The Secret Life of This Life Now #3
What happened to my writing after ten years of self-imposed silence that started as a way to maintain my closet, and ended after that closet was shattered
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This section of Beachcomber Mike is a memoir of sorts of how I came to write my first book of poems, the Lambda Literary Award-finalist This Life Now. The previous post ended with my going fiction silent for ten years, from age 18 to 28, once I realized, as a college freshman, that the only stories I wanted to write were gay coming of age stories, but that I did not want to write gay coming of age stories, because I was not ready to disclose to anyone that I was gay, even through the veil of fiction.
But around the fall of 1988 I began to feel fiction welling up in me again. That’s verbatim how I thought of it. I just wanted to write those stories again. One in particular, based on events in my own life in the summer of 1983. Events around my lesbian former girlfriend, my sexual feelings for my (straight) high school best friend, and some cinema worthy bedroom hopping in the apartment I grew up in that became, that summer, what my dearly departed mother—then a widow living in Dania, Florida with her high school sweetheart—would have called a “flophouse.” Actually, she did call it a flophouse.
Man, that woman could deliver a burn. She was very upset that young adult men and women were sleeping together in her three bedrooms (even though—or perhaps especially since—she was eleven hundred miles away), including at least two young adults who had been dating since they were 15, and had already shared a number of dorm rooms and apartments together, to the dismay of no one but, apparently, my mother. God rest her soul, and may her memory be for a blessing.
Well, I did write that story. And a number of others. And they were damn good. I did not know the first thing about submitting to literary journals. I took a couple of great fiction writing workshops with the then-legendary Hayes Jacobs at The New School. Jacobs loved my work, read each of my completed stories aloud to the class, and told me to do the only thing he knew how to do, the thing that had work so well for him and his peers in the first half of the 20th century—Namely, he told me to submit my stories to highly selective glossy consumer magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Playboy.
Needless to say: No acceptances. But I actually did get at least one really nice—and very telling—handwritten note from one editor at one of those magazines, I forget which. He wrote that the story I had submitted was a fine piece of fiction writing, but that of course he could not publish it because of the subject matter. Now, this was some six years after Michael Cunningham's short story “White Angel” was published in the New Yorker in 1987. But for one thing, I’m sure even then Michael Cunningham had an agent; and to be fair, there was, as I recall, no overtly homoerotic or homosexual content in “White Angel,” which became the first chapter of Cunningham’s first, very gay novel, A Home at the End of the World in 1990.
Whatever was going on with all that bad publishing advice from Hayes Jacobs and homophobic squeamishness on the part of fiction editors at glossy (and mostly [straight] men’s) magazines, I did not then, nor do I now, exactly blame anyone for any of that. It’s just what happened, it’s just the way things were then.
But the most significant thing that came out of that whole era of my writing was that I suddenly was no longer happy writing fiction anymore. Yes, I still wanted to write, but I wanted to write something else. That something else turned out to be poetry. But somehow, in my usual manner of spinning out a yarn that I thought would be a ball but turned out to be a skein, I’ve gone on at quite some length and we don’t really have room left for how I started writing poetry. In other words: To be continued.
So we turn now to the other charming feature of this series of posts, which is a look at a few lines of the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. The poem is called “Tony Poem,” and it is one of three poems in the book with that title or a slight variation on it. Like the previous two poems at which we took a peek, this is from the first section of the collection, the section called My First Ten Plague Years, the plague in question being the first waves of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 90s. The excerpt below is the first six lines of the poem.
By the time we meet, Bobby is dead and the guitar
lies untouched in its dusty case in a corner of the “dungeon,”
the dark hole you sleep in beneath your parents’ house.
You keep drinking and fucking,
ultimate bad-boy fuck machine,
vodka-fueled rock-n-roll Quasimodo.Anthony Ibrahin Salinas (1956–1994), aka Tony, was one of my three great loves of that era. Bobby was the love of Tony’s life. They had lived together in New Orleans for some years. Bobby had died of AIDS—I don’t know exactly when, but within just the few years before I met Tony in 1990. If I ever write “the memoir,” there will surely be at least one whole chapter devoted to Tony. What a piece of fiction that love affair would have been!
And in fact, I was still writing fiction when I met Tony. And another in fact, when I wrote my first “grown ass” poem in the fall of 1991, Tony was the first person I showed it to. In his inimitable way, he kind of smirked and laughed at my evocation of casual anonymous sex in some vaguely undisclosed setting. But he was not being dismissive. It was more a smirk and a laugh that said, You go, Mikey Boy. It was a smirk and a laugh of love, approval, validation, encouragement. Did I say love? Yeah, just checking. I wish I had been kinder to Tony about his drinking, his alcoholism, his failed struggles to stay sober, his failed struggle to live. He did not live long enough, but his love has sustained me now for over thirty years.
More next time.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...now. The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes—Get this!—includes SHIPPING. In the US, that is; if you are elsewhere, I will probably need to get in touch with you and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
Scheduling Note: I am going to try to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:45am eastern time. Other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
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