Flag Abuse

I was reading an interview today in which out country star, Chely Wright said: “I knew at 4 that I wanted to be a country star.” Really? At 4, I wanted to be a baker. Later, on her blog, a woman wrote “I wrote my first book at the age of six.” At six, I horrified my parents by announcing I wanted to be a trash collector then requested a trash trgck for Christmas, which they gamely bought me assuming, that desire too, would change. And it did. Several times. Remembering how fickle, how directionless I was, I thought about the jobs I’ve had. Here’s a partial list. I have been:

• a sales clerk for Bloomingdales—a weird cult-like experience in which all of the other Sales Bots seemed to worship the store, its clientele and its merchandise,
• a timekeeper for The World’s Greatest Department Store,
• a manager for a store that sold discount polyester suits—3 for $99!,
• a copy clerk—we worked in three shifts copying documents for the Exxon-Valdez litigation,
• a mail room clerk—back when fax machines used thermal paper and on Monday mornings you had to unroll the faxes and cut the pages before delivering them. I also drove the company van and famously once, when driving the CEO to the airport, I missed the exit. He yelled at me and I burst into tears.
• an assistant manager for a toy store at the height of the video game craze. I hated that job and after six weeks, I calculated that I had enough to pay the rent for two months, walked up to my boss and quit,
• a “paperboy”—I delivered the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

My life's path has been circuitous to
say the least. I’ve only ever been sure of two things: one, I was irretrievably gay and happy in my gayness. And two, I was, at my core, a writer. The rest has been a constantly changing blur of dreams and often conflicting desires. It took me a long time to realize that what I wanted to do, all I wanted to do, was write. I’m amazed by people who choose a path and stick to it, never changing direction or steering off the main road or stumbling into the undergrowth to see what they may find.

I think I fell in love with TSE because he was as directionless as I, both of us individually, restless, stumbling in the dark, getting bumped and bruised. Together we found rest and a common direction. I’ve been much, much better since he came along and I hope the same is trge for him. Still, I can’t say I regret my stumbling, every bump and bruise telling the story of me, which in turn fed my stories. As Geo tells the young would-be writer Thomas in What Binds Us, “Just remember: fear nothing. For a writer, there can be no bad experiences.”

A three year affair with a drug-addled hustler formed the basis for many of the stories in my next book, Damaged Angels. Adele may have set fire to the rain around her faithless, feckless boyfriends, but I had to content myself with setting fine to mine on the page, burning each in an effigy of words. Actually, it was more like capturing each one in amber, preserving a moment in time, an experience, capturing a personality, a way of being, so I did not forget.

As for the drug-addled hustler, in the fictionalized account, his story ends on the same street corner on which I’d found him: “Above their heads, pushing against the darkness, the flickering blue neon sign of the apothecary flashed a warning: DRUGS. Or perhaps it was a seduction.”

And while I sometimes wish I’d chosen an easier path, I can’t say I regret the journey.