The Secret Life of This Life Now #17
17th in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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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.
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.
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Michael, it's such a good book. It doesn't deserve to be out of print.
Oh my, I remember the Son of Sam/David Berkowitz, he was killing women and I was running around the city. Later I took an abnormal psych class and we talked about him the whole quarter or semester!