Poppy Z. Brite's Blog, page 65

Amsterdam, My Amsterdam

I'd be astounded if Amsterdam obeyed the "tourist weed ban" being discussed, bemoaned, and panicked over by devoted stoners online (see the forums on this site, which also offers all sorts of other useful Amsterdam information). Look, I've lived a block off Bourbon Street. I know what can happen when vacationers overestimate their ability to party. Hell, I accidentally poisoned two innocent young Frenchmen with my vast clouds of Super Lemon Haze smoke last time I was in the Dam. But I keep hoping there are still enough tourists like me, maybe a bit older, willing to spend money, able to handle their weed, not making a lot of noise or falling in the canals or needing ambulances called for them ... enough of us so that the Dutch government won't hassle the coffeeshops out of existence.

Even so, I think I better get my ass over there this summer. Just in case. The writing may be on the wall, and if so, it says THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS. If I do go, I'll spend too much money and probably set my health back a bit. Oh, and maybe get caught overseas while a hurricane destroys my city and I have no way of finding out whether my family is alive or dead. It's always a possibility. If I don't go, and if by some satanic twist of fate they do close the coffeeshops next year*, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. I don't think Chris will be able to go (they're remodeling/expanding the restaurant this summer), and I don't know if I am healthy enough to travel alone, but it's not as if I have to do much once I get there. (Due to lessening mobility, in recent years I've had to forsake my old favorite hotel, the ITC on a beautiful stretch of Prinsengracht, in favor of hotels on or near Dam Square. They're generally more expensive and not as nice, but I can easily get everywhere I need to go from them.)

This time, though, I need to make sure I'm absolutely clear on the smoking-weed-in-the-hotel-room rules. Back when I used to go all the time (10-15 years ago), you could pretty much smoke anywhere and no one cared. (You could even smoke tobacco and get alcoholic drinks in the coffeeshops! Oh, the decadence!) When Chris and I went for our twentieth anniversary in 2009, we stayed at the ITC, which has never minded smoking. When I returned by myself last August, I booked at a nice-ish hotel near Dam Square, blithely assuming I could smoke there. After all, I'd requested a smoking room. My first clue otherwise was a big sign in the elevator with a red circle/slash over a pot leaf and warnings in three languages not to smoke drugs in the rooms. Predictably, I did anyway (thereby adding my own little bit of obnoxiousness to the obnoxious-stoner-tourist stereotype), and blew the smoke out the window. Predictably, they eventually noticed and politely asked me to stop. The following conversation ensued:

PZB: I'm sorry, have I caused trouble? Has anyone complained?
HOTEL GUY: No, it's just the policy. I don't care about weed myself, but I have to enforce the policy.
PZB: OK, I understand. I use it for pain, so it's just hard not to smoke when I'm trying to relax.
HG: There are so many coffeeshops nearby ... you can smoke in any of these places.
PZB: But the coffeeshops are only open 12-14 hours a day. What about the other 10-12 hours?

Then he got the look I think people must be trying to convey when they make emoticons like this: 0_o I knew further communication was pointless, so I promised him I wouldn't smoke weed in my hotel room anymore, and by that time my trip was almost over anyway, so I didn't. This time, though, I don't intend to put up with such shenanigans (or cause them, depending on your point of view). I will find a weed-friendly hotel near the Dam, dammit, even if it has to be Dudebro's Groovy Green Guesthouse and Cannabis Museum (Trance Parties Every Saturday).

*Hmmm ... maybe those folks who think the world will end in 2012 are onto something after all!

Die! Die!

Disgusting things, tomato fruitworms.



I'd never had them before and they took me by surprise, so I spent most of yesterday afternoon waging (organic) chemical warfare on them. Neem and diatomaceous earth, you greedy bastards. Bt would be better, and I'm getting some, but this infestation had to be controlled immediately; they'd already ruined at least ten or twelve beefsteak tomatoes. Today almost all the "worms" (caterpillars) seem to be gone, and just now I saw an assassin bug sucking out the insides of a little one like it was a smoothie. HA.

Vertigo

Thank you for all the nice birthday wishes and gifts. It wasn't my most festive of birthdays, as I felt better over the weekend, even got some gardening done, but crashed with vertigo again on Monday night. It was so bad that I couldn't speak coherently or eat or do much of anything but lie in bed. By Wednesday I was able to have a piece of delicious purple birthday cake from Langenstein's and a little celebration, and today I felt pretty good. I think this terrible bout of vertigo may have been caused by Wellbutrin. It's caused me a little dizziness since I started taking it, but until last week it was a tolerable tradeoff for the mood improvement. I'd rather be the gloomiest old bastard on Planet Gloomyoldbastard than feel like that again. I've been off it for a week now, and it's supposed to clear the system in five to eight days, so I hope that's in the past.

I was supposed to go to Mississippi with my mom in the morning, but given that it's almost 5 AM and I haven't slept yet, I suspect that won't be happening.

I'm getting to be a long-haired hippie again. The clippers must come out soon.



Oh, and the damn urologist's office called to postpone my precious appointment until mid-June, no reason given. Also the receptionist kept saying "Tell him he needs to etc." until I said I was the patient. Doctors are like forces of nature; they appear and disappear as they will, and have the power to give or to take everything away. 44 years of living has suggested to me time and again that you can fight city hall, but you can't fight forces of nature. Well, you can, of course, but it's ultimately a losing battle. Except maybe in Holland. Oh, God, ignore me, I'm senseless.

"I hope and pray you don't have a aneurism!" -- my handyman

PROBLEM, BIRDWATCHER?

So I've been in bed for three days with vertigo, which seems to be getting better, and I kept hearing a cuckoo. It was too frequent and irregular to be a clock, and the bird that makes the classic cuckoo-clock call is only found in Europe and Asia. Had one escaped from a menagerie? Had a local mockingbird somehow heard one and become obsessed with it? It was driving me nuts. I probably would have been outside with binoculars if I'd been able to stand up.

This morning, feeling better, I was standing by a clothes rack on the other side of the room when I heard the barely audible sounds of a burbling brook ... and twittering birds ... and the cuckoo. Our tortoiseshell Oriental Shorthair, Lilly, has made herself a nest of old clothes and stuffed animals atop the rack, and she'd managed to turn on an old white-noise machine I had up there, but softly enough so that from any distance it seemed to be coming from outside.

Oriental Shorthairs are famous for considering themselves great wits.

Spicy Fish Soup

Had four glorious days of less pain than usual, and even an appetite for food the last two days. There's a new Chinese restaurant on Magazine Street, Wong's Golden Dragon, that has a real Chinese (mostly Szechuanese, I think) menu along with the usual Chinese-American menu, and it's very very good. They do a great super-spicy red fish soup that I'd previously only had in San Francisco and Melbourne. The servings are huge and I still have gallons of it in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, I'll probably let Chris take it to share with his cooks tomorrow, because this morning it all came crashing down. Not the leftovers -- I mean I had to get up and take Alexa for her pre-surgery consultation with the animal eye specialist at EIGHT GODDAMN FIFTEEN A.M. I had to be there then; I got up at the totally uncivilized hour of 7:00 A.M. For a late-night person, that makes it hard to get enough sleep, and I forgot how badly lack of sleep screws me up. Pain, pain, pain, it has its bony fingers sunk deep into my neck and upper back (which never used to hurt -- evidence of my scrambled nervous system, probably), and it isn't worth it to eat anything because I feel horribly sick for hours afterward, which is worse than being hungry. I haven't been able to nap; am going to drug myself to sleep if I'm not already there by 10:00 P.M. If this continues, I am going to end up a shriveled-up little old man.

Well, I'm trying to appreciate the four days and the fact that they happened to coincide with Chris' days off, though it's hard with this nausea. (What did I do to bring it on? I DRANK A WHOLE V-8. OH THE HORROR.) I got lots of gardening done and had some good meals even though I couldn't eat that much of them.

The appointment itself was terrifying for both of us. They put her in a cat straitjacket and did unspeakably painful-looking things to her eyes while I looked on in horror and tried not to throw up.

Queer Ramblings

When I was a little kid, there were no gay characters in anything I read or saw, although I latched onto the proto-bromances of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at a very early age. At eight or so, I read about a lesbian encounter in a biography of (I think) Hedy Lamarr, which I found (oddly) in my super-conservative Baptist paternal grandmother's library. At ten, I was both bothered and fascinated by the two "gay" characters on sitcoms, Jack on Three's Company (John Ritter) and Jodie on Soap (Billy Crystal). Jack was really only pretending to be gay so he could rent an apartment with two girls (these were different times, whippersnappers). Jodie was gay for real, but his boyfriend was so closeted that he made Jodie get a "sex change" so they'd appear to be a hetero couple. There was no hormone therapy, no psychiatric exam, no history of cross-dressing or or transness; he just checked into the hospital and told them to BAM! turn him into a woman. Only he didn't really want a "sex change," so he took an overdose of sleeping pills before the surgery, but (amazingly, for a gay character in 1977) he didn't die, and I don't remember what happened next. The effect these characters had on me was to make me mince around, limp-wristed, until my mother made me stop because it totally looked like I was mocking gay people. I wasn't; I just thought that was how you were supposed to do it.

A little later, I encountered the Bitter Gay Men: the play and movie The Boys in the Band; the novels of Andrew Halloran and such; The Best Little Boy in the World; even the horrible, horrible movie Cruising. Raw stuff for a thirteen-year-old, but I was doing research. Any gay character who appeared to be at all happy was a minor character, frequently someone's agent, frequently murdered (although I remember one wonderful mystery novel where the gay agent solved the mystery and pwned everybody!). There was the Charlie & Peter trilogy by Gordon Merrick, but even in their blissful beefcake world, it was a given that you had to hide a gay relationship. In the third book he dragged a girl into it, which made me give his books to the thrift shop (wonder who got those?) and renounce him forever. Other than Jodie's dubious adventures, there were no trans characters anywhere, or any acknowledgment that they existed. I can't even remember the next time I heard about transsexuality, and I know I didn't hear of FTM transsexuality until I was in my early twenties. It immediately resonated with me, but by then I'd already started publishing and being interviewed and photographed and all that tyranny-of-hotness crap, and it just seemed too late, and too hard. I admire and envy the certainty with which very young people transition today, but from what I now know about trans history, they have strong shoulders to stand on. (Not mine; I talked about it endlessly in interviews and essays, but I didn't start doing anything about it until 2005, which I hope will always remain the strangest year of my life for many reasons you can learn if you go back and read my journal entries from then.)

I guess the original La Cage Aux Folles changed my life in a way when I was 13. The characters still didn't seem terribly happy or romantic with each other, but they had a good time and didn't give a fuck who knew it. I acted like Albin for about a year, though now I am obviously Renato.

It took me a little while to realize I could write openly about gay characters and have anyone in the horror field publish it, but once I did, I obviously never stopped. Well, yeah, with the horror, but not with teh gay. (I have decided I love LOLspeak and I don't care if it makes me look like a dumbass and whoever doesn't like it can go hang.) I can maybe take a little credit for the emergence of gay characters in horror fiction that's still making homophobes cry -- I started this homo shit, and this the muthafuckin thanks I get -- but there's nothing new under the sun, really. Look at J. Sheridan LeFanu's vampire novella Carmilla (1872), which is so blatantly a lesbian romance that at least one essay was published after his death attempting to prove that the narrator was supposed to be a boy.

What got me started thinking about all this was the book I'm reading, Slut!: Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation (Leora Tannenbaum, 1999). Perversely, or maybe not, I find myself much more interested in feminist issues since I completely stopped trying to be female.

I would also like to thank Jeffrey M., the sleazebag speed dealer in my tenth-grade biology class who said to me, "Girls aren't supposed to [do something or other I was doing] -- but then you're not much of a girl, are you?" He was only being cruel, but that was the first time the neon sign in my brain flickered on: No, as a matter of fact I'm not.

The Collector

Good God. I'm reading The Collector by John Fowles. I've been meaning to reread it for years, but didn't have a copy, and I found one at an excellent used bookstore (McKeown's on Tchoupitoulas) yesterday. Last time I read this book I was about 16, and while I realized then that Miranda was a complete upper-class prig even though she was trying so hard not to be, I thought the things she said about politics, art, and society were basically Right and True. Now I wouldn't mind locking her in a room myself if it'd make her shut the hell up. It's a good book, but it's kind of like reading about Myrna Minkoff as a kidnap victim.

Song of the Now

Linctus House

by Robyn Hitchcock

You know I used to call my baby up
and we'd get real close
Just like the telephone was a sofa
and our thoughts would mingle
and we'd leave our minds wide open
like a big window in the evening air
and we'd say,
'Hey baby, come on in and help yourself to my soul'
'Hey baby, come on in and help yourself to my soul'

But these days even saying, 'Hello, how are you?'
'I'm fine, how are you?' takes a lot of sweat

Ain't that a shame
Ain't that a shame

But in Linctus House
In my flesh hotel
I don't care anymore

You know my baby and me
as Kimberley would say
We'd curl up like two dogs
in front of a fire
and our eyes would reflect each other
in the warm long heat of love
Yeah, the warm long heat of love
and I would hear the rain falling
on the leaves outside
I couldn't stand to close the window
'cos I'd shiver if I left her side
But now I'd shake if we should meet
And I spend most of my time in the bushes

Ain't that a shame
(Know what you're doing)
Ain't that a shame
(Know what you've done)

But in Linctus House
In my flesh hotel
I don't care anymore

'I understand how everything sometimes
turns out to be nothing,' you say,
but I wonder if you do
and if we understood each other
there'd be no need to talk
but even that, even talking is out of reach
Should I say it with flowers or
should I say it with nails?

I'm not the kind to push you around
but I don't want to make myself vulnerable
and if I was on my knees
you'd have a good view of my skull
and I happen to know you're carrying a chisel

But in Linctus House
In my flesh hotel
I don't care anymore
No
In Linctus House
In my flesh hotel
I don't care ...

Ain't that a shame
(Know what you're doing)
Ain't that a shame
(Know what you've done)

My Cousin Sebastian

Did I ever tell you about my cousin Sebastian? I doubt it, because it's pretty funny now, but it was so embarrassing at the time that I didn't let myself think of it for years and years.

I'll spare you the tale of the awkward, unpopular kid who Finds A Home In The Theatre. All you really need to know is that I was 14 and there was a local director upon whom I had a massive crush. He was cute, but part of the attraction was also that he was one of the first openly gay men I'd ever met. I went and tried out for a play he was casting, but before the audition was even over I knew I wouldn't get a part. I was actually a pretty sucky actor, and gave it up a year or so later.

As fate would have it, there were two days of auditions, and I'd gone on the first. I really really wanted a part, not so much because I liked the play (I have no idea what it was now) as because I wanted to see the director every day and bask in his gayness. So I decided to go back and audition again ... FOR THE MALE ROLES.

The idea of cross-gender casting is hardly radical, but I just had to take it a step further. I would actually go to the audition as a man. Not a boy, a man. With a mustache. Surely everyone would be fooled; I'd often been taken for a boy before puberty hit. I probably even speculated that the director (in his thirties) would fall in love with me. So I invented my cousin Sebastian. (Yes, in fact I did get the name from Brideshead Revisited; you wanna make something of it???)

My hair was already short. I don't remember what I did with my boobs, but I thought the mustache was a pretty good one. I made it out of real theatrical "hair," matched it carefully to my hair color, and glued it on with real theatrical spirit gum. It was thick and luxuriant. Unfortunately, it did not look very convincing on my 14-year-old girl's face. Unfortunately, I didn't realize this until I arrived at the audition and "introduced" myself to the director. He was very cool -- his eyes widened slightly when he first saw me, but otherwise he totally went along with it -- but from my first glance into his face it all came crashing down.

It wasn't in me to run away, though. Maybe now, but not then. "I think you know my cousin," I said.

"Is that Poppy?" he inquired, deadpan.

"Uh, yes."

Unfortunately (that makes three), my male audition was just as crappy as my female one. I don't know if the director thought I was nuts and took pity on me or knew transgender people or maybe even admired me a little for brazening it out or what, but he was very, very kind and never mentioned it, though I saw him several more times before he was offered a good theatrical job somewhere else and left the area.

I went through several more phases of dressing androgynously over the years, but never again did I actually try to look male until now. And you know, even at the time, even as agonizingly embarrassed over the thing as only a 14-year-old can be, even with the cheesy mustache, I had to admit it felt damn good to be Sebastian.

Ups & Downs

The bad spell of pain finally seems to be easing off. It still hurts, but I haven't needed a cane for several days, and 100-200 mgs. of tramadol controls it fairly well (as opposed to the bad days, when even 300-400 mgs. only just makes it bearable). And the asparagus, to which I probably owe at least part of this spell, is coming up. I had to leave the bare crowns in the box for much longer than I meant to, waiting for a day when I could dig the bed, and I feared at least two of them were dead. Digging the bed set me back considerably, but now three crowns are sprouting and I think the fourth is about to.

In worse news, we've been treating our youngest kitten/cat, Alexa, for an eye condition called distichia. It's fairly common in dogs but very rare in cats, and apparently Alexa is the feline world champion of it, so much so that our vet made all the other doctors come and look at her eyes. The standard treatment is cryosurgery, which freezes off the rogue eyelashes, but they can grow back. She had her first treatment at the same time she was spayed, and her second one two weeks ago. Today she had her recheck and they are thicker than ever. The best option at this point looks to be a horrible-sounding surgery called "eyelid splitting" (DO NOT GOOGLE WITH IMAGES ON), which requires a specialist, will cost $2000, and may also have to be repeated in the future.

It's a good thing binders are a lot more comfortable than I thought they'd be, because I sure as shit won't be having surgery any time soon. I'm still going to keep the appointment with the urologist. He and the bloodwork will be expensive, but as I understand it, testosterone is not all that pricey.

Back to good news: a poster on whatwasthatone finally found me my second-favorite creepy web comic I've been looking for. (Here's my first favorite.)

[ETA: Look at those tags! That's not a cluster you see every day.]