The Secret Life of This Life Now #5
The 5th in a series of mercifully short essays about the life cycle of my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, This Life Now (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014)
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.
This section of Beachcomber Mike is a memoir of sorts of how I came to write my first book of poems, This Life Now, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (which that year rightfully went to Danez Smith).
This series of mercifully brief essays is a sort of a belated tenth-anniversary gift to the book that put me on the poetry map at all—albeit some tiny little corner of the poetry map, and caused me sorrow along with joy.
Oh, and I would also like to persuade some people to buy a copy of the book, of which there are only about 100 copies left, and I have them all. See below for a link to get the book from me at the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US.
The previous post saw me entering my 30s as a poetry newbie at the start of a 1990s that would prove very eventful for me in terms of relationships, employment, creativity, and, oh, yeah, becoming HIV positive.
In each of these essays, I share a bit about my poetry journey and we get a sneak peek at a few lines form the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. We are still in the first section of the collection—My First Ten Plague Years—which includes poems that touch on my experience of living with HIV after testing positive in October 1990. This is post #5 in the series, and the fifth poem in the book is “I See You Often Around the City.” The excerpt below includes three and a half of this poem’s seven couplets.
Today I saw you cross-legged on the retaining wall in Central Park, shorn of your long thick tresses, writing in your diary— something about Anaïs, or how you crawled into bed with your mother’s lovers while she made flautas in the kitchen.
The “you” in this poem is Juan Marcos Betancourt—One of the holy trinity of Randy, Tony, and Marcos, the loved ones I lost to AIDS in the 1990s, the spirits of whom inhabit if not haunt This Life Now. Marcos was born on May 27, 1968 and grew up in Long Beach, California. He came to New York to dance, followed by his boyfriend Ken who tried to keep him out of trouble, but Marcos’s safety train had long ago left the station. I met him in my HIV support group in 1991. He died on July 21, 1995. I loved him and I cherish his memory.
There is my beautiful boy. Cheekbones for days. I look stoned, but I did not smoke weed in those days. Actually I had an inscrutable and debilitating kind of dermatitis over my whole body that made my eyelids stiff and puffy and it was hard for me to look good in a pose like that.
In Secret Life #4, I mentioned my eventful professional journey in those years. I met Marcos around the same time I got fired from my job as executive assistant to director Margaret “Peggy” Brooks at the Legal Action Center (LAC) of the City of New York. LAC started as a project of the Vera Institute of Justice. It began life with a focus on criminal justice issues; in particular, on employment discrimination based on criminal history. They represented clients in court, but their most innovative program was their rap-sheet workshops, where they taught groups of predominantly young Black men—the folks who were being targeted by the “war on drugs”—how to clean up their rap sheets, and what their employment rights were in the wake of their arrests and convictions, usually on low-level drug-related crimes.
With the coming of the AIDS epidemic, the lawyers and policy wonks at LAC—notably Paul Samuels, Catherine H. O’Neill, and Ellen Weber—turned their attention to AIDS-related discrimination, including confidentiality of HIV status and AIDS diagnoses, and discriminatory practices in housing, employment, and accommodations. They opened a policy office in DC. They had a major hand in the Americans With Disability Act and the Ryan White CARE Act. I admired them greatly.
And then there was Peggy Brooks. My job was mainly about helping Peggy research grant opportunities, and most of all writing, editing, designing, and producing two newsletters that started with my hiring, one for donors and one to promote the Center’s work, especially the work of the newly launched policy office in DC.
To make a very long story very short, Peggy fired me just after New Year’s 1991 because I challenged her order to maintain silence about her cruel and unjustified if not illegal firing of our business manager, the other gay man in the office, with whom I had become friends. Peggy fired John mostly because she liked her previous business manager better, and her previous business manager’s move to an arts organization blew up in his face and he wanted his old job at LAC back. And Peggy obliged. So of course, in true Beachcomber Mike fashion, at the end of our next staff meeting, which was mostly the lawyers talking about cases, when Peggy asked if there was any other business, I raised my hand and said, “I think we should talk about what happened with John.”
Perhaps needless to say, the meeting was abruptly adjourned, Peggy was pissed as shit, and I got fired the next day. As I noted at the end of Secret Life #4, I took my six months of unemployment benefits and started my long-deferred freelance journalism career. In a way, that is why I am here now, on Substack, a poet, a writer, an editor, a publisher, and a generally annoying gadfly.
More next time about the oodles of freelance editorial work I did in those years, most notably for Macmillan, where I was an indexer at Collier’s Encyclopedia, a fact checker at Collier’s Year Book, and a copyeditor in the elhi social studies department. And then came medical communications.
Adieu à la prochaine. More next time.
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 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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