The Secret Life of This Life Now #24
24th in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. This series of brief essays is no longer about unloading the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. It’s more about finishing something I started, and telling a story that may resonate for some of you reading this.
You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!
This is post #24 in this series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.
We are up to the third poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The third poem in this section is “Exotic.” The first stanza is as follows;
The delivery boy from the 24-hour diner
brings me a bleu cheeseburger deluxe, medium rare.
I seduce him at my apartment door.
His promise: “I fuck you every day.”
While I have been a busy boy with other boys for some 40-plus years now, some moments stand out in my memory and loom large in my imagination, and the moment described in this poem is certainly among them.
So old is “Exotic” that it exists among my computer files as a UNIX executable file dated 2001. I suspect I wrote it a few years earlier than that, maybe even in Word Perfect on an IBM-like PC. The apartment was just off the northwest corner of W. 57th Street, around the corner from Columbus Circle—The dream apartment my boyfriend snagged for us in 1996 when we moved in together. That was the unnamed social worker (and newly minted MSW from NYU) that you may remember from Secret Life #10 and the breakup poem “Words and Things” in the first section of the book.
When we broke up and he moved out in 1997, I dug out an old bag of my wild oats and started sowing them again. Fact is, I had acted out sexually quite a bit during our relationship, and my behavior contributed at least in part to our demise. That was when bad habits now old were relatively new.1 In any event, unnamed social worker was a really good guy—He deserved better, and I hope he went on to get it.
But all of this is just to say that the delivery boy from the 24-hour diner was one of those wild oats. And there were many others. Some stuck around for a while, like the opera director and the merchandiser. The merchandiser had a lot going for him. He gave me Tony vibe on a lot of levels, including but not limited to his sexual magnetism. He did displays at the now-defunct Fifth Avenue location of a high-end Japanese department store, and on a couple of jobs, he invited me to work with his crew. That was so much fun. And both quintessentially and existentially gay in a way that I had previously experienced only through, well, to be honest, sex.
The merchandiser possessed more praises that I could sing, and we had some very good times—from New Jersey to Woodstock to Cape Cod. But in the end, that relationship really brought home for me, like no relationship before, how I tended to allow myself to become objectified and instrumentalized by men. I wanted to change the way I related to men in intimate relationships to prevent that from continuing to happen. Of course, that was a very tall order. As it turned out, I still had some painful intimate relationship territory to traverse before beginning to glimpse some healing and some wholeness.
Back next time with more juicy stories and home truths. À la prochaine.
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That being said, I strongly suspect these “bad habits” ultimately all go back to very early childhood and The Incident of the Pacifier in the Crib, which you can read about at your leisure.