a second day either. I had better luck with the cutting crew, spending my days cutting down scrub pine and cedar with a chain saw or feeding the scraps into the chipper, a machine that turned branches and twigs into sawdust. I worked with them for two and a half weeks before the team boss said he didn’t like my attitude and fired me.

When someone says things like that keep on happening wherever they go, we’re nearly always justified in thinking the problem is their behavior, because that’s all these recurrent situations have in common, right? So I really can’t blame people for starting with the assumption that I’m probably lazy or insubordinate or don’t follow instructions.

It seems more like employers think that I have too high an opinion of myself. Just like Ellen and Ronald and Dr. Barnes, they don’t like me talking like an intellectual. I learned a long time ago to keep my unsolicited opinions to myself, try to keep my head down and just do what’s asked of me. But it seems like I have mannerisms, facial expressions, stuff like that, that hit a lot of guys in a way they don’t care for.

My parents are college educated and they read all the time and always encouraged me and my sister to put a high value on thinking and understanding and absorbing facts and learning processes. When other kids acted like I was putting on airs, my parents emphasized that to be more intelligent or better educated than others meant being different from them, and therefore different was okay.

So some of it, I think, is a sort of classism. I have upper middle class intellectual mannerisms and thought processes, and I seem weird and out of place in the kind of environments where I’m qualified to work, given my lack of a college degree. It certainly works in the opposite direction, where someone in a professional setting that requires at least a minimal college degree has a hard time being taken seriously if they don’t speak grammatically or they slouch or don’t have the right kind of serious attentive facial expressions. And if your family or your culture didn’t perform the approved set of behaviors while you were growing up, it’s not your native language, and you won’t automatically pick the right ones up just by getting a professional degree or certification, so it’s class snobbery. But that’s the direction we usually think of it working, of keeping the aspiring lower classes at a disadvantage any time they poke their head into a setting occupied by people from higher classes. I’m not saying class inequality is just some kind of mutual and equal oil-and-water situation, as if being kept out boardrooms and congressional chambers is equal to being kept off of shop floors and construction crews. But I’m focusing on how, not why. And for how it works, it’s useful to look at how social class makes you a misfit any time you don’t stay in your lane.

I think it happens when someone from the upper middle class like my parents find themselves in a situation where they’re surrounded by the established wealthy, the genuinely rich. I have a cousin who does volunteer work in the admin office of a charity foundation. She once told me about a time when she followed in the wake of a program administrator while he tried to schmooze potential donors at a charity event, and got the sense that all the wealthy patrons knew each other and had been to the same schools, but the program administrator she was tagging along with wasn’t one of them and had a different set of tiny behaviors, gestures, ways of speaking. He didn’t get the big donation he was hoping for.

I wonder what happens when the young adult children of the truly rich try to have an actual profession, on their own and independent of their parents’ clout, and all their behavioral habits mark them as trust fund leisure class prep kids. Do they come across as uncaringly lazy and arrogant and incapable, even if they’re trying hard, because of their mannerisms?

The system subdues the children of the rich, too. Class analysis urges us to blame the wealthy folks, as if they’re in charge of the unequal social structure. I think maybe as individuals they have no more experience of control than the rest of us. They’re defined by the structure too.

A big part of me not fitting in when I’m trying to find and keep a job is me not fitting in specifically with males. I didn’t notice that originally, or I didn’t consider it that way. But the working class world is a lot more sex segregated than the office world that people like my parents inhabit.

Guys always think I’m doing something offensively wrong. Thinking I’m better than them. They do this thing, it’s hard to describe, but it’s the equivalent of that high-five that Irma has us do at the beginning of morning meetings, and I don’t engage with them the right way.

The hardbander seemed offended that I didn’t join in with his sex-word-laden metaphors for the parts he was working on. I wasn’t bothered by his language, I didn’t act all huffy about it or anything like that. But he didn’t like me being polite. The roughnecks kept correcting my way of latching the clamp or handing a tool over. I should do it with more of a bang. They wanted me angrier, more emphatic. I wasn’t slow, and when I latched or attached something, it was solidly latched or attached. But still I wasn’t doing it right; the foreman said I wasn’t taking it seriously and could get them all hurt.

Back when I was in fourth grade, some boys in my class informed me that I walk wrong, that I bounce too much, and they took it upon themselves to instruct me. Walk flat and level, like this. And don’t walk around smiling, it makes you look stupid. Wear your face like this. Walk around showing that nobody better mess with me, see? It felt like they were partially doing this to get me on board, for my own good, but they were also annoyed with me.

They started calling me ‘Skippy’ and would prance in an exaggerated way when they saw me in the hallway, mocking me.


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I’m walking back towards my room when Valerie accosts me. “Hey, sissyboy. Do you play cards?”

“Some. Not poker, and not for money.”

“We aren’t betting. Just for fun. You know spades?”

“Decently well. I don’t know it as good as I know as hearts.”

“We need an extra person. We got me, Ronald and Jake, April and Joe. And it’s Joe’s last day.” She motions for me to follow.



“Hey hey, Derek! Have a sit down!”, Joe says, riffling the card deck. The classic red sketch of a bicycling angel beckons from the top card.

Hands are dealt. Bids are made. Tricks get taken.

After several games have been won and lost, I ask if they’d ever played Cutthroat Hearts or Oh Heck. Nobody’s heard of either.

“So tell us about them”, Ronald demands. “How are they different? How do you play?”

“Cutthroat hearts is where you shoot for low score. Every heart you take is a point. Queen of spades is thirteen all by herself. But the Jack of diamonds is minus ten, and you can also run hearts, if you get them all you take thirteen points off your total instead of adding a point for each heart.”

Jake says, “I know that one, I’ve played it, we called it ‘Shooting the Moon’. It’s not bad but I like Spades better.”

I nod, shuffle the deck, and deal out the starting cards.



* * *





I sit in my room with pen and paper, scribbling out edits to one of the chapters of The Amazon’s Brother. Ka-snap. I open the three-ring binder and put back the pages with the new notes. Close it again with a pop.

The Amazon’s Brother is really my first attempt to describe what it was like being me, growing up, going through puberty and adolescence, and on into early adulthood and finally coming out as...something different. Heterosexual sissy. And radical feminist. The second half of the book is my attempt to write contributions to feminist theory, integrating my experiences with the perspective that feminists understand and believe. They’re the visionaries and radicals of our time, my teachers and heroes, the people who gave me tools and viewing angles for discussing gender; and I want to contribute and belong. I want to be part of a shared identity, to be plural. For once in my life I want to join something.

And now I’ve had new thoughts and new analyses, prompted by my recent recollections of being at UNM that fall, when I was semi-accepted socially. I’ve been pondering the resultant questions about having a sense of belongingness and how being accepted can be a two-edged sword if the people who accept you don’t understand you. Hence my recent thoughts about needing to pull people closer and push them away at the same time.

I have The Amazon’s Brother here with me because I’m still working on it, but also because I always want to have it with me. I left a backup copy in my bedroom at my grandparents’ house, but I certainly didn’t want to leave the only copy of the book behind and risk something happening to it while I’m gone. I want it within reach.

And...did I take it with me the other day when I slipped out the unlocked door? Of course not.

I’ve thought at times that I might share The Amazon’s Brother with people here at Elk Meadow. That could still happen. Maybe.


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

= July 26, 1982 (Day Eight) =

That small animated nurse with the freckles is on the phone with someone who has a loud boomy voice, and I can hear him complaining about something on his bill. Someone must have transferred a call to the wrong line. I make eye contact with her and find myself smiling. God she’s cute. What was her name? Patty? She rolls her eyes and holds the phone farther from her ear. “Sir, that’s not my jurisdiction. You need to call back....”

I give her a nod and attempt a wry and sophisticated cynical smirk.

In a chromium rack on the counter, manila folders stand up with plastic tabs that have our names on them — Noelle’s, mine, Ellen’s, Jake’s, Ronald’s...

The nurse finally manages to get off the phone and says something to her colleague about needing a break. Colleague replies “See you in a bit, Penelope”, which gives me her name. Oh yeah, and I think Gary called her Penny, that’s the name I heard. Hey, I was close. We end up walking together down the hall.

With plastic trays and stainless steel utensils and napkins in hand, we point at hash browns and sausages and the counter person dishes out what we’ve chosen. “I’m curious about something”, I mention to her. “When this place was being described to me, one of the things they said would be part of the experience would be an examination of nutrition and vitamins and electrolytes and all that stuff, how the things that we eat affect how our brains work. I was in nursing school before I got here, studying to be an LPN, and I really liked the classwork ... anyway, it doesn’t seem like they do any of that here as a class, I mean it’s not on my schedule and I haven’t seen anything like that on anyone else’s.”

“No, I mean we have a dietician who sets guidelines they use in meal planning. But you’re right, there’s no instruction. Did you like nursing?”

“I liked a lot of things about it. I liked being a member of the nursing team, and I liked the patients.”

“Think you’ll go back to it?”

“I have been thinking about that...but...I don’t think caring for people on a physical-body level is what I’m best suited for. The biggest problem was feeling like I was invading people’s space and interfering with their autonomy. I had a patient die once while I was at lunch. I took his vitals and gave him his meds, went to lunch, came back and he wasn’t breathing, no pulse. It wasn’t unexpected, congestive heart failure and a DNR order, so it was just a matter of when. Anyway, I asked my nursing instructor ‘What do I do now?’, and she said after I report it to the ward supervisor, if I could clean him up for the family, that would be good. So as I’m giving him a bed bath and rolling him over and arranging, I realize how much easier these things are when the person is dead. Because then I’m not worried that I’m bothering him, you know? Anyway, I think maybe when you feel like it’s inconvenient that the rest of your patients aren’t all dead, that could be a sign that nursing might not be where you belong.”



* * *





I walk past the piano and down the corridor to the doors to recreation. Sun glares down out of a pale blue sky. Texas hot and dry. Same as it ever was... yeah thanks, David Byrne.

Many of the other residents are dressed more sensibly than I am. George and Ronald are in cutoff jean shorts; Valerie has nylon shorts with piping. All I brought were full-length pants.

”Hey everybody”, Joanne greets. She’s attired in dark rose spandex and she has very nice shapes. “Today I want us to take turns running a lap around the track. I’m going to time you, and I want you each to try to do your run as close to exactly three minutes as possible. That’s not all that fast but it can be a challenge if you’re not used to running.”

I feel like moving; I’m restless and I’ve got the urge to walk for hours, which is my favorite way to let the back of my head process stuff and sort things out. Instead, I shuffle and stand and wait my turn with the others.

I’m not the first person to whom Joanne calls out, “You’re going faster than pace. Pull it back a bit”, and I’m also not the last. The speed she’s picked for us is just barely faster than a brisk stride. Awkward, too slow to run, too fast to walk. Maybe it’s useful to exercise this weird gait but it’s unpleasant.

Ronald just ignores Joanne and runs at a much faster speed. “I don’t care, I used to run track, c’mon Joanne, this isn’t fun!” Then Valerie clowns around, running backwards part of the way, finally sprinting to the end. Mutiny.

”Well, I’m going to run around the outside perimeter”, I point.

”Couldn’t you just do jumping jacks or something?”, Joanne suggests. She’s admittedly cute in her stretchy clothes. Male sexuality is annoyingly stupid. I don’t like Joanne. She flattens my ears, I don’t know why. I do like the way she looks. I don’t like how that makes me feel.

”I’d rather cover some ground”, I reply, then take off at a lope. Enough other people aren’t following instructions that I don’t figure my own insurrection will matter.

Initially, I run around the outside border of the recreation space, the tennis courts and track and ballfield area. After two laps of that, I widen out and run along the inside edge of the fence that encloses the undeveloped area of the hospital property with trees and underbrush. Things had been cut back to put in the fence, but it means hopping over dead branches and leaping over boulders, so it’s more of a cross-country run.

Joanne yells out to me. As I come around the building side of the rec area, she waits in front and I slow to a stop. “I’d really rather you didn’t get that far away”, she tells me.



* * *





I take my customary seat in Mark’s office. He comes around and briefly clasps my shoulders in a greeting-hug. I think he’s sincere about wanting to be a caring counselor-person. I’ve thrown a lot at him, honestly. He’s still here, trying.

“You got out and then you decided to come back in”, he says, stating the somewhat obvious. “What do you think you learned from those events?”

“The important thing here is that I get to be the one to decide how I’m going to spend my time. Even when I’m showing up for all the things that are on my schedule, that’s me deciding to go along with that, and I don’t have to. Speaking of which, by the way, I still have AA and NA on my schedule, and as I’ve told you, I don’t think they’re relevant to me and I’d like them taken off. I get that not being an alcoholic or a drug abuser doesn’t mean I don’t need help to come to terms with how I’m living my life, but if I accept that, I’m still not a drug addict or an alcoholic.”

“I see your point, but the twelve step programs aren’t on your schedule because you have a drug or alcohol problem. That may be what they’re mostly focused on, but you can probably get something out of them anyway, and apply them to your own situation. Everyone here is signed up for AA and NA. I can ask, and see what your treatment team thinks, but we don’t want to start a mad rush for everyone dropping sessions that they probably need, so I can’t make you any promises. Meanwhile, please keep attending.”

I look back at him, noncommittal.

“I’ve noticed”, Mark comments, “that you take a certain pride in being immune to other people’s opinions. What I want you to think about, is that it may not be all positive, this not caring what other people think. You’re going to find it hard to bridge gaps and connect with people if you don’t give a shit about how they feel.”



I am thinking about that pretty extensively these days, but it’s not a simple situation that reconciles easily. I think Mark Raybourne would like to establish it like some kind of ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ maxim, some profound and single-sided truth, the kind of insight you embroider into a sampler and frame for your wall. ‘You can’t get close to people and push them away at the same time’ or something like that.

The example situation that my mind keeps harkening back to is fall of ‘79, University of New Mexico, the semester just before I came out. Unlike a lot of other places and times prior to that, where I’d been harassed and attacked, ridiculed for being femme and called queer and faggot and all that, the UNM students had mostly been pretty non-judgmental and accepting. Several of them came right up to me and told me so. They’d say things like, “If you can accept yourself, you’ll find that other people are ready to accept you as you are.” The central problem was that most of them perceived me as a shy gay guy who was uptight and in denial about it and still in the closet, but freaking out. That’s the pattern they had some familiarity with; it was the phenomenon they knew about.

I didn’t have a handle on my difference yet myself, I just knew their tolerant reaction made me really uncomfortable. That particular acceptance wasn’t letting me be myself, it was pushing me into something. Or towards something. That sounds homophobic, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t gay male people who were doing the pushing here. Think about that. I was being pushed towards thinking of myself as either gay or else embracing straight-plus-masculine, the only alternative.

By the time spring rolled around, everything was different; I was cheerfully telling people “I’m actually not a gay guy, I’m a sissy, like the opposite of a tomboy. Think of me as one of the girls except I happen to be male. It’s similar in some ways to being gay, but also different.” But I couldn’t have told them that in the fall. Things hadn’t clicked into place for me yet.

So sometimes it is necessary for me to tug on people to pull them closer with one hand, while pushing back at them with the other. A type of ‘yes, but’ reaction to what they are thinking about me and how they are behaving towards me. I mean, sure, if people are being hostile and judgmental, I don’t need to bother with them and their opinion of me doesn’t matter. I know I don’t deserve that. And I don’t even hate them for it any more—they’re messed up and their heads are full of twisted notions and lots of avoidance. There’s some creepy horror movie version of us that they’re scared of, and it isn’t even us they’re scared of, it’s their own weird horror movie shit. At the opposite extreme, if people are taking time to really get me and understand me, I do care and their thoughts do matter. But so much of the time it’s somewhere in between those positions. Not closed off to me but seeing me in skewed ways, filtered through assumptions and attitudes.

—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Jeremy signals the sense of a question mark, turning those big hands palms upward and then outward. “So what do you think is causing this, this difficulty in communicating? You make the effort. And you don't think people are deliberately tuning you out.” He's expressive with his long gangly arms; definitely a good communicator himself.

“I don't know”, I reply, “that's part of the frustration. Dr. Barnes and some of the counselors are always telling me I'm intellectualizing. But they do it too, I mean concepts like alcoholism and being in denial, those are all intellectual concepts, it's just that people are already familiar with them. Whoever explained those concepts for the first time had to lay out what they meant by those terms, they're abstractions. Well, when I try to do that, it's really difficult to get people to listen long enough to see if I'm making sense.”

“I've got an idea”, Marie tells me. “Let’s set up a scenario...”

Jeremy and Marie script a new drama setup, assigning Noelle to play me and a handful of others to represent the people I try to speak to. Jeremy gives instructions to Joe and Jake and Valerie: “Joe, you start off complaining... I know, complain that your children won’t do their chores around the house. You other folks try to give him advice. Then Noelle, as Derek, will have something to say.”

Meanwhile, Marie is whispering to Noelle, and the two confer conspiratorially, glancing over at me, scheming, Marie's sandy-honey hair bobbing next to Noelle's short brown cropped head.

Lights, camera, action. Marie wields the VHS recorder.

“These kids”, Joe states, “I love them but they’re driving me nuts! They won’t lift a hand around the place, they’re lazy and irresponsible!”

“Well, are they getting an allowance?”, Jake asks. “Cut them off until they pitch in!”

Valerie suggests, “Have you sat down with them and tried to talk with them about it when you aren’t mad at them?”

“I talk, but it goes in one ear and out the other!”, Joe replies.

“I have some important wisdom to offer you”, states Noelle-as-Derek, walking in with an arrogant strut. “Children and chores both appear in front of us but we can’t project the synthesis. Illusions can create that for us in our thoughts, and we invent theories but never analyze the intellectuals because we’re too busy in concrete. There are concepts! Chores have meaning. But only on Fridays! Do you understand why? Have you considered the cognitive? You can be a discrepancy!”

Joe, Valerie, and Jake look at each other in cartoon confusion, putting on bewildered faces and shrugging. Then Valerie shakes her head and turns her back to Noelle-Derek and continues what she was previously saying to Joe, “Maybe if you made a chore list and posted it on the wall.”

I feel a strong hot flash of anger. I’ve opened myself up to these people! I get mocked and ridiculed often enough without it coming from people I’ve let in. And I most certainly do not go around pretending I have something to say just to spout incoherent word soup at people! Then, amazingly, I find myself giggling. Yes, that’s exactly how people act, like I’d just said something that made no sense at all!

“That was beautiful”, Jake pronounces. “She’s got you nailed.”

“Derek”, Jeremy says, “I’d like you to reflect back what you’re feeling after watching that.”

“Well...”, I begin, “I do have an ego stake in thinking I have something important to say. One thing that’s a bit of a hot button for me, I guess, is when people think I’m just trying to sound smart and impress people. Like that poster that people used to have, ‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit’. I’m not playing that game, I’m not doing this to look smart. Promise. I don’t speak up unless I think I actually have something to say. But I admit that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to be regarded as smart. Or wise.”

“That may be”, Valerie says, “but sometimes you say stuff that sounds like what Noelle just said. You ever stop to think it might make other people feel dumb? It’s like ‘What’d he just say? Did you get that? No, me either, I guess we’re too stoooopid to understand him’. So maybe it feels like that’s something you do on purpose. Even if it’s not.”

“Yeah, man”, Jake agrees, “we got one of them there ego stakes in this too, you know”, he says, making quotation marks with his fingers. “You could maybe work on saying what you want to say without using the most college level words you can come up with.”

“Well, I don’t do that on purpose either. A lot of time I’m trying to be precise. Words and phrases that don’t get used by people as often can sometimes be very exact in what they mean. Like latching onto an idea with a set of surgical clamps, you got a really precise hold. Everyday words get stretched to mean a wider range of things, because they get so much use. And they also, a lot of the time, they take on additional implications, a sort of package deal, and if you don’t want to include stuff that’s associated, especially if you’re trying to call those assumptions into question, you want a clinically detached kind of word. And I think in those words. I don’t have to rummage around in my head for them. To say it in simpler language, that would require searching for the right words.”

Noelle nods and says, “Yeah, but if your problem is you’re not getting through to people, maybe that’s what you’ve got to do. Take time to find the right simpler words and bring it down to earth.”



* * *



I end up sitting across from Valerie in the cafeteria after psychodrama lets out. “I’ve noticed something about you”, she tells me. “You don’t get all upset and bent out of shape when somebody tells you something right to your face that’s not quite what you want to hear. But you act like nobody’s done that very often. Are you like an only child and your friends don’t set you straight and shit?”

“I’ve got a younger sister”, I answer. “But it’s like you said about your own sister the other day, we weren’t very close growing up either. When I was a kid, I wanted to be her older brother and I guess I wanted her to look up to me and let me take care of her, but she never wanted that...she probably wouldn’t have put up with it from anyone else if they’d been her older sister or brother, either, though, she was always ‘No, I can do it myself, I don’t need help’, but yeah, anyway, I felt pretty pushed away from early on”.

“That’s kinda unusual, I think it’s more often the younger kid who gets pushed away.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right about that. So for once in my life I’m an exception.”

Valerie grins.

Anyway, once she was old enough to go to school, she had more friends than I did. I was the weird brainy one, she was the more popular one that people liked. We didn’t really have the kind of relationship where either of us could tell the other one something and not have them on edge like this was maybe an attack. I think it’s fair to say we cared about each other but... we didn’t trust each other entirely.”

Valerie nods. “Me and my sister got to be like that. Not so much originally, it was more like we were always trying to outdo each other, but when I was in high school was when things really went sour. She knew the stuff I was doing before anyone else, and she started thinking of me as a fuckup.”

We eat for a while in silence. I think about all those long years in elementary school and junior high and high school.



“I’m tired of always being an outsider”, I say to Valerie. “I think I’m getting better at being with people and not thinking they’re out to get me, but it’s always kind of hovering there, in the background, that they could be trying to hurt me, because people did, a lot, and maybe that’s never going to completely go away.”

Valerie tightens her lip and nods slowly. “Trust is hard.”





* * *



"Can you push up your sleeve a bit more...", the nurse says to Joe. She’s not one of the nurses who were on shift when I came back from the Harrisons, but I think I might have met her on that first long evening when I came in. She has red hair with a tinge of brown in it, a scattering of freckles, and she’s small and moves rapidly. I watch as she pumps the blood pressure cuff and records Joe’s numbers. It's Sunday. Routine vital signs for our unit. "Okay, that's good”, she tells him. “Hey, so how're you doing? I haven’t seen you in about a week."

Joe nods and smiles. "I think things are working out pretty good, I guess. They don't always tell me, but I get the feeling."

She jots down some more notes in her chart and Joe stands up; I’m in line behind him, so it will be my turn next.

Joe continues, "You really got to be all in on the program if you wanna get something out of being here, I’ve always been onboard with that... but lately I’ve been kind of thinking you can't be going around all worried and wondering about how well you're doing because that's like not believing in the program. I'm really into positivity at the moment. Like sooner or later you gotta go out that door."

I'm momentarily thinking he means the door we found and opened yesterday afternoon. Joe had been there with me, along with several others, but I was the only one who actually went out.

Then I reinterpret Joe’s statement — Oh, I bet he means he's expecting to be discharged soon and be on his way. He’s been all-in on Elk Meadow since I first met him, total cheerleader for the place, even more than Ronald and Ellen, but yeah, once he’s out of here he can’t exactly be glancing at them for some kinds of thumbs-up approval.

Gary Stevens comes around the corner, his shoes making a little squeak on the linoleum tiles, and he slips a resident’s file into the file rack on the counter. The animated nurse gives me a little nod and gestures to the chair, then glances back over her shoulder at Gary. “You getting off-shift?”, she says. “You might want to stay off the Sam Houston, there was some kind of pileup in the outbound lane.”

“Yeah, thanks Penny. Long day. Be glad to put my feet up.” He heads down the hallway.

Penny the nurse turns to me where I’m now seated. “Welcome back. Umm, don’t tell anyone, but I endorse playing hookey now and then. I think I’m due for making a run for it myself!”, she adds with a wink and a grin. Co-conspirators, she and I. I guess word has gotten around about my little outing.

She wraps the Prestige Sphygmomanometer (same model of blood pressure cuff we used in Athens Hospital) around my upper arm, pulls the outer layer velcro down smoothly to the matching inner section, thumbs the release wheel closed, and pumps with fast squeezes. “How’re you feeling? Any leftover itches and sneezes from being outdoors? You said before that you’ve got respiratory allergies, right? That must suck in the summer with the jimson weed everywhere. And you came in from out of state, didn’t you?” She shakes her head. “So you’re not used to it. That stuff’s bad. I get red eyes from it myself.”

I’m impressed with how she can be casual and friendly with everyone and so totally efficient taking down these routine measurements and herding everyone through the process without being pushy about it. And she remembers people.

I think I could be good at some of this stuff myself. I realize as I sit there watching her scribble down my results that I’m not entirely ready to let go of the notion that I could be a nurse. Although I couldn’t do what she’s doing now. I’d have to learn how to recognize people by appearance. But Ms. O’Neil said I had a good rapport with my patients, that they reported that I was kind and listened to them. And I understand the biology and I’m good with words, so I can follow complex instructions and my charting is clear and has good details. As my Dad says, I’ve got to do something. I have to think on this some more.

—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I finally get passed onto my wing, my unit. Emily, being Unit Leader, is in charge and has every opportunity to berate me, but she doesn’t. “We’re so glad you’re back”, she says.

I see Jake and April. Now I see them as a pair. It was probably right there in front of me before and I wasn’t parsing it. I do feel a mild resentment. There’s a space in my head for ‘Why not April and Derek’. I don’t mean we were destined to be and now I’m deprived, more like ‘why isn’t it ever me’. April is somewhat atypical. She has characteristics and expressions that a person might tag as more like the boys than the girls, and she kind of pushes that out there. Therefore somewhat like me on the other side of the divide. And too often when I notice someone like that, especially someone broadcasting it as a defintion of who they are, it turns out she’s only attracted to female people, so then when that’s not the case, it’s annoying that it’s often still not me, or at least someone like me, that’s she’s inclined to latch onto. Well, not their fault, April and Jake, either of them. I nod to them both. I also wave to Ronald, Noelle, and Valerie, who motion for me to join them.

Ronald is apparently addressing Noelle: “...thing you gotta realize is that men are always gonna be in competition about it, it’s that old caveman inside us, spread your seed, make as many babies as you can, but then we get all jealous and shit if our women are being all loose and easy with other men. We want the babies to be ours.”

Noelle shakes her head, her short brown bangs flying. “That’s uncool, you don’t get to have one rule for the girls and different rules for the guys. He was fucking around and I caught him at it, that’s all there is to it!”

Valerie nods, adding, “Besides, it doesn’t make sense, I mean, let’s say you’re a caveman and you’re screwing cave chicks left and right, and the other guys in your tribe are doing that, too...you don’t know which kids are yours, none of you do, and why the fuck would a caveman care?”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with kids”, Noelle says, “it’s selfishness. People want to cheat but they don’t wanna be cheated on.”

“I think it’s kind of silly to worry about that”, I say. “If you care about someone and they care about you, why should it bother you if they have sex with someone else? I think the sixties flower children had it right, jealousy isn’t about love, it’s about being uptight and controlling!”

“That’s not realistic”, Noelle replies. “It feels like a gut punch, a betrayal, after you’ve trusted someone like that and then they go and do this shit behind your back.”

“Yeah, I get that”, Ronald says. “I’m not saying it isn’t a fucked-up thing to do, because it is. Just because guys act like that a lot of the time don’t mean it’s all right.”

I shake my head. “It’s only cheating if you make a promise that you won’t be sexual with anyone else. It’s a stupid promise that people shouldn’t make, because it’s an attempt to make love safe, but everyone ends up worrying there’ll be cheating, so love still isn’t safe, and then we resent being restricted and confined by the promise. I see all these people going around, like...” I switch to a cartoon voice:

“‘Oh, Love of my Life, because I love you so much, I insist that if you find yourself wanting to have sex with someone else, you won’t’...”,

then, dropping back to my regular voice, “that’s not an expression of love, that’s a demand for a sacrifice!”

Noelle scowls at me. “I don’t appreciate being called stupid, and you acting all superior like you’re above all this jealousy, I mean, can you hear yourself?”

Valerie adds, “Yeah, you do like to act like ‘this is just the way it is’, passing judgment and shit on other people, I guess you can dish it out better than you can take it.”

“Truth, bro”, Ronald says, pronouncing from that horse-face of his.

I feel my face flush hot. “I’m sorry, I apologize. I didn’t think about how that would come across. Jealousy doesn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t mean it to sound like I’m right about this and y’all are stupid not to agree.”





The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about thirty-five students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. Thompson and Ms. Dixon, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.

I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun too. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. Thompson spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called terpen hydrate. But then there was the TURP surgical procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). Or how to interpolate from a series of vital sign measurements. Anyway, at some point I was sitting next to her and glanced at her exactly when I heard the syllable “turp”, and I guess we both reacted as if her name was being called — and it made us giggle. And after that, in one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.

I liked my classmates and our camaraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Reena said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.

I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly-smiling dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband.” Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.

“Where’s Marjorie?”

“Well, she’s not coming.”

I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.

Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally be interested in going that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.

How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem in the same way? I mean, where these are the people that you like, the people you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also sometimes attracted to them... and you want that to happen too, some of the time? What if you don’t start off making a distinction? Just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.

Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.

The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part. I’m really bad at it.

So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning manly courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.

Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even downright creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices. I mean, I never properly learned to. I’m pretty unfiltered.

It’s all rather complicated. I long ago (well, two years ago) reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. Flouncy Derek. What I really really want, though, is a chance to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.

————

I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.

I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.

When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.

Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.



—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

Bleached bluewhite sky and blast-furnace dry. Lots of Houston sun.

I take the left, not knowing where I am but liking the sense of a built-up area in that direction. Another twenty minutes’ walking takes me past a grocery store parking lot and a post office and a couple of strip malls. The second one has a multiplex movie house showing Tron, Grease II, and Author! Author!; after a few moments’ consideration, I go on in and buy myself a ticket for the afternoon showing of Author! Author! and get myself a small buttered popcorn.



* * *



When the movie lets out, I ask the ticket seller if there are any pay phones around, and she points me to one in a corner of the carpeted lobby. In my wallet I find the folded slip with emergency contact numbers on it, and sure enough, I have a phone number for the Harrisons, former students from my dad’s days as a college professor. My parents had said if anything goes wrong, I could contact them.

Pickup on the third ring. “Hi, is this Melinda Harrison? I’m Derek Turner. I don’t know if you remember me... oh, you do? Oh, they told you I’d be here in town for awhile...”

“No, nothing’s wrong... I’m out on a day pass, I just felt like a change of scenery... I was wondering if maybe you and Reggie would have any interest in having dinner together somewhere, if you knew a place around here...”

Melinda suggests I come eat dinner with them at their home, and when I ask about directions for getting there, says Reggie will come pick me up. She recognizes the movie theatre and knows where it is.



Reggie pulls into the parking lot. I doubt I would have recognized him if I’d just run into him out of context, but when he gets out of the silver Datsun and looks around for someone who might be waiting, and waves at me, he looks familiar although we haven’t seen each other in many years. Curly dark hair, copper-colored wireframe glasses over a short wide nose. I walk over and we shake hands. I get in on the passenger’s side.

“Well...how have you been doing?”, he asks me. And once I hear his voice, it’s him.

“A mixed bag, I suppose, but overall mostly positive. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the last couple years, and I’m much happier and more confident than I was before. I spent years worrying that there was something different about me that was like defective and pathetic. Or if I stopped thinking so, it meant I was in denial that I was different, and then it would keep smacking me in the face, you know, other people would react in ways that showed they saw me as different, ...and maybe pathetic and all that. I’ve come around to thinking I’m different and proud of my differences, and so I’m not running away from it or worrying about it any more, and when people act like that, I know it’s because they don’t know any better. I don’t deserve it but it isn’t personal either, it’s a kind of prejudice that some people have.”

“Wow, that sounds really heavy. I’m glad for you if that has made you happy, and I have to say, you do sound a lot more confident than I remember you.”

“I’m here in a program that may help me get a handle on how to communicate better and be less isolated in the world. I guess my folks probably told you something about that?”

“They did say you were here in town to be in some kind of program, yeah. I’m not sure I understood what it was all about.”

I’m probably dispensing more of me that I have any right to assume he asked for. Okay, definitely doing that, even though it’s Reggie, and I just fell into talking to him easily because he has always been comfortable to talk to, he was a good listener when I was nine. But I also have reasons. I’ve never been good at small talk when there’s real stuff that’s right there on everybody’s mind, that everyone knows about, or at least knows enough about that it’s defining their perceptions. It was probably explained to the Harrisons as ‘Derek is going into a drug rehab facility’, so I don’t have a lot of reason to act self-conscious about the whole business of working on myself.

After a handful of suburban turns, we pull into a driveway and I follow Reggie into the one-story orange-bricked house.

“Hi, Derek”, Melinda greets me. A Dorothy Hamill sort of haircut, perky little face. She says, “Yes, of course I remember you! We sat on the couch when your dad hosted a Physics Department party, and you told me all about your Ralph Vaughan Williams album that you’d just gotten.”

“Yeah... I’ve still got it, in my record collection at home. Been played about a zillion times but not too many scratches. I’ve taken pretty good care of my records. That would have been around fifth grade. And a couple years later, you two came to visit us in New Mexico, too, and we went hiking.”

“Oh, yes, and I got lost! I thought all of you were on up ahead of me and somehow I got ahead of you instead, and I kept trying to catch up.”

Melinda begins fixing onion burgers. Formica countertop, some bowls and cutting boards. I offer to help, which at first she turns down, but when I offer more specifically to slice the onions, she passes me a knife and wooden cutting board.

“So”, I ask, “what do you folks do nowadays? Did you stick with physics?”

“We did... in fact, I’m working in the aerospace industry here. And Reggie is on faculty at the university with a research grant. Things have worked out pretty well for us.”

She slices up jalapeño peppers to put on our burgers and we all sit around the table, eating burgers with salsa and chips.

As Melinda dips her tortilla chip into the salsa, she comments, “I remember when Edward, Dr. Turner — your dad, I mean — was having trouble getting the stores in Valdosta to put salsa on the shelf. They said nobody would buy it — Mexican food wasn’t something that people in Georgia knew about back then — and he talked this one store into putting out a row of it as long as he promised he’d buy the whole crate if nobody else bought any. Then he told all of us who were taking his classes... he’d gotten us all hooked on chips and salsa by then... he told us to go in and buy some so they’d see there would be a demand for it, you know? So when he goes there, he says to the guy, ‘Hey, I thought you were going to put out some of that salsa!’ and the grocery guy says, ‘I did’, and he goes over there and they’re all gone. By the end of the summer, they were keeping four rows of the stuff.”

“Oh yeah, that totally sounds like him.”

“Your parents are good people. They have their own quirky way of doing things, for sure, but they were always kind to us.”

“They are good people”, I agree. “I think parenting is complicated, and I don’t always get to see them at their best. I inherited the quirky, like I said in the car”, I say, making eye contact with Reggie, “and maybe some of that is more than they ever bargained for, but they’ve always been on my side, at least as far as they could figure where my side was.”

Melinda says, “It’s good that you can see that it’s difficult on their end. Kids can miss that sometimes, a lot of the time, and don’t have much patience for when parents are struggling with how to do what’s best.”

“My dad loves me very much, but he just can’t let go of the steering wheel. He does it with Jan, too. I don’t think he’s trying to control us on purpose. In fact I don’t think he even knows he’s doing it. The problem is...he’s always thought farther ahead, on a curve of events he can forecast, than we have. Plans we could make, things we could consider. I think he sees it as making sure we see all that stuff so we can make choices, but, you know, framing someone’s options is a form of control. Now with my mom, it’s different. She wants us to be in charge of our lives. But she doesn’t see any reason why it should be at all complicated. So she gets impatient when things don’t work out. She was pushed, so pushing is loving. Be who you need to be, figure it out, do it and quit whining. I end up with her telling me to grow up and him wanting to look over my shoulder and take care of me and micromanage, and we all get very frustrated sometimes.”

Reggie comments, “It’s so easy to look at how your parents do things and tell yourself ‘I am never going to make that mistake’, and then you have kids of your own and go, ‘Oh, now I get it’.”

I nod. Rest my chin in the palm of my hand. “One thing I eventually realized is how my dad, by being so opinionated and so emphatic about his opinions, shoved me in the direction of having to set my own priorities. By him emphasizing everything that he thinks about anything, he ends up emphasizing nothing”, I say, doing my own emphasizing with chops of my hands. “It’s like he’ll say, ‘The Ormandy recording of Lohengrin is absolutely the best performance of Wagner ever recorded’ and he’ll make it sound just as important and serious as ‘A good person makes every effort to keep any promises they have made’ or ‘Freedom is worth dying for., I’m exaggerating a little, but seriously, every opinion of his gets emphasis.”


I pause for a moment. Neither Reggie nor Melinda says anything, although Melinda looks like she might be formulating something to say.

I continue, “When I was little he always swooped in and took care of me, defending me against the school people and also saying in various ways that you can’t be excellent but also not be any different, or else excellent doesn’t mean anything. It’s not that I don’t feel cared about and loved, I do. But I have to figure things out for myself now.”

I get nods on that one.


————

I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.

I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.

When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.

Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.



—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

After the lab technicians unhook me, I head towards the cafeteria for lunch. Jake is on the line, sees me, says “Whoa, that was fuckin’ weird this morning.”

I nod. “Yeah, I hadn’t expected that. I mean, not quite that, at any rate.”

“So what’s this about? What’s he saying you did?”

“Well, I have some taped-up stuff on my door, I do that the same way that folks with cars have bumper stickers”, I explain. “I mean, when I was in college, in the dorms, we taped stuff up on our doors, and I got in the habit. Like, back in Athens, on my bedroom door I have a hand-lettered sign in all caps that says “IF I THOUGHT IT WOULD RESULT IN YOU UNDERSTANDING THE THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD I WOULD GLADLY PLUCK MY HEAD FROM MY SHOULDERS AND DASH IT OPEN AT YOUR FEET; I WOULD GIVE MY LIFE TO ATTAIN A MEANINGFUL COMMUNICATION WITH YOU.” Jake stares at me and I belatedly realize that perhaps that particular example wasn’t making me more relatable. “Anyway”, I continue, “I made a reply to his fancy office nameplate, with a nameplate of my own, with my name and my current qualifications, which are ‘H.B.’ for ‘human being’ and ‘Pt.’ for ‘patient’. Ballpoint and paper, black out the parts that aren’t the letters, so you leave white letters. Taped it on my door.”

Jake nods. Companionable silence for awhile.



Jake looks at me. “So you’re into girls. Like, who? Is there anyone here you think is hot or cute”?

“Nobody I got any kind of flirty stuff going on with, but if you mean just looking from the outside and saying who seems like... you know, like someone you’d like to have the chance to see where things go..., well, April. The other person, maybe, is Ellen, oddly enough.” This all feels odd. I never really got into the habit of discussing my attractional portfolio with other males. It’s weird that I feel comfortable talking to Jake about it.



Hmm, now see?, remarks an internal self-questioning voice.

That’s a sign you’ve formed preconceptions. Thinking of yourself as essentially one of the girls. Now you react to male experience as foreign experience. But meanwhile you want female people to not react to your experience as foreign experience. So you don’t want to be othered but I guess it’s okay when you do it?

Yeah, of course you can be a genuine exception to the rule, and hence to the stereotypes. That can make you not able to occupy the roles. I don’t mean roles like The Daddy and The Mommy or for that matter The Breadwinner and The Mommy. I mean roles like Clark Gable as Rhett Butler or Sally Field as Norma Rae and so forth, examples of “check out who this person is and how they behave” that are shared complex character stereotypes, and they’re gendered for us. Those are roles. They are representative person-shapes we already hold in our minds, waiting for an appropriate person to pour into them and get interpreted as one of that type of character that we happen to know personally. Archetypes. It’s an oversimplification, yet it’s also a starting point in getting to know someone.

But since I’m complaining that the roles don’t fit me, maybe it’s not fair to then pigeonhole other people into role-identities of the type I hate being sorted into. And maybe I’m doing that whenever I see other males as a unified other.



Jake, maleness aside, doesn’t seem so foreign, although he is now looking at me oddly again, because I’ve gotten all distracted inside my head.. “...you get what I’m saying? I’m not doing a ‘hands off’ thing, like ‘she’s my girl’, I’m just saying, we been together, April and me, and that probably isn’t gonna change. That’s all.”

“Oh... well like I said, it was just a sense of ‘Hmm’, like if it could go in that direction, hey, maybe that could be good’. I like April. So, umm... good for you two to be together. Especially in this place.”

We wander over towards the lounge. Ronald and April and Joe join us. Now it feels awkward that I just discussed April with Jake. Why do male people expect to compare notes? No, that’s actually not what’s occupying my attention. Why do we want to be private about who we find fascinating and cute and have interest in? Also, why do people feel entitled to ask a lot of invasive personal questions about that stuff?



* * *



Hanging out in the kitchen, I describe to April and Ronald and the others what I would ideally change about Elk Meadow; I like some of what they’ve got going here, but there are severe deficits and issues, too, and I’m as entitled to evaluate them as they are to evaluate me.

I’m self-conscious lately about being pretentious. But I’m fired up and people kind of seem to be listening to me for a change.

“If I was in charge of setting up a place that people could go to and get help with things in their thinking or things in their feeling that they say they need help with... you know, first off I would still want to have a place where people confront their issues. Taking it seriously. But they would have the responsibility of identifying their issues.”

I pivot from facing left to facing right. I’ve been trying to remember to move around when I’m speaking, so this is good. “So first, when they come in, give them a wide range of clothes they can dress in, or, of course, what they brought in with them or anything else they want to bring in later. And in Arts and Crafts, they’d have a chance to develop anything they want, so they can communicate unobstructed. And there should be typewriters. And video recorders. And tape decks. But most important, there’s the front door. And you got a pass that says you’re a resident so you can go out whenever you feel like it and get back in at will. Go to the library and read books. Then go to the local movie house and catch what’s playing. Go hang out at the pub. Interact with people who aren’t here in the clinic. The clinic shouldn’t be your whole life. But the door is open so you come on back later on.”



“Yeah, you know, I’m tired of them thinking I don’t take this seriously”, Ronald tells us later on.

“If you aren’t taking it seriously”, I reply, “I don’t know who else could qualify.” I’m less convinced than he is that it’s entirely a complimentary assessment. But... hey, you know, it does make sense to think of it that way, that here at Elk Meadow there’s a competitive How Seriously Do You Take It discussion that’s part of your progress and levels assessment.

Hence Emily, now that I think of it. Yeah, of course she’s doing that. It isn’t a farcical mockery, it’s willful obedience. I’ll be exactly who you want me to be, just as competitively as humanly possible.



April says, “We can’t ever do enough to please them. Not quite. We’ve always gotta owe them, something where we let them down.”

I say, “They always say it’s for us, that we’re letting ourselves down.”

April rolls her eyes. “Of course, they always say that!.”



April departs. We have sex-segregated wings and I head back with the guys. We pass an exterior door. I don’t know what prompts me to look down, maybe I catch something from my peripheral vision, but the little tongue of the electrically disabled door is retracted, as if someone were pushing on the bars to get out. “Oh, hey, check this out”, I say. The others stop. Glances go back and forth.

“Naaaw, man....”, Joe says. “It probably sets off an alarm the moment you try it.”

The brass-colored push bars have a loose chain wrapped around them on the inside. I figure with nothing stopping the unlatched door’s outward motion except the length of the chain, I could slither through comfortably enough.

Jake says, “I don’t think the alarm knows the door is being opened if it already can’t tell the door latch is pushed in like that. So yeah, if we can fit through there, we could be on the town, man. Go see a movie.”

Ronald glances out to the portion of the outdoors we can see from the window. “Where you gonna go? I don’t know anybody around here.”

“I actually do”, I say. “My parents know a couple, they were both college students of his from back when he was a professor. They’re really decent folks, so I might go pay them a visit.”

Joe tries the door carefully, and we watch as he presses the latchbar and pushes the door slowly open. He makes an “after you” gesture to the rest of us.

Ronald winces and says, “If I had anyone I knew around here.”

Jake looks at me. “I should fuckin’ do this, and I don’t see nothing wrong with it. I mean, don’t really get all stuck in the notion I do, cuz that isn’t how it is. I don’t think I’m going to, not this time, but I’ve done stuff like this in the past and I don’t regret it.”

So it’s just me. I squirm past the chain.

It’s kind of spontaneous but it fits my mood. I shouldn’t dignify the situation by describing it as a plan. But I am out, I feel like being out, and I’d been feeling like I needed to double-underline my voluntary status. I don’t have to play. I don’t have to be here.

And yes... I am wary of Dr. Barnes.

I stride across the Elk Meadow turf as if I have authority and a known destination. It’s actually amazing where you can go if you charge forth and behave as if you have authority and a known destination.


————

I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.

I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.

When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.

Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.



—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

= July 23, 1982 (Day Five) =



Today’s AA meeting revolves around the first of the twelve steps, “admitting that we are powerless over alcohol.” Gary Stevens wants to define my disinclination to make such an admission as a case of me being in denial about it. This was predictable. If I’m surprised about anything it’s that they’re only starting in with me about it now.

I’m glad I got Mark Raybourne for individual counseling and not Gary; Mark certainly has his shortcomings but Gary annoys me more. I think he does it on purpose, in fact: irritating the clientele as a method of prompting them to change their position or behavior. Gary has light brown hair and a beak of a nose; he’s strutting around in an unbuttoned dress shirt like a rooster: behold, I have a chest!

“Wake up and smell the coffee”, Gary tells me. “We’ve all been right where you’re at, saying we don’t see ourselves as alcoholics, don’t hear what people are telling us about our drinking, and refusing to say it. Just like the three monkeys, you know? See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But you know that’s not gonna fly here.”

“I understand why this is the first step for an alcoholic coming to terms with their drinking problem”, I reply. “You can’t address a problem until you can acknowledge that you’ve got it. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who doesn’t acknowledge having such a problem is actually someone who does, but who hasn’t yet made that first step.”

“Talk plainly”, Gary Stevens urges me. “Don’t be playing word games with us here.”

“I thought I was being plain. Let’s try again, shall we? All alcoholics who don’t recognize that they’re alcoholics are in denial. But not all people who don’t consider themselves alcoholics are alcoholics in denial.”

“Are you talking about yourself?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’m talking in the abstract.”

“Well don’t talk in the abstract. Talk about yourself.”

“Hi, I’m Derek, and I’m not an alcoholic.” Pause. “This is where you all say ‘Hello, Derek’; that was your cue. I have never experienced myself as powerless over alcohol because I haven’t made an effort to quit drinking and then failed to do so. I haven’t made any effort to modify my alcohol consumption behaviors. You’re welcome to make the case that I should, but you don’t even know what they are yet. It’s not currently a concern of mine, though, and you don’t get to define my concerns. If I had decided that I should modify my drinking habits, and then found that I couldn’t, then it would make sense to consider that I was powerless over alcohol.”

“You’re very clever”, Emily pronounces, “but you’re pointing out something that we’ve all heard and most of us have said, and it doesn’t mean your drinking isn’t a problem.”

Party line. Just on the verge of exaggeration. I still can’t tell if she’s into this or if she’s making fun of them.





* * *



“All right”, I tell my psychodrama group, “Here’s the scene I came up with. I’ll need one person to play my dad and one to be my mom. I’m going to propose that y’all buy me a piano, since you’ve spent a lot more than that sending me to college and other schools which didn’t work out, and I think this might work out. And you argue that I’m being self-centered and irresponsible to think you owe me that after you’ve wasted so much money sending me to college and other schools and it didn’t work out. And then I’ll say I could have a career as a musician and you say that’s not practical and it’s just a hobby, and we can probably improvise from there.”

“Oh, that sounds good”, Marie says, clapping her hands. “Yeah, so a little bit about what your parents are like. Is he loud? Is he one of those ‘my way or the highway’ dads? Your mom, is she going to be worried you’re making a mistake?”

“She’s worried and hurt, for sure, but also the one more likely to make an absolute statement right off the bat. He’s all about showing he’s really listening and really cares, as long as I eventually accept his conclusions. No yelling. If they can make me yell, then I lose for acting immature. We’re southern, but we kind of act like yankees from those black and white movies from the fifties. No one gets to yell or stomp feet when we argue.”

Jeremy makes a deep appreciative nod. “Oh, that tells me a lot about you. Yeah, I can see that, that perfectly fits you. All right, Ronald, you want to take a go at being Derek’s dad? Noelle, you up for playing the mom?”

As typical of psychodrama, after running the scenario, I, as “director”, coach Noelle and Ronald towards some modifications in how they portray my folks; Marie and Jeremy and the other participating patients all make comments and suggestions. I am shooting for more accuracy; they, of course, are seeing what’s hitting my buttons and evoking a response from me playing myself, and trying to flush more of that out. Then we run it again with the changes.

After that comes the feedback section —

“I gotta say, I have to side with your folks”, Jake says. “I mean, it’s their money and you don’t get to tell them how to spend it. It’s like if I buy you a Christmas present. You can’t say ‘No, you have to get me this instead’, right?”

“Well, I agree with that”, I reply. “I’m an adult. I don’t seem to be very good at it, but I’m past the age of being entitled to support from them. So it’s not that they owe me. But it’s very frustrating that when it was their idea they were all for paying for me to get a future, and I tried their idea; but it didn’t work out. So I see a direction I want to try, I think I can write music and play it on the piano and sing, and a piano is a lot cheaper than a college tuition. But that they won’t pay for.”

“So you do think they owe you”, April says. “You’re saying since they paid for college they owe you a piano. You know, dude, that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense.”

I need to pause and run that through a few times. I know it looks like April’s got me quite stuck, but never mind that. I’m occasionally making ‘please wait’ gestures to them all. Finally —

“It’s really not about them owing me, but how it feels, the emotional side, is a lot the same as that of being owed something. Something like ‘I wanted something better out of this, and I expected better from you’. I’m disappointed in them. Oh, and it’s mutual. What I get from them is ‘We’re so disappointed, we had such high hopes’. I’m owed something more abstract than a piano. They feel like they’re owed something too.”

“Okay, I hear you”, April answers. And other people in the room are exchanging the kind of glance I associate with Whoa, Derek just made sense. I often don’t, to people, but I do land one occasionally.

“Derek”, Marie suggests, “I want you to say something to your parents here. Take some time, but say what you’d actually say to them if you had them here to listen.”

Following Marie’s advice, I do take a moment to assemble my thoughts into words. Then —

“You get worried and disappointed whenever these plans for my future don’t work out, so having a plan that works is very important to you. And you want me to take it seriously, so that, ideally, having one that works is very important to me, too. But you mostly haven’t included me in the planning before the ‘pick from these options’ stage. The one major exception was me saying I wanted to learn auto mechanics at vo-tech instead of going to college, and that’s the one course of study I finished successfully. The jobs I could find weren’t enough to let me move out on my own, but it wasn’t a failed career yet and still you pitched to me to go back and try college again, that was your idea...

“Sorry”, I interrupt myself, “ I’ve gone off on a tangent. I want to go back to the being worried and disappointed thing. That’s really what I want to talk about. I’m doing my most focused thinking about what I actually should be doing with myself, I’m taking it very seriously. And you addressing me like I’m irresponsible and unconcerned about my future is getting to be annoying. Not everything that hasn’t worked out pleasantly in my life is my fault. That doesn’t necessarily make it somebody else’s fault, but it’s still true.”





* * *



There was that moment in the psychodrama when I’d had that feeling of connection to the roomful of people I was speaking to. When I say making sense, I don’t mean “Hello, my name is Derek” or “Well, if you want to get on Interstate 40, take Interstate 25 south until you get to Albuquerque”, those things make sense, but they’re not new thoughts, they’re familiar patterns; I’m really talking about expressing something that they’ve never heard put into words before, but talking about everyday familiar life and its aspects, so there’s both a spark of surprise and a spark of recognition.

I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about that I think could hit people that way. Comedians do that. Tickling that spark of recognition, you know? I’m all serious and pompously full of intentions and I wouldn’t make a good comedian, but I want to hit people that way too. I came here hoping to sharpen this, so show me how to reach people in such a way that I can make that happen more often.

You want to know what I want to do with my life, Daddy, Mama? I want to be a political social activist. I want to start a movement. But I don’t know how.

Because a lot of the time when I try to talk to people about this stuff, those sparks don’t happen. People think I’m trying to be interesting to make myself popular. Some of them think I’m trying to be interesting and failing rather badly at it. Others assume I want to prompt a debate, and the ideas are just startup fodder to fuel a good debate. And a whole lot of people just think I don’t make any sense.



So yes...I had a good experience in psychodrama. I felt heard, but I also got challenged, I mean a legitimate challenge to my own way of looking at something personal. For all that Elk Meadow is frustrating, I could actually get something real out of this, something that I need.

I walk to the short hall with the little piano and sit down. The bench creaks. Piano is a Yamaha, a popular practice-room spinet, glossy black, straight lines, functional. I take out a pen and some scratch paper — the back side of someone’s discarded Elk Meadow schedule filched from the trash can — and shake the pen vigorously to get it to flow more evenly. An hour later I have four verses and a piano part for a new song called “Waves.” It’s specifically about being here, and the challenge to stay vulnerable enough to get something out of it while simultaneously being tough enough to engage with it and not be controlled by the people who like to push other folks’ buttons a little more than they should.

Another half-hour later, I’m singing it and playing it and totally getting into it. It’s got passion and fragility, intensity belted out on the high notes in places and in other spots the piano ringing a suspended chord and the voice part shimmery and delicate on top of it. I picked well when I chose the key of A major, I sound damn good on those high E’s.

I once again get the sense that there is another person standing behind me. The way the hallway is set up, anyone from our unit walking past the piano comes from behind and to the right of it. So anyone coming to hear would come up from behind me.

Perhaps me becoming aware of her is expressed in some way that she picks up on; Ellen steps forward. Green and white cotton shirt, sash tied around the waist, arms loosely crossed. I pause, and she speaks. “You wrote a song about being in here.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I thought you hated it here”, she says, glaring at me suspiciously.

“It’s complicated. I could get some good help here and really grow, but the stakes are high and they’re my stakes. I’m here for a consult and some help but I’m in charge. I’m not turning my mind or my life over to anyone else.”

“Everyone wants to take over mine. I mostly don’t let them but I fuck everything up when I’m in control.”

“Do they fuck things up for you any less when you do let them?”

“No. I just sometimes get tired of fighting, and fine, you steer, I don’t really care. It’s better in here.” With that, Ellen nods and walks back down the hall. It’s the least hostile she’s ever spoken to me.

I return to working on my new piece.





* * *



“What do we think of Derek’s growth and progress at this point?”, Irma asks the full community group. I am this evening’s subject matter because there were complaints about the “cram” posters still being on my door, and then other people (Jake, April, Noelle) actually rose to my defense, saying I was participating here in earnest and not just insulting everyone.

My counselor Mark is recognized and stands, looking contemplative. “Derek has reached some real important understandings, and I think we would all acknowledge that. His biggest barrier is that he intellectualizes and avoids his personal issues a lot of the time.”

Gary Stevens seconds all of that and adds, “He hides behind a lot of ten dollar words and ivory tower blather when he wants to avoid addressing things that others have brought to his attention.”

George is the first resident to speak. He states, “I think Derek is coming around, but he still, his first instinct is to bullshit, and he still goes with that a lot of the time.” George, a Black man probably in his upper twenties from the look of him, always seems a bit amused. I remember him saying the other day that maybe Ellen doesn’t like me because of my sexual orientation, spoken with the same sardonic smile.

Joanne’s take on me is, “I think Derek really likes to hold himself apart. He’s afraid of not being accepted so he holds back and says ‘I’m not really one of you’, and also I think he’s very unhappy with himself’.

Jeremy from psychodrama says, “Derek has a lot of courage, and he’s very smart. Some of what comes off as intellectualizing is him processing. I think he gets there eventually and sees what he needs to see, but like anyone, it’s hard going at first.”

Emily is recognized and states, “Derek distracts from his own issues by talking about social causes and politics. It’s a fancy way of saying everything is somebody else’s fault. That’s not him processing, that’s him refusing to process and I think we should call him on it more often.”



I have had the opportunity on previous occasions to see other residents put on the hot seat in community group. Ellen. Ronald. There seems to be a sort of script for how this goes: the mostly critical comments eventually make the targeted person angry in places where they feel like somebody has misrepresented how things are, and they start defending themselves, then they get piled on for being defensive and get pushed to admit they’re guarding themselves against the truth, after which there’s a sort of reconciliation and it gets called a growth moment.

I can look out of one cynical eyeball and one earnestly trusting one and see the same thing in stereoscopic vision: it isn’t good to respond until I’ve heard everything these people have to say and given it thoughtful consideration. There might be truth, partial or otherwise, in some of these observations. But it also makes sense to thwart the script and not rise to the bait and put a bunch of defensiveness on display.

There are a few more people who add their agreement to the notion that I intellectualize, and seconding what Emily had said about me invoking social and political situations when talking about my stuff, that doing that was a way of not dealing with my issues. I nod occasionally to show I’ve been listening.

It winds down. No one seems to have anything else to add.

Dr. Barnes asks, “Well, Derek, do you have any response to all this feedback? I know you have some thoughts to share with us.” Slow and deliberate, he sounds like he’s willing to listen to my side. His hands are open, palms upward, and he spreads them apart from each other in inquiry.

“I think...”, I begin, “... that for everyone, resistance to threatening ideas can take the form of clinging onto ways we’ve already got, ways we’re already comfortable thinking of those matters. And we shove information and experiences into those boxes even when they don’t really fit, to avoid dealing with them. For me, a lot of my familiar boxes are intellectual. I’m sorry if I come across sometimes like some stuffy stilted college professor who thinks he can learn life all from reading books. I don’t think that intellectual concepts are... you know, like ...something’s wrong with them automatically. It’s not that they’re intellectual and use a bunch of complex concepts and, how did Gary put it? ‘Ten dollar words’. That’s not what makes it defensive. It’s the act of not listening. Thinking that if I can put my thoughts into words better than you can, they must be better thoughts. That’s arrogance. And, to make it personal, thinking I’ve already heard what you’re saying before, so I don’t need to listen to all of it. I’ve caught myself doing that a lot. So have some of you, I guess, and you should keep on calling me on it. I’ll try to listen more.

“Now, the thing about bringing up social and political matters when I talk about myself... it’s one thing if somebody says ‘Don’t complain about my temper tantrums and missing work, that asshole Ronald Reagan got elected’, or ‘Why are you after me for my drinking and drug habits, what about the exploitation of South Africa?’, then yeah, that’s deflecting, and I agree it isn’t directly relevant, or not likely to be. But when I bring up political content, it’s almost always because I think it really does matter, and sometimes it does. Like a person being asked why they can’t manage to keep a job might bring up racism, if there’s discrimination and a belief out there that people of their race are the wrong people to give those kinds of jobs to. That doesn’t automatically mean that they’re right, or that you have to agree with them about everything, but it isn’t irrelevant.”

“In here, we want you to focus on you”, Dr. Barnes counters. “You can’t go out and fix the world and solve its problems when you haven’t dealt with the mess in your own life.”

“My own life isn’t just me by myself. When someone asks me to describe how things are for me, they mean my situation. Me in a context, me in an environment, with other people and what they expect and how I deal with them — which might be badly, it might be stuff I need to work on, but that’s social and political right there, the expectations and the roles and how things are set up.”

“I think Derek is intellectualizing again, don’t you?”, Barnes responds.

“If I am”, I retort, “I’m doing so relevantly, and calling it intellectualizing doesn’t make it wrong. Or defensive, or avoiding or whatever.”

“I think you’re just afraid to confront your own worst enemy, because unfortunately he isn’t out there with expectations and roles, he’s right there where you are.”

“And I think you and your staff like to ask us where we’re at, and I’ll give an answer like ‘I am a male nursing student on a medical floor in Athens Georgia’ and you’ll say, ‘No, don’t talk about that outside stuff, we want to know where you are at’, so I’ll say ‘I am a lonely shy stubborn sissy person trying to cope with a world I find strange’, and you say, ‘No, don’t talk about the strange world and how you’re different or special, we want to know where you are at’... so I’m reduced to saying ‘Well, I’m directly above the center of the earth, with my head in the air and my feet on the ground’. Even that includes context. The only me that there is is in a context. It’s the only where that I’ve got to offer you, and that’s where I’m at!”

“Derek...you think you know everything and have nothing to learn from anybody, because you’re used to spewing that intellectual nonsense and having everyone accept it and ignore that it doesn’t make any sense.” Dr. Barnes pauses to spread his arms, as if to gather and embrace the room. “You need to learn when you aren’t the expert. You are in Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat, which is a state-of-the-art recovery and rehabilitation facility, and I have advanced degrees and the advantages of years of practice. You aren’t the first person to come in here and try to snow us with a stream of pseudo-educated word soup.

“Now I suggest you listen to the people in this room. Many of us are experts at this, and others are your own colleagues and fellow sufferers, and yet you’d rather stuff your fingers in your ears. You haven’t solved your problems so far, so, since you’ve opted to be here, why don’t you let us take a crack at it? You know, I have an international reputation for the work I’ve done in my field, and people come from all over to listen to my lectures. Or to apply to be in this facility. We save people here. Let us help you.”

I shake my head, disappointed that Barnes isn’t actually listening to me. Guess he just likes to adopt a pose that comes across as thoughtful and sincere. I tell him, “I’m here to listen and consider what you and anyone else here has to say, but the name of my treatment team leader is Derek Turner. The final decisions about what’s in my best interests, therapeutic or otherwise, are mine. I can’t take responsibility for my life if I don’t have authority over it, because responsibility and authority are two words for the same thing.”

“Oh, listen to...”

“You’re!!” — I actually manage to cut him off —  “used to controlling people in here with reward and punishment. You’ve learned how to isolate us so that the only sources of approval or disapproval are people who are all afraid to express anything that you haven’t ratified. Your tiers of privilege are all about residents proving that they can be an obedient part of Dr. Barnes’ echo chamber. Anyone who doesn’t echo doesn’t advance to the higher levels. It’s how dogs and rats are trained, with rewards and withholding of rewards and penalties and so on. Well guess what? I do need approval and acceptance eventually, from someone, but I don’t need it today, and I don’t need it from you. Or from anyone else whose strings you’re pulling.”



After that, there comes a long queue of people, primarily but not limited to staffers, taking their turns describing all of what I’d just said as a continuation of my stubborn denial of my own issues, and a typical example of me intellectualizing.

I listen patiently and smile a lot and reply seldom, occasionally stating that I’ll give what they just said all the attention that it deserves.

I do see a few people sitting more quietly and looking thoughtful. I might be making sense to someone.





* * *



After group, I walk past Dr. Barnes’ office door and read the black nameplate on his door. “Dr. James F. Barnes, M.D., Pc.”

Then I go into my room, take out a sheet of typing paper and a standard black ink pen and write “Derek S. Turner, H.B., Pt.” in hollow outlined letters, and fill in all around outside the letter borders with the black ink to the approximate dimensions of a nameplate. I then cut out that black rectangle with its white letters and carefully tape it to the door below my “cram” posters.


————

I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.

I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.

When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.

Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.



—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

= July 21, 1982 (Day Three) =



Okay, I have to confess something kind of embarrassing. Because the decision to do the thing I did next was so close, as decisions go, with good arguments in my head for doing it or not doing it. Or at least for not doing it yet. Anyway, I considered each position, having really good orators inside my head for their chosen viewpoint, that I’m afraid the deciding element was ultimately how cute and clever I thought it was.

Not that I expected it to be received that way, mind you. But I couldn’t help appreciating it myself.

(After this, I was really going to have to be extra willing to consider my ego and my defensiveness and all that personal-stake shit as it came into consideration. It’s actually not all bad in this place so far. I do see some potential.

But anyway...)



I did it yesterday, the twentieth. Or I still think of it as yesterday, because I hadn’t been to bed yet. It was around 3 am and I was processing and replaying and feeling and interpreting the two days I’d just been through. Then I dug into my suitcase and pulled out the remains of a ream of blank typing paper, folded a page into quarters and ripped it along the folds, and then picked up a pen.

Cram. That’s what it felt like, my word for being on the receiving end of the process. That since my arrival, the other humans in my environment had been trying their dead-level best to cram their thoughts into my head. Non-reciprocally. A very one-way push, with a lot of enthusiasm on their part.

On the quarter sheet in front of me, I began writing the word “cram’ over and over, above and below and to the right of the first occurrence, but as I moved right on the sheet I made them denser, closer, more numerous, until they collided and combined to form a brick wall. Thanks, Roger Waters!

I put that piece aside and started over on the next quarter sheet, writing the word “CRAM” over and over in a vertical array, a CRAM pancake stack. Then to the right of that, I repeated the pancake of CRAMs but compressed it, squishing the stack vertically so the words were more tightly packed together. I repeated that, with the words now overlapping and the stack flattening. As I continued, they became dense and illegible and then compressed into a flat black line.

I picked up the third segment and on it I wrote the word “cram” except this time in large block letters. Then I filled in the white space within the C with smaller letter c’s and did that again, making the letters yet smaller, until I had a densely c-packed C. Then repeated the process with the other three letters.

Finally, on the remaining slice of paper, I wrote:



Communication is supposed to be a two way street

The flow of thoughts & ideas into my head needs to be balanced by a
flow of thoughts & ideas back OUT. Not just everything crammed into
me.

CRAMMmming your thoughts into my head. CRAMMmming them
into all the hours of the day. Displacing my own thoughts into
smaller and tighter spaces. Squeezing away my thinking room.

There is a lot of WE around here. I am not a part of any WE until I
get to join it as a contributing participant.
I’m here about US but I start off as ME. And on the subject of ME,
I am the authority, the expert, and the person
in charge of
my treatment plan.

I’m here because I want some help with it, so yes I’m here to listen.
But that’s not an invitation to take over.



Then after some trimming with scissors...

Yes, let’s not forget that whatever else this place is about, at least they don’t treat us like imminent dangers to ourselves, hence I can have scissors. And by the way it’s cool that April gets to wear chains and stuff...there’s a lot of freedom here even if there are some intrusive constraints...

...I taped the four compositions to the outside of my door, the public-facing side, then stripped off my clothes and went to sleep.








There is no explosion. It’s not like I lit a bomb and flung it. It’s obviously happening several notches slower than that, and I’m here watching it unfold. Okay. I mean, I’m sure it’s going to have an impact.

I file in behind other folks on the cafeteria line, my hair wet and hanging in ringlets. I nod to April, who is picking out a cinnamon bun; she nods back. I get my coffee, consider some nice-looking sausage links. I notice Emily pouring some half 'n half into her coffee and nod to her too, but she turns away, perhaps not having seen me.

I eat at one of the white plastic tables and then rise, carrying my tray to put on the conveyor belt to be washed. Joe is ahead of me, makes eye contact. There is the start of a smile that disappears into a flat line and a stare and then he glances around.

I'm expecting there to be some reaction to what I put on my door but it's hard to know if I'm observing any of that. Some people's behavior around me seems a little off but since I'm looking for that I'd probably perceive it whether it's actually happening or not.

For instance, when I go in for morning unit meeting, I see Ronald talking with April, and then he nudges her and it seems like they're both looking at me for a moment. Maybe they were talking about me. They aren't signaling a hello or waving me over but maybe they wouldn't anyway. It's not like I'm worried that folks are talking about me or that I'd be upset if they weren't, but I admit I'm curious. I did something from which I hoped to see some ripples. I really wish I was better at this “communicate with other people” thing.




I have biofeedback next on my schedule today, which is a lot less relevant a venue for watching for reactions to my cram posters than psychodrama would have been. But afterwards, when I get out and head for the cafeteria, I eat lunch feeling a bit more like I’m Illustration Figure One to whom everyone’s eyes are being drawn. More surreptitious glances, more conversations that stop when I come close. What I find amazing is that no one has said anything to me yet. I consider that some more. Nothing in this place feels spontaneous. Everything is calculated. This is something they don’t have a rule for yet. No one wants to react and run the risk of reacting wrong.

Or not. I should at least consider the possibility that I’m being paranoid as hell. That could be, you know. Perhaps this type of door poetry is all sufficiently unusual that they just don’t know how to categorize it so as to respond to it.

Or nobody has noticed. Yeah, I’ll hold that in consideration, too. Highly useful exercise. But it mostly feels like everyone’s afraid to react because they don’t want to react the wrong way and get in trouble. Seriously.







* * *







The big group, with Dr. Barnes, is where things finally get interesting.

Not right away. First a lot of innocuous news, similar to morning meeting. Our diet has been rated by a cooking show’s chef, and it compares to a landmark eatery, except that it’s healthy. We will miss Ms. Dockery, who has been sorting and aiming our endless mail to the right mailboxes all these years.

My attention wanders. Ronald is eating a leftover biscuit wrapped in a napkin. I wonder again if he and April had been discussing me earlier. I glance around looking for April. There she is, standing next to Jake, who’s in a grey ZZTop tour shirt. My eyes want to linger on the contours of her torso. She has cute shapes and looks so nice in that denim jacket she wears.

Dr. Barnes moves on. “Now, Ellen, here, she’s all positioned to make progress like her friend April, wouldn’t you say so, Emily?” Dr. Barnes looks like one of those “before” pictures for Grecian Formula, his hair a carefully shaped black nest highlighted with metallic-grey wires. Probably sprays it with hairspray once he’s got every strand in place just so.

Emily walks forward from the shadows to the front of the group. She makes a wry disappointed face as she gestures with an open palm towards the pinch-faced Ellen. “We all hope for that, and there’s been real progress on her attempts to make amends, but I’m afraid we’re still stuck on whether to go back to school, and she continues to obsess about running away to take a vacation.”

“Do you have any comment to make about that?”, Barnes asks Ellen.

Ellen’s eyebrows pull down; her shoulders hunch and she tilts her face towards the floor. “I am... considering school”, she says, starting off slowly and accelating into it, “it wasn’t... what I’d planned on doing, but I can see that it might be... good for me to have something regular like that when I get back. But that’s for when I get back. I’ve been planning this trip for years. It’s not like it’s some crazy...fucked up idea I came up with when I was shooting. We have the money for it and I deserve it. I don’t see why everyone is so focused on trying to get me to give it up!” She adds some scowl.

“Amanda, what’s your take on this?”, Barnes asks, calling on one of the other residents.

Amanda stands. Tall gal in a red t-shirt. “Ellen still seems very resistant to the idea that she’s attempting to run away from her problems. It’s a pattern we see often, but she has an emotional stake in not considering that that’s a possibility.”

Jake chimes in. “I know how much that vacation means to you. You were looking forward to it for so long and it’s your present to yourself. But the team is trying to get you to look at maybe the reason it means so much to you is that it represents a get out of jail free card, just hop on board and leave the old Ellen behind.”

Dr Barnes continues, “So there is concern. You hear it, Ellen, but you don’t credit it with any significance, because escape is still more important to you than doing a fair evaluation. Unfortunately, we can’t escape ourselves. Whenever we arrive at our destination, we look around and hey, there we are, same old us. What do you think you can do to get past that resistance?”

“You know”, I burst in, “if you’re demanding she cancel her plans, I don’t think that’s a fair either-or. Maybe Ellen’s vacation is not a good idea for her, but she doesn’t have to hold on to a belief that it is in order to keep planning to go ahead with it. She can still be seriously considering that you folks might be right and she shouldn’t go.”

People look at me briefly, then at each other, then to the center of the room, looking for their cues.

Dr. Barnes replies, “You’re suggesting that she can believe and disbelieve in the same thing at the same time. Humans can’t do that.”

“No, I’m saying that to believe is not good or necessary at all. You make a premise that taking a vacation is a good thing, and you plan around it, but you continue to consider other viewpoints.”

“Oh, so if we call it a “premise”, that makes everything all right. What if I call it a fishhook? Why does giving it a different name fix the problem?” He shrugs and makes an eloquent palms-upward gesture.

“A belief is where you’ve made a mental and emotional commitment to something being true or false. But you can adopt a premise without believing you’re right. Like if I’m in the cellar and the lights go out and I don’t know which wall I’m touching, I can decide to act on the premise that this is the wall that goes to the stairs. I can feel along it and keep walking until I find stairs or get back to where I started from or end up somewhere else. Maybe I’ll throw out the premise as probably wrong, but it gives me a starting point, so I can act.”

“What you’re doing now is intellectualizing. It’s a defense, Derek, a way of not dealing with what’s real and basic. Ellen’s problems won’t go away just because you intellectualize about them. That’s false. It’s not a real reaction.”

“No, I don’t think that’s true of intellectualizing at all. But then, I am an intellectual. So maybe I’m biased. I’m willing to consider the possibility that you’re right about this...but I’m going to continue to act on the premise that you are not.”

Barnes glares explosively for a split-second.

Ellen has been staring flatly at me throughout this exchange, and now jumps in, “Why do you want to get involved, it’s not like you care! I saw what you wrote on your door. You think we suck! So who do you think you’re fooling?”

Dr. Barnes looks distinctly pleased. He slides his hands down into his pockets and inclines his head like he’s thinking carefully, then says, “We don’t like to restrict people’s expressiveness. But at the same time, we feel confined to at least a little respect for how one person’s expression makes someone else feel. I understand that some ‘poetry’ and such is now posted on Derek’s door over in Unit Two. Emily, I believe you are Unit Leader for Derek as well?”

Emily stands up, cold-eyeing me. “Everyone in my unit is very upset. We tried to make Derek feel welcome, like he was joining us on our journey, and he acts like we were kidnapping him! People are saying privately that this is blocking their progress and erasing their confidence in their project. Derek could have spoken to any of us at any point, but he chose to attack us all and make these accusations.”

I nod. I wait.

Dr. James Barnes stares at me for several beats, then shrugs and says to one and all but addressing it to me, “I take it that you accept what you’re hearing?”

“Well, I was definitely the one who taped the messages on my door. Whether my doing so means what Emily says it means is open to interpretation, and so is the meaning of what I taped up there. People should read it and make up their own minds. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Well, don’t you think as a person welcomed into Unit Two you should care about what the others on your unit think? Are they that unimportant to you?”

“They’re of central importance to me because they’re the people most likely to understand me and be understood by me, and I came here to participate.”

“Everyone here who has gone down to look at your door says it’s a real poke in the face, that it’s hostile. Not the kind of thing you do to let people know they’re important to you.”

“There are reasons for giving someone a sharp poke aside from being hostile. Or wanting to hurt them. A few basic understandings needed to be spelled out. Otherwise their care seems likely to take a bad trajectory. I had to clarify my own relationship to my own case management and how anybody else’s participation is going to be viewed.”

“Yes, you find all kinds of ways to not need anybody. You can do it all yourself. Too together to need feedback. Too wise to need any advice. Behold, this is Derek. He is self-contained. He doesn’t need you, for anything.” Barnes winks conspiratorially at his rapt audience. “We’ve heard that song a few times, haven’t we? Well, I suppose since we’re unnecessary to Derek’s recovery, we may as well stop focusing the spotlight on him and leave him in peace. Valerie, I hear you had a real breakthrough in NA. Is that true?”

Heads rotate. Again, Valerie doesn’t like the attention. “I guess so”, she answers flatly.

Ronald pats her shoulder and said, “She’s been on the same road as the rest of us.”

Joanne from recreation says, “Well, she’s come a long way towards recognizing that she’s part of a group.”

Valerie says, “I just wish this would all be over. I want to go home.”

April gives her a brief hug and says, “We all want that.”







* * *






“I’m Jake, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Jake!”

Alcoholics Anonymous meets in one of the conference rooms, and, like all the other items on my schedule of activities, has been chosen for me.

“I always knew I had a drinking problem, don’t get me wrong. Like, you know, you tell yourself when you wake up in the morning and your shirt is all caked with where you threw up on yourself and your head is pounding, and you say ‘I can’t keep going on like this, I gotta stop’, right? But you can’t do anything about that yet, first you gotta get your stomach settled and scrape the shit off your tongue and get some clothes on and figure out what day it is today. And by the time you got yourself put together to face the day, you got Red and Joel and Renfro saying, ‘Hey, you going to the party? Let’s get a fifth of vodka and see what’s bouncin’ around’, and you’re thinking that sounds like a good idea.

“So yeah, Ellen and George and them, when they say ‘We got promised’, and ‘You said it was gonna be like this, and now you’re saying that’. Sure, ol’ Dr. Barnes, ol’ Sneaky Pete, he made me all kinds of promises, told me all kinds of things, all to get me to sign on the dotted line. But they got me in here, and, you know something? I’m an alcoholic. Maybe they lied some to get me in this seat, but I need help. So that’s my news to celebrate today. I am where I’m s’posed to be.”

Gary nods approvingly. “Thank you, Jake. Who else has something positive for us this evening?” Gary Stevens himself is apparently not necessarily an alcoholic, or at least not as far as any of us know; Gary is a facilitator, an Elk Meadow staff member. I always thought one of the selling points of AA was that everyone was on an equal footing. But in here we have a facilitator. “How about you, Luis? Anything good you can share?”

“I guess. Hey everybody I’m Luis, I’m an alcoholic, how’re you doing, blah blah blah. I heard from my brother and he says their loan got approved, so when I get out he’s going to put me in the showroom, I got a job when I get out.”

“Yay, high five”, Ronald says, and they smack palms.



Valerie shrugs. “I sort of have some good news, I guess. I was on the phone with my sister. We haven’t exactly been the closest. Growing up, I mean, not just recently. But I really felt like talking when I had the chance, and it’s like we’re not as angry, it was actually nice talking with her. She was in a good mood and wanted to tell me about this party where she made this chili that everybody loved and it’s got, whatchamacallit, you know, that green stuff that looks like parsley all cut up into it...”

“Cilantro”, I supply, recognizing it from the description.

A couple people glance my way. Valerie looks at me blankly, then keeps going, “...anyway, her kid sees this mound of chopped green stuff and gets the idea that they’re making pot brownies and I guess it ended up being pretty funny instead of an argument about it, anyway, she’s telling me about all that. And I’m going ‘yeah’, and ‘uh huh’ and enjoying the conversation, ... so then out of nowhere she says ‘We could try it.’ So there’s a chance I could stay with them for a while once I’m clean.”

Ronald nods at that. I do too.

Amanda says, “That’s cool. For her to say that, and also if it works out.”



* * *



I go through the food line and get my dinner tray, then sit down at the empty end of a nearby table. I open the book I’ve been reading and find my place.

After a moment, Ronald slides in across from me and props his chin on both palms and stares at me for a long couple beats. “Fucking hell, doesn’t it piss you off that nobody’s talking to you?”

“Huh? Oh, that explains a few things. I didn’t realize I was being coventried!”

“What’s ‘coventried’?”

“I don’t know why it’s called that, but when you give someone the silent treatment, lots of people call that ‘sending them to Coventry’.” I make quotation marks with my fingers.

“Oh, okay. Well anyway, dude, look, it doesn’t have to be this way. C’mon, man, we’re all in here trying to get our shit together somehow. I don’t know what you think we’re up to, I didn’t get all that what you put up on your door, to be honest, but we all want to work on ourselves. For some of us, this may be our last chance.”

“I’m here to work on my own shit too. I’m sorry everyone feels like I’m against them, or against this place. That’s not how it is. But you need to understand a couple things. First off, two years ago the people at my school tricked me into signing a paper and next thing I knew I was on a locked ward and I had no rights. So I’m very protective of my right to decide what is and what isn’t going to happen to me. And another thing. Just because I need to get better in certain ways, and work on my own hangups, doesn’t mean I’m trying to catch up with normal. In most ways, normal is several steps in the wrong direction. I’m doing better than most folks out there, and I’m sure as hell not handing the reins of my life over to anyone else, I just want to get even better with some stuff.”

“You sound almost human.” That doesn’t come from Ronald, but from Ellen, who has slipped in from behind me and is now sitting to my right. “You should talk like that all the time and quit trying to impress everybody with all that bullshit you keep flinging out.”

“I still hear a lot of bullshit”, Ronald responds. “You’re still saying you’re better than everybody else and you think you can confuse everyone with your made-up pretending, you’re all ‘Look at me, I’m so smart I don’t have to change my shit’, yeah that’s you, bro.”

“It’s not all bullshit”, says April, who has followed Ellen over to the table. “What you said to Dr. Bigshot, I caught that. You told him he’s taking the position where the only way we’re not in denial and still blocking the truth out is if we go with everything he says. You didn’t say it plain like that, you said it the way he likes to talk, which is like calling him on it, like ‘Hey, I caught you making like you can’t ever be wrong and whenever we don’t agree it means we’re in denial, but we’re onto your game’. And he didn’t like it much.” She snorts.

“Blah, blah, blahcakes”, Ellen says. “Look, you say you want to work on yourself. So work on yourself.”

By now, Jake and a few others have wandered over to the conversation. Jake says, “Hey, you know, we all came here from different places. Not just ‘I got sent here from Detroit’ or ‘I’m from Dallas’, but also our situations. Ronald used to be a hotshot business manager for some record label, and rode around in big limousines, didn’t you? Cocaine and fancy spoons. And me, I was looking at time, too many possession busts and I used to steal and fence some stuff to support my habit, so they said maybe I straighten my shit out, I just get probation. I don’t know how you got here but once we’re here we kinda realize we’re all in the same boat.”

“I was in a nursing program”, I tell them, “and I got crossways with the hospital and the program staff over patients’ rights issues, and for my parents it was kind of the last straw. I keep flunking out of colleges and not being able to keep jobs. My folks are very sheltered and old-fashioned and neither of them drinks except on special occasions, and they think all drugs, pot, LSD, cocaine, heroin, it’s all the same and if you use any of them you’ve got a drug problem. So for them it’s an explanation for why I’m not getting on my feet and getting on with life. They also think I’m probably mentally ill, although they think the drugs probably did that too. Those aren’t my reasons, but that’s how I got invited to come spend some time here. I got told a lot of stuff about how they were gonna work with me on improving my social and communication skills, and how I get more of what I want and need from my social environment, and that did sound kinda cool. I’ve got a lot of frustration about never fitting in or belonging anywhere, and I wasn’t doing anything else at the time, so I went along with it.”

April and Ellen state that they’re tired and are going to go back to their room. I think maybe Ellen is mostly tired of the conversation, and of me, whenever she’s looking at me it’s a scowl and a yecch, full-on revulsion and disgust.

“Shit”, George says once they’re down the hall, “That Ellen, staring at you like you just poured dill pickle juice all over her ice cream.”

“Yeah, right? I don’t know what that’s all about.”

George looks at me for a moment. “She’s maybe got a problem about who you get hot for.”

“I haven’t ever come on to her or anything. If I were going to try to flirt with someone in this place, I don’t think it’d be her.” And definitely not when she’s glaring at me.

Ronald says, “Well, I hope it isn’t me.” He actually looks awkward and apologetic about it.

Oh, that. “You shouldn’t worry anyhow, but relax. I got nothing against people who do, but I don’t personally find male merchandise arousing. Contrary to expectations. I know I set off a lot of people’s antenna in that direction.”

“Uh, yeah, nothin’ personal dude”, Jake remarks, “but I just totally assumed you were gay. Well, like you said, nothing wrong with it if you were, and if you aren’t, you aren’t.”

“You think Ellen’s got an attitude about gay guys?”, I ask. “The ones that do...they don’t usually think it makes it all wonderfully different and okay if I tell them I’m a straight sissy femmy boy instead.”

George says, “It’s kind of hard to tell with Ellen. She don’t warm up to people easy, and yeah, she thinks she’s got you pegged as something she don’t like, but I never heard her say anything about it.” He looks at me as if contemplating.



————

I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.

I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.

When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.

Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.



—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.




Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts