Friday, November 14, 2003

 

ENTRY 061


Last night I was a basket case.


It was, you see, my first time watching Terms of Endearment.


That may surprise some of you who know me to be a cinephile. To be honest, Terms of Endearment's reputation as the Ultimate Chick Flick is probably what has kept me from seeking it out all these years; I hate being manipulated by shallow melodrama, a la Titanic. But I'm currently watching all the Best Picture winners as they appear on TV, so when TCM showed ToE the other night, I taped it to watch later.


It seems I was wrong. ToE, while it could be called melodramatic, didn't come across as shallow at all. In fact, the film's honesty really surprised me--much of it attributable to Debra Winger, who is fantastic here. There is a fresh, unaffected, palpable directness to her performance that I found absolutely riveting. And, while Debra took the prize hands-down in this movie, Shirley MacLaine was quite powerful, too. *SPOILER* The scene in which Debra Winger explains her impending death from cancer to her two young boys was the truest "dying mother" scene I've known. By that time the tears were streaming down. *END SPOILER*


That felt good.


Of course, there is some reason for the ol' emotions to be feeling a little raw right now. On Tuesday we had a sort of wake at work for my coworker who died. They roped Hamlet into saying a few words, since the woman who died considered him one of her favorite editors to work with. Hamlet confessed to me, on our way into the room, that he hated dealing with death, even when it came to attending the funerals of his own relatives. But he was funny and inappropriate and prickly in his remarks--in other words, perfect. All I could do was sit there in the dim, candlelit room and think about Isaac and the others who died, all this vanishing youth. There was no way for me to find answers; I couldn't even formulate the questions. Sometimes I really am tired of death.


ToE reminded me of something else that I long ago relegated to the back of my memory: Marc's battle with cancer. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma when he was 21 years old and a senior at Rice. I was a high school senior, 17 years old.


It was a strained time for our family. I had come out two years earlier, after a prolonged, ongoing, and unfortunately precocious bout with inner depression and outward anger. The reaction all gay kids hope for from their parents--"We love you just the way you are, no problem, when are you bringing your boyfriend home for dinner?"--was not, of course, what I got. It ended up being what my therapist deemed emotional abandonment. I shouldered my own daily struggles with homophobia and depression without help from them, and also carried the burden of thinking that I was somehow at fault for everything being wrong. I told my parents that I didn't know if I loved them, and I honestly wasn't sure.


It didn't help that Marc had always been insecure of my early displays of writing talent, even though he was always incredibly bright. His attempts to chip away at my already unsteady self-esteem translated into a practically nonexistent relationship when he went off to college the summer I turned 14. When I came out, he accused me of doing it merely to get attention--the callous offensiveness of that accusation does not require explaining--and claimed that I was trying to destroy the family.


And then he got cancer.


There was a sore spot under Marc's arm that he chalked up to a weight-lifting injury. When he finally went to get it checked, the doctor found a lump and ordered a biopsy. It was a tumor the size of a softball.


In late afternoon on Friday the 13th, my dad called my mom at home to tell her the tumor was malignant. I was walking through the house on my way out, dressed for my after-school job, when I found Mom sobbing at the kitchen table. I didn't have to ask why as I stood dead in my tracks, conflicted and horrified. As long as everyone remained stolid and aloof, I could survive the ten months until I left for college. But now here was tragedy, and the accompanying emotional tsunami.


I gritted my teeth and my arms did the moral thing, stretching out and enclosing my mother, who was smaller than I'd ever realized. She shook and sobbed and I felt the moisture on my stomach as she cried into my work shirt. I was paralyzed, staring past the kitchen chair where Marc had sat for years, out the window at the sun-dappled patio alive with greenery. How could I, who felt so much like an orphan, be a son?


Thoughts formulated steadily, everything in my body and being concentrated in my cerebrum. How could Dad be such a fucking bastard that he told her over the phone? Why the fuck didn't he come home from work so he could handle this? What will happen if I'm the only son left? I'm going to be late for work. Is she going to cry forever? Am I ever going to?


Mom moved to Houston to stay with Marc in an apartment while he went through treatment. For six months she was gone, leaving me with Dad. That's when it became apparent to what extent she'd served as a buffer, a translator between him and me. With her gone, he would get frustrated that the communication wasn't effortless, that maybe our relationship was forced and inauthentic and that he'd played some part in that failure. For my part, I wasn't eager to meet him halfway. But sometimes we made the effort, even though at other times I was dismissive or he was abusive. Or both.


When I talked to Mom on the phone she often expressed guilt that she wasn't there for me during my senior year. For Marc she'd filled out scholarship applications and delivered everything to the post office, kept records, tracked deadlines. I told her I didn't mind doing it on my own, and, actually, I didn't. By then I was used to looking after myself, only now it was practically as well as emotionally. It took me years to fully absorb how much, in truth, I must have wanted from her and Dad that I didn't get. But at the time I felt on some level that it was what I deserved for being gay, even while, on the surface, I said that I didn't need anyone's approval and was okay the way I was.


This all sounds remarkably self-absorbed, I'm sure, but the reality was far more complicated than that. For I was always mindful of Marc, if for no other reason than that people were always asking me how he was.


And what was I to say? "His spine is being tapped and they're draining gallons of blood from him and he's paler than chalk and his hair has all fallen out and he has atrophied into someone none of us recognize"?


And what could I honestly reply when they so thoughtfully followed up by asking how I was? "Well, the brother who always seemed out to destroy any shred of my self-worth now has approximately a 50% chance of dying as they pump him full of toxins and he reminds me of death when I look at him. And my mother asked me not to have sex with anyone because, as she phrased it, if I get AIDS then I can't donate bone marrow and I'd be the closest match. And it's okay to tell my grandparents that Marc could die of cancer, but it's too terrible to tell them I'm gay because my grandfather has a heart condition. But most of all, I'm trying to feel sympathy and love and grief for my brother and I can't because for all these pointless years we have hated each other and now I don't think anything is left. That's the real cancer. We all have it, all four of us. That's how I fucking am, thanks for asking."


I wanted so badly to care, but I couldn't. It was like some casual acquaintance was suffering. I felt bad in a sense, sure, but I couldn't absorb it, it didn't stay with me. The guilt of that remained with me for several years, until I finally revealed it to Marc and he said that it was stupid.


So Marc went into remission, and Mom moved back home, and I graduated and went off to college, and eventually I came to terms with everything that had happened as best I could. The idea of cancer still chills me, as it must chill them, too. But we have all cheated death for now, even as death rears up for me and for them in ways that are thankfully not yet too close to bear.


The rapid growth in my brother's body could have destroyed everything, not just him but the potential, later realized, for us to be a family again. I'm not stupid enough to say that cancer was "the best thing that could have happened to us," or even a positive thing at all, but it was another thing that we survived. And what that survival means is reflected by another rapid growth in the body, this time in my sister-in-law's womb.


This is the fickleness, the ambiguity of rapidly multiplying cells, of the interaction of organisms, of matter and anti-matter, of love and hate and the staggering meaning of each.

12:32 AM

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Monday, November 10, 2003

 

ENTRY 060


The past week was something of an alcoholic haze. I have to say that isn't terribly typical for me, as there are periods when I come remarkably close to teetotalism. But this week--boy, oh boy.


Wednesday night, in particular, was a doozy. There was a somewhat swank-ish company party with a completely open bar. Dios mio. Not only am I a lightweight, but I hadn't eaten much of anything that day, so the two martinis and the Manhattan I drank really threw me for a loop. The weird thing is that everyone was getting hammered, all the way up to the head publisher, who gave a hilariously drunken toast.


Getting drunk, which I obviously don't often do, is always a remarkably strange experience for me. It entails a certain sense of self-reproval, almost, and I never seem to lose the sense of self-consciousness about my condition, nor my fixation on the idea that I must choose my thick, loud words carefully. (I've always prided myself on having better diction than the average tippler.) Even when inebriated, it's almost impossible for me to just let myself go, which probably goes some distance in explaining why I don't date often. And that kind of self-restraint is one reason I wanted to get drunk with Phil last week, to try to let loose a little for once.


Unfortunately, in this instance my lowered inhibitions entailed certain snide comments about unpleasant coworkers, and it wasn't an awfully bright vice in which to indulge. The next thing I knew I was smoking cigarettes, and I hate smoking. When Hamlet, after slurringly revealing a semi-disturbing secret to me, went home with the office tramp, I decided it was high time I rolled myself onto an uptown subway.


The next night was not much tamer; I had not one, but two farewell drinks functions for departing coworkers, and then an 8:00 performance of a play in which Zeke was starring. I hadn't seen him in ages, not since our heart-to-heart about boys. I might have been slightly buzzed during the performance, but it registered nevertheless that Zeke was great, even if the rest of the cast and the script weren't exactly top-notch. Zeke really cohered the thing, which just makes me remember why I had a crush on him, which is counter-productive because he has a boyfriend. Note to self: actors are Trouble.


Earlier this week I'd learned that someone I worked with died unexpectedly. She was only in her 30s, so it was a shock. I don't know if that's what accounts for a strange emotional moment I experienced on Friday morning as I was getting ready to leave for work. It came over me suddenly in a wave. The sobbing was such that I sank into a crouch on my bedroom floor, all the while thinking, oddly, "I don't want to wrinkle my slacks."


I think maybe it had to do with the associations we all make with death. It evokes all kinds of losses. I hadn't known my coworker that well; her death was simply the trigger. What entered my mind, actually, were thoughts of past relationships. But this sudden emotion wasn't because I was still in love with someone I could no longer reach, even as Neil, and, in a different sense, Jane, flashed through my head. It was because I wasn't in love at all.


Of course I'd committed to a drinks date with another coworker on Friday, so I was somewhat unsteady heading into Ray's birthday party later that night. It was the first time I'd seen Ray since the kissing conversation in the cab.


Of course, it turned out that Ray's boyfriend from Mexico City (somebody explain that one) was visiting, so there wasn't gonna be none of that kind of thing anyway. Oddly enough, one of the attendees was the guy from Austin I used to be friends with and who was rude to me at a bar a few weeks ago. Somehow I ended up in a long conversation with him and the guy he seemed to be dating. I kept noticing my ex-friend had yellow teeth and this strange rolling-his-eyes compulsion. And he seemed none too thrilled that his guy appeared to find me likeable. Me, I felt like the whole evening was just killing time, although there was a strange magical moment near the end of the party during which someone put Hall & Oates on the stereo. For some reason, about that time everyone decided it was time to go home.


This was easier said than done. Just try finding a cab in Spanish Harlem at 3 AM. You'd sooner have found a Cabbage Patch Kid in 1984. Or a monogamous gay man in 2003.

12:01 AM

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