Michael Brown's Blog, page 2

The Hidden Scars of War

As a teenager in Brussels, my mom endured World War II. She suffered the day-by-day anxiety of not knowing moment-by-moment if she or those she loved were safe. Few of us have lived through such horror.

One Photo Brought War Home

I was mid-twenties when I went through a box of photographs and found one of my mom looking out a train window, beautiful with a shoulder-length pageboy, padded shoulders, looking like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. This was the first time I was aware, at a gut level, of what my mother had faced.

My grandmother had taken the photo of her daughter from the platform. Tears were streaming down my mom’s face because she was saying goodbye to her mother; only her mother, because her father had died the day Hitler invaded Belgium.

My mom was going to meet her new husband, my dad, in Denver. She was 19. The year was 1945.

Choice, or Migration Forced by War?

My mother took the train from Brussels to a port, I don’t know which, and sailed to New York. She got herself from New York to Denver, eager and scared to meet my father’s family, in particular the matriarch, my Grandma.

Whenever my grandmother was part of the conversation, my parents would argue. It probably started that day November’45 after my father drove my mother from the Denver Grayhound Depot to his mother’s house in Englewood. Everyone would have been waiting for my father and his new Belgian bride.

There would have been my Uncle Clark, my grandmother’s oldest son, and Jean, his new wife. Jean was from Kentucky and I’m sure she had been pushed through that same gauntlet. They all would have greeted my mother, this exotic girl from Europe, greeted her with politeness, hugs, and hope. All except Grandma, whom my mom would face last. I have always envisioned, given the arguments generated by the mention of my grandmother’s name, my Grandma ignored her, had turned to my father and said, “Jakie, how can you understand a word she says?” Grandma would have gotten up and moved into the kitchen, proving she wouldn’t be going all out for any foreigner.

I think that day my mother withdrew. Became aloof. She had left her own mother standing, crying on the Brussels platform and entered some other dimension where a kind of crudeness, lack of knowledge about the world — even about the world to which they were most closely allied: Europe, had replaced my mom’s life of private schools and working skill in three languages.

The war had made her migrant to a country, which for the most part had no idea where Belgium was. It was common for Americans to assume she was from the Congo, since that was the only association they had of Belgium.

Eighty Years Of Not Forgetting How War Had Her Shaped Life.

She never lost her accent, and it was an accent people found difficult to place. Most often they’d ask, “Are you German?”

Only nine years after her departure from Brussels, we lived in Germany, and one of the other army wives asked my mom, “Are you German?”

I went rigid, fearful of being embarrassed by what my mother would say and knowing the hurt she felt. She was a French-speaking Wallon, with an accent different from the Parisian of Maurice Chevalier or Pepe Le Pew familiar to Americans, but in her mind, how could she possibly, possibly be mistaken as Bosch, as German?

Staring at that sepia-toned photograph of her in the train window, leaving Brussels and her mother — she had certainly thought forever — and only months earlier seeing Nazis patroling that same train depot, her life uprooted, shredded by those German troops, can you imagine, less than a decade later the effect on her, the effect of being asked if she were German?

The year she left her home was 1945. Five years earlier, at age fourteen, on the eve Hitler invaded Brussels, her father, yet a young man, died. My mother, an only child, was his princess; he, her guarantee she would always be safe.

The Nazis invaded. My mom and her mom were unable to get my grandfather out of the house for a week. And she fourteen was supposed to cope?

My mom’s memory of that kitchen table, which for a week held her dead father, fed an anger that only the fatigue of her dying could diminish.

When asked, “Are you German?” how did she not scream? Not rage? Not see the hatred she held was only fodder for more horror to come?

The post The Hidden Scars of War appeared first on Michael Brown.

In the Midst of Mass Migration, What is Home?

The past is a country from which we have all emigrated …

— Salmon Rushdie

This quote brings to mind the immense human migration going on in the Mideast and Asia, where thousands are leaving the past and homes behind, as well as the personal journeys each of us take.

Syrian and Iraqi Refugees Arrive in Greece wikipedia.org

My Migration Home

From my earliest days my family moved often; I witnessed others feeling at home. I waited to belong. In the twelve years before college, I went to as many schools in as many places. I haunted our Atlas, hoping to turn the perpetual loss of friends into adventure.

I made many friends, but making friends wasn’t the same thing as feeling at home. To this day, even among the closest friends, I witness, rather than belong.

Is this an aberrant state? Or does everyone feel this way? Or is it this feeling apart that has made me a writer, and in turn has made writing a home?

Going out into the world has been my Odyssey. First as a child moving from place to place, then as an adult from job to job, from desire to desire, always returning to my writing.

The Odyssey as a Migration Paradigm

Is it necessary to feel there is somewhere called home in order to have an Odyssey: a circular journey?

The Odyssey is a metaphor for journeys towards unification: the evolution of unity to multiplicity and back to unity again. Or the evolution of the unified consciousness of a child out into the world and its many relations to return to a higher unity as a member of humanity.

But for the child to realize that return, the child must be raised in a safe home, to feel there is a home — an Ithaca — to which he can return.

And for the two-thirds of humanity that believes in reincarnation, a particular incarnation can be a departure from knowing who one is to striking out and conquering the unknown and returning with a larger sense of what is possible, ready to be reborn at a higher turn of the spiral.

A New Home in Mexico

Mexico became part of my Odyssey

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

― William Faulkner

San Miguel de Allende has become my place out of the rain.

My father started talking about moving to Mexico, Guadalajara, about five years before he retired from the army. My mother thought he was nuts, and my sister and I, who mistook my mother’s fear for wisdom, agreed.

So instead, after a career of moving us from Colorado to Kansas to Missouri back to Colorado to Germany to Los Angeles, he retired in San Francisco. He still mentioned Mexico, as if it were a faded dream. He began to go off during the day and sometimes at night on journeys in his red Volkswagen bug to destinations he alone knew.

My father ran from the violence of his upbringing in Englewood, Colorado, I’m sure more rural than suburb in the 20s and 30s. When his father died, my father underaged signed up and went off to World War II. This was the beginning of his Odyssey.

However, unlike Ulysses, when his wars were over nowhere felt like home.

Is Home a Way Station or a Final Rest?

Tom has made a home for me. My gratitude is beyond words. With Tom, it was easy to stay forty years in Rhode Island and grow my career. But all that time in Rhode Island, I yearned for greater vistas, vistas from mountain tops. New England’s scale felt small. Then a conspiracy of events brought us to Mexico with our house on the mountain and vistas to the horizon.

Now home includes a second language, Spanish, as it did when as a pre-schooler my Belgian mother and grandmother spoke French as our first language at home.

There has to be a reason for so much travel, for a life defined by the use of English, yet bracketed by two other languages, doesn’t there?

Ulysses returned from the wars to find his home under siege and his wife Penelope, representative of the sense of home for which he longed, holding off suitors. He returned to find his home about to be usurped by others.

Is the end of the Odyssey a metaphor for end-of-life? In old age, our travels complete, we long for the peace and contentment of a life well lived, and instead we find usurpers everywhere: regrets, ill health, ghosts of enemies and friends alike?

Ulysses having lost all of his sailing companions, companions on his life’s journey, returns to Ithaca to slay all of the usurpers. It is a raging:

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light …

— Dylan Thomas

I hope the dying of the light is a distant event for all of us, as indivuals and as a species. Yet, that dying’s inevitability defines our most obvious common ground.

TV gives us images of those Greek beaches, which spawned the legacy of Odysseus, now lined with abandoned life jackets as thousands are forced to make an unexpected and unwanted journey towards new definitions of home.

Let’s not turn away helpless, or thank our lucky stars. It is —it must be — our problem too.

Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone…if you didn’t migrate then your father did, and if your father didn’t need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him…”

― José Saramago, The Notebook

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David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and the Rainbow Bridge

When I heard David Bowie had died, my breath caught. Then tears followed. All that day, I haunted Facebook and Twitter. Any poignant post would make me cry harder. This reaction was silly, yet perhaps unavoidable.

Why?

I hadn’t listened to a David Bowie song in five years, but somehow a link, a deep identification had formed. Was it sentimentality that made me cry more for a celebrity than for the passing of a friend? Or was something more revealing involved?

A Real connection to David Bowie?

The marriage of circumstance and readiness formed links between me and this rock idol:

The daring and attraction of his androgyny in the seventies when I was just daring to come out.
The rumor he and Mick Jagger—a bad boy hero of mine—were at one time lovers.
The way in which “Ground Control to Major Tom …” became an anthem for my partner Tom and me.
The poignancy in his voice when he sang China Girl, which always reminds me of my first official love, which happened to be with a girl and Asian, named Mariko.
His eerie alien waif portrayal in “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” which I saw several times in the seventies, and perhaps eighties, haunted by that film.

Could I make a similar list for any friend of mine, a list demonstrating how my imagination and being had been sparked and enhanced by my relationship with them? I’m not sure.

David Bowie was a repository of sounds and images, which enlivened my imagination and redefined the possible.

Marilyn Monroe: Reminder of the child we need to protect?

I also cried when Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor died.

I can’t reduce the connection to Miss Monroe to a list, perhaps because the connection formed when I was much younger. I saw most Monroe movies for the first time when I was younger than ten. Only later, after her death and a cult began to form, did I recognize the vulnerability she revealed in every photo and every frame of film. Each glimpse did and does pull at the heart.

In spite of the sex and drugs and affairs, of the pin-ups in garage bathrooms and desperate attempts to marry someone who would banish her vulnerability, Marilyn Monroe was always a little girl. She is an eternal reminder: it’s the children we must protect.

Because Marilyn Monroe existed, we became more compassionate.

Elizabeth Taylor: Vulnerable defiance

Elizabeth Taylor also portrayed vulnerability, but in the face of that vulnerability, she was defiant. Her eyes unlike Marilyn’s, which pled for understanding, flashed independence: a willingness, if not a preference, to go it alone.

You can’t imagine Marilyn Monroe racing National Velvet in a steeplechase or playing Martha in Virginia Woolf. Yet in Elizabeth’s harridan screech as Martha, she touches the same sources of human pain.

Celebrities: The Modern Pantheon

Yet the irony persists. I have felt more grief at the passing of a celebrity than at the death of a friend—not a lifelong friend (someone you shared time, grief, and joy with)—but a friend for an occasional chat, or someone to send Christmas cards to.

Is it because this is the nature of celebrity? We reduce them to essential qualities. More and less than human, they are our gods and goddesses. Pop culture is the repository of human extremes: the closest approach for many to the divine.

Our icons make us aspire, feel, connect. Connect even when there is no physical link.

This binding, this connection to the celebrity, is also a way we connect to one another.

We share our social media posts, our phone calls — “Did you hear David Bowie just died?” — to those who remember listening to China Girl with you, or also speculated on whether he was gay.

Finding or creating common ground is also the function of art. Whether pop or highbrow, together our imaginations are enlarged, sparked, with new images, new sounds, and crazy juxtapositions.

The Rainbow Bridge

Some believe the imagination is a suggestive glimpse of another and higher plane of existence that has been named many things: Shamballa, Heaven, Paradise. Upon imagination we build the real bridge that connects us: a Rainbow Bridge, the Antahkarana of Eastern Philosophy, the bridge to our common destiny.

For me, these three celebrities linked me to something that transcends personality. Maybe in their willingness to be vulnerable to all of us, they pointed the way to union.

The post David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and the Rainbow Bridge appeared first on Michael Brown.

How Every Self-Justification Builds Walls Between Us

When there are disagreements between us, walls, they are often over beliefs we’ve clung to for a long time; even if those beliefs become outmoded. Such clinging is self-justification.

Are we immoveable in our politics? Unwavering in our belief our religion or lack thereof is the only way? Did we inherit these beliefs from our family, the way we inherit eye color? Are we truly, logically and emotionally convinced we are right?

If not, what if instead of converting those who think and feel differently, we understood, with sympathy, their beliefs too have become an unquestioned part of their identity?

These are the questions I ask about my characters. At the psychological roots of my characters lie the same self-justifications leading to the conflicts, which divide individuals, communities, and nations.

How Coping Creates Walls

The characters of The Consecration of Jacob Jordaens must cope through self-justifications with the one big elephant in the closet: one of their own is operating a child-sex trafficking ring over the internet.

A bleak prospect, to say the least.

Whether a character denies to themselves or others this business is nefarious, represses knowledge it exists, or worries whether their role is to reveal the sex-trafficking ring to the authorities, they handle the resultant negative emotions through coping, through self-justifications.

Those self-justifications, create the barriers between the characters and generate the conflict, which moves the novel forward.

Belief Systems: The Building Blocks of Self-Justification

What do the characters of The Consecration of Jacob Jordaens believe?

Moira Connery was born to raise everyone up to greater heights. As a little girl, she believed in her Guardian Angel. As an adult that Angel has morphed into a Master in a grand spiritual hierarchy. She is an aspirant: someone on the Path. A natural optimist, Moira is confronted with the darkest aspects of human nature. Can her faith all humans are on a progressive path to enlightenment be sustained in the light of an overwhelming evil?

Karen Vaughn will not be a sucker in a dog eat dog world. If she creates victims, they are victims of their own choosing. With her mom as her role model, Karen knows she is made of strong genetic material, built to survive. Can Karen’s faith in her own cleverness, her intelligence, bear her up under the weight of her own wrong doing?

Shay Vaughn has always believed the odds have been against him. Fortunately life offers compensations, like drugs and gambling. But can Shay escape, blind himself, to his wife Karen’s involvement with the sex trafficking ring? Will he ever see his denial is what enables her?

Nick Vaughn believes he is destined to be famous. Why else was he given his intellect and the blessing of a fine education and a wealthy family? Or is he driven by the need for his father’s approval? The subtext of every interaction with his father is his father’s disappointment Nick is gay. Thus, Nick so needs his father’s approval, he has convinced himself the child trafficking enterprise is just another business. Can Nick’s “sophistication” stand up against the evidence against his family, evidence of horrors committed against the most innocent?

Lexis Jordaens believes she can leave the past behind, and create herself anew whenever needed. She once believed in the supernatural and the esoteric. Now she’s stronger, a good mother and professor of feminist theory and history. Pressured by terrors, she would have once called psychic attacks, can she abandon her former beliefs in good and evil, reduce it all to political theory and logic?

Our hero, Jake Jordaens discovers his past heroes have feet of clay and gravitates towards Karen, who intrigues him with promises he can control his own future. Yet when he learns Karen’s empire is founded on the broken bodies of children, and he is an accomplice in building that empire, can he do the right thing?

Self-Justification vs. Self-Knowledge

A character, who grows, travels from self-delusion to facing the truth about his or her justifications. Where they are in this journey to self-knowledge determines whether they will act: whether they are reticent or ready.

Karen feels she is ready to act, because she has to. She doesn’t lie to herself. She just believes those who get hung up on good and evil are fools. If she doesn’t run her business, someone else will, and there is no one going to take care of her.

Shay has no vision of the future, beyond not losing his comfort. He doesn’t know how to do more than react.

Moira hesitates, because she is engaged in a battle to save souls Yet, who is she to have such lofty conceits? But she has no choice. She is driven by a moral imperative to serve the group good. Therefore by sheer will she transforms her reticence into action, in spite of emotional and physical pain.

Nick Vaughn wants to fulfill his destiny, his dharma: he is supposed to create works of art. As long as he pursues his goal with single purpose, what others do is none of his concern. If they say he’s selfish, they don’t understand.

Same Tier/Different Ethics = Conflict = Walls

These characters’ ethics are determined by their tier: survival, personality optimization, service to humanity.

Andrew Vaughn, although monstrous, does counter Moira Connery on the service to humanity level. Andrew just believes the greatest good is to eliminating the weak, rather than lift them up.

Lexis Vaughn counters Nick Vaughn, she too wants personality optimization, but doing so means being the mother Jake needs and a voice for women’s rights. For Nick, it means completing his opera and proving to his father his value. Both Nick and Lexis, unlike Moira and Andrew — who have left behind their personality concerns to operate at a higher level — are hampered by doubt they have what it takes to succeed.

On the survival level of trying to get by, we have husband and wife, Shay and Karen Vaughn. Shay, deluding himself his self-destructive behavior can do anything but destroy him, and Karen, refusing to depend on others, survives by destroying others.

We All Self-Justify. We’re All Human.

Few people, or characters, are outright evil. Those who do evil, are often self-justified: they need it to survive, they have been wronged, etc.

Therefore, when we look at world issues, you name it — gun control, immigration (regional or worldwide), nuclear proliferation, climate crises, etc. — we can examine the different positions as reflections of justifications.

If we remember behind both sides of an argument, there are weak areas, soft bellies being protected, we’ll realize our common humanity and in that perhaps is the beginning of a solution.

Next time you feel like lashing out in anger at a social media post or something you overhear at a party, stop and ask yourself, why would they hold this belief? What in their background or current context would contribute to them clinging fiercely to that position? You’ll be surprised: you’ll start seeing what you have in common. And that “in common” is the bridge between what separates you.

The post How Every Self-Justification Builds Walls Between Us appeared first on Michael Brown.

How I Faced Being “Different” and Wrote a Novel

Haven’t we all known someone whose enthusiasm, instead of being infectious, made us want to step back a bit? Cross to the other side of the party and engage in conversation just a little more mundane?

But what if it’s that “odd” character who allows you to close your evening with the feeling that night had indeed been different, that somehow your mind had been sparked.

I have wasted so much energy trying not to be that odd ball.

But maybe it’s time to accept I am who I am.

Becoming a Zealot

Before, when I was much younger, I bestowed my opinion about everything to everyone.  I didn’t do

it to prove I was smart or knew something you didn’t.  I did it because I was psyched.

Sure some of that enthusiasm was over-the-top, like my enthusiasm for Transcendental Meditation or a particular diet. Over-the-top, because I was unsure about my choices, and the more unsure the harder I pushed for others to follow me.

I became a zealot.

I wasn’t different from the young man, who daily sat next to me on the bus as I commuted from Providence to Boston to manage a Japanese print gallery in Copley Plaza. He’d ask me once more, forgetting he had asked me the day before, if I had been born again. Did I have Jesus in my heart? Irritation built into rage as he persisted. I snapped: I’d been born once into a world where idiots like him resided and once was sufficient.

Yes, I was haughty, pompous, and saw no connection between his zealotry and my more New Age variation on his theme of trying to feel safe in a not-so-safe world.

Rude Awakening

It was my best friend who took the brunt of my fanatacism. Certain if she would listen to me she’d find happiness, I’d harass her to take up meditation or exercise or read Proust.  I nagged her for  years.  She was the model of grace.  At times she would read something I suggested, but only because it already appealed to her.  She never told me to tone it down, until one day she had had enough and asked me if I ever tired of being a know-it-all.

She might as well have slugged me in the face. I blushed to my core. I was mortified, because I knew she was right.  And I went silent.

And I stayed silent, until in the search for the right voice for my novel, The Consecration of Jacob Jordaens, I discovered once more in my young narrator’s voice, that passion, that interest in letting the world know the world’s impact on my consciousness.

Finding a Voice

In finding Jake’s voice, I found my own. I began to examine my interests aloud: someone else might be entertained, find a book they might like to read, or a perspective they might like to consider.

I began to wonder, if I kept it all inside, what was the point of having the experiences at all.

Here I am, oddness and all, writing about everything from classic literature and philosophy, to wishing I knew more about math, to everything Eastern, to occult–theory and practice, to drawing (which I can’t do, but want to), to software, to Reality TV, to People Magazine, to Gossip Girl,  and to who is the latest celebrity to come out.

Writing here, as if I’m speaking to someone, allows me to explore. Allows me to remember.  Allows me to reinforce the enthusiastic me.

Whether you want to step to the other side of the room, is up to you.

True, I could be boring.

However, I hope some of you will join me in this corner and dare to spark something new.

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How To Promote Goodwill, In Spite of Everything?

Active Goodwill

How can we use goodwill to promote unity, after Paris, after the accelerating rancor in the US elections, or after the dangerous game of chicken Russia and Nato are engaged in?

My first reaction to what ISIS did in Paris last month was to want to obliterate them. This also seems to be the world’s reaction, as we step up the bombing campaign. But what are our real assumptions about ISIS and how reliable are our souces of information?

Goodwill is an active energy we project when we will everyone the best. Sometimes projecting that energy is hard, very hard. Whether we are talking about a difficult relative, a self-absorbed friend who drives us crazy, or a group of kids who stand and slaughter 89 people at a concert.

However, how often has a new insight into our relative or friend improved how we deal with them in the future?

I have three articles to kick off this holiday, again from my favorite source The New York Review of Books, which challenge assumptions, about who, what and why ISIS.

Are most ISIS recruits Islamic?
Will improving economic conditions,remove the reasons ISIS exists?
Is there an idealism in ISIS’ extremes not altogether disimilar from the idealism of the 60s?

Believe me, I want ISIS gone, but feelings are not a solution. Until we begin to deal with questions like these, we’ll be pitted in a hopless war of bombings and doubling up on our security forces on every bus, plane, train and public gathering venue in the world. And how long is that tenable?

Who, What, Why ISIS?

This week take a look at (please click on blue links to get to the articles):

“For the greater the hostility toward Muslims in Europe and the deeper the West becomes involved in military action in the Middle East, the closer ISIS comes to its goal of creating and managing chaos.” This is a quote from Paris: The War ISIS Wants.

And for a look of how ISIS strategy differs from al-Qaeda: From Mumbai to Paris.

And the final suggested article on the origins of ISIS, opens with this revelation: “Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.” The Mystery of ISIS.

All three of these articles expanded my notion of who, what and why ISIS, and made me wonder if the West’s strategy in combatting them is correct, or will it just pull us into a deeper quagmire, with all of even less safe?

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Off Pebble Beach (4)

Off Pebble Beach, Part Four : Ring of Fire

Go here for Part One: Off Pebble Beach: Darkening Waters

Go here for Part Two: Off Pebble Beach: Distraction

Go here for Part Three: Off Pebble Beach: Schooner Jake’s

Johnny Cash came on, and Joy began to warble, “And it burns, burns, burns … ”

I yelled, ” Turn that shit off.”

“You’re right, Davy.” Michael said. “Hick crap. Not opera. But you know what? I frigging love this song.” He joined in, ” …that ring of fire, that ring of fire.”

“You do not like country,” I said.

They sang louder. When I reached for the dial, Michael shoved my hand away and yelled, “Stop being such a queer!”

I slammed my fist into his chest.

“Hit me again, little girl!”

I did and he slapped me. My eyes blurred with the sting, and I shrank against the door and let my face cool against the tuck-and-roll of the seat, inhaling new leather.

They sang, ”And it burns, burns, burns … ”

The slap and the harshness of queer sank me into a black funk, so when Joy took the dirt rode down to a cove off San Gregorio public beach, I didn’t notice.

When she threw open the door, the boom and bang of the waves brought me back. She ran down to the water. Michael followed.

I only heard the waves and the gulls, but then a sharp, short cry startled me. I ran from the car towards the jutting of a cliff out into the waves, thinking the scream had come from the other side.

Just then, Michael, rounded the rock, pants rolled, wading in the surf. He said, “She’s waiting.”

I ran around the rock and found her, her skirt up and panties around one ankle.

I turned and ran to the car and held my breath, deafened by the sound of my own heart.

In the car, we were surrounded by the sour, salty smell of sex.

I wanted her dead. My fist pounded against the seat. My feet pressed hard into the floor. Then Michael’s large hand covered mine to stop its frantic beating. He squeezed gently, letting me know it was OK.

Joy drove towards home and when we hit the first curve of Devil’s Slide, and the precipice dropped two hundred feet to the granite below, I knew I could reach across Michael’s chest, grab the steering wheel and yank it free of Joy’s grip.

Instead, settling into the curve, I tried to shove open my door. Physics kept it shut. I jammed hard with my shoulder. Air caught the door, I was lifted from my seat, and the wind chilled my hot face.

“Don’t you fucking wig out on us!” Michael screamed. He grabbed my belt loops, pulled, and I landed on his lap.

Joy kept driving, and the Pacific roared.

I woke from the nightmare of Joy reaching beneath her mini to pull her panties, wet with Michael’s seed, from her crotch.

“Ring of Fire” was playing, and when I sat up on the bed, it was still playing. Then I remembered the party, the song was part of the Pacific Rim theme. I was back in the year 2000.

By the time I had showered and dressed, the year 1963, San Gregorio, and me inside that black galleon of a Buick curled in on myself had almost faded. What remained was the certainty that night Joy had forced my life to take another, less happy, trajectory.

Determined to be her victim no longer, I went down to the fake luau, with Don Ho hokiness, hula, and spiked Hawaiian punch.

I kicked off my shoes. My feet sank into the sand, and I saw Gabriel sitting near the bar pushing back his shades, party-perfect in white surfer togs and a blue Hawaiian shirt.

I, on the other hand, had rolled up my suit pants, wore a button-down oxford, and dangled cordovan wingtips from one hand. Opposite of cool, I felt I had all the self-possession of a clerk.

When he saw me, he shouted out, “What are you? An East Coast refugee?”

“This is all I had. I crammed everything into my carry-on.”

“Well come on over here.”

I flopped in the beach chair next to him and undid three buttons, then tried to cover the pale paunch I had exposed.

“You need a drink, my friend. I’ll send the boy back for another.”

On cue, coming round the plaster volcano with 70s lava lamps, was my pink-eared cherub carrying Gabriel’s drink. Instead of blazer and tie, he was shirtless and his trunks had dropped to reveal the first hint of blonde pubes. When he reached us, he said to me, “Oh, I remember you.”

His curls glowed against his tan.

I said, “And I remember you.”

“Gorgeous, go get our friend a vodka and lime, neat,” Gabriel said.

What games was Gabriel playing? Gorgeous? I said, “I’m going to walk around a bit. I’ll take you up on the drink later.”

“Is your Nemesis here? Missy?” Gabriel asked.

“She wouldn’t come to this. She . . . ”

But Gabriel wasn’t listening. He had turned to the boy and was trailing one finger down the boy’s stomach.

I snapped. “For Christ’s sake, Gabriel! Leave the boy alone. I thought you weren’t queer.”

“I told you I was curious. Maybe we could share?”

The boy was unfazed. What the hell was his gig? I wondered. “Don’t be an asshole, Gabriel. You’ll get the kid fired.”

“I thought you liked him.”

“This is such bullshit.” I had to get out of there. I bolted from my chair.

The sprint to the water left me bent forward, panting for air.

When I straightened, the breeze cooling my face, I saw Joy down the strand, circling the rocks where earlier I had watched the otters play.

She stood, barefoot in the spume. She paced, weaving in and out of the wash, retracing her steps in looped chains.

I walked towards her. She was on her cell. Her laugh rippled in and out of the breeze, then closer, I heard “I love you too. Tomorrow we’ll have all day to talk.” She hung up and when she turned, I was there.

“David? That was my . . . ”

“I don’t care!” I screamed. “Why are you here?” The wind, the waves, the kelp’s stink embraced me, warping time, making my thirty-year-old hurt new. I could still see Michael beckoning her to spread beneath the cliff. The hurt, the rage, was new, was now. “What the fuck Joy!”

She stepped back, afraid.

“You remember?” she asked.

“Yes, Goddamn it. I remember!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“When I saw you that first day. I thought maybe we could talk. Maybe make some of the hurt go away. It hurt me too, you know?”

“Nice of you to have a daughter and to never let Michael know he was a father. Did you ever think how much you may have hurt him?”

“I never mentioned her. You couldn’t know.”

“All the Bebe bags from your shopping spree? Not a style you can pull off, and too many purchases for even a doting aunt. Remember, I’m a smart boy.”

She stood, didn’t answer. I didn’t tell her I had called a friend at Microsoft in HR. Easy to find out she had a dependent daughter. Like I said I was a smart boy.

My rage had cooled. I enjoyed her discomfort, but wanted justice and said, “You just had to get between Michael and me.”

“There was no Michael and you.”

“Not with you around.”

“You had no problem with me driving you everywhere. What did you think? I was going to drive around forever, watching you try to guilt Michael with all your neediness into being queer?”

“We had no problem when you weren’t around.”

“Michael was one horny boy. I suppose he could make do with you.”

“Bitch.”

“I can be. But David, what I want to know is, if you and Michael were all you make it out to be, why aren’t you two together now?”

My toes curled and drove down into the sand. I wanted to tear her head off. Instead, I forced a laugh, so shrill it sliced through the gathering fog.

I saw her clearly, the bravado fading from her stance.

I had hit the jugular and now I didn’t know what to do with her bleeding before me. I asked, “Are you o.k.?”

“Fine. Just fine. Let’s go back to the party.”

“Fine? What do you mean fine?”

She started to walk past me, up to the party, now more crowded, and louder as the requisite limbo had began and chants of lower drifted down to us.

Next to me, I put my hand on her arm and stopped her. I tried to be gentle, but when she flinched and tried to pull away, my grip tightened.

She let her arm go limp in my grasp. “What is it David?” She was all resignation, as if she knew our lives had brought us to this moment.

Then, drawing upon an entire life of unresolved pain, I asked, “How can you be fine? Now he’s dead.”

I watched her face empty, then twist. I fell back, then turned and ran.

My bare feet kicked up sand, a storm of sand behind me as I rushed down to where the sand merged with rock and the sea eddied in those crevices where otters slipped into sunset shadows.

I heard her scream, “What do you mean dead?” I faced the waves. Then heard, “No, God! No.”

The wind brought her wail to me, standing at the edge, where granite shards — ramparts in a war against the waves — were polished and slimed with algae.

A scream, a sob, followed. I inhaled the sea, disconnected, saw — amused at my mind’s fertility — bodies sloshing back and forth in the tide.

Then she was behind me. “David?”

I didn’t turn.

She asked, “When?”

Not answering, I said. “He had heard you were pregnant.”

“He couldn’t have heard. No one knew.”

“But you disappeared, Joy. You just left him. In his mind, you must have been carrying his baby. When the rumors started that you were in the Haight, even though Stanford was about to start, he came looking for you.

“Then when school started, he kept looking. At first just on weekends. Then he began skipping days of class. I told him he was crazy, that he was risking everything.”

“Well he didn’t find me. He must have gone back to classes again. I don’t understand.”

“He kept looking. When he dropped out, no one could convince him. Even Stanford offered to give him a year’s grace, even holding his scholarship, but soon he even stopped taking my calls.”

“He didn’t go to Stanford?”

“He didn’t. Later his Mom told me he had gone back east. He was dead more than a year before I found out. My junior year had just started. He’d overdosed shooting meth, or at least those were the rumors.”

“So! Only rumors. Maybe … ”

“Joy! It’s been thirty years. He would have made contact with one of us … by now, you think?”

She stared. Her eyes wide. Her mouth contorted.

“But then, of course,” I said, “you know better than anyone what it means to move on, right? I have John, and I’m certain you have someone?”

Her moan engulfed me and I stepped back. The cold of the water soaked into the rolled up cuff of my pant.

Her arms flayed. She rushed forward. I stepped, ready to shove her aside.

Her bare feet hit the slimed rock. I was transfixed, as if behind the wheel watching another car careen towards me, and time slowed. Her legs splayed. Her head dove towards the rocks.

And then, my hand shot out and clutched her back, seizing blouse and bra. With one yank, she was upright and then in my arms. I cradled her. I hushed her, whispering, “I know. I know. I love him too.”

I rocked her. The frantic beat of her sobs slowed until they softened and merged with the flow of the waves.

When she lay still, I asked if she wanted to go back to her room, and she nodded.

We walked back toward the party. Gabriel, on watch, saw us. He ran down to meet us.

What had I done? I had had one chance to be free and instead became this reluctant hero.

It was too much. I had to have her away from me, gone. I asked Gabriel, “Could you make sure she gets back to her room?”

Gabriel took her arm and said to me, “Take this. It’s the kid’s number. He said to give him a call.”

I put the note in my pocket and watched them walk away. Had I done something good?

My phone rang. Still lost in what had happened, I answered.

She said, “David? David! Finally.”

I cut her off. Before I made it down the hall to my room, she called two more times. I’d talk to her later, but not now. I was still too raw.

She had become so needy since Dad died. Enthroned in her bed, surrounded by her framed putti and stacks of novels, she could no longer ignore the man who had lay next to her for forty years.

When I got to the room, I flopped on the bed and pressed back against the tuck and roll of the headboard, then got out my cell and dialed.

When he picked up, I said, “Michael, it’s me. … I know, it’s been too long … Remember Joy Remington? … Yes, that Joy. Was that a mess? Anyway damnedest thing. They had a party tonight to close out the conference here in Monterey … Yeah, I did go back to Cannery Row. Nothing like when we were there … Anyway, Joy? She slipped on some rocks on the beach … No, not o.k. She fucking died … I didn’t talk to her, not really. Nothing but long time no see … It is a shame. How’s Linda and the kids? … Excellent. Well you know I love you? … Good and always will.”

After I hung up I grabbed the TV’s remote. It came on to PBS about to air the opera Manon Lescaut.

A chill ran through me. I grabbed the edge of the bed cover and pulled it around me. My jaw still shuddered.

My Dad first met my Mom at this same opera in Brussels. The war had been over for a month and they had just enough time to get married before my father was shipped back stateside.

I loved the music. I loved the story of the working girl and her knight, but as the overture began, I thought, I can’t, I have to call Mom. I have to.

Instead I called John and told him I couldn’t wait to get home the next day.

“You know I love you, don’t you? … Good. And always will.”

I thought about going back to the opera and letting myself be transported through sentiment and tears to a good night’s sleep.

Instead, I took the slip from my pocket and called the kid, “Hey angel boy. It’s room 263. Come on up.”

The post Off Pebble Beach (4) appeared first on Michael Brown.

Off Pebble Beach (3)

Part Three: Schooner Jake’s

Michael J Brown

Go here for Part One: Off Pebble Beach: Darkening Waters

Go here for Part Two: Off Pebble Beach: Distraction

Sunday morning I decided to revisit 17-mile drive. The conference closing party was that evening, but the rest of the day was free.

The last time I had driven down this mythic stretch of coast was when my Stanford roommate invited me to his parent’s house, projected above the sea. I remembered my roommate’s father bemoaning the price of a bucket of balls at Pebble Beach.

When we had arrived back at our dorm, my Mom called. Charlie a high school classmate, on acid, had nailed the modern dance teacher inside a pentagram and quartered her with a machete.

Three days ago, when I drove from the airport to the conference, I passed that shack at the edge of the beach. And in passing, wondered if I could still see the whitewashed pentagram on the splintering planks. Or if the pilings, visible through missing floorboards, were still blood-stained, or had the tide washed all away.

After that visit, three decades ago, to the rich and elite, I decided one day I too would have a cliff-perched home with views of Carmel, the greens of Pebble Beach, and of that gnarled cypress, that lone tree on the cover of my first Joan Baez album.

But now this Sunday morning as I drove past these homes I had once thought of as a touchstone for success, I realized envy had become a bitter pit in my heart.

Yes my smarts, talent, and ambition had brought me full support to go to Stanford and Brown, but the truth was that my father was an army sergeant. I was sure I was cool with that and equally sure the world was not. The son of an army sergeant I would always be.

Like Joy, I was indelibly working class. I belonged to Terra Nova High and Pacifica, with its candy-colored split-leveled ranches and RV camps draping the slopes of the Coastal Range, a hundred miles north of Carmel and 17-mile drive.

I returned from the drive with several hours remaining before the party, so I headed over to Cannery Row. Michael and I had come here Junior Year of high school. We had both read most of Steinbeck, and Michael’s father was inspired by Grapes of Wrath (or by Henry Fonda playing Tom Joad?) to become a union organizer. We had caught the bus from Greyhound on Seventh and Market in San Francisco. And seeing all the men mill in and out of the restroom in a needy, hungry, wave, I felt a pilgrimage was about to begin, and Michael let our legs rest together on the bus ride back and forth from Cannery Row.

Now, Cannery Row was just another aggregate of clothing and food stores with Dow trademarks I had seen on Singapore’s Orchard Street and on the Riverwalk in New Orleans. With nothing to buy, nothing to see, ennui drove me to cruise each man who passed. I was friendly, only slightly suggestive. A few of them smiled.

Enough time wasted, I drove back to the hotel and showered and changed for the night’s festivities.

Late afternoon light was pouring in through the glass wall that faced the sea as I entered Schooner Jake’s. I looked for Gabriel. The sun blinded me, at the same time a chill clung, like a depressing fog; I was afraid I might find Joy instead.

But, it was Gabriel slumped at the bar. Above him a mirror reflected the marble deck, site of the opening reception. I stopped. The Gabriel I knew didn’t slump. Was I intruding? I sat around the curve of the bar, knowing if he looked up he’d see my reflection in the mirror. A moment later he did. Without pause his shoulders straightened and a smile broke. He patted the stool next to him. I moved over.

He so had that queer beach boy thing going. Like another aging Tab Hunter or Richard Chamberlain, except Gabriel swore he wasn’t queer at all. However, when I looked up and saw myself bald and overweight. I wondered if claiming he wasn’t gay was simply another way of being kind. I ordered a Grey Goose neat with lime.

We didn’t talk. Baseball was on the tube. I again thought of Joy and my emotions stirred somewhere between nervousness and anger. What did she want? I knew my anxiety meant something was coming, something not good.

Gabriel said, “I have a feeling, it’s going to be Boston.”

“What?”

“Boston’s got to take the game. Don’t you think?”

I looked up. It was a Sox-Yankee game. That instant feeling of stupid came over me. “I don’t know. I hope . . .”

“Yeah, me too.” He paused, then blurted. “David, I hope you’re not pissed about the other night. I am not a homophobe.”

“I figured that. You did get into bed with me. Come on, are you kidding? I came on to you like a horny eighth grader. I’m surprised you didn’t smack me.”

“No way. I wanted to try. I’ve wondered for awhile.”

“Then wonder became disgust.” I said, “Happens to the best.”

“It wasn’t that at all. I guess maybe I am straighter than I thought.” He stopped and turned to look up at the game. Then still watching the game, “That’s a lie. I got scared. Chicken shit. O.k.?”

Gabriel’s leg fell against mine. I patted his knee, affectionately, I thought, but he yanked it away with, “Your Missy still haunting you?”

Still chicken shit, I thought, but answered, “I can’t get her out of my head. I understand it was Michael she was after. Hell, he was her God.”

“God, huh? Sounds like he might have been more than your friend.”

“Maybe he could have been a long time ago. I hadn’t thought of him until seeing Joy the other night, and of course, you.”

“Me?”

“You look like him.”

“So the other night wasn’t about me at all! That’s a relief,” he laughed.

I turned red, tried to explain, but Gabriel wasn’t listening. He had sat straight up in his chair and was staring at the game. “Jesus! We don’t have a chance. Clemens just put out his thirteenth batter in a row.”

“Come on Boston,” I yelled. “Hit something damn it!”

“You tell ’em Providence. Boston all the way.” He smiled.

I grinned back and said, “Yeah, I guess.”

Some time during my third vodka, Pedro Martinez in the ninth created a miraculous Sox comeback-to-win by protecting their two runs, and Gabriel in his excitement reached down and squeezed my thigh, saying. “Holy shit, David! Do you believe it?”

The bar around us erupted with the Sox win, but my only focus was on the ghostly imprint of Gabriel’s touch on my leg.

“Be right back,” he said before tossing bills on the bar and heading across the lobby to the Men’s Room.

My hand shook as I tried to ease the money from my wallet.

The bartender said, “You’re all set. Your buddy took care of it.”

I gave him the ten anyway.

Gabriel wasn’t in the bathroom nor in the lobby. I had a sudden intuition he had gone up to my room.

I hurried to the elevator and jammed the UP button. Hurry up, god damn it. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t interested.

Then a gaggle of chattering ladies with bags from Aveda, Anne Taylor, Jones of New York filled the lobby. Joy was with them, laughing, having fun. When she saw me, her smile faded, but the elevator opened, and I didn’t have to deal with her.

I slid in and slammed the button to close the door, just as Joy rushed forward. “David! Wait.” She ran both hands swinging bags from chic and hip Bebe. As the door closed, I imagined Joy in a sequined mini and tube top. Bebe? I thought and burst out laughing.

As I walked towards my room, amused at middle-aged Joy in twenty-something fashion, I realized: of course! The clothes weren’t for her.

I was still laughing as I walked down the hall to my room. What was she doing in that store? Then I knew. I stopped mid-hallway. Of course, the clothes weren’t for her.

I had to tell someone. This was just too rich. And who else was there but Gabriel? I hurried towards my room. Then my phone rang. Mother, again. I sent the call to voicemail.

Gabriel was not waiting for me outside my room.

The damn phone rang again. Once more, I sent Mom to limbo.

I waited an hour lying on my bed, resisting the urge to call Gabriel’s room. The setting sun lulled me with its play of orange and black across the pastels of my room.

I began to doze, until the Joy who greeted me in my sleep was perfectly appropriate in sequins and mini, confident, and much younger.

The post Off Pebble Beach (3) appeared first on Michael Brown.

Off Pebble Beach (2)

Off Pebble Beach: Distraction

Part Two: Distraction

Michael J Brown

Go here for Part One: Off Pebble Beach: Darkening Waters

The man next to me at dinner introduced himself as Gabriel from Boston. Since I lived in Providence there was common ground. Even so and unfortunately I suppose, the shop talk that followed was inevitable.

Gabriel reacted to Joy’s boss from Microsoft now at the podium: “So what if Microsoft manages 130 languages? How does that help me struggling to manage four?”

Of course, he couldn’t expect me to answer. I smiled and began to scan the room. If Gabriel, as handsome and well-dressed as he was, was indeed a dud, I needed to know my options. Then I saw Joy across the room. She was watching me. I whipped around, back towards Gabriel, and our knees touched. I didn’t move; I left my knee in place and felt his begin to tremble. I inched my knee so more leg made contact. David shifted, and our outer thighs, hip to knee, were pressed together. Suddenly embarrassed, I recoiled and knocked a fork to the floor. I bent down to get it and came up looking the other way so as not to face him. Instead there was Joy across the room still staring, ignoring her friend on the dais, intent on me.

Gabriel noticed Joy’s fixation and said,”You do intrigue her. You two have something going?”

“God no. She’s someone I barely knew in high school.”

Gabriel nodded toward the speaker, “What an arrogant asshole.”

I agreed that the man was tedious and told Gabriel that he was Joy’s friend.

“Now I really pity you.”

I laughed, realizing I liked this man, and as our legs settled together again, I grew hard. Maybe we could skip dinner? I slid my hand between our two thighs as if to scratch, when . . .

“Is there a David here?”

It was my pink-eared angel who had served me and Joy hors d’oeuvres. “I’m David,” and I took the folded note from the boy.

“From your lady friend?” Gabriel asked.

I read quickly. “Neither a friend or a lady,” I said. “Exactly who does she think she is?”

“If I’m not intruding, what does she say?”

I read the damn thing to him.

David, sorry, but that was no way to begin our reunion. Please, I must meet you later. If you can’t or won’t, then do you have Michael’s number or email? Although, it would be so much better if we could call him together and tell him about this miracle. Joy

“Miracle? I tell you she’s nuts. And like I’m going to drag Michael into this?”

“Who’s Michael?”

“He’s . . . ” I stopped. What could I tell him? Nothing really. “He’s just someone we knew in school.”

“Maybe you should hear her out. At least it could be a hoot, fodder for parties back home.”

“I’ll send you as my emissary. You bring back the intelligence. I’m not getting near her.”

“You think I won’t? I’ll be back in a jiffy with the dirt.” He rose from his chair.

I put my hand on his arm and settled him back into his seat. I liked this bad boy streak in him. I was going to suggest we leave as soon as we were done eating, when I saw her crossing the room. “Fuck. She’s coming. Let’s get out of here. My room?”

He laughed, “How about we start with the bar?”

I jumped up and headed for the closest door, but she anticipated the maneuver and cut us off before we made it. She grabbed my sleeve. “You don’t remember any of it,” she said.

I tried to free myself.

Gabriel extended his hand, “Hi Joy. I’m . . ..”

“Don’t tell her your goddamn name!” Then turning to Joy, I yelled, “And you! Drop the arm.” She released the sleeve and I continued, “No, Joy Remington, I do not remember. What I do recall is that we were not of the same circle, socially or academically. Not in high school and I doubt now. Now if you want to embarrass your Microsoft buddy at the podium, keep up this harassment and I’ll call hotel security. We’re going to return to our seats and finish our dinner.”

She said nothing. I held her gaze as her green eyes filled and flooded over. I felt nothing. No past I shared with her could account for this hysteria. This poor woman was unhinged but she had nothing to do with me. I knew there was nothing to remember, nothing at all.

Later at the bar, for the first time since I first saw her several hours ago, I felt good.

Gabriel said, “You are tough. That was severe. I hope I keep on your good side.”

I raised my glass of Napa something and smiled.

“No hard feelings?” Gabriel asked.

We were both on our way to Saturday’s first workshop and had met in the lobby before heading down different wings.

He continued, “I’m so sorry David. The pinot noir and the Verdi last night were seductive, but I think boy-on-boy isn’t for me.”

“Maybe a little too much pinot?”

“No, I don’t think it was the booze.” He laughed. “Anyway, I hope I didn’t ruin your night.”

I wanted to say that I knew he started out interested. I wanted to know what happened. I was ready to beg. Again. Had I actually pleaded with him last night?

“Well, hey. My session’s about to start.” He paused, then ran up to me threw his arms around me and whispered, “Really, I am sorry.” He kissed me on the neck, then walked away.

What the hell was he doing? I wasn’t nuts. All the mutual groping at the bar. And it was Gabriel who led him upstairs. And just now hadn’t he felt Gabriel swell against his thigh? It isn’t me. That boy is confused. I turned and yelled after him, “Let’s get a drink later.”

Gabriel waved his hand above his head and kept going.

Yet, I wondered as I went into “Content and Global Translation”, if I were delusional? Was he straight?

A wave of embarrassment shuddered through me and I took a first seat on the aisle. I tried to read the workshop handout, but instead replayed last night. This wasn’t going to work. Before the first speaker, I had to get out of there. Maybe I could talk Gabriel into dropping his workshop and over coffee we could talk?

Resolved, I got up to leave, but there was Joy, ready to enter the aisle and take the seat next to me.

I blocked her. “Are you fucking stalking me?”

The lights dimmed.

“David! Move over and sit down. It’s starting.”

“Our speaker received her doctorate in Asian philology at Oxford . . .

I froze.

The woman in the row behind hissed, “Sit down!” and I shuffled down the aisle and dropped into a seat midway.

“By the mid-nineties she had already completed major localization initiatives in Hong Kong and Singapore. Currently, she is . . . ”

“David,” Joy whispered.

“Shhhh! They’re starting.”

“It’s just the introduction. You have to talk to me. I need . . .”

I ignored her and turned toward the podium.

“It’s become a management cliché that content management is the way to shorten delivery time and increase quality.”

I was going to learn nothing here. Standard corporate bullshit. Besides I really had to talk to Gabriel.

Then Joy leaned into my ear, “You always sat in the middle, David, keeping me from Michael, and I hated you for it. I may have driven the car to San Gabriel that night, but what happened was your fault. I was determined to hurt you.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Was she crazy? Hurt me? I couldn’t help myself, “The only time you drove was to the Junior Prom. I was with Charlene. Michael with Linda. You were with someone, and we went to the Moonbeam in Moss Beach for burgers after.”

I was shouting. The woman behind tried to shut me up, shushing me.

Joy snapped “I never went to the prom. Charlene drove you two. Who would take me? Every other night I was with the two of you. It was always me, you, and Michael. Always.”

“My God! You are unbalanced.”

“Please,” the woman behind leaned forward. “Be quiet or leave.”

Whipping around, I forced her to rear back, “And you are Ms. Bitch who?”

I half noticed Joy heading up the aisle, while I continued to stare the woman down until she finally settled back. Only then did Joy’s absence register. When I saw Joy exit out the rear, instead of letting her go, I ran after her, trampling feet in my rush down the row.

Tearing through the back door, I saw her across the lobby. She was slumped on a sofa near registration. She looked up, wan, her eyes rimmed with red, and asked, “Do you remember anything David?”

Of course I did. I said, “Your car was a Buick and black.” God I even think I remembered that it was an Electra. Not bad for thirty years.

“Black?” I saw her grip the top of the chair in front of her. “Black? For Christ’s sake David. Did you know I was so jealous that it was always you that Michael picked!?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was so jealous. I thought maybe this would get his attention.” She unbuttoned the tiny buttons at the cuff of her cream-colored blouse and rolled up her sleeve.

Two purple cords extended from the bottom of her palm to the crook of her elbow. Lord, had she used a meat cleaver? Definitely pitiful. The girl was mad. But what in the hell did it have to do with me? Where was the relevance?

“Thank God my Mom found me in time. Back then I didn’t know what else to do, because . . . ”

“I don’t care why, Joy. A sane person doesn’t do that to themselves. Let’s end this. O.K.? Enough is enough.”

She looked down as she re-buttoned her cuff, then stared me in the eye and said,”Asshole.” She got up and walked towards the elevator.

I wanted to yell after her, to fill the peach ambience of that so California lobby–even with all my associates mingling, networking, judging–to ask her just who the fuck she thought she was? Instead, I screamed just before the elevator doors closed, “You’re right bitch! He did pick me.”

I felt myself trembling. I just wanted too get up to my room and bed. About to push UP. I felt someone beside me. It was Gabriel.

“Hey kid. Maybe we should talk?”

Thank God, distraction I thought, still trembling on the brink of some unwanted recall.

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Blog: Mike’s Voice

I think going public is all about learning to trust your voice. . .

Voice circulates in our head; echoes parents, teachers, lovers, spouses, children, who then coalesce as a strange brew. A pinch of what is perhaps uniquely us is added and the cauldron begins to bubble, maybe babble, maybe sing.

Against the Other, the Silent.

I play Solitaire or Sudoku on my iPad for hours to  keep that absence, beneath the thrum of birdsong, heartbeat or mood swing, at bay.

Or I can stir the pot and wait . . .

The post Blog: Mike’s Voice appeared first on Michael Brown.