The Secret Life of This Life Now #7
The 7th 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 story of how I came to write 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, and caused me sorrow along with joy.
In each Secret Life, I share a bit of my poetry journey and give you a sneak peek at a few lines form the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. We are in the first section of the collection—My First Ten Plague Years—aka my HIV poems. This is post #7 in the series, and the seventh poem in the book is “Days of 1999.” The excerpt below includes the first two of the poem’s five tercets.
Summer strangles like a telephone cord—
I must remember to call if a day goes by,
to say I’m sorry for wrongs I have not done
so as to court you.
Smooth, brown, easily wounded,
you roll onto your stomach when it’s time.I’ve said quite enough in previous installments about second-person direct address in these poems. Nor do you always need to know who the “you” in these poems is. In fact, no need to say anything more about this poem at all, except to mention that the title, “Days of 1999,” is a nod to a series of “Days of” poems by Constantine Cavafy. James Merrill borrowed that titular conceit (can you use “titular” that way?) for a number of his poems. And I love both Cavafy and Merrill, so it was only a matter of time before I wrote some “Days of” poems, too.
On to the poetry journey / life journey stuff. In TSLTLN #6, I told you how I took my six months of unemployment benefits after getting fired from Legal Action Center and started my long deferred freelance journalism career.
In that essay I focused on the writing I did about AIDS-related issues for publications like The Body Positive, City Limits, Downtown, The Brooklyn Free Press, and The Bay News (the bay being Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn). Starting in the spring of 1992 I wrote quite regularly for the fledgling LGBTQ glossy news magazine NYQ (which changed its name to QW after the venerable poetry journal New York Quarterly asked them to cease and desist using the moniker NYQ).
But I did other kinds of writing during that period. The most fun was the writing I did for a gay porn magazine called Heat. November 1992: “Playing Together.” December 1992: “Cruising the Fourth Largest City in America” (under the pseudonym Matt Brimmer). Two pieces in March 1993: “The Long and the Short of It” (about having a small dick), and “Tunnel of Love” (subtitled Meeting Hot Men on New York City’s Subways). Needless to say, perhaps, it was all based on personal experience.
What may have been the highlight of my foray into journalism started on December 23, 1992. I was listening, as usual, to Morning Edition on WNYC, my local NPR affiliate, when I heard this enthralling fellow with an endearing lisp deliver an essay about his stint as a Christmas elf at Macy’s Santaland when he first moved from Chicago to New York. There were many wonderful moments, but the most indelible was when he imagined what it would sound like if Billie Holiday were to have sung “Away in a Manger.” I swear, thirty years later, I prefer his Billie Holiday to Audra McDonald’s Billie Holiday.
That was, of course, David Sedaris in what was to become his breakthrough moment. Quant à moi, fledgeling journalist that I was, and wanting very badly to move away from news writing and towards feature writing, I saw an opportunity. I phoned in to WNYC, introduced myself as a freelance journalist, and asked if they could tell me who had delivered that essay on Morning Edition that morning about being a Macy’s elf, and how I could get in touch with him. They told me his name was David Sedaris, and suggested I call producer Ira Glass in Chicago to find out how to get in touch with Sedaris. They gave me Ira Glass’s phone number! Just like that!
So I dialed Ira Glass’s number. I got an answering machine. I left a message. He called me back! He told me that he had seen David Sedaris read a piece at Millie’s Orchid Show—a variety show hosted by Brigid Murphy as Milly May Smithy that rotated among Chicago night spots featuring a cutting edge blend of music, dance, comedy, and other kinds of performance. Impressed by Sedaris—then living in Chicago after graduating from the Art Institute—Glass asked Sedaris if he had any Christmas-themed essays, and booked him onto Morning Edition to read “Santaland Diaries.”
Glass gave me Sedaris’s phone number, I called and left a message, he called me back, I told him I was a freelance journalist and I loved what he had done on NPR and I would like to interview him for a profile, and he said sure, that would be fabulous. Sedaris came over to my East Village apartment and I recorded (on cassette tape) a friendly and casual interview that lasted about half an hour. My favorite classic David Sedaris quip from the interview was his disclosure that he was under contract to write a novel, which he found terrifying, so instead of using the word “novel,” he would say “tumor,” which has the same number of letters but is less scary.
Long story less long, I ultimately wrote a profile called “David Sedaris: Welcome to the Talent Family,” that appeared in American Theatre magazine in the Summer of 1993.
There’s more—much more—but dang, this is getting long, so I will end it here. À la prochaine.
In the course of writing this installment of TSLTLN, I have realized that what this series really is is a “tryout” of sorts for a memoir. 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 TSLTLF #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 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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