The Secret Life of This Life Now #8
The 8th in a series of brief essays about the life cycle of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems
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The Secret Life of This Life Now is the backstory of This Life Now, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (which that year rightfully went to Danez Smith). It’s a belated tenth-anniversary gift to the book that put me on some tiny little corner of the poetry map. It’s also the story of how we can suffer as much when we succeed as when we fail.
In each Secret Life, I share a bit of my journey and give you a peek at the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. This is post #8 in the series, and the eighth poem in the book is “Twilight in the City.” It’s a nine-line poem, and the excerpt below includes the first two of three short stanzas.
Car horns blow in on breezes,
fill the spaces left by fading light.
Color drains from this room,
time floats in space where once
there was a microwave oven.These lines were jotted down in some notebook at some point in the late 1990s, when I was living on the 14th (really 13th) floor of a beautiful rent-stabilized prewar building off the northwest corner of 57th Street and 8th Avenue (Columbus Circle). I was between boyfriends. I think I was re-reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and I started a little productivity project called Quantity Counts Poems. I had to write one every morning. These lines were from those quickly drafted poems. The idea was to revise them into “keepers” wherever possible. In this case, I tacked on a few poignant lines in which the speaker talks to his boyfriend about a painful incident at a party—maybe a weekend brunch—that the couple had thrown for some guests earlier in the day, and voila—a classic Michael Broder poem of homoerotic love and longing. But if you want to read the rest of the poem, you have to buy the book.
On to the poetry journey / life journey stuff. In TSLTLN #7, I told you how, in my brief but exciting journalism career, I wrote not only news, but other cool stuff, like a profile of David Sedaris for American Theatre magazine at the very dawn of Sedaris’s phenomenal success, and even some features for a gay porn magazine called HEAT. Then my journalism career spawned my medical communications career, and my medical communications career ultimately strangled my journalism career to death.
One day in February 1993, shortly after I moved from my studio apartment in Brighton Beach to my new dream apartment in a classic tenement on East 4th Street between A and B in the East Village, I got a fateful phone call. It was the editorial director at a Madison Avenue medical communications company that produced continuing medical education (CME) activities that were certified by prestigious medical schools, accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), and funded through educational grants from pharmaceutical companies.
Their main focus was physician education around HIV and AIDS. They routinely used freelance medical writers to write educational materials that were based on transcripts and slides—it’s 1993 and we’re talking 35mm celluloid slides and rotating slide carousels here—from presentations given by leading AIDS experts. One of their go-to writers was a friend of mine who was doing this work to pay for his med school education. He was unavailable for a particular project, and he referred the editorial director to me. It was a freelance gig. It was AIDS related. It paid well. I said yes.
Now, while I understood a thing or two about the virology of HIV and the pathophysiology of AIDS, I was by no means a medical expert, or even particularly medically knowledgable. In my AIDS-related journalism, I may have touched on routes of infection now and then, but I wrote predominantly about social, cultural, and political aspects of the AIDS epidemic. This medical writing assignment was going to be a real challenge. And no, the fact that I knew Latin did not help (just wanted to get that out of the way.)
The task was to write a 12-page monograph about HIV resistance to the bare handful of treatments that were approved or nearing approval in 1993. This was several years before “the cocktail,” aka triple combination therapy. These new drugs, used as monotherapy (i.e. all by their lonesomes), quickly succumbed to drug-resistant mutations of HIV that emerged in response to the drug itself. This was a huge obstacle to inhibiting HIV and stopping progression to what was then called “full-blown” AIDS.
So I picked up my transcripts and slides at the offices of World Health Communications at 41 Madison Avenue (across the street from Madison Square Park), took the M14 bus back to my East Village walkup, and got to work. I projected the slides on the wall—Yes, I had a slide projector. Although I worked on a computer, I had only a hard copy of the transcript, which—though I did not know it at the time—was produced by a chain-smoking transcriptionist in a claustrophobic office on Broadway whom I would one day meet in person.
Now, mind you, I did not have to know very much about HIV drug resistance to complete this project. I only had to know how to turn transcripts of 20-minute slide lecture presentations into continuous prose. Which apparently I did know how to do. Quite well, as it turns out. The editorial director was happy with my work. There may have been another monograph or two that I wrote in that series. It’s hard to remember because of what happened next: The editorial directly called me to come meet with him in his office one day in the spring, and asked me if I would join the World Health Communications team at the Ninth International AIDS Conference in Berlin—Yes, the Berlin in Germany—from June 6-11 that year of someone’s lord 1993.
Okay, this post is way way way way longer than usual. And the above seems like a good place to stop. À la prochaine. Until next time.
In the course of writing the previous installment of TSLTLN, I realized this series is is a “tryout” of sorts for the memoir I have long wanted to write. And as of right now I want to call that memoir But Oh, How the Cool Sand Calls. Those are the climactic final words of “Secret,” the poem in This Life Now that includes the title phrase, “this life now.” You will learn more about that poem, and the significance of that phrase, in TSLTLN #21. I am grateful to you, Reader, for being the second-person addressee who brought me to this momentous realization.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US. If you are elsewhere, I will probably need to reach out and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
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 6:45am eastern time. Other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
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