8

When I got back to the hotel I ate my food while watching Isner and Mahut make tennis history. I went back up to the room and rolled three joints. I remember how House was always into colognes. Here I am using them to cover the smell of weed, just like he was doing all along.
I smoked all three joints in a corner alcove near the hotel, while watching a long line of well-dressed people slowly enter some kind of club.
The truth started coming on fast, and I kept holding back because I wanted to write it down like I did the last one, so I could learn it.
Same as last time it began with a series of challenges, each making itself known to me by a quickening heart beat and intense waves of inexplicable fear.
This time a few more rules were made known to me: You have to have learned all that last time had to teach, or you won’t get higher then last time. The higher part always begins with fear and then strong emotions. Then you will calm these emotions by the truth of your bravery. Then you learn as much as you can.
There was a strong shift to Homer3D as I was thinking about how it felt to have muscles tensed and my body so calm. Then my thoughts started jumping.
For some reason when I’m this relaxed and around a grey concrete building I strongly remember the clinic we were always going to as kids because R__ had passed out once at work for no reason. Since then he regularly had appointments. There’s something important in that memory, a mystery the high is pointing to.
You’re expressing yourself into every moment -- living yourself into every moment. Every movement, every posture, all of it is self expression, all of it is chosen, hence sheer presence is required. You come all the way forward into the physical. The braver you are, the more you’re allowed to express yourself as Him. Every moment is self expression, it flips the dreaded silence and stillness into becoming the safe place. The choices freedom implies now suddenly daunting instead of coveted.
So self expression is the key. Self expression IS the fight. Self expression wasn’t allowed in the House, it was what made me attractive to them, my purity, that pure masculinity that every young boy has. That’s when I shut it down .. pure self expression in every moment for eternity. That’s how you live. Pure How. Pure Alive.
You can’t express yourself until you remember who you are. Hence, the Abuse and its affects. Keeping the person confused about themselves.
I come from horrific, and just to say that makes it alright. Makes alright the twenty-seven years I paid for the same twenty-seven years. The two sides of the same coin.
When it comes to my reckoning with the weed, it’s the baby boy who fights the hardest, as if I hadn’t been raised well, that screaming, fighting, tantrum-ing baby boy never learned to calm himself.
I thought about the baby boy. It’s like each human being represents every living thing evolving: the baby is the beginning -- where the horrific is strong and big and the Good only a seedling and still small. The good is preserved somehow, raised, until it is big enough to beat the horrific. It’s as if it’s taken me twice as long to be raised the fear pumping in my heart says as the wave passed through me. No, I think as I try to be brave, Look at the ones not from horrific, how much they’ve missed out on.
I suddenly felt as masculine and rough as a Greaser from the book The Outsiders, and the expression of my body changed to that, as I stood in the alcove, watching the line of people enter the club, my right sole against the wall, my fingers looking like they held a cigarette that I puffed on intermittently.
It felt masculine, tough, as if the more relaxed I got the more Masculinity was being injected into me.
All I had to do was continue to flip the lies for truth, faster and faster more skillfully and agile, like a competitive sport,
I saw the joint burning between my fingertips and remembered how I perceived men’s cigarettes as a little boy: dirty things with live fire in it. It was like I was there again, like I was a boy again, at the local Exxon repair shop, that’s how clear the memory.
Feelings are physical, that’s the whole deal. When you feel, it’s your soul creating the physical, bringing the Truth forward from the Dark expanse that would exist in place of the physical world if it weren’t for the Souls feeling.
If it was the other way around, if the physical decided the truth and not the soul, then evil wins, all is horrific, darkness prevails, the souls lose.
And it’s not just the world that is flipped now, [here Joan Rivers’ voice begins teaching this part of the high:] it’s that it always was the other way around. It’s the Lying that is the root of evil. The Promise is on one side of the spectrum, and the lie on the other!
[Joan Rivers’ arms are up, conveying the huge size of the spectrum.]
Weak lie, [she tells the audience, as if she were giving a sermon while on a comedy stage,] Strong don’t.
Listen to me, people. [The audience laughs at the way she says ‘people.’] That’s why there’s no such thing as the future or the past. Because it’s always being decided, fought for -- not in physical violence, but in the bravery and the sheer violence that that Promise implies! The worst enemy is horrific! And if you’re stronger than horrific -- if you’re strong enough to make that promise to yourself -- to make it wordlessly in each an every moment -- [Here she repeatedly slaps the podium] -- Then you are you for eternity, Baby. You are you for eternity!
[She laughs; the audience joins in and claps.] You are yours for all the future and all the past! [She throws her arms up wildly.] For all of time! All of eternity! [The crowd roars.]
I had been walking aimlessly and had entered the Manhattan Public Library. I decided to leave and walk to the first psychic I saw advertised.
In inebriation, it’s athleticism that keeps you moving perfectly, like a ballet dancer, every muscle tensed and relaxed at the same time, graceful, balanced -- the opposite of inebriated.
That’s why guys always want to converse with girls, because they know the more the girl likes who he is on the inside, the more physically attractive he will become to her. I just got that.
There’s always a challenge to the high. It can piss me off because sometimes you need a break from being challenged. It says: You can get higher -- [it points to a place in my mind, my mind a series of caves and tunnels and hallways and staircases] -- if you think in this direction. All you have to do is stay brave and you’ll relax, which by the way is the physical side of the word Brave.
As long as the soul is Brave, the body is not stressed, and the moment lasts forever.
My sense of humor has always been like W__‘s and K__‘s, who incidentally are the funniest guys I’ve known. I’m a smart ass, always have been. There’s a joking, wise-cracking attitude to it, and to the high I have now, like it’s playing a game and knows it’s winning.
Sometimes it was like I was smiling at my abusers when I was in the House. They owned me, and I was just as aware of it as they were, so I drove them crazy with my supposed-nervousness, my supposed-fear, a little over the top, a little threatening to them. Later the little boy’s meanness would mature into the _Living in the lion’s mouth_ concept of Ralph Ellison’s.
The next part of the high was the part where the mind starts to wonder and then go blank, forgetting where it was going. Can I athletically WILL my body to move and think like I need it to? Is Will that synonymous with the idea of bring the soul all the way forward into the physical? Can I be that Present?
A weird paranoia plagues the high from this point on. I remember K__ always referring to the paranoia that always accompanies good highs. I keep thinking I see little movements out of the corner of my eye, sounds I hear wrong at first. I think someone said one thing when really they said another, like I’m afraid of people saying certain things so I keep thinking I hear those things.
It’s at this point where I walk up some stairs and enter into a small room where a young girl my age tries to convince me she’s a psychic.
It was like a game we played: her reading me, trying to decide who I was, and me listening to her interpretation of my movements, my manner, my ways.
That was the only part of the reading that was worth anything. The rest she got wrong: the logistics of my life, the idea that I was wondering about some promotion even though I’m unemployed, etc, etc.
But it was interesting to hear who she thought I was by who I presented to her. It’s nice to have a truer mirror than polished metal. She wanted to call me ‘sweetie’ but each time she did, it wouldn’t work. She was trying to act like she was an old woman, like the psychics down south in the rural country and bayous.
I guess psychics are for losers. Strength goes against believing any common psychic.
_Oh, so you’re too objective to believe is such things,_ she’ll say.
No, I believe in the stuff, I’ll say, I just know you ain’t it.
The thing that affected me the most was how she couldn’t read me, she kept going back and forth, implying this, looking at me carefully afterward, trying to get a sense of me; she always seemed to come up with nothing.
I arrive back at the hotel and look forward to sitting watching reruns of Will and Grace. This is the part of the high where memory is required to color the world Real again. This hotel is a lot like E__’s house, and also like the House in God’s Country.
Just always pay attention, don’t just watch the TV, really watch, don’t just zone out, experience more and more, see more and more.
It’s like how you take a test in school and you accidentally take a test far beyond your grade. You pass the test with flying colors, now unsure what to do next.
Do you go back and take the smaller, more civilian-style class that would’ve led you to the test, or do you trust that you know that stuff, even if the simpler terms are unrecognizable to you.
The world is Real, everything that happened in the House was Real. All those years I naively tried to forget about were Real.
Everything reminds me of everything. The kitchen area in the hotel reminds me of the break room outside L_’s community college classes that she would take us to when we were little because she didn’t have a babysitter.
When you don’t want to remember, you don’t want to live. When you don’t remember, you don’t know how to live.
My identity remains the same and all that happened in the House happened. It seems contradictory, like one can’t exist along with the other. You were just a boy, b.
That’s why the past flips. The House told one story. I lived a totally different one.
I stopped by the bathroom downstairs in the hotel before leaving for the diner. It reminded me of Christmas and L__’s mom’s house.
I have to keep asking and answering in order to keep the high going: What memory does this remind you of? It’s actually not hard, even though the answers -- even to the same item -- are always changing, always going further and further back in time.
Like the more eyes I see it through -- the baby boy’s, the little boy’s, the adolescent’s -- the more complete I am.
The game continued indefinitely:
The diner’s employees’ back door / the church coatroom at Christmas when I was little.
Beer / Grandpa’s bottles
Asians / Nick, an old playmate
Brothers / The kids at church before I started school
Ketchup bottles / The old Heinz commercials with the ketchup bottle dripping from the window sill.
The old Heinz commercials / Ernest, Hee Haw, L__ playing the piano
I have to remind myself not to be afraid of the specifics. You’re universal, I promise, I told myself. Afterward I reminded myself to not let thoughts remind me, but instead the Dust all around me.
Words are never enough compared to the wordless poetry.
The TV in the restaurant / The Greek restaurant in my hometown and 60 minutes playing on its TV, always talking about tobacco companies.
The waitress / the dumb teenagers of the Greek restaurant, they seemed so much older than me they looked adult but were so dumb and sloppy acting.
With each new memory comes a slew of little memories stretching out from it, too many to write.
So you don’t make new memories, I think to myself, You remember instead so that you understand and are aware of what’s around you.
It’s like when you’re a kid you experience the world all these different ways, and as an adult you melt into the world.
Back then I didn’t know I was living horrific but did have a general sense that I was to grow up and fall in love.
I remember being raised, the constant-ness of it. I remember how A__ and H__ would manage their rejections of me as if they were sexual rejections.
If I’d played by the natural rules they would’ve won. They were so pissed when I stopped expressing myself.
And one day sex will remind me of rape.
So the whole idea was to not remember.
To somehow beat the system.
To have good sex while numb.
An immature way of handling it, but I was a boy.
I chose not to remember.
It’s not something that just happened to me.

__________