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Today’s is the final installment of Secret Life. Herein, I finish telling the behind-the-scenes story of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Having followed this story of love and loss, one or two of you may even want to read the book. So note the following—

In the 31 installments of this series, we have gone through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet (sometimes more), and chatted a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

Today we look at the last poem in the book, “You see, the thing is.” You will never read a more sweet and tender love poem. Here it is in full:

You see, the thing is,

I’ve been in love before,
but never like this,
the way I lie, arm around him,
dark outside, can’t sleep,
thinking of mother in a hospital bed,
lying awake while dawn comes,
yellow, gray, and slightly stale,
the hundred and eighty
degrees I turn, the away I face,
clock I check as he rolls over,
fast asleep, and catches me.

I shared in an earlier Secret Life how my mother had a stroke in 2004, three days before her eighty-third birthday. She recovered well from that, but in the spring she was diagnosed with biliary cancer. The plan was radiation and chemotherapy, but then she had a heart attack while in the hospital. The doctors said she was too frail to continue treatment, and that, given the aggressive cancer, her overall health status, and her age, the best course of action was hospice, which meant keeping her comfortable until she died, which she did on June 23, 2005.

The poem above was written while my mother was still in the hospital, before she was moved into hospice care. The poem requires no explanation.

And that’s how the book ends—a declaration of love for my ex-husband, the precocious poet, and also of gratitude for his having come into my life, his being there to catch me on this night in the spring of 2005 while my mother lay dying in the hospital.

Somewhere, at some point, I intend to write more about our relationship, our marriage, and our divorce. But not here. It is the book, This Life Now, that is the intended subject of this finally concluding series of essays.

So it’s a 2014 book based on a manuscript that was drafted in 2006. I submitted it to virtually every contest in poetry world two years in a row. Not even an honorable mention. Then I shelved it, because I was finishing my doctorate in classics. In particular, I was working on a kick-ass dissertation on a cutting-edge topic.

I was also very involved in student government and program governance. I was instrumental in getting my program to include students on standing committees, which was CUNY Grad Center policy, but was not honored in my program. With other students, I organized our program’s first-ever graduate students conference, which became an annual event, and I started a chartered organization—a type of interdisciplinary affinity group—that gave us access to student government funding for our annual conferences. Working on that doctorate from 2005 until my defense in 2010—including the scholarly part of it as well as the service part of it—made for five of the best years of my life.

I recounted in a recent Secret Life how things went for me in the years after I earned my PhD. Pretty well, at first, with the one-year postdoc at the University of South Carolina. But downhill after that, as I came off the academic market and settled into a life of—gag me with a caduceus—freelance medical writing. A freelance career which, mind you, I was eager to embark on in 2003, when it meant freedom from corporate cubicles, and time to work on my poetry, my MFA, and my PhD. But by 2013 I wanted to be past that stopgap, and the universe did not seem to be cooperating.

Then, in the spring of 2013, my ex and I went to the Rainbow Book Fair—a putatively annual LGBTQ+ event—at the Holiday Inn Midtown on West 57th Street. He introduced me to Julie Enszer, who was staffing the table for Sinister Wisdom, the trailblazing lesbian feminist journal started in 1976 that Julie has edited since 2010. Julie had a close personal and collaborative relationship with Lawrence Schimel, the founder of A Midsummer Nights Press. Apparently my name had come up in a discussion Julie had with Lawrence about gay poets he might like to publish in the coming year. Julie suggested I send him a manuscript. And I did.

Before I go further into this story, I want to make it very clear that Lawrence was, is, and always will be a great publisher and a great friend. (In fact, Lawrence later became an Indolent Books author as translator from the Spanish of the poetry collection Impure Acts by Ángelo Néstore.) The bottom line of the tale I am about to tell is that I sold myself short in various ways that ended up leaving me very sad and very disheartened about my poetry career. It’s nobody’s fault. Not even mine. I made decisions. I regretted some of them. I suffered. And now I feel better. That is an occasion for gratitude. I am grateful for that. So here’s the story….

The books in Lawrence’s Body Language series were poetry collections about queer existence and queer experience. Frankly, I did not realize that as I sent him my manuscript, which was about sixty percent gay existence and gay experience stuff. The rest of it was far ranging—for example, a straight couple’s poignant struggle to conceive a child safely when the man had HIV; some 9/11 sonnets; an officer delivering news of a death to the next of kin during the Iraq war; a poem about so-called “killer algae”; God’s sense of betrayal in the Garden of Eden; and so on.

It was perfectly reasonable for Lawrence to send me back a cut of the manuscript that aligned with his vision for the Body Language series. Perfectly reasonable—but I had not expected it. I was alarmed. More than that, I knew I had probably another thirty or so poems—gay existence and gay experience poems, if you will—that would have fit quite nicely into this newly conceived configuration of This Life Now. And I said as much to Lawrence in my reply email.

And here’s the crucial thing—In his response, Lawerence wrote, “I’d be happy to look at any additional poems you wish to send me,” or words to that effect. I can no longer find that email—I think it’s from too many computers ago. So all good, right? Right. Except I choked. I didn’t want to jinx it. I did not want to scare Lawrence off. I did not want him to think I was a problem child. I did not want to do anything that might jeopardize the publication of the book. Again, again, again, I want to reiterate—Nothing he ever said, did, or put in writing ever gave me any reason to have any of these concerns. Never ever ever. I did not need him to sabotage me—I was perfectly capable of sabotaging myself. And I did.

From then, design and production rolled along through the winter of 2014, and the book was published in March. I was thrilled. I organized a blowout book party for myself at the now defunct reBar in the super hip Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was fabulously well attended. I sold lots of books.

But something happened. It is not totally clear to me what happened, but it happened. For one thing, as time went by after the book’s pub date, I started to feel worse and worse about the poems I did NOT include in the book. But that is far from all that was going on with me emotionally. In fact, after not keeping a regular daily journal for many years, I started one on January 1, 2014. I started keeping a journal on that date because I felt that something was going on with me, and I wanted a record of whatever that something was. In that first entry, I wrote, “My major themes right now are getting old and feeling like a failure.”

Then, on November 14, 2014, I wrote this:

I had such a nice day yesterday. Just a regular day—fed the outside cats, made breakfast for J—, went for my run, and worked all day (with a break for a nap in the afternoon). But that’s the whole point. Enjoying a regular day. I used to enjoy my regular days. Then I stopped. Stopped enjoying my regular days. It happened some time in the spring. Shortly after the book came out, apparently. It feels like it all started the day I read Timothy Liu’s review of my book on Coldfront.

Ah, Timothy Liu’s review of my book on Coldfront. Again, not unlike what I said about my publisher and friend Lawrence Schimel, Tim Liu is a dear poetry friend. Similarly the two poets who founded and edited Coldfront—Melinda Wilson and John Deming—are not only dear friends, but are now both Indolent Books authors (Headline News in 2018 by John, and What It Was Like to Be a Woman in 2024 by Melinda). So this is not about people with whom I have any beef or towards whom I harbor any grudges. It’s just shit that happened, that none of these folks—Tim, John, Melinda—even knew was happening.

That being said—Here’s Tim’s review in full. The exact date of the review is hard to pin down at this point, but it appears to have been within a few weeks of the book’s publication. The reason I am posting it in full is to make clear the fact that it’s not a bad review. It’s actually a pretty good review. See if you can figure out the part that got me down. I’ll disclose the answer after you read the review. (The number 15 indicates that my book was fifteenth in Tim’s series of 100 reviews in 100 days.)

15. This Life Now
Michael Broder,
A Midsummer’s Night Press, 2014

What I keep returning to in this too-short book (my one big quibble: the thirty-plus manuscript pages make more for a fat chapbook than a slim volume of poems retailing for $13.95!) are the Tony Poems, Tony as the Beloved Messenger of Viral Peril who haunts whatever comes after. A few decades in the making, Broder’s debut is beyond resentment. Having cleaned up his side of the street, we are left tenderly haunted by his “normal” suburban homo childhood as prelude to the AIDS pandemic followed by Broder’s long lyrical postlude that bears witness to survival without glorifying it, looking back wistfully instead on a time when reckless passion was at its height.

Disclosures: Back in the day, MB curated a fine reading series at the Ear Inn on the East Bank of the Hudson.

Favorites: Prologue; Tony Poem; Another Tony Poem (“But tonight, if I went down”); The Remembered One.

Can you guess what really galled me? It was Tim’s assessment that my “too-short book” was suited “more for a fat chapbook than a slim volume of poems,” and he had to throw in the “retailing for $13.95” just to twist the knife a little bit more. As you can imagine, seeing Tim’s comments about the whole fat chapbook thing only reinforced the regret and self-recrimination that I already felt about letting my beloved 60-page manuscript get whittled down to 35 pages.

So, yes, 2014 was a bad mental health year for me. In fact, I dubbed it The Great Depression of 2014. I think there were other factors that contributed, but a big part of The Great Depression of 2014 had to do with the negative emotions that were dragged up by everything surrounding the publication of This Life Now. There was a sort of false start, false alarm kind of feel to the whole thing.

But most of it seems to have been generated between my own two ears. For example, I think of my participation in the NYU creative writing program alumni reading in September 2014, six months after the book came out. I read with fellow poets Nicole Callihan and R. A. Villanueva. As with Tim Liu, both are dear poetry friends. I wanted nothing but the best for them. And yet, I could not help but notice that each of them sold a number of books after the reading, while I sold none. My fellow NYU alumni in the audience did not seem to be particularly jazzed about my too-short fat chapbook that was posing as a debut full-length collection.

Upon leaving the event, I told my ex how awful I felt about the whole thing. My qualms about the book itself. The fat-chapbook-ness of it all. He responded, “There’s no such thing as a bad book.” I get it. I get what he meant. Take the win and start working on the next book. Which was probably not bad advice. But it was not what I needed from him in that moment. What I needed was for him to see me, to see my pain and sadness, even if he thought they were unwarranted, and simply to comfort me. Not advise me. Just comfort me. Just love me.

And I think I’m going to more or less leave it there. Except to say the book was ultimately a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2015. I lost to Danez Smith, which was as it should have been—I mean that with all my heart and soul, and I meant it at the time, having read his work in journals and having witnessed Danez doing his thing at an offsite reading at AWP in Minneapolis in April of 2015. That was his year, and he deserved it.

So here we reach the end of The Secret Life of This Life Now. All 31 installments of it. One for every poem in the book. Things are much different for me now. I have done a lot of wonderful things in the past ten years. Whatever was going on with The Great Depression of 2014, it abated. Things got really good again for a while. Then they got really bad again. Then I got divorced. And now it’s now. I could even say, “now it’s this life now.” But I’m not going to say that. That would be cheesy.

À la prochaine. Whenever that may be.

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Today is the last Thursday of Secret Life. Next Monday, I finish telling the behind-the-scenes story of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Having followed this story of love and loss, some of you may even want to read the book. So note the following—

This is post #30 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet (sometimes more), and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the penultimate poem in book, “Buffy Rerun Poem.” My ex and I were great fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV show based on the star-studded 1992 movie. Below is the first half of the poem.

It’s one a.m. and I’m lying in bed,
watching a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
talking to you on the phone.

I tell you Buffy is ice-skating,
and you tell me it’s the episode from season two
where the assassins come to attack Buffy on the

skating rink,
and Angel leaps onto the rink to save her,
and afterwards they kiss

and Angel pulls away in a moment of self-loathing
and says,
I still have my vampire face on,

and Buffy touches his bumpy vampire forehead and says
I didn’t even notice.
You are right, of course, about every detail—

they unfold on the muted screen at the foot of the bed
as I watch and you narrate from 200 miles away;

As I did so many other things we shared during our marriage, I was the one who discovered Buffy. Often in the fall of 2000, while the precocious poet was at workshop in the second year of his MFA program at NYU, I would do laundry in the basement of our pre-war apartment building on the northwest corner of 57th Street and 8th Avenue, just off Columbus Circle. One night, while folding laundry in our bedroom and flipping channels on the old-school TV set atop the dresser facing our bed, I came across an episode of Buffy, a show I had never watched. It had started in 1997, so it was already in its fifth season. I was immediately captivated, and told my ex all about it when he got home after post-workshop pizza and beer (I can’t remember the name of the bar on University Place where the poets used to go after workshop).

The following week, we watched Buffy together, and from then on, we were hooked. Season five—no spoilers—proved to be highly consequential for the series as a whole. We needed to catch up! And again, pre-streaming—so we bought all five seasons to date on DVD, and watched them in rapid succession (“binge-watching” avant la lettre).

That fall, my ex went off to Provincetown, where he had been awarded a prestigious fellowship to a seven-month residency along with 19 other emerging writers and artists. It was on his list of dream bio blurb credits—along with Yaddo and Bread Loaf—and he ultimately attained all three (including the coveted “work-study” positions as waiter, assistant head waiter, and head waiter at Bread Loaf, before that aspect of that program was shut down in 2019 over concerns about sexual harassment and racism).

So there you have the real-life background for the poem’s reference to the speaker talking to the beloved on the phone past midnight one evening, recounting a detail from an episode of Buffy, which the speaker is re-watching on DVD, perhaps to assuage his loneliness in the absence of the beloved.

The contrast between my persistently poor memory and my ex’s “powers of recollection” are a theme in a number of my poems. Here is one, in full, that first appeared in the journal Softblow and later in my book Drug and Disease Free under the title “The Rock.” It refers to the speaker’s same sense of P-town abandonment as “Buffy Rerun Poem.”

Was it mine before it was ours,
this rock we call our own,
where we perch with coffee and bagels weekend mornings?
I can't remember that far back, or what I did
before I had you and your powers of recollection.
I must have invented the past, yesterdays that had to be,
to suit the mood I was in or provide a clue
to whatever happened next.
Today I sit here alone and ask myself if you exist
or if I only imagined you, without you here to tell me
whether or not we ever met.

Okay, why stop now? Here is what I think is the final poem in this sequence of abandonment poems, this one having less to do with memory and more to do with sheer pain and sorrow. It, too, appears in Drug and Disease Free.

I can’t blame you

for cheese left out on the counter
overnight, hat left on the subway seat
as I dashed from local to express.

Can’t blame you, away in your manger,
nestled in some swaddling, doing your thing.

How unfair of you to leave me like this,
accountable to no one but myself,
left to my own devices—

We know where THAT leads.

When I visit you there, it is analgesia only,
not healing.

You must come back to me,
to the nest I feathered for you,

the blanket-lined cardboard box
where I dropped you by the scruff of your neck.

You must doff your charade of being anything at all without me.

You must come home, and be my due.

I was proud of the precocious poet for having been awarded the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship; but at the same time, I was baffled and sad and felt abandoned. He had a perfectly good apartment around the corner from Central Park with an entire bedroom as his own private workspace! I thought of residencies like FAWC as essential options for writers and artists just getting out of school and facing uncertainty about where they would go and how they would pay the rent. That wasn’t the situation the precocious poet was in. The precocious poet primarily wanted a fellowship/residency credit in his bio when it appeared on his forthcoming first book of poems.

Do I sound bitter? Well, I mean—It took 20 years, but we did, after all, eventually get divorced.

Don’t worry too much—You’ve only got one more of these essays headed your way. After that, you can shower off the toxicity for good. And I assure you, the book ends on the most sweet and tender of love poems. À la prochaine.

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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. I started this series to sell off the remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Now I simply want to finish what I started 28 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that some of you may find intriguing. That being said…

This is post #29 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the eighth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The eighth poem in this section is “Confession.” In keeping with recent Secret Life practice, here is the poem in full.

Confession

Sometimes, when people are hungry,
I still want to eat; when they are naked I want to dress.

Sometimes, even though people are homeless,
I prefer to sleep in my own bed,

and when there’s a war, I certainly don’t want to fight.
Sometimes, knowing there is suffering,

even the worst kind of oppression all over the world,
I don’t want to bear witness

or speak out or be counted or make amends. Sometimes
when you are gentle I want it rough and when you’re here

I wish you were gone; sometimes I want him back
and it has nothing to do with the hungry,

the naked, the homeless; sometimes it has nothing to do—
nothing whatsoever to do with you.

Another poem about the now ex-husband. But also about Tony, who is the “him” of the penultimate couplet. I wrote this in Marie Howe’s workshop in September 2003, my first semester in the MFA program at NYU. A couple of months before The New York Times published my letter in defense of same-sex marriage, the letter where I said, “I want my partner to get my Social Security check when I die,” which was true. But clearly, even three years into the relationship, there were flaws in the weave.

I was somewhat surprised that my ex never asked me about the sentiments behind this poem. Then, in the summer of 2018, I was a last-minute stand in for another poet at the legendary Monday night poetry series at KGB Bar on E. 4th Street, the series started by Star Black and David Lehman in 1997, and in 2018 co-curated by my ex-husband. Walking towards the F Train after the reading, he said to me, “That reading sounded very angry,” or words to that effect. I answered with a vague, “Oh, did it?” or something like that, but the fact is, I had very consciously poured anger into that performance that evening, and I remember doing it most vividly when reading “Confession.” By that time, there were a lot of flaws in the weave.

Speaking of weaving, in these last few installments of Secret Life, we’re sort of weaving together two sections of one timeline. The timeline described in the poems, which is childhood to 2005 or so; and the timeline of that life which is described in the book itself as “this life now,” from about 2000 to the time the book was finally published—or some version of it, at least—in 2014.

I ran through some elements of this condensed bio in an earlier Secret Life, but in a vein both more whimsical and more wistful. Here I just want to bang out the facts—and more about me than about us. The precocious poet and I meet, date, commit, and get married between 2000 and 2004. I get my MFA in poetry at NYU in 2005. When I resume my long-deferred PhD in classics at the CUNY Grad Center in the fall of 2005, I begin adjuncting at Brooklyn College, which I continue doing continually, including summers, through 2011. I defend my dissertation—Mensura Incognita: Queer Kinship and Camp Aesthetics in Juvenal’s Ninth Satire—in August 2010.

We almost split up that summer, but we win by a nose and, in fact, I recall 2010 to 2013 as a truly lovely stretch in our marriage. I interview for classics jobs at national academic conferences (the American Philological Association, later rechristened the Society for Classical Studies, primarily because nobody knew what “philological” meant by then, which made marketing the organization to younger students and scholars difficult), but fail to get any second interviews. I think it’s a combination of the Great Recession, ageism, and a syndrome I call What-The-Fuck-Is-He-Talking-About (with reference to my dissertation that was too cutting edge for most search committees’ comfort).

In October of 2010, my ex, whose six years of grad school funding had ended that spring, received a fateful phone call on which he was veritably begged to start working immediately as interim writing center director at a local community college. A new hire had not worked out, the writing center was in the lurch, and they knew my ex from his years as a fellow in the school’s writing across the curriculum program (part of his grad school funding). He had had other plans (we’ll save the details of that for the memoir), but those plans did not come with a salary, so he opted for the writing center job—which contributed mightily to the blissful sense of forward motion in our relationship at this time, after a perilous brink.

At the same time, I land a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, for the 2011–2012 academic year. The facts that (1) I lived in student housing and (2) did not drive in a city that was about as pedestrian unfriendly as you could get and (3) did not seem to know how to cultivate or nurture meaningful relationships with colleagues—All of those things made for a difficult nine months. But I loved the job. I loved teaching. I taught Latin 101; an upper level undergraduate class in Plato’s Symposium; Introduction to Classical Mythology; and a graduate seminar in research skills that was required for all students entering the MFA or PhD program in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (which was chaired by a Paul Allen Miller, one of the pivotal mid-career classics scholars of that era, and the guy who gave me the job).

When the spring semester ended in May 2012, my ex drove down to take me home, and the road trip from Columbia to New York—which included my first-ever breakfast at a Waffle House—may have been the best, most loving, most memorable 48-72 hours of our entire relationship. We loved each other so much that weekend.

That summer of 2012, I teach in the Summer Latin Institute, a ten-week beyond-the-intensive team-taught program offered jointly by Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center, the program in which I first studied Latin in 1982, and to which it was always my dream to return as faculty. There was a toxic fellow faculty member with whom I could not restrain myself from tussling, and so, on balance, it turned out to be a pretty awful experience—but it was an awful experience that fulfilled a cherished dream, so I was grateful for it, and remain so to this day.

During Hurricane Sandy, we hole up in our apartment—Bed-Stuy is high ground, and is not affected by flooding or power outages—and I proofread and copyedit my ex’s dissertation on molested boys in the postwar gay novel. It’s another very close, very loving, very sweet time that encourages my belief that maybe we will get through this—whatever “this” is, exactly—after all.

In the fall of 2012, I resume teaching at Brooklyn College, now as an adjunct assistant professor. I’m also teaching the noncredit basic Latin class at the CUNY Grad Center, designed for graduate students in the humanities who need to pass a Latin proficiency exam as part of their degree requirements. Meanwhile, my ex gets a full-time, tenure-track position as an assistant professor of English at the same community college where he has been directing the writing center while finishing his dissertation. We did it! Yes, I say WE—WE DID IT. From the moment I met my ex, I had a sense that my job was to love him, nurture him, and support him while he went from MFA to PhD to full-time academic job. And now he had it. I some respects, I felt that my job was done.

That’s a nice note on which to end this, the longest Secret Life I have written so far, by far. In Thursday’s installment, you will learn about how This Life Now hooked up with its publisher in 2013 and made its debut in 2014.

À la prochaine.

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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. I started this series with the goal of selling off the remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But now I’m here to finish what I started 27 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #28 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the seventh poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The seventh poem in this section is “Civil Union.” In keeping with recent Secret Life practice, here is the poem in full.

When I die, you say, you can take
hot young Russian boys home
and have sex with them in our bed;
but you must tell them about me.

Here I should capture you
in a deft array of telling details
that bring you to life in the reader’s
imagination; but I will not—

while yet you hold me in your arms at night,
let me betray nothing more intimate
than the roommate who blamed you for his cat’s diseases,
or the police raid on the Moscow discotheque.

That, you may have guessed, is a poem about the ex-husband, the precocious poet. I am not going to go into the details of his time in St. Petersburg, the police raid on the Moscow discotheque, or the roommate who blamed him for his cat’s diseases. Those are his stories to tell.

How convenient for “Civil Union” to be the poem for this edition of Secret Life. Just the other day, I was giving you the sort of back-of-the-envelope version of our meeting, courtship, and marriage, with a brief coda about our divorce. I was so in the tank for same-sex marriage. Here’s a letter of mine that was published in The New York Times in 2003, about three years into my life with my ex-husband.

To the Editor:

I appreciate David Brooks's support for gay marriage (column, Nov. 22), but I am dismayed that he minimizes the significance of the constitutional issues at stake, complaining that liberals frame gay marriage as a civil rights issue rather than as a moral imperative.

What the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision put in play is same-sex civil marriage, which is indeed a civil rights issue.

As a gay Jewish man, I can already marry my male partner in a synagogue and obtain a traditional Jewish marriage contract. What we lack is the ability to obtain a state-issued marriage license that would give us rights of inheritance, visitation, custody and entitlement.

Yes, I want my partner to get my Social Security check when I die, and that is no trifle, but rather the equal protection of the Constitution of the United States.

MICHAEL BRODER

New York, Nov. 22, 2003

Ironically, perhaps—or perhaps it is only poetic justice—our being civilly married made splitting up infinitely harder than it would have been had the state not recognized our intimate partnership. And infinitely more costly just in dollars and cents terms, which even we poets have to think about now and then, especially when our access to essential needs like housing and health care are at stake.

Be all of that as it may, here we are. Wow, did ever a sentence mean less that that one? But that’s kind of how it is. One big shoulder shrug. I thought…but nah. I’ve become fond of saying I was a volunteer, not a victim. My therapist looked at me a bit quizzically when I said that at a recent session. “I want to preserve a sense of agency,” I explained. Which led me to compose and text myself the following poem as I waited for the bus after my session:

I said volunteer not victim.
She said it can be hard to see what’s going on underneath.
I understand your desire
to preserve a sense of agency, she said;
but that complicates your ability
to see what was really happening.
I felt my expression transform, my face.
That’s what makes it a story, I said.
She seemed unsure where I was going with this.
The story, the novel, the movie—
That’s what would make it compelling.
That the victim’s desire
to preserve a sense of agency
prevents him from seeing his partner
as a predator and himself as prey.
Pardon me, I said. I’m always looking for what makes the story a story.

I mean, in the end, I think that’s what this whole Secret Life odyssey has been about. What makes the story a story. Can’t that be said to be the driving force of all poetry in and beyond the Anglo-European world since Whitman and Dickinson? The modernists, the confessionals, the New York School, the Beats?

Yes, I missed my calling as a literary theorist and critic. Or have I missed it after all? Last I checked, I’m not dead yet. Another new poem, very little this time:

Everybody dies — Stephen Sondheim
I’m still here — Stephen Sondheim

Twenty-eight down, three to go. We’re almost done with this Secret Life thing.

À la prochaine.

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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. While those remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, sit in that box, I’m finishing what I started 26 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #27 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the sixth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The sixth poem in this section is “Later Than I Would Like It to Be.” Okay, Secret Life is feeling generous in its old age—Here is the poem in full.

Shadows lengthen on the cold pavement,
October stains the leaves on dry, rustling trees,
you become loam in the ground—
dissolve, disintegrate,
like words that made no difference on first hearing—

Words like:
Nobody has the flu for nine weeks;
see another doctor;
drinking will kill you before the virus has a chance.

Words like:
You do not have to die;
I love you;
I love you anyway.

Words like:
It’s okay, it’s okay.

Guess who? If you thought you would’t see Tony again, well, as Tony would say, “later for you, hon.” This poem is sort of a companion to “The Remembered One,” in which Marcos came back to me in a dream to invite me to join him in the nether realms. I don’t think “Later Than I Would Like It to Be” needs any explanation. I missed Tony and I wanted him back. I still do.

But that’s the Inferno. We left off last time when I was just about to enter the Purgatorio. Just after the precocious poet pressed his card into my palm with his number written on the back, flashed his impish grin, turned on a heel, strode briskly away, and left me there on the dance floor of the LIT 2 launch party at The New School, wanting more.

This is not the place for an exhaustive account of our courtship and its aftermath. My mother—who delivered eleven boys (no girls) in the course of seven pregnancies, of whom four were live births—called me her Last of the Mohicans. The precocious poet was the last of my boyfriend Mohicans.

From roughly ages 20 to 40 there had been Randy, Chet, Erving, Tony, Michael I, Michael II, the unnamed social worker, the opera director, the merchandiser, and the boyfriend in San Juan. Opera director was very short-lived (the relationship, not the man, thank you God—the man is alive and well and directing opera to this day), but for some reason he gets on the list. Not on the list is the dog-walking photographer from Mexico—It was too brief, and having lost him makes me too sad. And mind you, that is a list of people I dated, watched South Park with, whose family members I met. Recounting my purely sexual adventures with guys I never actually dated would require many more installments of Secret Life. There were also a number of men who fall between those two categories—men from whom I wanted even a little bit more, but did not get it.

But from roughly ages 40 to 60, there was the precocious poet, and only the precocious poet.

We met in March, boyfriended in April, and shacked up in May. I put a ring on it in 2003. That year, we organized a World AIDS Day reading at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City with an incredible lineup of poets. We got married—civilly, legally married in the state of Massachusetts—in 2004. We bought a house in 2005. Life ensued. There were MFAs and PhDs all around. There were jobs, academic and non. There were books published. Essays in academic journals and edited volumes. We travelled the continent. We saw the Patti LuPone production of Gypsy both at City Center Encores! AND on Broadway. We had it all.

And then…not so much. He moved out of our house in 2021. We signed our divorce agreement in 2023. Our divorce was finalized in 2024. And now it’s now.

And that’s really all I’m going to say about that. Maybe more later, maybe not. Secret Life is never planned in advance. I often pick up where I left off, but, seeing as how I have already cut to the chase of divorce, I’m not sure where I would pick up from.

There will probably be poems, memoirs, autofiction. Or not. I feel like this is a good time to quote the wonderful Spanish expression, el mundo es un pañuelo, life is a handkerchief, which I learned from one of my graduating seniors at the Rudolf Steiner school on New York’s Upper East Side in 1988. But it’s probably completely irrelevant. I like saying it, anyway. And I like saying À la prochaine.

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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. Let those remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, sit in that box. I’m here to finish what I started, to tell a story that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #26 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the fifth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The fifth poem in this section is “The Old Meaning/Moaning Dichotomy.” Here are the first two and a half stanzas of this poem in eight quatrains.

On bad days I seek a theoretical basis
for my actions, a point of origin, a strategy,
a thread to pull me through,
family tree, concentric circles,

dates of birth and death, lists. Because
meaning is not so much in things
as in the story the thing implies,
like melody implies harmony,

a setting that makes the pattern perceptible,
lets the tune make sense.

“Meaning/Moaning” (as I affectionately call it for short) was written prior to 1995, and was published in spring 2006 in the now-defunct roger, a journal edited by undergraduates at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island.

The genesis for the title, if not the poem overall, was an article in The New York Times magazine of February 9, 1986, about the so-called Yale Critics—Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Titled “The Tyranny of the Yale Critics,” the article included the opening sentence of Harold Bloom’s essay “The Breaking of Form,” which was included in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), an influential volume that included essays by Bloom, De Man, Hartman, Miller, and Jacques Derrida. It reads

The word meaning goes back to a root that signifies “opinion” or “intention,” and is closely related to the word moaning.

I loved that idea—of the ineffable and inescapable connection between body and mind, feeling and thought, emotion and intellect. Now, mind you, I read that article in that issue of the Times magazine in 1986—I may still have it somewhere in my file cabinet. What’s more, I was a total theory head in college (1979–83), and I know I read Deconstruction and Criticism from cover to cover at some point, although that might not have been until the mid 90s. So this idea was in my noggin for a long time.

So it feels inevitable that at some point I would write a poem about those mind/body, thought/feeling, emotion/intellect dichotomies, and allude to the Bloom quote in the title.

But enough about that for now. Last time, I left you hanging just as I was about to hit on the man who would become my husband, whom I spied from across a crowded room at a journal launch party at The New School in March of 2000. Just as the boyfriend in San Juan was planning to leave his tropical island for my Manhattan island. And just as I was letting the dog-walking photographer from Mexico—with a heart as big as Mexico City—slip through my fingers.

As you may remember, I walked up to poets Mark Bibbins and Ravi Shankar and said—suggestively, I will admit; seductively, some would argue—“Hi, guys. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

The precocious poet, J, would later describe that moment by saying he had not worn his contacts that night, nor was he wearing his glasses at the moment, and so when he looked up at me (I’m an inch taller), my face alone was clearly visible against the background of the out-of-focus room. I remember it as everything else fading away in the glow of his expectant smile. “Hi,” he said, not totally without his own hint of seduction.

In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, neither of us could restrain ourselves from referring to that moment as love at first sight. We knew from that first glance—at once improbable and inevitable—that we were destined for each other.

We were glued to each other for the next couple of hours, talking—well, he mostly talked and I mostly listened, raptly—sitting through the reading (during which he seemed to have some insult-comic-of-poetry barb to hurl at every reader, quietly leaning over to vituperate in my ear), and dancing afterwards to the DJ’s tunes. Given that it was 2000 at an MFA program in NYC—with a lot of gay people—the music was probably some mix of Third Eye Blind, REM, Madonna, B-52s, Pet Shop Boys, Clash, Britney, Whitney, and Cher. In any event, suddenly he was gone. When he came back a moment later, he was wearing his pea coat and thrusting a business card at me, the back of the card face up so I could see that he had written his number on it, and then he was across the room and out the door.

When I got home—the incredible rent stabilized apartment that the social worker boyfriend had snagged for us in the prewar building off Columbus Circle—I wrote, by hand, in my composition notebook journal, “I met this cute poet tonight at the LIT party at The New School. He’s in the MFA program at NYU. He was kind of sassy, but I liked it.”

And…that’s a good place to leave it for today. As many of you know, there’s more. Quite a bit more. À la prochaine.

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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. Forget about my selling out the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I’m here to finish something I started, and to tell a story that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…

This is post #25 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the fourth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The fourth poem in this section is “Cases.” I’m not sure how it escaped my publisher’s chopping block, as I don’t really think it belongs in this book.

The poem goes through the cases of noun declensions in Indo-European languages, giving an example of the characteristic usage of each in a sentence about a river. It’s a lesson in syntax in couplets.

What the hell, I’m going to include this whole thing here:

Cases

Nominative, locus of being;
the river rises, the river falls.

The genitive’s whole, that of which one is part,
as the river’s breath that sweetens us.

To the dative we abject ourselves,
as to the river we bring what we love.

Accusative: what we inflict upon another
as we enter the river.

Ablative—case of separation or, paradoxically, accompaniment:
We emerge from the river whole.

Where is the locative (vestigial in extant languages)?
Where our children wait patiently in the river?

By means of the instrumental we achieve our end:
With the river we enter eternity.

Vocative, whom we supplicate or implore:
River; oh, River; you, River!

Imagine that! A poem in This Life Now that has nothing to do with AIDS, homosexuality, or adolescent angst! Or does it?

“Cases” was written in April 2005, just a month before I finished my MFA at NYU. I may have written it for Phillis Levin’s craft class. I thought she would appreciate its preoccupation with the mechanics of linguistic syntax.

I promised juicy stories and home truths for this edition of Secret Life. Not sure I am up to delivering that, with federalized National Guardsmen patrolling Los Angeles county, and an ICE officer deliberately shooting an Australian journalist in the leg with a rubber bullet.

I will just pick up on a bit of the boyfriend timeline from my last post, where we touched on my breakup with the social worker in 1997, followed by the fling with the opera director and the six-month relationship with the merchandiser. For a while I really did lay off the boyfriend sauce. Then, in the summer of 1999, I took my first ever real life grownup solo vacation to San Juan, and of course met this guy on the beach outside my gay guest house, and proceeded not only to date him, but to fly back and forth to San Juan a few times to see him, and ultimately I invited him to come to New York to live with me and be my love.

During that same period, I met one of the most courageous, creative, imaginative, and honorable young men I have ever known. He grew up in an affluent farming family in Mexico. He had a physically abusive father who would not accept him or even tolerate him when it became known that he was gay and had HIV. So he ran away. On his own. By himself. Made his way to New York. He supported himself as a dog walker while building his photography portfolio. Yes, I met him at a bath house—the now defunct West Side Club, to be exact, which some readers of this essay may remember fondly. We started seeing each other. The chemistry was…so healthy! Looking back, I think that was the problem: He saw me in the way I wanted to be seen, and I wasn’t used to that, and I pushed him away. My excuse was the guy from San Juan. But I think that was just an excuse.

I think that was just an excuse, because a few months later, with the guy from San Juan having quit his civil service job in preparation for coming to New York to live with me and be my love, I met the man who would become my husband. At a launch party for the second issue of LIT, the journal of the New School MFA program in creative writing. I was there with my roommate, a young woman who, in fact, had dated my social worker boyfriend back when they were college kids in a southwest city that shall remain nameless.

We stood at one end of the room munching on crudités, and I spotted this guy in a charcoal grey turtleneck sweater with a thick head of curly dark brown hair, sort of darting around, air kissing Fran Gordon at one end of the room before alighting beside Marc Bibbins and Ravi Shankar, who were students in the program and whom I knew via my duties at the weekly reading series I hosted at the Ear Inn on Spring Street (more about my Ear Inn gig perhaps in an upcoming Secret Life).

“Who’s that cute little Jewish guy,” I said to my roomie. She flashed the smile of a friend who had now known three to five of my most recent boyfriends, including one who had been her boyfriend.

I had quite the smooth move for finding out who the cute little Jewish guy was. I walked over and sidled up to Mark and Ravi and said, “Hey, guys. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

The rest is a once celebrated, now infamous chapter of New York City Gay Poetry Mafia History. But I’m over 1200 words here, so we’ll come back to this fateful meeting next time. I guess this edition of Secret Life turned out pretty juicy, after all, despite my gloom in the face of the burgeoning police state. And there was even a home truth.

À la prochaine.

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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. This series of brief essays is no longer about unloading the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. It’s more about finishing something I started, and telling a story that may resonate for some of you reading this.

You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!

This is post #24 in this series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the third poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The third poem in this section is “Exotic.” The first stanza is as follows;

The delivery boy from the 24-hour diner
brings me a bleu cheeseburger deluxe, medium rare.
I seduce him at my apartment door.
His promise: “I fuck you every day.”

While I have been a busy boy with other boys for some 40-plus years now, some moments stand out in my memory and loom large in my imagination, and the moment described in this poem is certainly among them.

So old is “Exotic” that it exists among my computer files as a UNIX executable file dated 2001. I suspect I wrote it a few years earlier than that, maybe even in Word Perfect on an IBM-like PC. The apartment was just off the northwest corner of W. 57th Street, around the corner from Columbus Circle—The dream apartment my boyfriend snagged for us in 1996 when we moved in together. That was the unnamed social worker (and newly minted MSW from NYU) that you may remember from Secret Life #10 and the breakup poem “Words and Things” in the first section of the book.

When we broke up and he moved out in 1997, I dug out an old bag of my wild oats and started sowing them again. Fact is, I had acted out sexually quite a bit during our relationship, and my behavior contributed at least in part to our demise. That was when bad habits now old were relatively new.1 In any event, unnamed social worker was a really good guy—He deserved better, and I hope he went on to get it.

But all of this is just to say that the delivery boy from the 24-hour diner was one of those wild oats. And there were many others. Some stuck around for a while, like the opera director and the merchandiser. The merchandiser had a lot going for him. He gave me Tony vibe on a lot of levels, including but not limited to his sexual magnetism. He did displays at the now-defunct Fifth Avenue location of a high-end Japanese department store, and on a couple of jobs, he invited me to work with his crew. That was so much fun. And both quintessentially and existentially gay in a way that I had previously experienced only through, well, to be honest, sex.

The merchandiser possessed more praises that I could sing, and we had some very good times—from New Jersey to Woodstock to Cape Cod. But in the end, that relationship really brought home for me, like no relationship before, how I tended to allow myself to become objectified and instrumentalized by men. I wanted to change the way I related to men in intimate relationships to prevent that from continuing to happen. Of course, that was a very tall order. As it turned out, I still had some painful intimate relationship territory to traverse before beginning to glimpse some healing and some wholeness.

Back next time with more juicy stories and home truths. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

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As another emotional crisis recedes, I’m taking a shot at keeping these Secret Life essays coming out twice a week, ideally on Mondays and Thursdays. It’s no longer about unloading the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. It’s more about finishing something I started, and telling a story that may resonate for some readers.

You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!

This is post #23 in this series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are up to the second poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The second poem in this section is “The Remembered One.” Remember Marcos, one of the beloveds I lost to AIDS in the 1990s? Well, he’s back, and (grâce à Obi Wan Kenobi) more powerful than you can possibly imagine. He enters the poem in the second stanza, shown below.

I dreamt of Marcos last night.
I thought he came to be buried,
to be done with; but no, that caramel devil,
leaving his tangerine swim trunks wet on the floor,
toweling his gorgon hair as he sits in my lap,
numbing me with the poppies
of his opiate grin and reasserting his claim:

The first draft of what became “The Remembered One” was written in December 2006. Marcos had been dead eleven years. I had been with my husband for six years and legally civilly married for two years. Marcos is pissed off about this.

Why should you get the house,
the husband, the PhD, while I chew on dirt
and feed succeeding generations
of night crawlers?

It was a good question. Marcos later suggests that I might be happier down there with him, that his realm is better suited to the life I had lived before my current spate of health and happiness. If you’ve been keeping score, you may see a connection between Marcos’s suggestion here, and lines we looked at a couple of of poems ago that give the book it’s title—

and this life now is the better life, but oh,
how the cool sand calls.

After leaving high school as the kid who did not want to do anything he would not feel comfortable telling his mother about, I had ultimately lived quite an adventurous life in my post-college years. Some of it in Paris, London, and Rome, some of it in Jerusalem, some of it from east coast to west coast and northern states to southern states, most of it the City that Never Sleeps, and a lot of it under the boardwalk at night in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and often on my knees. I loved that life. I almost died for that life. So Marcos’s suggestion was not without its appeal. And he even showed a keen insight into my husband, suggesting that the latter might enjoy life with “precious memories” of me even more than he enjoyed life with the living, breathing me. Funny, how wise can be the people we encounter in our dreams.

Okay, I was going to go on a bit more, but that is simply too perfect a place in which to leave it for now. Back next time with more home truth. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

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The previous edition of Secret Life seems to have sparked some joy for some readers, so I’m striking again in hopes that the iron is still hot. In know I am not going to unload the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But I started Secret Life and I want to finish it, all 31 installments, one for every poem in this slim book or—to quote a well-known poet who wrote a review—“fat chapbook.”

You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!

This is post #22 in this series. We go through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are at the start of the third and final section of the book, “This Life Now.” Each section starts with an epigraph—the first section with a quote from Emily Dickinson, the second with a quote from James Joyce, and this section with a quote from my mother.

     I don’t want to sleep; I just want to be alive with you.
               — Lee Broder
               Methodist Hospital, Brooklyn. May 6, 2005

My mother, born Lena Brecher in New York on October 28, 1921, the daughter of Eastern European immigrant Jews, suffered a stroke in 2004, three days shy of her 83rd birthday. She was alone when it happened, in the studio apartment she lived in in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—the apartment she helped me buy in 1989, which I had not lived in for years.

Amazingly, she managed to call 911, and she was taken by ambulance to Coney Island Hospital, where she made a remarkable recovery. In January, she transferred from the hospital to Sheepshead Bay Nursing Home to continue her physical therapy. At some point in early 2005, she was discharged home to the apartment in Brighton Beach. My husband and I visited her there, and she did not seem to be in her right mind. I did not think this was going to work out; but there was nothing I could do that day.

Within days, however, God seems to have made some decisions for us all. I received a call from a hospital emergency room in Brooklyn—I don’t remember where, maybe Maimonides, somewhere in that wide swath I refer to as Belt Parkway Brooklyn. My mother had again called 911, this time with unbearable abdominal pains. My husband and I went to the hospital. While we waited, my mom was diagnosed with a cancerous biliary tumor.

Much of that period is a blur. Whatever hospital she was in, it was awful, and we had her transferred to NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, in Park Slope, which was much better. I visited her more or less daily for some number of days or weeks at Methodist. Again, much of it is a blur. I remember stopping into Zuzu’s Petals, the florist and plant shop on 5th Avenue near the hospital, just to find a moment of peace and maybe a kind of hope. At some point, my mother had a heart attack that put her in the ICU, and in the wake of that, I remember an episode of something called ICU psychosis, after which my mother was never again fully lucid.

It was after the ICU psychosis that I sat beside her bed one day when food was brought in, and I asked, “Mom, do you want something to eat?” And she said no. And I asked, “Do you want to sleep?” And that’s when she said, “I don’t want to sleep; I just want to be alive with you.” I jotted that down in my notebook. I was, after all, a poet. I wanted to be alive with her, too.

After the heart attack, the oncology team said she was too frail to undergo radiation and chemotherapy. They had trouble spitting it out, but eventually, they told my brothers and me that hospice was the best option. My mother was going to die, sooner rather than later.

Within weeks, my mother died in hospice. June 23, 2005. Age 83.

The first poem in the last section of the book is called “Random.” It is, like “Secret” in the previous edition of Secret Life, both very short and very central to the major themes of the book, so now for the second time in Secret Life history, I share a poem from This Life Now in full.

Random

This fabric, once torn, cannot be mended.

You call it industrial chic; I call it
what I grew up with.

Our love has no trajectory.

We are a fait accompli, pen to paper,
shattering of silence.

To this day, I still do not know precisely what that poem means, or what I mean by it. And yet I say it is very central to the major themes of the book! How can that be? How can it feel like one of the most important poems in the book, and I don’t really know what it is even about? Some kind of feeling; but what kind?

It appears to have been written in late January 2001. That was almost a year into my relationship with the man who would become my husband. I don’t think he ever said anything about industrial chic, but somebody akin to him is definitely the “You” to whom a speaker somewhat akin to me is addressing this little poem. I will let you figure out the rest—Whatever you think about this poem is doubtless no more or less valid than whatever I think about it. I only know that I love it. It is a darling I could never kill.

Okay, that’s if for now. We have nine more installments of Secret Life in which to dig into the psyche of this book. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

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Secret Life has been away for about six weeks. This series will not succeed in selling out the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But I started Secret Life and I’m going to finish it, all 31 installments, one for every poem in this slim full-length or—to quote a well-known poet who reviewed the book—“fat chapbook.”

My offer still holds—Both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!

This is post #21 in this series. We go through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

We are at the end the second section of the book, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” The last poem in this section—21st in the book overall—is “Secret.” It is a brief poem, and very important to the story of the book as a whole, so for the first time in the history of Secret Life, I share a poem from the book with you in full:

Secret

Remember when walks on the beach
led to trysts in the cool sand beneath the boardwalk?

Disease then crept through your body,
but you kept it at bay with a churning engine of desire.

Now you wash the virus away
like silt through a hollow drainpipe,

and this life now is the better life, but oh,
how the cool sand calls.

Remember, you can get This Life Now AND the sequel poetry collection, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Click this link to order yours now!

As you may notice, this poem contains the phrase that is the title of the book, “this life now.” It would therefore only be natural to think that I pulled that phrase from the poem and made it the title of the book. But it fact, it’s the other way around. I had decided to call the book This Life Now, and I needed that phrase to appear in some poem somewhere in the book.

The earliest version of the manuscript stored on my computer is dated January 28, 2006. I know, right? Poetry collections can be a long time coming. The file itself is called “attempted manuscript,” and there is no book title indicated anywhere in the document. The poem you see above with the title “Secret” was a section of a three-part poem titled “Random,” and it included only the first three couplets of the four-couplet poem you see above.

The first version of the manuscript to have a cover page is dated July 29, 2006. The title on the cover is This Life Now. There is a poem in the manuscript titled “This Life Now,” but that poem did not end up in This Life Now. Instead, it ended up in my second book, Drug and Disease Free, under the title “The Rock.”

Sometime in early 2007, I sent a version of the manuscript to Peter Covino to get his input. We still sent print copies of things in those days, and within a few weeks, Peter returned the manuscript with copious and invaluable comments. I probably have that paper copy with Peter’s handwritten comments somewhere in my file cabinet, but I’m not going to look for it now. The next version of the manuscript on my computer is dated April 14, 2007, and the file is called “post-Peter-comments.” The poem “Secret” in included in that version of the manuscript, as you see it above, with the fourth couplet included,

So—Why that title, why that poem, why that couplet, why that phrase?

By 2006, the year I started assembling that manuscript, I was a gay man legally married to another gay man. I had not died of AIDS. I had come through a lot, as we all come through a lot. A lot of gay poets of my generation where starting to write individual poems and in some cases poetry collections about the AIDS years and about longterm survival with HIV. A lot of those poems and those books seemed to focus on the past. I wanted to write a book that gave the past its due, but whose bottom line, so to speak, was not the then and there of the struggle, but the here and now of survival. I wanted to write a book about this life, this life that I was living, this life now.

That’s why I wanted to call the book This Life Now.

And so I did. But at the same time, I had something of a secret; namely, that I missed my old life. I missed gay bars and hookups, sex in public places, sex in private clubs. Walks on the beach where I picked up guys like sea shells, and tossed them back in the sand just as quickly and easily, with just as little regret, and infinitely more pleasure. I missed Randy and Tony and Marcos, all dead by then. To a degree, I even missed the struggle for survival, the game of waiting out AIDS and betting it all on staying healthy, or even just alive, long enough to be there for the treatment, if not the cure.

And that, my friends, is why I took a very short poem that somewhat romanticized the struggle for survival at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and waxed somewhat wistfully at how much we took for granted our turns of good fortune—why I took that poem and added to it the following couplet:

and this life now is the better life,
but oh, how the cool sand calls.

I’m not sure how many readers of the book found that couplet as, well, as earth shattering as I did. Almost literally earth shattering, the way it blows the heavy-duty plate-steel door right off the hinges of my comfortable new life as one of many survivors of HIV infection and one of the first handful of legally same-sex married gay men in the United States.

I think that’s as far as we need to go for now. We have ten more installments of Secret Life in which to dig deeper into that fundamental contradiction. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

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I don’t think this series is going to succeed in selling out the 100 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But I started this and I’m going to finish it, all 31 installments, one for every poem in this slim full-length or—to quote a well-known poet who reviewed the book for a notable review—“fat chapbook.”

My offer still holds—Both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!

This is post #20 in this series. We go through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem.

Nearing the end of the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of the book. The next poem in this section—20th in the book overall—is “Ommatidia.” Below is a snippet from the beginning of this 26-line poem.

          What about a good old-fashioned
          ich-du type poem, like the old days,

          Budweisers and brown paper bags,
          high-school sweethearts

          and gym-class heartthrobs,
          the bad skin, bad teeth,

          never saying, always doing,
          the art of the locker room

          drive-by....

Ommatidia are units that make up the compound eyes of arthropods, including insects, crustaceans, and millipedes. So from the get-go this is a creepy poem. The first couplet alludes to the poet’s identification with second-person poems addressed to an object of homoerotic desire. Man, this is such a good poem! It’s so chilling. Even just these eight and a half lines. That’s all I have to say about it, on a craft level at least.

In terms of its place in the poet’s story, the poet’s portraiture of himself as a “young sodomite,” well—What can I say, there was a lot of yearning for straight male friends in middle school and high school. In the latter part of the poem, the speaker maybe gets a little “handsy…” but if you want to read that kind of smut, yuh gotta buy duh book.

This feels like a good time to go back to the dry-run-for-a-memoir vibe that we indulged in early editions of Secret Life. When we left off the bio stuff in Secret Life #18, I was breaking the hearts of high school girlfriends who did not understand why I stopped dating them. I was gay but not out. I was secretive. I was scared. It was the late 1970s. Less than a decade since Stonewall. Sodomy was still illegal in many states. And what would my mother think?

So anyway, I go off to college in 1979. Columbia. Full ride on a Pulitzer Scholarship. I live on campus in university housing. John Jay Hall. Room 1228. My floormates like me! Columbia is not yet co-ed. It is rumored during pot-hazy dorm-room card games that 20% of Columbia’s all-male undergraduate population is gay. “There are five of us in this room right now,” Dave Rubin says, a Dorito poised at his lips. “So statistically one of us is gay.” I say nothing. Believe it or not, I’m butch enough to escape suspicion. Sort of. My floormates get the memo over time. I am the butt of some gentle ribbing by some I count as actual friends, and it feels good. I don’t have to hide, but it is in nobody’s interest to make it a big deal.

I think that’s as far as we need to go for now. We have eleven more installments of Secret Life to cover the following 20 or so years.

À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

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If I can coerce 100 or so people to order a copy of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, the book will be blissfully out of print. This essay is a self-serving ploy to pique your curiosity so you will snag one for yourself.

To sweeten the pot, I am offering you both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US. Click here to order yours now!

This is post #19 in this series. We’re going through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet, and chatting a bit about the world of the poem or the world of the poet at the time he wrote the poem.

Still in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of the book. The next poem in this section—19th in the book overall—is “Investiture.” Below is a snippet from the first half of this 16-line poem.

          When I turn the next corner,
          Batman casts a shadow over moonlit Gotham,
          and climbing down the stairs
          to the cool sand beneath the boardwalk,
          I am Orpheus descending,
          down on my knees before you can say blow me.

A poem about Greek mythology and sex under the boardwalk in Brighton Beach—Now that’s eclectic, don’t you think?

Investiture is a medieval term that referred to the ceremony in which a priest or other religious official first donned the vestments (garments) of their new office—literalizing the more modern idea of “clothes make the man.”

In classical philology, the term “poetic investiture” refers to the process whereby the Muses—as the mythological sources of poetry—invest a poet with their poetic powers. Later in this poem, there is a moment of the speaker’s poetic investiture that is much more parental-advisory–worthy than the scene from Hesiod’s Theogony on which it is modeled, where the Muses on Mt. Helicon invest Hesiod with his poetic powers by bopping him over the head with a laurel branch. But if you want to read that salacious passage, you gonna have to buy the book.

I gotta run to therapy now, so this edition of Secret Life is sharply curtailed. As they used to say during commercial breaks on The Love Boat, “more love to come.”

À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

If I can persuade 100 or so people to order a copy of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, that book will be blissfully out of print. These essays are a ploy to pique your curiosity so you will snag one for yourself.

To sweeten the pot, I am offering you both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US. Click here to order yours now!

This is post #18 in this series. Still in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of the book. The next poem in this section—18th in the book overall—is “Pictography.” Below is the first stanza of this 20-line poem.

          They declared war on me,
          but I was no warrior, so I left—
          wandered deserts alone,
          spoke no one’s language,
          knew no one’s customs.
          I invented civilization with every step—
          every footprint a cuneiform wedge—
          alphabet, syllabary, pictograph:
          hope, love.

This poem refers to the transition from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood. when queer children start to assert their deviant sex and gender identities, and families—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins—resist, rebel, and retaliate.

In the previous Secret Life, I wrote a bit about my middle school years, the early to mid 1970s. I started high school in 1976. I had lots of crushes on boys, and broke the hearts of a number of girls who dated me, or wanted to date me, and upon whom I lavished charm and attention, until there would be a line of intimacy and affection that I could not cross, and I would begin to drift away, and they would not know why, and maybe they would ask me why, and I would not be able to tell them. At first I was not able to tell them because I was not really sure myself. But soon enough, I knew exactly why, but I was not ready to disclose, so I just left them feeling shitty about me—but even worse, feeling shitty about themselves. What had they done wrong? Nothing, of course. And I could even say that, but without an adequate explanation of what was going on with me, those assurances on my part rang hollow.

That’s enough about that for now. I’m going to share a previously unpublished prose poem set in the summer of 1979, my transition from high school to college. Grace Gold was not a girlfriend. She was a casual friend, a neighbor, a year ahead of me in school. Her memory is cherished by many and is for a blessing.

[Note: This is a prose poem. Substack does not support justified text.]

Graduation Day

Grace Gold was beautiful and dizzy. Red hair, creamy skin, lips full as a promise. Spacey Gracey we called her in high school. So smart she was always somewhere else. How she haunted me the summer of 1979. Had she really walked me home just a year before, talked about college, the future? Had she really gone off to college, a credit to our whacky experimental school? Had we really read the news that spring: GRADUATION DAY AT COLUMBIA—BARNARD FRESHMAN. Teenage girl walking down Broadway, maybe thinking about a summer job, a summer romance, when the masonry fell and where there had been Grace now there was only space. How like Gracey to die that way. How it haunted me that final Coney Island summer. Was this what I was in for? The papers said Grace never knew what hit her. It didn't make me feel any better. First my father, biopsy to coffin in twelve days. Now this. How it could all end in a split second. How you could never know.

À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

Down to the last 100 copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. If I can persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear, this book will be blissfully out of print. These essays are a ploy to pique your curiosity so you will snag one for yourself.

Click here to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.

This is post #17 in the series. Still perusing the poems of sweet, innocent childhood in second section of the book, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” The sixth poem in this section, and the 17th in the book overall, is “Directional.”

[Note: This is a prose poem, but Substack does not support justified text.]

          If I part my hair on the same side repeatedly,
          I develop a cowlick (also called a spit curl),
          so I vary the part periodically, sometimes
          right, sometimes left. I wonder if I’m

          misunderstood, if anyone thinks my action
          signifies something. Because these things
          do have meaning sometimes, like in the
          seventies, when an earring on the right

          meant a man was gay.

This poem’s connection to childhood is tenuous, except it ends with my biggest high school boy crush assuring me that he is not gay based on which ear he has had pierced. There, I gave it away. But you might still want to read the rest of this poem (i.e., buy the book) to learn about the hanky code, which has to do with different colored bandanas that gay men use to indicate which bondage/domination sadomasochist (BDSM) fetishes they are into, and what role they play in such “kinks.”

In Secret Life #16, I went back to my origin story and told you a lot about where my parents came from, how my dad established himself as a freelance commercial artist in the 1960s, and his death from colon cancer in 1972 at the age of 52, when I was 11 years old.

My dad died in the summer. That fall, I started middle school at George C. Tilyou Intermediate School 303 in Coney Island, across the street from Warbasse Houses, the middle-income cooperative built by the United Housing Foundation and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in 1965.

I am sitting here in front of my computer, staring at the screen, my fingers poised above the keys, and I don’t know what to write. As you may realize by now, that is very unlike me. But here’s the thing: I have always had this clear narrative about my first decade of life, with its often traumatic family drama, my mom’s cancer and hysterectomy right after I was born, my dad’s heart attack when I was two years old, the constant conflicts between my mother and my oldest brother, always about a car or a girl, often violent, my brother holding my mother over the sill of an open window or wielding a knife at her, my mother in turn throwing pieces of furniture across the room at him. Of course, the horrors of Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Retarded, where my brother Freddie lived when I was a child.

And more—Young people jumping out of windows of our Mitchell-Lama co-op on acid trips. Barbarella, which my dad took me to see one night in 1968, when my mother said to my father—on one of his rare nights not working late in the city or being at the American Legion Post calling bingo or playing poker with the boys—“Aw, Marty, take the kid to a movie.” (I think Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim may be why I’m gay!) Not to mention public events like race riots, assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, the Six Day War, and Apollo 11 (see my poem Years (1961–1970) in Secret Life #13).

But my middle school years, while just as eventful, lurk more amorphously in my memory. I will here toss in the ring some isolated things. Maybe connecting them is the poetic work of the next couple of years. My crushes on (mostly straight) boys at school. There is already a mention of “Doug” in my prose poem “Mod Squad,” which was previewed in an earlier Secret Life:

          Doug had light brown flyaway hair, the kind of hair boys
          would flick out of their eyes with a jerk of their neck in
          kind of a girlish way, and soft pink lips and the slightest
          bit of an overbite, and he was troublemaker enough to
          be bad boy sexy, but not so much as to trigger my withering
          sense of right and wrong.

Then my sixth-grade math teacher did something quite inappropriate sometime after winter break—He fixed me up with a girl my age and my grade in another class! I’m thinking about how my 1970s could be portrayed as a series of movies: Lizzy and I went to see Jeremiah Johnson (directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Robert Redford) on what was my first ever movie date with a girl. Jeremiah Johnson had a memorable title theme, but it was no “One Tin Soldier,” the theme to Billy Jack (1971)—a movie I saw with a boy I grew up with who was one of my first friends who was (also) gay—but we did not openly mention such things then. When we were in eighth grade, I went with a whole gang of my middle school buddies to the recently opened Kings Plaza shopping mall in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn to see Jaws (1975).

We spent a lot of time at Kings Plaza in those days. It took about an hour on two buses to get there from where we all lived in the high-rise housing developments of Coney Island and West Brighton—Luna Park, Warbasse Houses, and Trump Village. That’s where we got our records at Sam Goody, we went to The Plum Tree for black light posters and scented candles and to ogle the lava lamps. And so on.

See, I feel like this has been the most Facebook-post-y of all my Secret Life essays thus far. My 1970s feel very After School Special, very Edge of Night, very Irwin Allen—The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974). It feels like a blur of disaster films, heat waves, Son of Sam—aka the .44 Caliber Killer, aka David Berkowitz (we all breathed a sigh of relief when it was revealed that he was adopted by Jewish parents, not Jewish by birth). “Ford to City: Drop Dead” on the cover of the New York Daily News on October 30, 1975, referring to the city’s municipal bond crisis. It all feels like it would make a great movie, but it also feels like that movie must already have been made, and anyway I am neither a screenwriter nor a filmmaker.

Okay, now this is the longest Secret Life post so far. What’s happening to me? Zip that lip, Beachcomber Mike. Back next time with yet more portraiture of the artist as a young sodomite. Maybe I’ll have figured out the storyline by then (doubt it). À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

I recently bought from my publisher the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. If I can persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear, this book will be blissfully out of print. These essays are a ploy to pique your curiosity so you will snag one for yourself.

Click here to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.

This is post #16 in the series. Still in the second section of the book, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” Poems of sweet, innocent childhood. The fifth poem in this section, and the 16th in the book overall, is “Mod Squad.” As in the TV series about three hippie cops—Pete, Linc, and Julie— that ran on ABC from 1968 to 1973. Here is the first one-third or so of this poem.

[Note: This is a prose poem, but Substack does not support justified text.]

          I didn’t leave home, I was kicked out, Pete says to Linc as
          they drive conversing in close-ups through the night.

          I had the hots for Pete, and for Wally Cleaver, and for
          Chip, the middle of Fred MacMurray’s three sons, but
          never for any of the Brady boys, although possibly for
          the original youngest son (Chris) on The Partridge Family,
          the dark haired one with the big brown eyes (Jeremy
          Gelbwaks), not that blond dork (Brian Forster) who
          replaced him in season two.

          Yes, Jeremy Gelbwaks was prepubescent, but so was I, so
          there was nothing icky about it.

The poem goes on from crushes on TV actors to crushes on boys in middle school and high school.

In recent posts, we’ve gotten away from the personal history portion of the program. In Secret Life #13, I gave you an overview of my first decade of life (1961–70) via a series of Sapphic stanzas. In 1972 my dad died of colon cancer. Colon cancer does not develop overnight, but he had apparently ignored symptoms and did not get regular checkups. And in any case, we did not do routine colonoscopies or occult blood tests starting at age 40 when there is a family history, the way we do now. So when my mom finally insisted that my dad go to a gastroenterologist, if was far too late. The doctor ordered him right into the hospital, and it was all of twelve days from biopsy to coffin.

Martin Broder—son of Jacob and Alice, brother of Frances and Eugene, husband of Lee Brecher, father of Henry, Freddie, Victor, and Michael—died on July 7, 1972, at the age of 52. I was 11 years old. Victor was 15. My mom was 50. A widow at 50. With two minor children living at home, and a severely disabled 17 year old son, my brother Freddie, in a state institution. What followed were dark years. Sad years. Financially difficult years.

My father had been self-employed as a commercial artist (what today we would call a graphic designer). As I wrote—and you may have read—in my poem “Years” for 1964,

          Dad, forty-four, mends from a heart attack and
          makes the switch from sales to commercial art, the
          doctors having said he could neither smoke nor
          carry his sample

          cases any longer

So he went from selling risqué novelties to concessionaires—pens with pictures of girls on the barrel whose dresses came off when you turned the pen upside down, that sort of thing—to drawing straight lines between newspaper ads. Literally. That’s the kind of drafting work he started out with. That was a skill that was in demand at publishing houses and in other settings before computers.

My dad was an amazing draftsman. It is impossible for me to know why he did not pursue a career in the visual arts from the beginning. But you may remember that my dad’s parents were both deaf mutes, had gotten legally separated when my dad and his younger brother and sister were minors, and the three siblings grew up in a series of foster homes, separated from each other until my father turned 16, got emancipated, and reunited his family—not only his siblings, but his parents! Maybe that was all the heroism he could handle for a while. Maybe he needed to lay low.

I lack a lot of the details because I was so young. But I know that after the heart attack, he managed to snag a gig as a freelance draftsman for McGraw Hill, the publishing company. At the time, they were in their legendary Art-deco skyscraper at 330 West 42nd Street.

McGraw Hill gave him access to a drafting table and allowed him to do work for his own clients as long as he was available when they needed him to draw a straight line. I don’t know where these clients came from. Presumably my dad was hooked up in ways I have no knowledge of. Probably should not be surprised. The guy’s 45 years old. Grew up in New York. Served in the army in the Pacific Theater for the four years of WWII. Was active in his local American Legion post. Had been in business with an old army buddy of his running a dry goods store called Coast to Coast at 889 Broadway, where Fishs Eddy now resides. Then the novelties racket. He had to have picked up some useful contacts along the way.

Anywho. I think it was when my brother Henry came back from his stint in the naval reserves that the two of them leased an office-slash-studio at 611 Broadway, the Cable Building, on the northwest corner of Houston Street, where Angelika Film Center is today. It was Henry who actually had the college education in graphic art. It was Henry who taught my dad how to turn his stunning drafting skills into a living.

Drafting tables, illustration board, Rapidograph pens, X-Acto knives, Best-Test rubber cement, tracing paper, masking tape—all the tools of the trade back in the 1960s: It was Henry who had learned about that stuff at New York City Community College on Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn. That’s were Henry met the woman who would become his wife, also an art and design student at NYCCC. Henry and Kathy got engaged in 1965. Then Henry went into the naval reserves for two years—the patriotic thing to do, and a safer bet than waiting for your number to come up in the draft lottery.

Henry served on the USS Entemedor, which deployed from its home port in New London, Connecticut, to the Mediterranean to serve with the 6th Fleet. Henry was assigned to the galley and remained a cook at heart his whole life. His son, my oldest nephew, followed in his dad’s culinary footsteps and became a professional chef after graduating from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. (My niece, by the way, got the visual art gene from her mom and her dad and the grandfather she never knew, graduating from Rhode Island School of Design and pursuing a successful career as a working artist and art teacher.)

Clearly I’m proud of my family and have veered off the autobiographical path a bit. What I got diverted from was the dark and uncertain path I was on once my father died. I’ll get back to that. But I will close for now with a poem that was published in the journal Softblow in 2006 as part of a sequence called “Syntax of Loss.”

          I was eleven. He was fifty-two.
          I want to say you were fifty-two.
          But he is not my second person,
          like the lovers at whom I can be angry,
          or regret something we said or did not say to each other,
          but still say you.
          He is he, that man over there,
          way off in years, not me, not my.
          Today makes 30 years. Last night
          I lit the candle that will burn for 24 hours.
          It will burn for him.

When it was first published, some people seem to have thought this poem had something to do with sexual abuse—maybe because I compare my intimacy with my father to my intimacy with a boyfriend. But it’s not about that. It’s about the sad fact that I was not able to develop the level of intimacy, of connection as father and son, that I wish I had been able to develop before he was taken from me when he and I were both so young. The candle—begging the pardon of those readers to whom this is perfectly obvious—is a yahrzeit candle, a Jewish memorial candle that you burn from sunset to sunset on the anniversary of the death of a loved one. The word yahrzeit is Yiddish and literally means “time of year.” I wrote this poem on or about my dad’s 30th yahrzeit in 2002.

Wow, this is the longest Secret Life post so far. Thank you for making it this far. Back next time with still more portraiture of the artist as a young sodomite. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

Now in my possession are the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. If I can persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear, this book will be blissfully out of print. I’m hoping these essays will pique your interest in snagging yourself a copy of this rare commodity.

Click here to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.

This is post #15 in the series. We are in the second section of the book, poems about my childhood, aptly called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” The fourth poem in this section, and the 15th poem in the book overall, is “Gladiators.” Here is the first one-third or so of this poem.

          Kirk Douglas on the small black-and-white screen
                    in the bedroom I share with my brother.

          Spartacus arrives in chains at the gladiatorial school.

          The trainer puts him in the center of the circle
                    (loin cloth, bare chest).

          Using brightly colored paints from wooden buckets
                    he marks on Spartacus’ torso
          the location of blows that will kill a man with maximum
                    efficiency.

This is a poem about a child who found himself erotically charged by the spectacle of muscled men being degraded and dehumanized on a small black and white TV screen. How confusing is that for a little boy?

If you want a peek at this boy’s emerging sense of shame and demoralization, you need to buy the book. I assure you there will be whips and Roman galley slaves.

The “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of This Life Now began life as a sequence of poems that appeared in Columbia Poetry Review (that’s out of Columbia College Chicago) in spring 2008. As in the previous installment of Secret Life, I share with you here in its entirety a poem that was included in the journal publication that did not make the cut for This Life Now. Full disclosure, I just edited a number of lines in the sixth and seventh stanzas. As Paul Valery said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”

          Notes on an Elegy for Karen Carpenter

          Not a touch, not a kiss, only proximity to you,
          desire I can understand, accept.

          Lovers and Other Strangers playing on a double bill
          with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice at the
          Oceana movie theater on Brighton Beach Avenue.
          My parents take my brother and me.

          The wizened ticket-man exclaims,
          “You’re taking him to see a movie like this?”
          “He’s very mature and intelligent,” my mother says.
          My father buys a box of Raisinets.

          We come in in the middle of Bob and Carol
          and Ted and Alice. I fall asleep during the part
          where they all go to bed together.

          When we see it from the beginning,
          I fall asleep during that part again.

          In between, we see Lovers and Other Strangers.
          The Carpenters sing the theme song, “For All We Know,”
          which becomes my favorite. I took a mellow
          turn that year, but the first 45s I'd made my mother buy me
          were raucous: Lou Christie, “Lightening Strikes” (1966)
          and the Jefferson Airplane, “Somebody to Love” (1967).

          My dad used to cut our hair, and I cried when he tried to touch mine, so
          they told me he was giving me a Beatles haircut. I said okay, but it had to be
          a Ringo haircut. Later, my taste in men, like my taste in music, changed. 
          I liked it when John and Paul pursed their lips to the microphone together 
          to sing “You, woo, woo” at Shea Stadium (on TV of course).

For better or worse, we are not quite finished with the burgeoning queer sexuality of the poet in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of This Life Now. There are more adolescent gay crushes and awkward, fumbling interactions to come before we see our protagonist through his Stephen Dedalus years.

As you may have noticed, or maybe not, This Life Now sort of careens from the AIDS years of the poet’s 30s in the first section to his all-too-knowing childhood in the second section. In terms of the personal backstory element of these essays, that led me to jump rather precipitously from an AIDS conference in Yokohama in 1994 to a nuclear family saga that led from the pogroms in Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side of New York, from Long Island to Coney Island, from the 1910s to the 1960s.

You must have realized by now that I make these essays up completely as I go along and do not look back, or ahead, very much. I am nevertheless struck by the herky-jerkiness of this narrative riding along, as it were, beside the poems. As I’ve set before, these essays have turned out to be a dry run for a memoir. I look forward to figuring out the edges of this sprawling jigsaw puzzle as this whole process unfolds. Presumably we will eventually get to the AIDS conference in Vancouver in 1996 that dramatically changed the world of AIDS and HIV forever. And the launch party for LIT 2 at The New School on March 3, 2000, that dramatically changed my intimate-partner life dramatically and forever.

There, that bit of rambling gets me to a more respectable word count. Back next time with still more portraiture of the artist as a young sodomite in waiting. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

I recently snagged from my publisher the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I thought this series of essays might persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear. It’s also turning out to be a good teaser for my as yet unwritten memoir.

Click here to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.

This is post #14 in the series. We are in the second section of the book, called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” These are poems about my childhood. The third poem in this section, and the 14th poem in the book, is “Imaginary Playmate.” Here is the first stanza of this ten-line poem:

          My parents questioned me, suspecting you existed.
          I affirmed you in a general way,
          but kept the intimate details to myself—

If you want to know the intimate details—and they are pretty racy—you need to buy the book.

The essays about this section of the book give me a chance to share a bit about how I grew up. I concluded the last installment of Secret Life with a poem in ten Sapphic stanzas that summarize my childhood from birth (1961) to age ten (1970).

“Imaginary Playmate” is about, to put it bluntly, the masturbatory fantasies of a small child who loved superhero comic books. There’s no poem about when the small child’s mother stole his pacifier while he slept and then lied to him about it—which I believe is intimately connected to the existence of figures like the “imaginary playmate” of this poem in the small child’s intimate fantasy life; but you can read about that in another memoiristic essay on Substack called “The Incident of the Pacifier in the Crib.”

The “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of This Life Now began life as a sequence of poems that appeared in Columbia Poetry Review (that’s out of Columbia College Chicago) in spring 2008. That publication included a few poems that did not make it into This Life Now, and I thought I would share a couple of those that had to do with my childhood love of comic books in their entirety here. Starting with “Coming Book Heroes.”

          Comic Book Heroes

          Origins reveal the thing naked and bereft:
          Bruce Wayne watching his parents
          crumple in the murderous Gotham night—
          I think of the terror drawn on his face,
          eyes wide spurting tears like drops of blood,
          open mouth pink with swollen tongue,
          icy cry caught forever in his black throat
          by that comic book freeze frame.
          And later I see him doing pull-ups, a boy
          alone in the basement of his parents’ house,
          his face too supple to hold the crease of resolve
          that strains to leave its mark.

Another poem in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” sequence as it appeared in Columbia Poetry Review but did not make it into This Life Now was “Metamorphoses,” included below in its entirety.

          Metamorphoses

          The best superheroes undergo transformations—
          Bruce Banner, pelted by gamma rays, becoming the Incredible Hulk—
          gimpy Don Blake striking his cane against the sidewalk—
          becoming Thor, God of Thunder, with his flowing blond hair,
          always saving the world from his evil brother Loki—
          Why does their father, Odin, great Norse god that he is,
          keep putting up with Loki’s crap?

And now I’m going to let you even further behind the curtain. I was just searching my computer to find the original document containing “Comic Book Heroes” and “Metamorphoses,” and what I found along the way was an unpublished, frankly forgotten poem that I wrote for Marie Howe’s workshop in the MFA program at NYU in my first semester, fall 2003, which is to some extent a precursor to the version of “Comic Book Heroes” above. It’s called “Origins,” and displays a bit of my classical language background as well as my childhood fondness for superhero comic books.

          Origins

          Origo, originis, feminine, from orior, oriri, to rise,
          like the sun in the East, a deponent verb,
          which puts aside its active forms
          but retains its active meanings.

          But I didn’t know then about grammar or
          etymology, only that I liked stories—
          how things started, where they came from,
          comic book heroes for instance—

          how parents crumple in the murderous
          Gotham night and Bruce Wayne vows revenge;
          how Kal El hurtles Earthward in red and blue swaddling
          as Krypton flails at the sun;

          how Bruce Banner dares the nuclear desert,
          sweeps insouciant Bud from the blast
          though he knows the countdown will overtake him,
          and gamma rays pelt him;

          how heroes and monsters—
          abandoned to their fates by gods, deeds of men
          the careless forces of the world—
          are born and made.

Okay, now I feel I’ve given you your money’s worth. And I did not have to go into a lot of dreary autobiographical narrative about hysterectomies and heart attacks and asthma and allergies and myopia. I keep mentioning those hysterectomies and heart attacks, but you will probably never learn anything more about them than that—until I write the memoir.

Back next time with more portraiture of the artist as a young sodomite in waiting. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

I recently came into possession of the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I thought this series of essays might be a good way to persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear. And it’s turning out to be a good teaser for my as yet unwritten memoir.

Click here to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.

This is post #13 in the series. We are in the second section of the book, called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” These are poems about my childhood. The second poem in this section, and the 13th poem in the book, is “Supermarionation.” Take a look at the first two stanzas of the poem, and I’ll tell you about Supermarionation on the other side.

          In our bedroom chop shop
                    my big brother and I
          scoured through NASCAR colorful cardboard boxes,

          reliquaries of polyurethane remnants,
                    spare tires and hub caps,
          demolished chassis and bodies stripped from last year’s
                    car models...

The essays corresponding to this section of the book give me an opportunity to tell you a bit about how I grew up. In the last installment of Secret Life, my parents had just—as my mom used to say—”lost the Levitt house” and moved from Hempstead, in Nassau County on the south shore of Long Island, to Luna Park, a subsidized housing development for middle-income (mostly White) folks in Coney Island (which my dad used to call “the asshole of Brooklyn”).

My brother Victor (third in birth order of my mother’s four live-born sons, all of us siblings of the seven still-born sons my mom delivered during her seven pregnancies between 1946 and 1961, when I became—as she liked to say—“the last of the Mohicans”) and I used to build plastic car models. That was a popular boys’ pastime in the 1960s. From my occasional forays into toy stores today, I don’t think it really exists anymore.

Our car models had a shelf life—literally: They were displayed on pine shelves that our dad mounted on a wall of the bedroom we shared. When their shelf-life was over—perhaps a car model was damaged in a fall, or perhaps one of us simply grew tired of it and was ready to move on—we did not throw away the pieces; rather, we stored them in the boxes in which unconstructed car models came from the toy store—or in our case, usually the stationery store in the Trump Village shopping center, back when stationery stores were also toy stores and also—very importantly—sold comic books (another central focus of our childhood).

From the “polyurethane remnants” in those “NASCAR colorful cardboard boxes,” Victor and I built new things, usually futuristic, space adventurous flying things. All you really needed was a car engine, a bucket seat, and a little airplane glue, and you were off to Mars or to Alpha Centauri. One or more tires might make for some good landing gear, and a hubcap might serve as docking probe.

To some extent, our inspiration was live-action TV shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek (the original series). But the primary fodder for our flights of outer space fantasy was Supermarionation. The term itself is a portmanteau of “super,” “marionette,” and “animation.” It refers to the animation technique used to produce a number of science fiction TV shows in the 1960s, including Supercar (1961–1962), Thunderbirds (1965–1966), and Captain Scarlet (1967–1968). The characters were all marionettes with cool costumes, awesome vehicles, and exciting adventures. And that is all you need to know before you read the poem “Supermarionation” in its entirety (i.e. buy the book).

I’m thinking about how much detail I should go into about my 1960s, with its hysterectomies, heart attacks, allergies, chronic bronchitis, family feuds, political assassinations, civil rights marches, antiwar marches, doctors who made house calls, and much, much more. I can’t decide what to bring in and what to leave out. So instead, I’m going to share with you a poem called “Years (1961–1970)” that is not in This Life Now. In fact, it is unpublished. This, however, counts as publication, so this poor poem of which I am so fond will never find its way into a journal. Nevertheless, for you my loyal readers, here it is.

The form of “Years” is Sapphic stanzas (often called simply “Sapphics”). The meter is associated with the Greek lyric poet Sappho. She, like other Greek and Roman poets who composed Sapphics in Greek or Latin, used syllable length (long vs. short) rather than syllable stress (stressed vs. unstressed) as the basis of their poetic meters. The more sesquipedalian terms for this distinction are quantitative meter (syllable length; long vs. short) and qualitative meter (syllable stress; stressed vs. unstressed), Adapted for qualitative (stress-based) English poetry, the Sapphic stanza goes something like the diagram below, with the dashes representing stressed syllables, and the “u”s representing unstressed syllables. The “x”s refer to a length-or-stress status called anceps, Latin for “two-headed” and by extension “uncertain” or “unfixed,” meaning the metrical rules allowed either possible option at that position—long or short for Greek or Latin quantitative meter, and stressed or unstressed for English qualitative meter.

– u – x – u u – u – –
– u – x – u u – u – –
– u – x – u u – u – –
– u u – –

That being said, in this poem, I do not adhere very strictly to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables shown in the diagram. In the first three lines of the stanza, my main deference to Sappho is in the count of eleven syllables. The rhythm is somewhat variable in those lines. Where I am more faithful is in the last line of each stanza, which is based on an Ancient Greek metrical patten called an Adonic, and has the rhythm of the English phrase “shave and a haircut”—bump buh-duh bump bump. I’m very careful about my bump buh-duh bump bumps, because in my book, that’s what makes a Sapphic stanza a Sapphic stanza.

YEARS (1961-1970)

Dad behind the wheel of his new Ford Falcon,
driving home from Freeport Hospital, south shore;
Mom and Vic and newborn Mike in the back seat—
that’s when he tells her.

No job, four kids, new baby; money low, they
sell the Levitt house and we move to Coney
Island, brand new, towering housing project
named for the burned-down

Luna Park amusement park. On black-and-white
Motorola, Mom watches the procession,
cries when he salutes the cold coffin, me the
same age as John-John.

Dad, forty-four, mends from a heart attack and
makes the switch from sales to commercial art, the
doctors having said he could neither smoke nor
carry his sample

cases any longer. In sixty-five my
brother Henry works at the butcher shop, saves
up and buys a first generation hi-fi,
microphone built in.

Kindergarten. I wanna hold your hand. We
take a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
to attend Dad’s twenty-year (since World War II)
army reunion.

Dad’s behind the wheel of another new Ford—
this a pale yellow Galaxy 500.
The Six Day War plays on the car radio—
Israel is winning.

Teachers go on strike, year of two more murders;
we sing protest songs in assembly Tuesday
mornings like a tree planted by the water—
white shirts and red ties.

June of sixty-nine on a ghostly blue screen,
Armstrong fluffs his line as he leaves the module,
ghostly figures leaping in clumsy space suits—
Eagle has landed.

Beatles break up post Let It Be. My first loves—
in my playpen twisting and shouting. That was
a childhood ago. Now at nine I get my
first pair of glasses.

Uh! Such a long post now!! Back with more portraiture of the artist (poet) as a young sodomite (sodomite in waiting, at least) next time. À la prochaine.

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from this section, see instructions at the bottom of this post.

I recently came into possession of the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I thought this series of essays might be a good way to persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear.

Click here to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.

This is post #12 in the series. We move on to the second section of the book, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” That section begins with an epigraph from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.” These are poems about my childhood. The first poem in this section, and the twelfth poem in the book, is “A Brief History.”

“A Brief History” is a ghazal, an ancient Arabic form that became a mainstay of Persian poetry starting in the 10th century. It was popularized in the United States in the 1990s by several prominent poets, including the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, who died way too young of brain cancer in 2001. The single most characteristic feature of the ghazal is the refrain that ends each couplet. The refrain usually begins as a rhyme with the last word or phrase of the first line of the first couplet, but in “A Brief History” I opted to go full refrain, as you can see in the first two couplets of the poem, excerpted below.

          In 1960, by my mother, my father’s bread is buttered without irony.
          Then, the word “luncheonette” was uttered without irony.

          Sodium lamps surround our housing project like a stalag.
          Home alone, watching Rosemary’s Baby, I shuddered without irony.

I can take a break from my rah-rah 1990s and share with you a bit about my childhood and adolescence in these upcoming SLTLN posts for the “Portrait of the Artist” section of the book. I was born in 1961 in Nassau County on the south shore of Long Island. More about me later. First, the ancestors.

My parents were first-generation Ashkenazi Jews, their parents having come to the United States from the Pale of Settlement around the time of the First World War. They grew up in New York City. My maternal grandfather sold junk from a pushcart. My father’s father repaired shoes. My grandmothers kept house and raised children.

All four grandparents came to this country knowing only Yiddish. My mother’s first language was Yiddish. She did not start speaking English until she started school. My father’s parents were both deaf mutes; they communicated using American Sign Language, in which my dad was fluent. His parents were legally separated when my father was a child, and he and his younger sister and brother spent years apart from each other in a series of foster homes. When my father was 16, he became emancipated and reunited his family, including his siblings and his parents! The older I get, the crazier that story sounds, but there you have it.

My father had a high school education. My mother had a junior high school education. My parents knew each other from the block, so to speak, but I don’t know offhand which block that was—somewhere in Manhattan where poor Jewish immigrants lived. Initially my mom was friends with my dad’s kid sister Frances. Then I guess she took a shine to my dad, or he to her, or what have you.

In a story that has always baffled me, my parents got married in the fall of 1940 and my father immediately enlisted in the army—or he enlisted in the army and they immediately got married; I’m not sure anymore which was the cart and which was the horse—and they headed off together to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where my father was stationed for basic training. I guess my mother planned to accompany him to wherever he was stationed after basic training? But then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II, my father was “shipped off to Hawaii for the duration” (as my mom used to put it), and my mom came back to New York, initially living back in her parents’ apartment, but ultimately moving out on her own. My understanding is she supported herself as a chamber maid in New York City hotels.

My father came home after the war. My parents moved into an apartment in the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a New York City Housing Authority project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. My oldest brother was born in 1946. He was a twin. The twin was stillborn. My mother went on to have several multiple births; but after that first time, the survival rate for the multiple births was always nil. All in all, my mom had seven pregnancies and gave birth to eleven boys (no girls), seven of whom were stillborn, four of whom survived. One of my three brothers was born with brain damage, cerebral palsy, and other physical disabilities—“severely crippled and profoundly retarded,” as we used to say when you were allowed to say such things.

If all of that does not sound very auspicious in terms of launching pads for a safe, happy, healthy, and successful life—Welcome to my world. And it never gets much better from there. Writing those words, I feel a certain kind of way. Like I’m trying to manipulate the reader, play or even prey on the reader’s sympathies, try to score as much crappy childhood cred as I can. Am I doing that in fact? I don’t really know. I think it would be disingenuous for me to insist that I am not. And yet, at the same time, I mean—Well, that’s the story. If I told a different story, a nicer story, that, too, would make me feel a certain kind of way. That, too, would be disingenuous.

So I’ll start to wind this down now. Henry was born in 1946. Freddie was born in 1954. Victor was born in 1956. Shortly after Victor was born, my parents bought a house in Levittown, Long Island. Levittown was a planned community in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County, named for developer Abraham Levitt and intended for returning World War II vets. I don’t remember the Levitt house. My parents went bust and sold the house soon after I was born, and we moved to Luna Park, a Mitchell–Lama co-op in Coney Island (which my father referred to as “the asshole of Brooklyn”). Named for New York State Senator MacNeil Mitchell and Assemblyman Alfred A. Lama—the Albany legislators who sponsored the enabling legislation in 1955—the Mitchell-Lama program used very generous tax abatements to encourage developers to build affordable housing for middle-income residents on property acquired by eminent domain (plus ça change).

In the next installment of Secret Life, you will learn about Supermarionation and what it was like growing up on the site of the Coney Island amusement park where Thomas Edison electrocuted the elephant Topsy in 1903 to demonstrate the power of his newly developed alternating electrical current. I shit you not. It was even captured on film. The good times, they just kept rolling on!

Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.

Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.

The Secret Life of This Life Now is a section of Beachcomber Mike. To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on the publication you want to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you'd like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.