"White Trash Lab Rat Transplant"

c. 2005 by Chris McBeth

The Raging Queer was screaming, swearing, throwing furniture, foaming at the mouth and generally acting out as his Mother lay dying on the operating table.

He was angry from not being able to be with her-the indifferent Security Blackbots had escorted him from the operating room. And he was angry because he knew that even when she was conscious she talked in riddles. Honesty was not her way. From a broken home background rife with alcoholism, abuse and incest-emotionally she herself was more of a stunted child than a woman.

He raged because there was no name for the twisted jumble of emotions he felt for her; and no way for him to express them other than through violence. If he had been a healthy GAY man (how he loathed that term--as if there was anything GAY about being queer) he would be able to turn off his emotions, detach, objectify, (as it was so easy to objectify, turn off and detach from men-AFTER you came with one of them that is) maybe call his shrink or his sponsor; calmly ask for reassurance of some kind from his lover (another absurd word) if he had one.

These healthy supportive actions however weren't part of the equation in his life. He couldn't afford a shrink at this point-he'd had so many bad ones in the past he distrusted them all instinctively. He fallen off the wagon so many times in his anti-sex 12 step program, it hardly seemed "Program" was still a part of his life. Besides his sponsor was probably dead of AIDS by now. As far as a lover, he had none. The longest relationship he'd had was Elizabeth with her honey-colored hair. Back in the day she had been a teen-aged prostitute replete with black pimp turning tricks in the best hotels in New York. A few months after their relationship began, Elizabeth had thrown him out, as she didn't approve of his bisexual lifestyle. "Get rid of the men or get out" was her ultimatum. He'd gotten out. No man had ever replaced her as his lover. Fuck her, he thought, she'd been a whore and SHE was telling ME to lay off the men-HA!

No, all he had was his Mother. She was the only balm in his life--besides cumming with men. But cumming with men had little heart, so emotionally he kept looping back to her, seeking some kind of warmth from her. And after staring at her like a deer frozen in the headlights on a cold snowy Wisconsin highway, the headlights of her eyes never said that "Yes" to him. He always ended up skidding on the cold icy patch that covered her heart.

He rested from his violence for a moment; the Blackbots were nowhere to be seen. He approached the porthole window to the operating room and peeped in. The lovely old woman lay covered with a sheet up to her neck. The cold steel table was illuminated by bright white surgical lights like a fabulous Hollywood opening night or a star-studded charity event at the Met. And there she lay there, motionless, like a grand beautiful old Queen. Some of her wounds screamed out from just under the edge of the sheet, gaping crimson holes sparkling like wet rubies.

Finally the Blackbots appeared and motioned him into the Animal Transplant room, which adjoined the Operating Room. He entered and walked along row after row of cages of large white lab rats. Some sleeping, some copulating, some feeding, a few fighting. One was chasing itself and then catching and chewing on its own tale, mad from the confinement. The room smelled of cedar chips and rat shit. Closest to the Operating Room door was a single large cage in which in the bodies of two rats lay, unmoving and bandaged, breathing through tubes with miniature rat IV's connected to them.

He understood then that they had transplanted pieces of these rats into his Mother. Miniature rat lungs or tiny rat livers. Since the early part of the century, the poor, the uninsured and immigrants were given organ donations from animals. Only the rich could afford the luxury of human transplants. Drugs had made the animals transplants function almost as well as the human ones.

The Blackbots gently motioned for him to enter the adjoining door to the Operating Room where his Mother lay, conscious but groggy. Instead of her usual soft golden brown ash blond-tipped coif, her hair was stiff like wire and straw-like, almost bleach-burned white, like the kind of cheap wiry wig they placed on naked mannequins in the window of small-town run-down department stores on Main Street in Anytown, U.S.A. And at the very top of her head was a shaved and bandaged bald spot that looked like a yarmulke skull cap. “Oh Jesus” he thought “they COULDN’T—“ but the thought was too ghastly to finish.

She was beyond looking white trashy—he had never pictured her in that class anyway. But now she looked different. She was “uber” white trash, white trash nightmare; white trash Mad Lab-Rat experiment gone bad. And still, as he stared at her, he loved her more.

He felt himself growing hard. He flashed on his earliest Mother sex memories. Forbidden and repressed. The taboo veil of his body again feeling her body; the pressure of her hungry "Motherness-that-loves-too-much" squeezing his little puppy body closer and closer into her until her coarse pubic hair was biting into his stomach, hands and arms like needles and he couldn’t breathe from the pressure of her. Then that sound--that gurgling sound as she came on him, wrapped around him in a dream, holding and smothering him.

Now he wanted to lie down on top of her again. That she was groggy, still drugged from the anesthesia made him get fully erect. He fought the urge to jump on top of the cold hard steel table and mount her, penetrate her, pump and pound her with those hot hot super silver surgical lights burning over them like suns. He flashed on another memory of how she used to lie prostrate for hours under her sunlamp, loose towel covering her breasts, small damp cotton wads over her eyes. Sometimes she would do her “leg-up” exercises at the same time. Her six-pack was the most fabulous and the first he could ever recall seeing. How he longed to fondle it now, massage those gorgeous Venus stomach muscles of hers, caress and penetrate her…

He longed to feel what her cunt felt like. He wanted to enter her hole again and see what it felt like to be touching the place where he came from; that place where he’d emerged from some thirty odd years ago. To shoot his cum into her mound—to explode inside her old woman beauty was all he needed to reach supreme Tantric enlightenment!

It was mad but he saw his fucking her as being some kind of catalyst for his life energy to change. An exorcism to fling out all the demons and darkness that haunted him day-to-day. She would transform him through her excitement. There would be no screams but only half-murmured whispers of hot pleasure and little girl-nothing words cooing from her lips like small Vermont birds singing in the green lush summer. As he fucked her and fucked her, her juices would flow again inside her, her body electrified by his pounding waves; a steady and unstoppable stream of power giving them both new life.

As she began to open her eyes his fantasy ended. She tried to reach for the large bandage that covered part of her chest and trailed her fingers down toward a large exposed wound further down on her torso.

“It took two—two to fix me” she slurred softly “that’s what that doctor said.”

“Shhh Mom—quiet now—just rest. The nurse‘ll be in soon. Just rest now.”

Like changing a bike seat, or the oil in a car. I changed the direction of the story. Then I became my Mother in that hospital bed, recovering. The transplanted pieces of live rats renewing my life, my chi with their tiny energy. Then I was young again and following my emotions to their solitary stunted source of rage. I was 11 or 12, a tomboy loving to play with my model wooden airplane in the back of the house in the garden in the dirt and weeds on a street in Sterling, IL. It's the Depression. I am bruised and bleeding from “The Old Man” coming home all boozed up and throwing me down on the kitchen floor like a rag doll and fumbling with his zipper and sticking his Peter in that place between my legs…my brothers and sister screaming, screaming for him to get off me, blindly batting at him like so many flies buzzing around a buffalo. Father McBeth, big ragged whisky drunk bearing his weight down on my soft white virgin tomboy place—squeezing and squeezing the rage into me like some poisoned kind of vise squeezes the heart out of a chicken till it emerges engorged with sex up to it's neck and out through it’s beak, then you chop off the head and let it go running, running shooting the hot chicken blood into the cold white perfect Illinois snow.

This is where rage comes from I thought recalling my Mother’s stories of growing up during the Depression in the 20’s and 30’s in that small house in Sterling, Illinois with a Dad who was a boozer and six brothers and sisters and mush every day and never enough to eat and one day brother Ward was mowing the neighbor’s lawn and it rained and he got wet and caught a chill and had a nervous breakdown and died. Sad stories. Sad stories from a beautiful old Queen. Sad but so so rich the memories passed on and on for future generations to be horrified by, to be tainted by. And they in turn, needing the healing, the release from the rage. The release from living.

"Bisexual Love" c.2006 by Chris McBeth

Bisexual Love
c. 2006 by Chris McBeth

There were too many people in Tucson. Too many fat people consuming. Consuming products, cars, DVDs, land, etc. An overabundance of everything!

Coco Puff fancied himself to be a connoisseur of taste in all things--food, wine, men, women, and a bit of a charming clown, or a sprite, though a rather large one weighing in at 340 lbs.

He was next in line at the checkout of Blockbuster Video with two classic Bette Davis’ DVDs in hand when he noticed the handsome muscular dirty blond-haired boy. The kid must have been in his early 20’s with longish hair, a handsome roguish face and a muscular, stocky body, probably about 6’. He was just Coco’s type of guy. Of course most of Coco’s ‘types of guys” laughed at him or wouldn’t be about to give him the time of day. There was a dark-haired cunt hanging onto the boy and making him laugh feeling his torso and hugging him. Coco was immediately jealous of the girl and wished it were he lovingly nudging the gorgeous jock-like man. However he didn’t find the girl all that unappealing either. A thought occurred to him—“Mmmm, together, the TWO of them—and little old me!” He pondered to himself deliciously. “I MUST have them. I will have BOTH of them!” A wicked smile spread over his face and made his huge jowls twitch with pleasure.

“Umm, never mind—I have to do something” he told the acne-faced clerk. Coco quietly dropped the DVDs and nonchalantly followed the couple out of the store. He followed them stealthily along Pantano Boulevard in his vanilla cream-colored van until they turned off onto a quiet, dark side street. Making his move he floored his van up next to the couple’s car and then edged it off the road into a ditch. Luckily for him there were no houses on this stretch of the road. The boy charged out of his car screaming his head off and swearing to beat the band. His anger excited Coco Puff. He felt himself getting erect. As the boy reached up and into the driver’s side of the van, Coco shot him with his super deluxe stun gun. The beautiful boy fell to his knees and collapsed. The big Puff babe exited his van, knelt down, and kissed the jock boy fully on the lips while injecting him with a paralyzing poison that would render the boy conscious but unable to move.

Onto the girl “Oh shut UP you beautiful babe!—Don’t you know Coco Puff’s here to take you and your hot boyfriend out on a date?” He said, all 350 lbs. him galloping toward the now hysterical girl. Coco reaching into the interior the car and shot the screaming cunt with his power nail gun. “Pop” the first nail pierced the girl in the left eye. “Oh” she said. The second “Pop” projectile nailed her right between the eyes, the girl passed out.

Coco collected both the lovely couple’s bodies into the back of his van, placed them side by side, arranging their bodies as if he was arranging dolls. He headed for home with his dream date couple in tow.

After he got the bodies home, he lovingly carried them both into his gigantic bedroom, undressed them and tied them both up on top of his huge heart-shaped bed, stretching them out full length belly up. He sucked the muscular jock boy’s flaccid cock then until it got hard. At the same time he was fingering the girls pussy with a metal glove studded with razor blades. He ravenously sucked and bit at the Jock boy’s cock until the big fella started moaning. The girl was moaning too as Coco dug deeper and deeper into her cunt. Bleeding freely now and getting quite mushy, Coco began to fist punch bitch’s pussy with his razor blade glove as if he was fist fucking a man’s asshole. After a huge commotion and lots of flesh-tearing, Coco penetrated out the poor girl’s asshole and he could feel his bloody fist emerge and feel the mattress beneath her. Thank Goodness he had put down a think layer of lime green canvas as a kind of bedspread “fluid catch-all-fuck-sheet” before he’d laid down the couple, for now the blood from the cunt was everywhere.

At this point Coco felt like taking a break from the cunt. Coco Puff disengaged his razor glove from the girl cunt’s pussy (which now was literally a ragged red hole) and anus with a loud “SUCK-SWOOSH” noise he freed it from her big body crevice. He tore the glove off and cast it aside.

“Now for you my pretty!” he said to the boy, razing himself back from the boy like a Funnel Back spider preparing to bite, Coco Puff then immediately brought his head down and down into the boy clamping down hard on both his cock and balls with his fat head and very strong teeth. He then pulled his head backward, tearing tissue like taffy; raggedly tearing both cock and balls from the beautiful boy’s torso while at the same time exploding with a fierce orgasm that sent small tremors all the way to Los Angeles! He mauled the bloody soggy mess of male genital sandwich, continuing to chew on it as he first sat up in the bed, savoring his bisexual boy feast snack and blinking stupidly over the hapless couple. Still chewing he straddled the boy, cut off wires that were affixing the boy’s hands and feet to the heart-shaped bass bed frame, drew a hold of the football jock boy’s now cockless and ball-less body and rolled it over so that the boy’s muscular yet still untouched ass arched high up in the air. The boy was barely conscious…

Madly, merrily drunk with bloodlust, Coco Puff the killer sex clown grasped a large pick ax hanging next to the bed. He kept it there just for these special occasions. Grasping the ax in both hands and towering over the muscular jock’s butt he raised the pick ax high, high into the air. “I AM GOD—LOVE ME!” he bellowed making the walls of ranch-style house shake (Good thing he was miles from neighbors). The fat killing demon brought the point of the ax down with a thundering SLAM breaching both the gorgeous boy’s anus and stabbing deep deep inside of and into lower pelvic floor muscles, ripping and shredding through cartilage, bones, and tendons.

“I’m a SOUL MINER—looking for a heart of Gold” Coco sang an old Neil Young song, partly making up the words as he plunged the pick ax again and again into the muscular boy’s buttocks, obliterating them. The garbled song turned into waves of mad laughter, loud and high-pitched and penetrating as that pick ax was penetrating the flesh.

Coco Puff finished and threw down the ax. He rested and lounged in between the lovely but quite bloody and quite dead couple now, curling into their juices and feeling a kind of perfect bisexual love. He nestled within the (formerly) beautiful and virile man and his cunt date like some blood addicted fetus demon. He felt safe. He felt peace.

He must have fallen asleep or a few hours, for when he awoke, the blood all around him had started to congeal and the bodies were beginning to grow cold and stiff. There was a shit smell too which he hadn’t noticed before, for when the torture really got going both the couple had become incontinent.

Coco got up off the bed, took a shower and then removed both of the bodies to another room in his basement. To what he later referred in his anonymous note to the Police as his “Plastication Chamber.”

Here he laid out both his lovelies onto another different white canvas and began carefully arranging them. He was “the auteur of death.” He outstretched the muscular arms of the boy and spread-eagled his legs (what muscular quadriceps the boy had mused Coco Puff. How those quads must have run and jumped—like an uber-College Jock Football player flying over the other players in the Super Bowl!). The cunt’s body he fashioned so that she was curled into the boy’s torso on his right side, nestling into it. “Nothing’s Going to Harm You” Coco hummed was he worked.

When completed with the final manipulation, he dismounted the canvas and tipped a huge overhanging vat of liquid polyurethane spilling it onto his dead bi-lovers, now relegated to live forever as memorials to art and beauty. He left the Plastication Chamber, went upstairs and ordered 4 pizzas. Waited patiently watching cartoons until the delivery came and engorged them all as if starving—making love and death is hard work. Making it into art even harder. His appetite was boundless! About three hours later Coco returned to the Plastication Chamber and poured another layer over his sleeping beauties, his lovers now stillborn forever.

This he continued to do again and again for the next few weeks, daily until he was sure the encasing polyurethane would cover up any telltale odor or stench of decay and freeze dry any signs of decomposition.

As a final touch Coco Puff went to the neighborhood art store, a fabulous one he frequented near the University of Arizona campus--and bought about 10 lbs. worth of gold leaf. This he used to cover the couple until they looked like a gorgeous Greek frieze worthy of ANY Classic Roman or Byzantine Temple—worthy of the worship of any High Priest of the Nile. Coco Puff was the emperor immortal--the magic spawn of the Gods, the ultimate artist sculptor of high art and beauty…

When the conglomeration was hardened to perfection and gold as the sun, Coco spray pained tiny fine key-light effects of pink here and there to bring-out a kind of Arizona sunset sparkle within the piece. It was a kind of testament also, he thought warmly --to the couple’s living days in the gorgeous fascist state of Arizona. There was nothing quite like Western light. Coco then hung the beautiful horrid mass vertically, on the west wall of his living room, surrounded by black velvet. And a few small subtle orange spotlights.

For many evenings, he sat or lay before the death-gold-pink frieze studying, relishing and masturbating to his gorgeous otherworldly art again and again. Sometimes he played love songs on his antique banjo, serenading the dead lovers (who never decomposed and never grew old or offended with obtuse smells). By and by through the lonely nights-he paid homage not only to young, lithe (though dead) virile love, but also his perfect bisexual love obsession, which he had finally managed to capture.

This went on for many years until one evening when a great meteor crashed into Coco Puff’s ranch style spread flattening both the house and the fat killer bi-clown as he sat one night tenderly serenading his still-as-death glittering art children.

"Surviving Dad" 2005

Surviving Dad and Cudahy, Wisconsin

c. 2005 by C. McBeth

Today—Aug. 4, 2005 in Amsterdam it is cloudy, overcast and muggy. I’m fighting the urge to go the “Day Spa” (the queer Baths) just down the block—I decide to write instead. Cloudy, overcast and muggy—then a molten sun bleeds through heating the skin on my face like a small Dutch oven heats and toasts the sweet cinnamon toast I treat myself to every morning from “Health Wanker” the organic food store down the street called “Tweede Looiersdwarsstraat” (which is really an alley) and across the Elandsgracht. I am in apartment number 40 for the summer. The sun feels so so good, the silvery North Sea sun. A ladybug wonders up the brick wall off the tiny terrace (“room for one”) in the rear and jettisons off.

This overcast sky looks like the sky over Lake Michigan in a south suburb of Milwaukee—“Cudahy”. The name so ugly spoken on the lips it makes you feel sick to your stomach. “Cud”—as in cow chewing a cud; “a” as in long A and hy as in “Hay”—“cow chewing cud of hay.” A name for a town that never existed. A name for a town I survived…the place of my High school and Junior High school years; the place where I came of age.

Chapter 1
It’s 1972 in Cudahy, on Lakeshore Drive. I can see my fat Dad sitting on the front cement porch. He’s sitting in his white silk “muscle tee shirt” with his stomach hanging over his favorite baggy blue pants, sloppy brown sandals, eternal cigarette in hand, legs sprawled open, dreamy angry lost look in his eyes as he stares away at something in the distance. There is maybe a glimmer of sadness in his eyes. Does the thought pass through his mind that soon he will die? This is to be his last summer on earth. Maybe he just feels it, just a feeling in his soul.

Hector (my Mom shortened it to this from his middle name “Heckman”) has lots of fat—especially in his tits. They are like a fat farm woman’s, large droopy things sloping down his chest like mountains. He wheezes slightly when he breathes. The first heart attack has come and gone more than four years before when we lived on Edgerton Ave. (another ugly name). Then, he sat in his easy chair all day long with a hot water bottle on the left side of his shoulder swearing that it was just “bad digestion”. Afterward, in the hospital the doctor told him he had to stop smoking, it was a major coronary. The third day a nurse bought him a new pack of Parliaments. Was that Nineteen sixty eight or nine? I recall both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King being shot--Milwaukee under martial law for a few days. The country was this close to a revolution but no one knew it back then. I remember marching for Angela Davis—it was the cool thing to do and it felt good, it gave one a purpose and it was another way to connect to others to flee the silly suburban safe world of green lawns, cars and white people.

I was desperate for him to live. I wanted him to be healthy. I wanted a friend for a father—not some fat fearful thing. After “the First One” (heart attack No. 1) I would take the new packs of fags he bought when he got out of the hospital and stick holes in them and try to bury then in the small garden that lined our sidewalk. He made me go out and collect them. He needed to smoke. He was always smoking. Life was an endless chain of cigarettes.

Smoke, fire. I recall when about 3 or 5 and he set himself on fire while cleaning a hot water heater--with a gasoline soaked rag WHILE the pilot light was on--in the basement of our little white house on North Fourth Street—screaming like an animal at the base of the stairs engulfed in flames. Mother drove him to the hospital in the big black marshmallow of a Buick. She put me in the car between herself and Dad. I sat in the middle crying and watching one flame lick his forearm while he murmured and whimpered like a deranged thing, nude, next to me, wrapped only in a white stippled bedspread.

Later I asked God to “please let him live” on neighbor Hattie’s screen porch—I knew she was watching me as a prayed. He survived. Weeks later when he was back home again—healing--I couldn’t stand the sight of his bloody-skinned-monster-body. The burned boils and skin sloughing off, transplanted skin and still festering, regrowing, oozing and glistening like some living crimson filth thing. My brother and I were allowed to watch TV while we ate—otherwise we couldn’t eat and Dad couldn’t wear a shirt while he was healing from the burns.


Looking back at Dad’s burning accident I’m in awe at the strength that he had—that our family had--to survive that experience and live together for another x amount of years.

Dad is a perfect model for a fat laughing Chinese Buddha when he’s in a good mood-- from rage hell on the phone screaming and screaming about this train on that track and that track on this train--when he’s in a bad. My Brother has recently become a drug dealer, selling marijuana by the pound. He’s big into it. His wife Joan (a dead ringer for an Ivory Girl who later marries a preacher) has left him and is living with my parents on Lakeshore Drive in Cu-da-hy. At one point they even try to match me up with Joan but I’m too busy either playing “nice” or “dumb” in public and masturbating to pictures of male bodybuilders in private. All this adds to the stress and pain my Father is going through. Bad for the heart muscle…

Life’s going to hell in the 70’s. Our family is imploding—all the dysfunctions are melting the veneer down like Christopher Plummer burning and melting at the end of a “B” Dracula movie when the sunlight hits him. First Benji, our neurotic dachshund dies. His back just goes out after he has sat vertically sitting up on that long “weener dog” back begging for food at every meal for the past twelve years. My Mother taught him that. He’s put to sleep.

I’m away at my first week of college when “the Big One” (heart attack No. 2) comes. I am awakened by a phone call in the early frosty cold fall morning in a dorm. in Stevens Point, WI and a tearful Mother informs me Dad has died. I remember in our last conversation we talked about pillows. “Come home son” says Mom. I sit in the car studying the crystallized paisley design of frost on the windshield as an older student with a handlebar moustache drives me to the bus station. I am numb. It’s finally happened. I’m supposed to cry but tears aren’t coming. This isn’t right I think—I am supposed to be crying. I pretend to cry—I force myself and finally a few tears come on the bus back to Milwaukee—to (hate the sound) “Cudahy”. Why aren’t there tears--that this overweight man of 44 years has died--this man called “Dad”? My feelings seem unnatural—almost as unnatural as living with this raging, self-centered, bullying, never wanting to get deep, pseudo-redneck thing for some 19 years. This fat complex, dreamy, angry-swinger-wanna-be.“Hector”. My blood.

As I watch him smoke—I could be a passing stranger on South Lake Drive in an anonymous car. Does he know he’ll soon be gone-a mere ghost of another American male sent to Heaven by a heart attack? What if someone informed him of the future? Warned him of impending doom and he took up jogging? Had psychotherapy? Tried to actually CONNECT to his family in a real way? Fantasies. Too much tension, cholesterol, rage. Too much trying to keep a family together that’s blown-up now and sent shrapnel flying everywhere as if hit by a bomb—the bomb called “the seventies”. Too much for one man.

Cut to a typical weekend at home entertaining. The “Ink Spots” are playing. Dad’s lighting up again and mixing fresh Manhattan’s for all the dollys, for company is coming. The dollys are the wives of the men he works with—he loves to schmooze them and make them laugh with his stories, his sarcastic wit, his humor and his meanness and they—suburban white Milwaukee folks—love him. They love his charm, his power, his overbearingness, his brash sarcasm. This fat, sexy man with balls, with power. They don’t see him raging on the phone and if they did they’d say—“There’s a man who loves his job—who works hard, who demands.” Hector’s “The American Dream”.

They say things happen in threes. First was neurotic Benji; Second was my Father. His heart explodes early one morning after a big night on the town to try to forget with food, booze and cigarettes that his world is coming apart—that he has no control, no power—this powerful man is finally and at last powerless. At night in bed after he makes love to my Mother one last time, his world stops as his heart explodes. The ambulance comes—they try to revive him…too many cigarettes, too many Manhattans and phone calls screaming with rage and fighting with my brother because he’s dealing. A drug dealer! In the Orr Family! Unheard of!

Here is Number Three. For the next two weeks Nina, my Mother’s older protective sister joins her, helps her arrange the funeral and get things in order. After a week I’m back at Stevens Point. Another week passes and one morning my Mother calls again in tears. Nina’s dead. She returned to New Mexico and a few days later was broadsided in a car wreck in the mountains outside of Las Cruces. She had to be cut out of the camper she and Harry, her husband were driving. After “the jaws of death” pry her out like a mangled sardine from the metal vehicular coffin--she lasts for a few hours and dies before they reached the hospital in an agony of pain.

Harry Hartman—Nina’s husband of some 30 years and a bit of a scalawag and a bully himself (like my Dad) later proposed to Mother within a few short days of Nina’s funeral. He had survived the mountain crash without a scratch. My Mom said no as it wouldn’t feel right as he and Nina had raised her for a time after her own parents died of alcoholism, incest, or mysterious nervous breakdowns. She couldn’t see sleeping with Harry as he had been like a Father to her. Within a year he is dead of a heart attack. Harry, Duane, and another Harry (to come—see “The Men In My Life” available for reading in “Archives”).

Within a few days after The Big One, the dreamy eyed angry sad fat man is a little shriveled thing in a coffin. When we had to shop for it, it was lined up in the basement along with hundreds of others like shining spaceships ready for their rocket launch into the cold moist Illinois earth. The chosen one was blue and metallic like a car—and as expensive as a used one. At the initial viewing, he’s laid out wearing his Masonic apron. An American flag is folded alongside him (for he was a veteran of two wars).

“His hands” my Mother says—“Please change his hands”. They are like dried claws of birds curling into and just up from his groin. The undertaker asks us to leave the room for a moment. I imagine him breaking, stretching, moving, manipulating the claw-like things into a more natural pose—maybe one over the other—as if he was resting on a lawn chair in the sun. No—then they’d be behind his back. One over the other is NOT Dad’s body language but it will do. I’ve never seen my Father look so peaceful. He was never peaceful, never smiling like that in his sleep. He slept with his mouth open, snoring loudly like a big old fat bear. And there’s his nose. It isn’t right. It looks stuffed with something. How can a dead man smile? It’s a fake smile, scarily fake. As phony as the wet-lidded tears of Cy Law the undertaker who addresses us in the hushed tones of a quivering jellyfish.

But before, before that Big One--I’m coming home from school and have to walk past him-which I hate. He embarrasses me and I fear him. It’s hard to breathe in the house when he’s there. His anger is free-floating, everywhere like some dark cloud just about to burst and shower in every room. He is fear and cold. The epitome of every negative of every straight man I have ever known. The “Grand Cunt” of my life.

“How’s school?” he asks-like every day and every day I answer the same. “Fine” as if dismissing his invasion of my private life; a sarcastic—but not too obviously so “fine” for he attacks “smart mouth” fast, in the blink of an eyelash. Now I reflect what if—like all the “what if’s” of the parts of a life that could have, would have been but never did—never were. The unlived life—mine.

“Oh really fucking good” I see myself attacking him one day after he asks that same sickening boring question like every other stupid-ass day he ever asked it. Like he wanted a REAL ANSWER!

“Fucking swell” I start to scream, to come alive—to wake up and stand up to him and all his fat and all the fear he ever made me feel. “I’M A BIG QUEER you fat fucking REDNECK old LADY you! YOU HEAR ME—I’’M FUCKING QUEER! THERE! NOW WHAT ARE YOU GOING DO ABOUT THAT???” Throw me out on the street??!!! I can always SELL MY BODY! I’D welcome that! Anything would be better than this constipated angry HELL of a coffin you call a house we live in—a family—WHAT FAMILY? We don’t talk. We EXCUSE ourselves—WE ATTACK—and when not attacking we creep!”

Oh the joy I feel—like an exorcism just imagining that it could have happened…but no. It was just “Fine” and I pass him, afraid of his invasions, his eyes that stare into nothing, his fat and his rage. He can hurt me, he can hurt me bad. Years later I realize that I’ve assimilated him into me. Where there should be self-confidence, there’s a self-bullying, self-loathing voice. It’s him—in me! The bad voice, his legacy to me. And it’s busy looping. Beating up me. “I’m sorry” is my favorite phrase when I really want to push someone down the stairs. “Excuse me” a cue for the imaginary power drill I use to put people’s eyes out. The rage flies up at any time—and oh how professional I am at concealing all feelings!

I can flash for just a millisecond of a moment on the vision of a handsome, svelte, friendly man who is my Father. Having heart to heart talks with him every day about everything from God to penises to boys to girls and animals and being and doing and wow I think that would have been so so nice. A man to love, to be my friend. My Dad—beyond the real world. But that Dad’s a fantasy.

My Father was an only child and I heard that he was beaten by Edna Heckman—a very strict domineering, smart and charming woman—when he was small. That’s what Lucy Miller says. That she saw him get beat up a lot in that house where he was raised on the Hospital Hill. And Lucy should know. She lived right across the street.

Grandmother “Nan”, fat Dad’s Mom, made THE BEST cinnamon rolls in the world and even her toast made of homemade bread was to die for—literally. Her secret? BUTTER! The men in my family all died of butter. It marked the end of a genetic line…first my Grandfather—a dead-ringer for Robert Taylor until he gets fat in his forties. At 54 he is dead of his big one. His bladder let’s go in his easy chair as his heart explodes one morning as Nan calls him to breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast with cinnamon rolls and lots and lots of butter. My Dad goes next at 44.

I am queer at 51 as I write this in Amsterdam. I have no lover and no intention of seeing my genes carried on into the future. I was not meant to breed. Love and sex for me is to be enjoyed as a kind of heaven on earth (as an antidote to pain perhaps?). No—let’s call it what it is. “Lust” is the antidote to the Black Hole of sin which is my Father’s legacy to me. The sin of loving someone who can’t possibly love you back. So you’re left wanting—for years—and you begin early. Begin to fill the wanting with lust.

Sometimes I go for the butter but I spent a lot of time dancing and biking and at the gym. Intense physical activity and working out is a great antidote for constant heartache! A way of healing…

My Father—“the charmer”—the swinger! I always pictured him as being bisexual for some reason. I remember once he sent my Mother a picture from Korea—he’d reenlisted after World War II. He loved the army—couldn’t get enough tough guy shit. It taught him to be a manly man, swear and piss in the street, drink and be machismo like the rest of the guys. In this picture he’s in a hot tub of corrugated metal. Steam is rising from the water, soap in one hand. And that look at he stares at the camera—that sexy “Come hither look” he’s got on his face. I always imagine him about to fuck the photographer—or be fucked.

The constant pressure to maintain a veneer. To squelch all the feelings of sadness and pain and joy that simply and naturally are a part of life. To maintain a mask while underneath, the body’s building up the cholesterol into hardening arteries squeezing to the breaking point and finally rupturing, exploding. The final release at last; intense pain and then exquisite nothingness.

Dad—what were you so afraid of? Life? Your inability to control anything?—That being number one, your family--one son odd, maybe a queer--and the other a drug dealer. “--Not in the script—not supposed to be how--now-I’m--dying—the pain—“.

He is dead at 44. The heart-attack was massive…from the food and feasting, the wining and dinning, the laughing too loud, the need to entertain. Oh you sad sad happy-angry clown! The cigarettes, the Manhattans, the Ink Spots or Guy Lombardo playing on the stereo. When company’s sufficiently drunk he puts on the Rusty Warren “Knockers UP” album for that “touch of Blue” to get down, to get risqué (but he would never use THAT word). The cool, swinging, sexy fat man—making all the dolly’s laugh at his off-color jokes. The charming bully.

Queer Me Is Born Anew in Make-Up

Fire, breathing, bisexuality. Breathing. Before the first heart attack one Saturday night, 8th Grade—circa ’69, Dad and Mom go out. I’m very into Mother’s make up in their bedroom. I have just learned how to masturbate and putting on her lipstick and eyeliner give me an erection. I am discovering something other than fear and pets in my life. It’s very powerful and fun. I wanted to look like her—beautiful perfumed Barbie Doll—eternal June Cleaver everything is perfect-Mom-of the 50’s and 60’s. Even when it’s not—it’s the 70’s and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Imploding before our eyes…let’s NOT talk about it!

So, I’m all made up and with a hard-on and suddenly they are coming home way too early. I smear cold cream on my fact and dive onto the couch feigning boredom in front of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” as they enter. ”What the HELL have you got on YOUR FACE?” my Father accuses, as if I’m wearing dogshit—as if I’ve been eating it.

“I WANNA BE A GODDAMED GIRL!” I scream! “I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THIS FUCKING CHARADE (I’m kicking and screaming on the floor)—I AM A GIRL INSIDE you FAT FUCK. I’M REALLY A GIRL! The girl on the inside IS SHOWING ON THE OUTSIDE—THAT’S WHAT I’VE GOT ON MY FACE! AND I’VE GOT A FUCKING HARD-ON TOO BITCH!”

Ohhh delicious fantasy. Almost as good as sex! For the next 20 minutes or so my Mom goes on and on about how weird it is that I “need to play in her make-up like a girl”, (“Steve’s not a fighter.” All the queer signs. “He’s not a fighter—he’s the artistic one”). Christ how many times was THAT drilled into me until it’s no wonder I was a walking BULLSEYE for other kids to attack—I was incapable of raising my hand to ward off any blow. I was paralyzed by their programming. I believe at a very young age my Mother in fact planted the idea into my head that I was a girl, or no—maybe, just maybe that idea was just there from the moment of my creation.

I lie and make up some lame-o excuse about wanting to practice making up a Monster face for Halloween…yeah, right. A Monster with big red lips and lots of rouge and eye shadow! Clown drag is more like it. The beginning of the lies…they were all there. Mixed up and in with the feelings. You learn how be lie and practice deceit as a way to not awake the constantly slumbering beast of rage that dwells with you day by day. Moment by moment, you learn not to walk, but to mince around as if on egg-shells. Pretending pretending pretending. Entertaining becomes a way of survival, a means of distracting the despot on the throne—you become the court jester—at times you fantasize assassination plots. In public you can show “the Entertainer face”—it’s acceptable (though insincere, it’s fun to make people laugh!)

Junior High

At home was fear of fat Dad fear. At school was a different kind of nightmare. Since moving to CU-DA-HY for my entrance into seventh grade—the first year of Junior High School--I was constantly getting beat up, spit at, verbally attacked by boys and girls. They hated me in CU-DA-HY and oh how I hated them.

We had moved there from St. Paul Park in Minnesota where I had so many friends it was insane. I was “popular” in the 6th grade in Minnesota where kids seemed friendly and fun. It was light there—Cudahy was dark, the seventh brutal. Kids torturing me and me coming of age. It was a Polish-Slovakian neighborhood where I truly discovered the meaning of the words hood, greaser, ignorance, the ignorance of the old country--my first introduction. Later, after moving to New York, I would spend another 25 years in the midst of the Polish Ukranian East Village—“NAZI-like” in their tribalism, arrogance, small mindedness and bigotry on one side of me and white-hating Latins down on Avenues A through D. They’d see you and spit. You could see the hate in their eyes—even the old ladies spitting pearls of flem, thinking “White man—You got it made”. What an ugly discovery for a nice, innocent kid from the Midwest!

But back there in Cudahy, the hoods, the young tough greasers would spit on me from passing bus windows while I was innocently riding my bike. They’d beat me up in homeroom when the teacher wasn’t looking, kicking my chair, my legs, punching me in the head and laughing always laughing at me.

Now the armor’s in me through and through. I meditate, do Self-hypnosis and get lots and lots of massage (when I can afford it) and have lots of sex (when I’m lucky) in order to somehow feel my heart again--find the joy buried beneath the years of pain and fear—rediscover my soul. Sometimes it works. And sometimes I just wake up and the heartache’s still there—the Black Hole of pain and missing Daddy and missing man love and lusting for anything that will remind you that you’re alive—(singing) “Good Morning Heartache—“ the phrase is looping, over and over again in my mind.

One day of whole gang of nasty kids are following me home from school, calling me names, throwing things at me. I’m too afraid to even turn around. Then, just as one is within running steps of jumping me—I turn into my back yard and am safe. Safe at home—with my Father??

My few friends were the other losers, rejects, geeks (this was before computer time), misfits and insecure kids. Joey Majewski’s Mother and mine made an attempt to introduce us knowing we were both real loners or losers. Joey had three chins and soft fuzzy short brown hair. I can still recall his voice quivering when he talked to me, painfully shy. Clifford Cook and I hooked up in the 8th grade, he lived one block away. Clifford was pudgy, had black horn-rimmed glasses, and a big flip of Dondi-like light brown hair that kept falling down onto the right side of his face and glasses which he kept constantly pushing back and adjusting his glasses (all in the same stroke with his right hand). Clifford also had the most sibilant s’s I’d ever heard out of anyone’s mouth—his voice like a baritone Truman Capote. He made a supreme effort to constantly appear heterosexual. Later on I’d heard he’d even married a woman—perhaps he was straight after all—and in spite of the s’s. He was always inferring that he had these secret crushes on various girls (and they on him).

Once he shocked me by saying that “Jeff Koslewski was bragging about jerking off the other day…”

“What’s jerking off?” I said—feigning innocence by keeping my face as neutral and wide-eyed as possible—arranging and setting my expression with the proper combination of both shock and disgust. For just recently I myself had discovered the joys of jerking off.

“Its when you go like this”, he made a fist and moved it up and down real fast with an owwy-gooy disgusted face “on your thing until this stuff comes out.”

“Eeeww” I intoned making a face.

I had begun last year. It started one night in the bathtub. I was rubbing myself and it felt curiously interesting so I kept doing it and doing it—until something weird happened. I suddenly felt very ill as if I was sick and dying and then the “stuff” came out of my dick and it smelled like pepper and then the more I did it--I started really liking it, especially doing it to pictures of naked or muscular men’s bodies.

I also had various toys to assist me in my orgasms ranging from pictures of nude boys and men from the underground Hippie newspapers to tanned surfers on bottles of Coppertone Tanning Oil. Some of my favorite visuals were my brother’s bodybuilding magazines. On one particular photo of an Italian bodybuilder I actually burned a small hole in the man’s skinny black pre-Speedo bathing suit using a magnifying glass and the sun—thinking that somehow I could reveal the luscious forbidden mystery his bathing suit kept hidden. Another jerk off prop was a small discarded plastic tube which fit perfectly around my dick and was great to twist slowly to imitate a kind of slow screwing motion. I would cum immediately and the tube kept the jism contained. No muss no fuss. I kept it in the eaves spout outside my bedroom window on Edgerton Avenue. Funny how autumn leaves rain and dirt used to collect in it along with my semen. The passing seasons and the sperm of a horny teenager.

Along with my masturbatory activities I had been keeping many small animals from late childhood on. I always had a strange proclivity for small furred things like mice or baby chicks emerging from eggs. I had pet Guinea Pigs, hamsters and gerbils. Once in fifth grade in a different town (we were constantly moving and changing cities) neurotic Benji the dachshund came charging out of the back door of our then aqua colored house in the suburbs of St. Paul and fast as lightning, snapped up the small hamster I had let outside in his powerful yapping killing jaws and broke it’s spine.

Shortly after I began to jerk off, I noticed that my attitudes toward my pets started to change. Instead of cuddling and loving them, I began to resent them. After more than a year of being tortured by the bullies in Cudahy—I started to torture my little furred friends myself. I think it was out of frustration and a way of wanting to put pain out into the world as a reaction to the pain I was being forced to experience from the world.

Sometimes I would tape Sam the hapless little furry red short-haired female Guinea Pig I bought at the store for six bucks in seventh grade (Sam then gave birth to two little Sams) to a record turntable and force her to ride from 33 r.p.m. to 78 revolving around and around until I removed her, tore the masking tape off and watched her with glee as she struggled to walk—crawl mostly on her side—her feet struggling in the air so dizzy from the ride. Other times I would practice partial suffocation on her, closing my hand tight over her little Guinea Pig nose and mouth until she passed out then watch her come to again—she always came to. Other times I threw darts at her as she ran across the floor. I still regret this actions now.

Then there were the gerbils—I got a pair which quickly turned into a family and in a few months there 2 or 3 generations. The Mother kept giving birth so often that once I slammed her little gerbil body into a rat-running wheel while it was going forcing her to miscarry the umpteenth litter. No problem in the gerbil world as the aborted litter of “pups” made for nice naked little fetus snacks to nibble on for the whole overpopulated family for days to come. Kind of like being poor and living like rats in a ghetto in a big city—except there the feeding and the killing is done by guns mostly by gangs over turf and drugs or simple hatred.

One block up from the lake drive in Cudahy on Edgerton Avenue in the bushes lining the alley in the back yard of 3909 is a miniature gerbil and guinea pig cemetery.

There were a few high spots in Junior High. Once, Mr. Young—the geography teacher who was tall, fat, wore bottle-thick glasses and had very fat lips which he used to constantly be pursing together; either out of anger or in a vain attempt to show his troublesome students how they couldn’t “get over” on him—went to pull up a map of the world covering the middle of the blackboard. He fumbled with it, pulling on the string and it FLEW out of his hand and snapped up rolling round and round to reveal in large chalk letters, perfectly printed ‘CONGA IS MIGHTY” (that was his nickname). The class went hysterical with laughter and Conga--er—Mr. Young’s face was beet beet red as if it was going to explode.

Mrs. Silk was my 7th Grade English teacher and she discovered that I had a terrific flair for drama. In one class presentation project I invented a cereal breakfast food called “Diet Crunchies” and did a commercial for it—holding the box doing a spiel with an English Accent. She went bonkers over me and had me coming in and performing it for all her other classes. I also used to do imitations of Bobby Kennedy too until he was assassinated. The bullies watched in awe one as a neighboring homeroom teacher invited me to come over and perform my “Bobby imitation”.

One of the darkest and most painful memories I have was when I was punched in the ear and side of the head by mean old Mr. McLymans, the shop teacher from hell. Shop class was a queer student’s nightmare—right up there with gym class. It was force-fed-cultural programming for boys on the how-to’s of building and operating your own workshop. We were taught things like how to cut wood, cut wood and cut wood—oh—there was also some emphasis cutting wood. It’s easy to let my anus go limp when I dwell on this memory—even now. The way it came about was one day goony Mark Spies (a pre-computer “Geek” kid if there ever was one) asked me to do a staring contest with him—which we were engaged in for about 3 or 4 minutes when McLymans caught a glimpse of us and started screaming bloody murder. He must have thought something like “staring into each other eyes” was happening between two boys. Screaming his head off like a maniac he demanded we march into an adjoining room where he proceeded to belt us with (taking very large swings) with his tightened fist in the side of the head—one at a time. I got mine right over my right ear on the side of my head. The old fuck was strong—my ear was ringing and in pain for days after the incident. In the moment after clipping us both he grabbed a nearby cloth towel hanging from a wall dispenser and rage-screamed “THERE! YOU WANNA CRY NOW? GIRLIES WANNA CRY??? HUH? HERE’S A CRYING TOWEL—HERE’S A CRYING TOWEL—NOW YOU CAN CRY!”

To this day I can only reflect that it must have been the old bastard’s innate homophobia that made him want to attack and punish us so viciously for something which on the surface seemed so innocuous—yet to him implied something much MUCH larger and extremely taboo. Boys staring into each other’s eyes—Heaven Forbid as the solid iron walls of cultural patriarchy start to crumble and melt. Kids razzed me for days about the incident “You want a cryin’ towel Orr?” I confessed what happened to Mother that night but we both agree not to tell Father. I think this was before heart attack No. 1.

But back to social torture. I got it from the girls too. Once Karen Kovac in 8th grade put a sticker on my back that said “I am a Homo.” The kids all during THIS English class (not Mrs. Silk—she wouldn’t have stood for it—it was some pregnant cow with a huge belly and a face a cross between a clown and a orangutan) kept asking me “Is it TRUE Steve?—Is it true?” “Maybe” I intoned mysteriously not knowing what they were talking about but wanting to put an end to it--and then they snickered. Another day Lynn Bernier just went off on me in the hall in between classes going “Oh God, Steve Orr--You’re such a fem—FEM. You FEM!” I didn’t even KNOW what “fem” meant until Clifford with his sibilant “s’s” explained to me that “fem” was short for “feminine” as in girlish.

The roots of hate (“Sins of the Father”), beginning in childhood are passed on from generation to generation. I had a bigoted father, but his bigotry was all implied—never spoken outright. Learned hate, external, internal, self-hate… It still floors me when I think back on these experiences…the cruelty of kids—of people. Of me for and towards other living things and people.

But there has always been cruelty and there seems to be some general glee of giving pain to other members of the tribe—especially those who are different.

Like torturing my pets, sometimes my rage still gets the better of me and I have the urge to act out; usually it only goes as far as verbal violence and usually it’s when some accident or act of ignorance scares the hell out of me or inspires me to “road rage”.

I recall at our 20th High School reunion in 1992 with Pat Delaney--who always seemed rather “butch” to me herself--going off on me as being the poster child for “You QUEERS spreading AIDS all over the place.” My friend (and former girlfriend Robin) just looked at me after both Pat and her tirade were gone, held my hand and said simply “Don’t”. That was a real bonding moment in our friendship. Later, after the dancing, dinner and drinks we were taking a walk by the dark lakeshore and Robin confessed to me that she thought there was something demonic about men fucking each other in the same hole where they went to the bathroom. This wasn’t new to me—my Mother when I was 20 or so came up with that too. It’s a take off on the old “Is sodomy a sin?” debate. Cultural programming against the different one.

“It’s just one aspect of gay sex—gay to me means un-straight—or being able to create whoever and however you want to love somebody” was my response.

High School was slightly better as I finally found a kind of tribe to hang out with—it was either the Hippies or the Drama kids, sometimes the band members. In Junior High I began to experiment with speed but just in a small way. In mid and late High School there was a lot of drinking (usually on the sly and usually I’d end up getting caught and punished). There was a lot of taking acid and getting stoned and a mountain of lies and excuses to dodge my Dad’s ever present rage and propensity for misunderstanding, judging and jumping to conclusions. For years afterward I had reoccurring nightmares that some “problem” had been discovered in my High School records, that I was really NOT graduated and had to return to make up the missed classes and get the diploma.

Masturbation can be a wonderful release for me and also a kind of substitute for actual living. When it goes with Internet porn—I have to keep an eye on it—it’s such a time waster and a life-energy sucker. But God those orgasms feel so good!

Better to write—even if only for myself. At least I’m focusing on something, creating something—trying to find some meaning in it all from within instead of always seeking the answers (or some temporary masking for the pain) from without (the external world).

Now the cloudy sky’s turning to rain in Amsterdam and I still want to cum or meditate and imagine a sun burning out all my frustration and feelings of loneliness—away. Again I reflect on going to the baths…I think I will meditate and imagine I’ve moved out of the East Village into the woods, maybe to the North Shore (ha—too expensive) of Long Island. More likely Austin or ALB., New Mexico. I don’t know if I have enough money for the seashore. I really have to go suburban or country. It’s long past overdue. I fear how I will make money. Will this just “take care of itself” or am I doomed to failure? To living off the proceeds of my East Village cave and ending up on Skid Row? That’s my greatest fear. I think my fear of homophobia is passing. That’s a good thing.

The lack of sex and friends and that haunted feeling of always being different, and being terribly isolated has come out here in Amsterdam in full force. In New York, I’m isolated too, but tend not to notice it so much with all the details and STRESS of daily living. It’s also easy to get “quick fixes” by visits with neighbors on the street or connecting with neighborhood shopkeeper (I know some neighborhood Muslims and love them)—I’ve been trying to counter it by imagining self-happiness and a sense of peace through meditation and self-hypnosis or suggestion. I don’t know if it works but it allows me to function better in the world and have better boundaries. I have made just a few really good friends here. My original idea to treat the whole summer as a sort of “writers colony” or retreat keeps reoccurring and gets me through. I’m probably not a very good writer but it really doesn’t matter as I believe in the general scheme of things you get better the more you do it whether you’re published in The New Yorker or not.

I imagine the sun; I imagine moving out of the East Village; I imagined I never had to wait for the phone to ring again—if it does—fine. If it doesn’t—that’s alright too. I can practice my Pilates, meditate, be happy on my own. Write—write out memoirs and wonder over all the living I’ve done; and try to put some perspective on the whole thing.

Fucking Noah’s Ark out there…hmm. Maybe I should move to Portugal? Amsterdam—was it so good? Well…kind like the living like a homeless man in a cave experience—it toughened me up. And unlike that—it softened up my armor a bit. Forced me to use my mind more—that’s a very good thing!

Maybe there is no “goal” but to spread my soul around the world by traveling…


Conclusion “Surviving Dad and Amsterdam”

Today it is a new day, a different day. Weeks have passed--I am lying in my bed not knowing what to do today. I’m thinking I can meditate and create happiness thereby making this constant heartache go away. Further I realize that this constant ache is partly a result from an incompletion in myself. This incompletion or “hole-feeling” in my heart mainly comes from my Father being “the love of my life” who gave me no love. Years later now, still, part of my identity contains a vacuum where my Father’s love should have been. I can finally give up blaming him—and simply grieve. He was incapable of giving me what I needed to be whole! That’s a lot to forgive someone for! I’m forgiving him as I write this. On a cerebral level anyway; on an artistic-writing level—that’s the action, the “do”. Perhaps with whole process will even inspire GREATER changes in my thinking? Baby steps…

A very self-healing way to deal with heartache is by exercising and reading self-help books…I will go to the bookstore and make notes from “Conversations with God”…then I will go biking (or to gym)…maybe go ship-sight seeing here—the Dutch are so big on water-culture, canals, etc.

This whole memoir has led me the black hole of missing my Dad’s love; therefore not having a love of myself. Or maybe—just maybe it dawns that through this shitting out of the missing Father pain—I can truly love myself. The phallus is empty but lust leading to release has it’s own reward.

Now, having reached 51 I hunger tremendously for friendship and quality time just hanging out and having good conversation. Wow…

I do believe that the healing effect of being in this Amsterdam apartment’s LIGHT has enabled me to see through many of my own neurotic layers of personality. A mirror held up to my face if you will…ayyyeeeee (screaming sounds—LOL!)…

I also—very important—must remember to not be so hard on myself. I am, after all in Amsterdam where it’s “Easy to be Hard” (in both the sense of being unfriendly—the Dutch—and in exploring lust (zzzzzzzzz) as a means to it’s own end. Oh yes—then there’s the 30 years of armor from living in N.Y. (a very minor detail when it comes to making friends!)…