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| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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The Demon Brotherhood Revisited (A Quick Tour)
That Same Evening Sophistica calls but I don�t catch the call. I call back. We don�t bother to say hello anymore. I pick up and say, �I missed your call because the phone was on vibrate, which it never is, and I was laying here while it rang, thinking, what is the hell is that noise? Anyway, the phone�s about to die because I never plugged it in last night.� She says, �Dude, what is the deal with people trying to protect you when you don�t even really need it?� I say, �It sounds like you had the same evening I did. You tell me your version and then I�ll tell you mine.� She tells me about her friend, the bisexual woman, who has suddenly began issuing warnings to Sophistica about the boys in her life (x, the xbry, another man that Soph has been talking to). Soph says, �She keeps saying stuff like, �Why are you talking to those guys? They treat you really badly.� She keeps trying to get me to stop calling x and talking to xbry.� �Sounds like she�s trying to redefine some boundaries to include you in,� I say. I mean that she�s trying to pull Soph over into her territory, and that I can see a strong element of jealousy in the woman�s actions. Soph says that she thinks the woman has a crush on her. I agree. I tell her about Max and Mayflower�s efforts to never give me a chance to talk for two minutes to Aisho, about how Mayflower kept up this kind of drunken monologue all night that wasn�t intended to let anyone else interact with each other, how Max just hung on and hung on until finally I put an end to the evening just after 3:30 in the morning. I tell Soph about asking Max later, �Why did you guys just sit there and sit there?� Max had replied, �Well, if you wanted us to leave, you should have said something.� Soph is like, Yeah, right, and says as though she�s me talking to Max and Mayflower in front of Aisho, �You guys should leave.� And I�m, like, �Exactly.� (I ask Max later about Mayflower�s behavior, about the efforts to control the situation and to not bail on the evening�something that has an unusual place in Mayflower�s repertoire. Max says, �She was jealous.� I am surprised at this answer. I ask, �What do you mean?� He says, �I think she has a crush on you. I mean, you put three drinks in her and she starts talking about having sex with you.� I had thought that he meant that she was jealous of me, but he means that she was jealous of Aisho. I hadn�t considered this possibility with Mayflower�though I had been able to see it with Magdalene, who once tried to convince me that my telling another woman that I though that she was beautiful was detrimental to the other woman. I had decided during that conversation with Magdalene that pretty much whatever was developing between me and Magdalene was a waste of my time.) Soph and I talk about the possible ulterior motives for our friends� actions and the conversation moves into a related area, and we begin to discuss how with some people you have to look past the surface to what�s underneath. How you have to wait out the surface stuff, let the other person calm down a bit and relax the defenses before you can truly connect with them. We are talking about something else then�about Henry James�s novels and Ibsen�s plays and George Eliot�s Middlemarch�when the phone battery dies. A Demon Revisited At one point in the evening, I found myself talking about my brother James. We were sitting in the ubiquitous and inevitable Village Inn. It was close to three in the morning and I don�t remember how the subject came up. (No, I do remember. I was telling the Aisho that he looked like my youngest brother Marshall.) The Aisho asked how many brothers I have and I said, �Four. Three living.� He asked, �What happened to the other one?� And I said, �He died.� That was too flippant, I know, but I have a hard time talking about James. James was one of the two brothers added to my family when I was a teenager and my parents divorced. My mother married his father, but James had been raised by his own mother, an indifferent woman who is memorialized in my mind by her response to the news of James�s death. �Is his father taking care of it?� was all she had to say. James is one of the earliest demons (#6 I think). I painted him the way he was at the end of his life, twenty-three years old, wasted by AIDS, dying of an avian virus that is normally easily conquered by the immune system. He spent a month in a hospital in San Francisco receiving treatment. He had never before sought treatment, even when it was clear that he was very, very sick. He had continued to live on the street or crash with friends and he worked as a prostitute or ate out of garbage cans and I am horrified to think about what his life with his mother was like that this was the preferable alternative. Someone brought James into the emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital. He was comatose. The doctors revived him long enough to get my grandparents� phone number out of him, which is the only reason we knew where he was. When I was managing a restaurant, James had come to work for me. He wanted to be a cook, but I knew that he wasn�t fast enough and the cooks I had working for me were like sharks in the water. They would have torn him apart. So I gave him a job as a dishwasher. He was terrible at it. It wasn�t that he was lazy; it was just that he had no idea how to do the job at all. (And I�m not saying that it�s an easy or pleasant job, because it isn�t. It�s hot, ugly, boring, repetitive work.) I lost my temper with him, would go in and finish his work for him and I wasn�t very nice about having to do it. I dreaded working shifts with him because everyone knew he was my brother and his poor work reflected badly on me. It was a weak spot. At the time, I was a shark too and I couldn�t afford to have weak spots if I wanted to maintain control of the restaurant. When James ended up quitting, I was glad. The doctors treated him for the symptoms of AIDS, for the virus that was killing him, for the effects of a life on the street, for the malnutrition that he was suffering from, for the drug addiction that he had succumbed to. They gave him drugs meant to alleviate the side effects of the drugs that they were giving him to treat his other ailments. And then his liver started to fail. They asked him if he wanted to undergo further treatment and he said, very simply, �No.� A nurse stood over him a week later and, as he had requested, prayed with him. After a bit, he told her that angels had come for him and to please tell his parents that he said goodbye. I ask Max later, �Was that weird, me talking about James?� He asks why I am asking that. I don�t say it�s because I am uncomfortable talking about James, that I felt bad about disliking him for such a stupid reason as that he was bad at being a dishwasher and how I�m never going to be able to make that up. I don�t say it�s because I feel this kind of helpless rage when I think about what kind of childhood he must have had at the hands of his mother, who used him as a pawn, and who mistreated him in horrific ways. I don�t tell him about the stories that Boss, my grandfather, choked up telling us at his wake, about how he used to come to visit them and then, knowing he had to go home, would ask Boss to drive him around the block at least once just to forestall the inevitable. James, by the time he was six or seven, had learned at the hands of his mother, that it was useless to ask for anything, help included. I hadn�t said any of this to my friends. I had said, �I can�t imagine being twenty-three and having to make the decision he had to make. I mean, twenty-three. Can you imagine?� Max says, �Why wouldn�t you talk about James?� The Others The evening was filled with reminders of my brothers. The Aisho really does look like my youngest brother Marshall, James�s brother by my stepfather and yet another woman. Like James, Marshall joined my family when my mother married his father. The Aisho looks like Marshall when I first met Marshall, who was all of four years old at the time. He had been a sweet kid with a talking teddy bear. He was as trusting and open as any normal four-year-old. I hadn�t been around kids in a long time and I liked him. We played together and missed each other when we didn�t see each other. He�s twenty-two now and lives in Monterey with a young woman that I�ve met once. He has a sarcastic and therefore appealing sense of humor. He was home-schooled by his mother and then attended a community college for a certificate to do computer work. He works as a computer tech for a small company. It�s been over a year since I�ve seen or spoken to him. I was reminded of my immediately younger brother when we walked into the last bar of the evening and I saw the bartender. I did a double take because he looked, from across the room, just like Scott. Scott is bigger though, and scarier looking. He often shaves his head and is covered with tattoos, has one leg done in what he calls �Hell tattoos� (demons and devils) and the other leg done in �Heaven tattoos� (Mary and Jesus and various saints). People see him and cross the street, but he is actually quite nice most of the time. (I say most of the time because he has done a lot of bad shit in his life�though I can�t say that I disagree with all of what he�s done. For example, the last time I saw my niece she told me a story about her uncle, her mother�s brother, who had said something rude to her. My brother, having heard him, broke his nose. Maybe he�s good for something after all, I thought.) Scott is my parents� favorite, the favored child, the spoiled child, the baby. Yet he�s the most diplomatic of my brothers�of anyone in my family as a matter of fact. I�ve written about him here. Scott haunts me. His stories haunt me. They haunt him too. He once told me that he wakes himself up in the middle of the night sometimes because he�s yelled out my name. I only have one more brother, my oldest brother, and he defies my ability to explain anything at all. He is my favorite. I always say that if it weren�t illegal or immoral or whatever, that I�d be married to him. He�s smart as hell. He doesn�t talk a lot. He buys me comic books and toys. He taught me how to drive. He calls me �Dude.� We speak to each other in cartoon voices when we�re serious and when we�re joking. He�s the only person I don�t question. If he tells me to do something, I do it. I would tell a story about him, but I don�t want to let any of them go. No, wait. I�ll tell this: When I left Max, my brother showed up at the studio. He hung around for a really long time not saying anything. There were other people around. He won�t speak about family things in front of other people, and since that is what he had come to talk about, he said nothing at all. The people around us were my friends; they tried to engage him in the conversation but my brother is as silent and immovable as a mountain when he decides to be. The others around us finally became uncomfortable and drifted away. He was still silent. I was worried. I prepared myself mentally to make some explanation of my actions to him, or to justify what I had done, or make an excuse, or face his judgment. He remained silent for a long time. Finally he said to me, in his voice that is gruff from being so rarely used, �Dude. Are you okay?� I said, �Yeah.� He said, �Are you sure?� I said, �Yeah.� He said, �Call me if you need anything.� And I walked him out to his truck and he left. The List I am grateful for my brothers. (I measure every other man in my life against them, against my experiences with them, against their treatment of me. And almost every other man in my life falls short.)
More lies:
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