The Progressive Movement, One Afternoon At the Grocery Store

One day a young reporter from the local television news station is assigned a story that his editor decides would be amusing and interesting, but into which his editor did not put much consideration. The editor says, "What is the progressive movement in America thinking? What is the progressive movement in America doing this afternoon? What kind of clothes does she have on?"

The young reporter, who was eager to please, answers immediately and with what he hopes is intrepidity, that he will go to progressive organizations and see what they say, but the editor scoffs. "No. I don't want hyperbole. I want a street-level perspective. Try and follow me, kid. How does the progressive movement look? Still a bunch of sexy white co-eds trying to save the slums? How has the progressive movement being keeping up her figure? Or are they all like those shrill old ladies that protest the station sometimes, for God cares what reason? Street-level, son!"

These marching orders are, for the young reporter difficult to reconcile with the training he received in his school for journalists. After some consideration, he decides to head down to the health food grocery store in Berkeley. As he walks around, he spots two women shopping. They are both approaching middle-age, and they look to be the progressive types. One is large, curvy and straw-blonde, wearing an old house dress. The other is a rail thin and darkly brunette, wearing pants and blouse that barely can be considered casual.

The young reporter approaches the two women and introduces himself. He tells them that he is trying to find people who are progressives, so he can ask about the current status of the progressive movement. Immediately the women protest, the larger one claiming that they are too boring to profile, and the darker one explaining that they are too abnormal and would not showcase any trends or modern realities.

"Perfect," says the reporter, "good. Tell me about yourselves. Do either of you have children?"

The dark one smiles and points to her friend. "Demeter has seven children, from six different men. She's been trying to save the world in bed since we were 20 years old."

The reporter nods. "Ah."

The blonde woman laughs dryly and says, "Oh jeez. Now Regina is going to put on a show for us."

Regina explains: It first happened in July, when we were just babies ourselves, recently having shaken the dust of college off and just dying to live somewhere 'real.' Demeter and I were close as could be, like sisters, and the same size too, if you can imagine. We found some rooms to rent and it just so happened that they were in houses on the same block. It was a grimy, ugly little block back then, nothing like it is now.

Oh no, Demeter protests, it never was so. And in fact it was once upon a time a great realm of families and loving people for whom there were no need of fences, even for the dogs. Do you remember the mural? It was on the wall of the old corner shop. That mural was the most beautiful piece of art I have ever beheld. I lived inside it once for thirteen years.

That mural is still there! Regina says incredulously, In fact you were the one who formed the committee, which saved it from being torn down!

But it isn't the same now, Demeter sighs. They cleaned it up and now it looks like it belongs in Disneyland. It's appropriate, I suppose, because the neighborhood is becoming a playground for affluent white college kids.

Just like we were, Regina says.

No, Demeter says, we were different.

Regina says, Demeter loves the slums. She wants to save the whole world from people who want to tear down the slums, and the way she tries to do this is by having babies. Regina looks at Demeter as if expecting a rebuttal and then, receiving none, Regina frowns. The frowns of Regina's face are powerful sources of impetuousness for the world of men, but when tossed upon her best friend they are absorbed by that all-loving patience. Regina frowns while Demeter listens. They are no longer the same rounded size of girlhood. Regina is one of those people who has a career inhabiting her body, and the career has whittled her away into all edges. Demeter, on the other hand, carries all the curves that are beholden to motherhood.

Regina continues, now more adamantly trying to agitate: And when the world wasn't saved enough by the first baby, Demeter had another. And then another, and then another, and then we were old and the world was less saved than ever, so she had some more.

Demeter is still giving her that all-loving terrible patience look, and Regina is becoming exasperated. Well? She demands of her friend, So that's your story. You have nothing to add?

Demeter blinks, surprised to be asked to share while she had been so content to listen, and she smiles tranquilly. Oh, she replies, of course it didn't really happen like that. Regina is being dramatic. What happened was that one day Clarence asked to borrow some money, and I offered to let him stay on my couch. Then he needed someone to drive him to the hospital, and then someone to take care of him while he got better, and then he needed someone to stay up late with him, so that he wouldn' t do anymore heroin. And then he needed me to have a baby with him, so that he would have a reason to stay clean.

Regina slaps her forehead and tells Demeter to tell the young reporter about Clarence's current location. Demeter shakes her head sadly.

I hope, wherever he is, he is happy, Demeter says, but really he is most likely dead by now. Then Demeter frowns and says, But really, Reggie, are you making fun of me? You make me sound like a loopy idealist. Each time I decided to carry the pregnancy to term it was with due to the most responsible of reasons.

Regina interjects, I had my tubes tied when I was still a teenager, so as to not compound the Multitude Problem. That is responsible. You had kids with Abud Jur Kassi, because he wanted his children to be American citizens. That's not responsible. And let's not forget that he is now married to that hag in Canada, and that she does not allow him to see his precious American babies anyway. And meanwhile, you're raising two more people in a world dying from too many people!

Demeter protests, greatly troubled by her friend's attitude. Arab relations with the United States have never been worse! Something has to be done, to bring us and them closer together! A storm cloud of conviction blusters across the cornstalk tan skin of her face, and she pulls back her wheat field of hair, bothered. And he needed to marry that lady in Canada, because if he hadn't he would have been sent back to Zimbabwe to be castrated and possibly killed. I would have married him, except we couldn't stand each other back then. Demeter sighs, but consternation is unmaintainable for her, due to her disposition, and she smiles and says, as her head falls slightly to the side with coyness, Besides, she says, Our skin colors mixed so beautifully.

Regina scowls, and she snaps, So the unemployed father of the children is held prisoner for his visa in Canada, you, the social worker mother, works 60 hours a week trying to get a bunch of drug addicts on welfare, while Auntie Regina the Public Defender does all the real, true, brutal work of saving the world each day in the courtroom.

Regina means this to be a rebuke, but Demeter just nods, and she adds with a sigh: And yet despite all our best efforts, the world continues to suffer.

Best efforts? Regina is scandalized. Demeter knows how it is with Regina: Regina thinks the world should know better and is angry that she has to involve herself so often, to correct the errors of so many fools. Regina snaps at Demeter: You have seven children from six different men. The last three of which you had with men for whom you were a caseworker. You couldn't volunteer at a soup kitchen? You couldn't donate to charity? That is your best effort to save the world? Not saying 'No' enough?

Oh, Demeter says, distracted, but if I had said 'no' more often, what children would there be to fill up your house and nurture you with love?

And Regina blinks a few times, opens her mouth to respond, and then shuts it again. The young reporter, having been unable to interrupt the two women until this point, sees a chance to speak in the temporary lull, and asks: "Where are the children now?"

Demeter looks dazedly at the young reporter, having had forgotten he was there. "Oh, Sheila is out at the food bank, where she volunteers on Saturdays. Jasmine and Florence are meeting with their neighborhood group, Children of Horatio Street Union, to plan their next anti-war protest."

"Daniella is at my house," Regina says, "painting. Yvonne should be there too, probably going through my old books." Regina smiles, "That little girl is going to be a lawyer just like her Aunt, I bet."

"Liam is taking care of Paulina," Demeter says, "and he is writing letters to the City Council arguing in favor of tearing down the old steel factory and building a playground and community garden."

"Oh, Jasmine might be at the 7th Street community garden," Regina adds, "she's very excited about trying to feed us with only food that she grows herself."

"She's always been our idealist," Demeter says with a smile, and Regina laughs and they talk about Jasmine more, and then they talk about Yvonne again, and then Liam and soon they are so busy talking that they don't notice the young reporter at all, who has given up on using the women for his television segment about the progressive movement in America. He hurries away with an apology that the two women do not hear, and he hurries to catch a young black man with dredlocks.

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HONORABLE MENTION: ZYZZYVASPEAKS

A lot of people probably already know about ZYZZYVA, the literature magazine that features work from West Coast writers and artists, and blah blah blah. But do people know that the ZYZZYVA Czar, Howard Junker, is a devoted blawger?

I dig this guy's blog. Of course, a lot of guys and gals who run lit mags or lit e-mags or bookstores, or other literature-related thingies, blog it up. Almost all of the time those blogs are about literature-related news, or publishing industry news. And those are all cool, I read those.

In contrast, Junker blogs about stuff he sees while walking around San Francisco, or while going to artsy-fartsy events. Aren't those blogs the best, always? I especially like Junker's, because 1) he blogs daily, so there's always new stuff up, 2) he's a good writer with a lot of personality, and 3) he's always taking pictures of funny and/or interesting things and writing often-times goofy captions.

Anywho, check it out sometime, if you like fun and cool stuff. He's on a road trip with his kid right now. I especially liked the part when they went through Amish country.

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Charlene Over the Hollow

I do not want Stephanie here any more, because she has no bra on which he can't stop noticing, and because he touches her on her legs when he's talking to her, puts his hands on her and she squirms and pants and she doesn't know but he's riled up like how the cat or the elephant is on the nature shows with its thing all hard and hanging. And she don't know about it (but maybe she does know at the same time) what he wants. I do know, or if I don't know exactly I have a good idea. And I want it.

If he were alone with me I could show him what he wants, but we're not alone together so I have a choice and then I make it. I go to him and sit down at his knees at the edge of the couch and look up at him while he's playing around with her and he stops and looks at me, grinning, and then I smile at him and then I feel dreamy and distant like everything is a dream, and I touch his thing through his jeans.

While she watches, getting quiet and curious as a little kid, I mess around with him and then he messes around with me and then we're taking our clothes off. It is crazy and confusing, and we fumble around and then fall over onto the ground, like we're playing even though we don't want to be playing, we don't know what we want to do exactly, but I remember the cats and the elephants and I get myself turned around underneath him, so I can push my rear up in the air. At first he just sits there, stupid and looking, and then I say for him to come on. I'm embarrassed and also so riled up I'm almost in a pain, and I don't think he will and I'm almost relieved but not really. And then I feel his hands, trembling and weak at first, and then I feel him and he does it.

At first we thought it was just an issue of Charlene being inquisitive. She asked my wife if she could go with her downtown so that she could go to the library while my wife was shopping. Of course, my wife said yes. Imagine Joanne's shock when Ms. Henry, the librarian, told her Charlene had been looking through the abortion books. Charlene was just a child, and she did not realize that whatever material she borrowed from the library, my wife and I would know about. Yes, of course it was shocking and very much embarrassing, but Ms. Henry understood more than most people in town understood that children like Charlene were curious. That was what we thought was the reason behind Charlene's behavior, certainly. So in the car, after innocently inquiring about what Charlene was reading about ("Fall of the Roman Empire, momma. For class."), my wife started talking about abortion.

"You're getting to be a certain age, sweetie, when you're going to have to know about certain things. You know when Pastor Margaret talks every week about 'the hands that shed innocent blood,' and we all take a moment to be silent and contemplate the fate of those that cannot defend themselves?" My wife looked over at Charlene, but the girl just stared at the road, in that way a teenager is wont to ignore her mother. "Well, what Pastor Margaret is talking about it abortion, sweetie. Do you know what that is?"

Charlene continued to be silent, and my wife became frustrated. She pulled over to the side of the road and, without giving Charlene a chance to react, she reached over and grabbed the girl's backpack. Charlene started yelling and protesting, and my wife had to give her a real quick slap in the mouth to remind her of her place. Inside the backpack she found the abortion book.

"'Our Bodies, Ourselves,'" my wife read out loud, and then she looked at Charlene to explain herself. Our daughter just sat there, bright red in the face and staring out the window. "When we get home, you're going straight to your room," my wife instructed, keeping her cool, as usual. "And your father is taking this trash straight back to the library so as he can have a conversation with Ms. Henry about what a young lady should and should not have the choice of reading."

And that, I figured when she told me the story, should have been that. Of course, we didn't know how bad the situation was then. Come to find, when I got back from the library, Charlene sobbing and bleeding out of her nose, with my wife standing over her, flushed red and trembling with anger. I asked what was wrong, and my wife snarled at me to shut up.

"Excuse me?" Now I was scandalized. "What the hell is happening in my house and home, woman?"

And that calmed my wife down a little bit, so that she could go ahead and tell me a story that I wish to God I didn't have to hear about. After I had left for the library, maybe 10 minutes after I was gone, Charlene had come downstairs quietly and apologized to my wife. And then the girl had gone and got herself a Coca Cola from the fridge and scampered back to her room.

Well, Joanne hadn't said anything when Charlene apologized because of her pride and her anger, but after a few minutes she softened up and went to the girl's room to have a talk. And, lo and behold, she found the girl with her drawers down, trying to douche with soda pop.

I was stunned, and stared from my wife to my daughter, lying on the floor sobbing and bleeding. "What the damn hell is-?" I start, and then my wife cut me off, "That is a way that damn stupid girls try and get a miscarriage, Tom," she shrieked at me.

I just stood then, stunned. And then I was hollering and red faced as my wife, but probably just about ten times as terrifying. "What God damned man put his forsaken hands on you, girl!" I yelled.

"She say she don't know, Tom!" My wife yelled at me in that way that was angry and confused at the same time.

"Don't know?" The awful feeling lurched inside of me, just getting worse and worse. "How many have there been?"

"She don't know, she says!" My wife screamed.

And all of this news set in so loud and so hard that I could barely think. Then, just as suddenly, I was not angry anymore, I could not maintain the rage, it broke apart and there was just sorrow and pain in my soul. My wife saw this as it happened, and she was at my side even before I buckled and began to fall. She propped me up, my pillar of strength, and she sheltered me with her arms.

"Go to your room, girl," she told Charlene. "And don't do any more foolish things. Your father and I have to talk about our choices, now that we know."

Charlene calmed herself down and cleaned up, and my wife helped me to the bedroom where I could rest and then we could talk.

Pastor Margaret was completely understanding and graceful about the entire matter, and she told us that life, no matter how it came about, was a beautiful thing and she said that God was asking us to hear that new Life's voice through the roaring of anger and betrayal and pain, and that God was asking us to understand that He had decided to grow our family and that the little baby was a gift. I sobbed like a little child, listening to this, and I begged for strength and gave praise.

"Hush now, Mr. Dutton," Pastor Margaret said in her deep and hoarse voice, "give your praise and your pleas in the form of prayer. Almighty Father, give us this grace, as you gave to us the gift of Life, as you created our inmost being, as you knit us together in our mothers' wombs, as you knit little Charlene together in her mother's womb, and as you have knitted together this new life in Charlene's womb. We praise you because we are each of us fearfully and wonderfully made."

"Amen," my wife said.

"Amen," I said.

We gave the whole issue a rest for the week. Pastor Margaret said that we should, and that we should not mention it at home or let any thoughts but those concerning the grace and the glory given to us by God in the form of Charlene's little accident. It was not an easy thing for me, but I tried my best, and every night I spent on my knees talking to God about it. Charlene could not have been a better angel. Better to be an angel eventually, than to never ever be one at all. That was one blessing that I could be thankful for. The girl had not been with us to see Pastor Margaret, but, from the way her behavior had changed, it seemed like she understood that we were taking care of the situation. We took her out of school all week long, to let her rest. I don't think we really needed a whole week to make our decision. When it came down to it, we did not want to put our little grandchild up for adoption. There was hardly any choice at all, except to keep him, or perhaps her, with us and raise the child up ourselves. What other choice was there?

We had made our decision and, on Friday morning, my wife took Charlene to the pre-natal care doctor at the hospital. That's when the real trouble started with the girl. From what my wife told me afterwards, Charlene was serene as could be all the drive over. She wasn't talking much, but didn't seem upset or anything, and she was perfectly happy to go and see the doctor. My wife took her to the room and they met the doctor and my wife answered the questions. And as the doctor went over what to expect and what they needed to do, Charlene started breathing funny and making noises. The doctor was, from what my wife said, as professional and straightforward as one could expect a man to be when confronted with the difficult reality of a young, and perhaps troubled girl's indiscretions. He continued on talking about the different appointments they'll have to make to check up on her progress, ignoring Charlene's fit, and just as he started to go into the prescriptions that we would of had to get for Charlene, the girl started to punch herself in the belly.

My wife jumped up and grabbed ahold of Charlene, who was screaming and hollering and pounding on her stomach. The doctor got up and went out without a word, and came back a few minutes later with a pill for the girl to take. But then they could not hold Charlene down long enough get her to swallow the pill, though they did stop her from hurting the child in her womb any more. Charlene broke down then, just sobbing, and my wife went into a rage. She dragged the girl out of there and took her home. Once they got here, Charlene was too tired to do anything at all but whimper quietly and gaze at her mother. We took her to her room and started trying to talk to her, to try to explain how everything was going to be fine. But the girl just lay there, gazing at us with this glassy look, saying, "No," over and over again and probably not listening at all.

That night I had a dream. Thinking back, the dream seems sadder than anything I could ever imagine, but at the time it filled me with a great joy. In the dream, Charlene had her baby and he was the prettiest little baby I had ever seen. Charlene grew up as she saw her baby, and transformed from girl to young lady, so that she thanked her mother and me for what we had done for her, and so that she praised God for the gift of a newborn life. We lived as a family more united and more happy than ever before, and that little boy grew and grew as we watched, to become a young man of a powerful, unshakable love and humility that left me in awe. I got shaken from sleep by my wife, by her cries and her tears.

Dazed, I let her drag me from bed and I stumbled after her, down the hallway to Charlene's room and then I heard my daughter. She was grunting and crying, and I have to make this clear: it was like no noise I'd ever heard. It was a sound that evoked the deepest human sadness and terror within a man's soul. My wife was trying to staunch the bleeding and I rushed to help, but my wife screamed at me to get back, to go downstairs. She screamed at me, "Call the police! Can you hear me? Are you listening? I'm telling you, call the police, for Christ's sake!" I ran downstairs to get the phone, knowing already that they wouldn't be fast enough and hoping otherwise, the image burned into my mind and consequentially all of my nightmares forever afterwards when I am shown Charlene in the Lake of Fire: my poor, darling daughter sitting on the ground naked, her legs open and blood gushing out of herself, while one hand fumbles stupidly, crazily with the coat hanger that she shoved up there and her face twisted up with sobbing and becoming like an animal's that's having it's life leak away. A man should not have to outlive his daughter, oh Lord no, and but even moreso he should never, never have to know that his dear, darling daughter died in sin and therefore must life eternally in Torment. Oh Lord, he should not know that.

Some mornings I wake up convinced that God wants to punish me. Other mornings I wake up deeply in prayer and meditation.

And then those worst mornings at all, I wake up, believing so deeply and so dangerously that it, what she did, that it is all my fault.

The Treasure Hunters

Past the steamstacks, the air tasted different, it was hot because everything was hot but also it tasted emptier and brighter. The whole world was so incredibly hotter outside, so that I felt sick and a little bit crazy, and the sunlight was brutal and even with the sunglasses on I had to squint and blink so that my eyes didn't sting so much while they adjusted. The murky cloud cover, which the steamstacks were constantly pumping out, kept it cool and safe in Nevada City where we lived, but all the grown-ups I knew had always complained that the steamstack air tasted stale and now, leaving the protection of the steamstacks, I knew what they meant and knew that I would remember forever afterwards and always would know that the air under the steamstacks was stale and not as good or free as the air outside. Outside.

The buggy charged down the hill, and I didn't say anything but I was scared we would crash into a tree that had fallen and blocked the road. I didn't say anything because no one else said anything and I didn't want any of the men to know I was scared. All the trees were dead and so they fell all the time, so who could say one hadn't fallen in the night onto the road? Maybe Daddy was nervous too, because he didn't say anything and just stared through the sunglasses that were so dark that I couldn't see his eyes. I wondered what kind of face he was making underneath the white cloth head scarf that he had wrapped around his face, and I looked around at my uncle and the other guys and I wondered if all of them weren't silently grimacing, as terrified as me. There was a loud "bang!" and I jumped in my chair, terrified before I realized it was the normal noise that the giant, heavy exhaust collector made. It was attached to the buggy's tailpipe and it caught all of the car pollution from the buggy so that later Daddy could take it all and put the pollution into the ground. It was a large metal box, and it looked corroded and warped so that it wasn't hard to think it might blow up. I didn't like it, because it was dangerous and dirty and ugly, but Daddy said the most terrible thing ever to do was to let car pollution into the air. If there was no car pollution, everything would be better. The collector didn't blow up, and there weren't trees in the road and soon we had reached the water.

The boat that Daddy and my uncle and our friends had hired was waiting there. Everyone was tense and a few of our friends jumped out the minute Daddy stopped the buggy and held their guns up so that all the grungy, mangy men who were scavengering for food or useful trash along the water should know to stay away. Still they came, mumbling and grinning and gasping, each saying how they could help us for money or for food and that we should hire them. They didn't have headscarves or good sunglasses, and you could see what the sun would do to you if you didn't wear your headscarf and your glasses: it made them like ash and dirt, lined with crease marks everywhere and, in the case of some of them, blind. Daddy got out and came around to me and pressed the small pistol in my hand, and then he smiled at me. "Everything is going exactly right," he told me, "and we're going to have a great day out on the water."

I helped load the diving gear into the boat, and a few times as I walked back and forth I saw the weird men staring at me and Daddy would come over to me and, without looking at the men, he'd put his big, gloved hand on my head and move me onto the other side of him and he'd put his gun up in the air like it was a flag and we'd keep going. When everything was on the boat, two of our friends got into the buggy and drove it off, back up the hill, to some safe spot where they would wait for us. Daddy gave the men who owned the boat some money, and they helped us get everything ready, and then they pulled the ropes away and we left the shore.

The boat was a solar-powered raft, and it sped along the surf, jumping with the waves and crashing along so that I was a little bit afraid that it might shatter apart. I got sick, but didn't want anyone to notice so I didn't say anything but held onto the railing and shut my eyes tight and tried not to feel the rolling, bouncing. And then Daddy came up behind me and put his hand on my back and I relaxed, but then suddenly my stomach released and I puked all over the deck. And I was so upset, so upset that all the men had seen I was sick, that I started to cry. Daddy said, "What a brave boy. What a good, strong, brave boy," softly and soon all I could hear was his voice, repeated over and over, and in a little while I was so tired from sobbing that all I could do was sleep. When I woke up it was night and still hot, but nice out, and I knew we had arrived because I could see the lights of the other boats, far away over the black and shiny water.

Daddy had worked at the steamstacks in Yuba City before they closed and we and everyone had been forced to leave there, and he had thought he could work on the steamstacks in Nevada City but there were already too many experts in Nevada City. He always said he wasn't as good at steamstacks, because he had been a scientists before, and so he didn't have as much experience as some of the real steamstack men. When he was a scientist, he had been working on seawalls to stop the ocean. But then they were wrong, and nothing stopped the ocean and Daddy said all a person could do was to live with that sea and accept whatever it decided, in its angry vengeance, to do to us. He had his arms wrapped around me when we slept on the boat and I could feel his chest move, and I felt safe, but then I also felt nervous because of what he had said about the money. He couldn't work at the steamstacks, and there was no work in the greenhouse gardens where they tried to grow food, and my uncle couldn't find work either. And so we had to do what everyone else did who didn't work the steamstacks or the greenhouses. We had to be scavengers. I thought this quietly, shamefully, and I thought were we like those dirty, pitiful men prowling along the shore? But almost immediately then I felt angry and I shut my eyes tightly and thought that we weren't. We had a boat, and we had equipment. And Daddy had me, and he said that I was his secret advantage. We weren't like them at all. We were treasure hunters.

Before the sun was up, we were awake getting ready. I was still groggy with sleep as they helped me into the wetsuit and the oxygen tank and everything else, and then they started to ask me questions about what I would do if the oxygen got cut off ... what I would do if couldn't see the boat or the line ... what I would do if Daddy got hurt. I answered them at first, but then I got scared and I just nodded and tried not to feel sick. They gave me boxes that I could use to store valuable treasures down there. I didn't want to go, I was so scared and sick. But I remembered what I had heard Daddy say, that we wouldn't be able to pay Exxon soon if he or my uncle or someone couldn't get a job. And I knew that if you couldn't pay Exxon, you couldn't live in Nevada City, or anywhere else, because the Exxon company owned all the steamstacks and you had to pay for the clouds. I was scared about all of that and other things at first when I got in the water, but then I saw it toss Daddy around like he was just a child like me, I knew that maybe he was scared too and then I thought that I should be brave for him like he was strong for me.

He looked at me and gave me the thumbs up, and I nodded, numbly, and then we dived and we started down slowly into the murky bright blue and, deeper, the hard green underwater world. Below us were the uncertain shapes of a town, like a town drawn by a little kid, and then we got closer and closer and I began to see that I was looking at buildings that had been wrecked in the tsunamis and worn by the sea. I saw street signs and upside-down cars, and then we got closer and I could see that chunks, big chunks of the cars and the buildings and the streets signs were all missing and I thought that people must have been here before, and that they must have taken away the most important, most valuable parts of the old world. And that reminded me of how Daddy had said that I was his surprise advantage, because grown-ups couldn't go where kids could.

We had mapped out where to look for treasure, in a place called Piedmont where they had been rich once upon a time. We went down to the streets, and then I got nervous all over again because I knew that he was depending on me doing a good job. Daddy pointed to the house he wanted me to explore. The house door was blocked by cars and old warped dead trees, but there was a window, which had been shattered and I saw that I could fit through though Daddy couldn't. But it took a while, because I was small but not so small. Anyways, I tried to go quick like Daddy had said to, but I didn't know what he wanted and didn't want and so I took all of the things that I saw and put them in the boxes. I was starting to get more and more scared because the boxes were starting to get heavy, and then they were all filled and I was grabbing things and shoving them in the little pockets in my wet suit and then I was getting scared, so scared, that the oxygen wasn't going to keep coming and that I was going to drown. It didn't make sense to be afraid like that, but I still felt it. I grabbed a little gold box off of the dresser, but couldn't find a pocket for it so I just held it tight in my hand and I needed to go because I had filled the boxes and because I was getting more and more scared. Even though it was impossible, because the oxygen tank was safe, it was safe, I felt like the oxygen wasn't coming anymore, or that it was coming slower and slower, or that it wasn't oxygen but water and I was trying to breath water by accident, and I felt like I was going to puke and I got even more scared because what if I broke my mouthpiece if I puked? I swam towards the window, breathing hard and sobbing, but then I couldn't get through. I couldn't get through, I was stuck. I tried again, and again and again, and then I noticed that the boxes were getting stuck on the window frame. Daddy was waving his hands to stop as he watched me, but I looked in his eyes and saw that he was scared, and so I tried even harder to push through the window frame and the wood splintered and the whole world fell on top of me.

Then I felt Daddy's hand pulling me, pulling me, but I was tired, so tired and I couldn't make my body work and I relaxed and drifted into the cool green dark and then I saw Daddy pull out his knife. Suddenly the oxygen stopped and I jolted awake as my lungs filled with water and I started to cry and moan and think about Mommy and my little sister and everything and I wanted to sleep even though I was trapped in a dizzying spiral of lights and winds. I felt Daddy pulling me up, up, up. When we hit the surface, I felt Daddy's arms around me and I heard his voice screaming, hoarse, for my uncle.

They dragged us on board and they gave me fresh water and pushed my stomach gently so to help me puke up the ocean. They were all silent and I knew something was wrong and then I saw that the boxes I had filled with treasure were gone, and that the oxygen tanks Daddy and I had been using were gone and it was all gone, gone, gone. I had failed. I had lost everything and I had failed.

I thought I might die, or I thought that it didn't matter if I did or not, and I felt like the sun was already making my skin turn to cinders, and I wanted to cry but I didn't have the energy and then a voice said: "What's that?" And another said: "What's in his hand?" I opened my eyes a little bit to see the men crowd around me, and then, suddenly right then I saw that I was holding the little gold box and then my uncle took it gently from me and he opened it. Immediately all the men started jumping around and smiling, and Daddy had to remind them not to look too excited. The other scavengers might come.

The box was filled with treasure, treasure, treasure! Little sparkling earrings and gems, and Daddy saw and sighed and held me close and whispered, "My good, strong little boy. My brave, good little boy. You did it."

SHOUT OUT RVCA

My buddy Jen writes for the RVCA blog, and she was kind enough to mention BGB over there. Thanks, Jen. You're rad.

We were buds in college. She's a cool lady, a very good writer and she also sings in a groovy band called Jonesin' with her fiance Matt Jones. Check their stuff out and then say "thank you" to me for telling you about them:

http://www.myspace.com/jajonesin

and here's her blog about your's truly:

http://www.rvca.com/vasf/blog/?p=1124

C O O L !

Sexual Revolution, '88

With the clinical grace of a professional in dressing and undressing the female form, Homer Mannet slid the new dress onto one of his three shop mannequins. The fabric was cut differently than the dresses he was used to working with, and he found that he had to handle the dress gently, for fear of it stretching or tearing. It fit much tighter than anything else that he sold, and the bright, glaring colors didn’t match anything else in his shop, he reflected as he stepped back to appraise the item. He didn’t like it. Of course, on principle, he didn’t like that it was cut so low around the bust, and so high around the hemline. But what he particularly disliked about the dress, the aspect that was the most puzzling about it, was the fact that it was not symmetrical. Homer wondered, bemused, how anyone could wear such a hideous thing, let alone how those weirdo New York designers could imagine up such ridiculous pieces. It hung lower off of one shoulder than it did the other, and the skirt reached mid-thigh on the left leg, while being almost indecently high on the right. He sighed.

There were certain realties he had to take into account. Five years ago, his shop was where nearly all the women in town went for their nice dresses and blouses. Now, he was competing with two shopping malls, soon to be three. He could no longer realistically refuse to acknowledge the sexy, trashy trends in women’s clothing. So the new dress was an experiment, to see if he could lure some of the young people back to his little shop on First Street. He had actually sold several items very similar to the outfit, as special orders that had been placed by local women. And so he could not deny that there was demand for the new styles, no matter how distasteful. In fact, the dress was less scandalous than some of the other special order items he had sold in the past year. He was not interested in going out of business, and so he was attempting to be open to these changes. But he had a 20-year-old daughter, and it was difficult for him to look at the girls in tight denim and revealing dresses without feeling like the styles were a personal affront. His daughter was no tramp, luckily, not the type, like some he had read about, to give up her virtue to those college boys he had seen around her campus when he and his wife had visited her. So he took comfort in that. And, regardless of anything he felt, he still had a shop to run.

He loaded the mannequin into the back of his truck and drove across town, from his small warehouse to his shop. Unbeknown to his employees, who assumed that they were the last people to be in the shop before it was shut down until morning, Homer nearly always came by late at night to do a last check over everything and to sometimes drop off new merchandise in the back storage room. In the past 20 years, he had rarely gone home earlier than midnight.

As he went into the storage room, he noticed, with some alarm, that the lights were on in the front of the shop. Immediately seizing the baseball bat that he kept for exactly such circumstance, Homer went silently to the door that lead into the shop and peered through the peephole. He could see two people were in the store, a boy and girl. He squinted and realized that it was Becca, one of his two employees. To his immense relief, she appeared to be smooching with a young man. Homer relaxed and then chuckled. Naturally, he did not want his store to become a making-out spot for young people, but he found that he was charmed by the passion of two teenagers. It didn’t seem so long ago that he and his wife, Melanie, were obsessed with sneaking away from her parents to experience those long, hot embraces and touching. “I’ll go into the shop and surprise them,” he thought, “I don't like embarrassing the, but they'll need to be a little bit embarrassed, so that they'll know to find a new spot.”

He opened the door and went into the room, and then he stopped, frozen. Becca was sitting on the counter while the young man grasp her hips, thrusting. The young man’s jeans and underwear were down around his knees, and from the angle where Homer stood he could see with all the alarming details, that the young man was inside of the girl. Her skirt was pulled up, her panties lying discarded on the ground, and her blouse was open, her mouth was opened in a small red “O,” and she was grunting hotly.

After he had stopped them and made the two leave his shop, reducing the girl to tears in the process and the young man to shameful, dogged apology, Homer stood for several minutes staring through the darkened windows of his shop, out at First Street. He was enraged, embarrassed—humiliated, in fact, and, he decided after further reflection, he was also disgusted. He went back into the storage room and, with the same deftness as he had put it on the mannequin, he removed the new dress and carefully folded it up. There were standards, no matter what was popular. He couldn’t ignore that, he thought angrily. He didn’t want to sell low-cut, trashy clothing that made the young ladies in town look like no-good tramps. What was happening to the world? Who did these young people think they were? Troubled by these thoughts, Homer left the truck parked outside and walked home in the cool, warm, sweet late-Spring night, thinking up ways to explain what was wrong with Becca, and how what was wrong with her was not wrong with his daughter.

.....................................

The man with whom Melanie Mannet made love lived down by the cool, gentle green water of the Carquinez Strait in a beautiful, old home, which had for many years been slipping into a state of disrepair that it would not recover from. The man was named Harold and he was too old to keep up the integrity of the house, which he had personally, distractedly kept together with amateur carpentry and roofing and plumbing throughout the years after he and his wife had purchased it and filled it with children. His wife died in late 1976 suddenly when she was so young still and for many years he lived in the same state of shock that he had suffered when she had first passed from his life, and in that state he continued to work on the house, less and less enthusiastically year by year, until he found that his children had grown up and that his expertise in computer engineering was almost completely obsolete. He retired and began writing essays on the history of the United States Navy, which were often published in the local newspaper.

Melanie worked at that newspaper, selling advertisements to local merchants, and it was in the newspaper offices that she first met Harold. She would go to his house in the late afternoons on the days when she would see him and often she would cook dinner for him but never would she eat with him.

Near the beginning, she had wanted to tell her eldest daughter about the affair, excited as she was and without friends that she felt could relate to how it felt to have that hot, supple fire suddenly live within her. Melanie knew that her daughter, who was in her last year of college, had slept with boys and, moreover, Melanie knew, like everyone knew and had known for years now, that for young people sex had become the first enormous step into the world of romance, rather than the destination of romance. For her daughter, and never for Melanie even in infedility, romance would be a road without end, which would not necessarily lead to the martial bed. Before Harold, Melanie had known how her daughter lived and loved, but not until she was a lover again herself, after many years of not experiencing sex and all of its consequences, did Melanie feel as if she could talk to the girl about it all. Melanie often imagined what she and her daughter would talk about, if they were able to talk about what Melanie was doing. Once, foolishly, Melanie had taken her daughter to meet Harold, introducing him as a close friend, and her daughter had immediately known and had not yet forgiven her.

The affair had the tempestuous fire of an endangered love, not because Melanie was married and because her husband Homer might someday find out, but because Harold was almost too old to be anything more than truly a close friend. He was approaching the oldest of old age, and though Melanie had pulled him back from it, he was often so tired after making love to her in the afternoon that he’d sleep until the late morning the next day. She suspected, a little guiltily, that she hadn’t prolonged his youthfulness at all, but forced him to expend it faster than he was meant to, with large, gasping ejaculations. Whatever feeling of guilt she might have had, however, was eased by her knowledge that he loved the idea of growing old in such a manner.

Never in the course of the affair did she ever remotely consider leaving Homer. Nor did she ever love him any less. In a small, but growing way, she felt that she loved him more. Her affection for him grew. She noticed things about him, new things that she had either never been interested in before, or qualities that he was developing as he became older. She felt that she would come to be in love with her husband again soon, and so she taught herself to accept what she would once have considered a profound and wretched betrayal as not just natural, but as necessary to allow her to keep the man who was the love of her life.

Harold never played the part of the stand-in husband, and he never tried to create a domestic life with her. To her giddy, girlish pleasure, he never stopped trying to seduce her, even when she was naked underneath him, or even after that.

............................................................

Homer shifted the shop away from newer, younger fashions, and instead he began to search for a market of older, more respectable women. Consequentially, his business began to shrink, but he found himself renewed. He let go Becca, of course, though he decided not to inform her mother of what had happened. If a mother let her daughter dress in that fashion, then such choices on the girl’s part could not be a surprise to the parent, Homer decided. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, he was embarrassed to approach Becca’s mother about the situation and he received some comfort, instead, from the thought that something was simply wrong with the family. As a part of shifting his business towards what he considered more classy clothing, he let go his other teenage employee, and hired a new worker who was in her thirties, a pretty blonde woman named Tina.

She had been born in town and had left it immediately at 18, a wild and willful child who married eagerly to a man who almost killed her ten years later. While her wildness had been strangled and her stubbornness beaten down to the point of being deeply dormant by the time she had returned to town, her gregariousness had only grown, now fueled by a powerful, desperate drive for approval. She returned to her father’s house, defeated, divorced and in need.

She eagerly volunteered to work overtime, and often sought out conversations with Homer. He was pleased with her work ethic, and of course he enjoyed the company. While his two teenage employees had always been shy and quiet around him, Tina always wanted to talk, and, as Homer got to know her, he began to consider her a close friend. She treated the business with utter seriousness, and she seemed as concerned as he was with its future. They began to have longer and longer conversations, first about women’s fashion, and then about society. She made him feel like a philosopher, she regarded his opinions and ideas with respectful fawning, and, possibly due to her proping him up in this way, he began to speak with more volume, more boldness, more indignation. The shop was failing, and he blamed a destructive culture of sexuallized, trampish clothing. He blamed political, cultural and economic leaders who were afraid to withhold permission for anything the American people could lust after. He described all of this loudly, angrily, and Tina would agree freverently. She was convinced that he should run for mayor, or at least start writing letters to the newspaper. She would touch his shoulder and say, sighing deeply, that she had such respect for his mind.

It wasn’t clear to him, later, which one of them had initiated the fucking, and at first it didn’t seem as if it had been initiated at all, but that was only a fantasy, a burning inside of him. He realized, one afternoon while mounting Tina from behind, that he had not had sex with Melanie in nearly a year and a half. How had that happened? As he fucked Tina over and over and over again, the concept of living without sex became a prepostorous concept. Gradually, he began to wake into a new life that Tina had built around his old one, and he realized that fucking her was the only thing in his life he cared about. He stopped giving his angry speeches about society, and became dangerously, disasterously happy. They’d close up the shop at any hour of the day and go in the back, and barely have enough control to undress properly and not rip each other's clothing off. His wife and children seemed to vanish, the shop seemed to vanish, and all that he wanted of his life was to stick himself inside of Tina, without the consequences that the outside world would possibly impose, as often as possible, for as long as possible.

Julio and Haniel, '81

Julio wants to go to Maxwell’s for salad, but when we arrive we order a carafe of white wine instead and I notice that my hands are shaking, but don’t say anything. Behind his Wayfarers, Julio is gazing at me and then not. I want to look behind me and see what he’s looking at, but I don’t want him to see me look so instead I look at two people, a couple, or maybe not, who are laughing. He doesn’t move his head, his shoulders, but slides the cigarette case out of the pocket of his flimsy cotton shirt that is so threadbare that I can see his tan, and he opens it and takes out a cigarette and places it between his lips. He lights it with a match and for a minute his hand covers his small, smooth mouth while I can’t see past his Wayfarers so almost his whole face is obscured and I get upset for some reason and want to leave. It’s breezy out and his hair is being pushed around. He says that he’s going to Grant’s tonight for a party, and he tells me that I can come if I behave, and I watch his cheeks suck in against his cheekbones though his chest doesn’t move at all, not even slightly, and he pulls the cigarette away from his mouth and seems to notice me again, notice that I’m still gazing at him, and he smiles. He shifts his weight, and then I feel his foot on my thigh, moving up, but it isn’t anything, he's just playing with me or maybe he's testing me for something, and he’s already looking away like he’s bored and then he’s pushing too hard so that he's hurting me and I cross my legs to knock him away because I don’t want a bruise. He takes another long, slow drag on his cigarette and leans forward and tells me, “You know that I'm in love with Grant, don't you?”

And I wonder how he manages to never exhale any smoke when he breaths out and for a minute I think that he doesn’t breath at all, that he isn’t human but something better, better, better, and I want to put my hand on his chest to feel if I'm right or not. He’s sneering like he knows what I’m thinking and doesn’t like it, and I finish my glass with a large gulp. I wonder if I have any coke left, though I don’t have any on me, and I try to remember if I finished the baggy that the old queen at the Senator’s Bathhouse gave me. I tell him that I think it's great he's found Grant, and I'm trying to sound a little bit jaded like I'm teasing, but I think that I sound hoarse, like I’m upset and I clear my throat as if that were the problem, and he leans back in his chair.

“You’re so frustrating sometimes.” Julio says and I want to get up and leave. I wonder if it’s getting worse, and I force myself to think back to when we slept together last and the way I thought it was passion that I saw on his face, but it wasn’t, there was no passion. There was no affection. He did what he did in the dark the same as what he’d do to any other lover, and he had done all of that and more for others. It isn't as if he is trying to hide this from me, and I think that it was stupid for me to fantasize that there was anything more. Is he different now, with Grant? Or will Grant be like Bob, or Tyler, or the other men who come and go in his affections? Julio knows that I want more and that's why he hates me, and if I didn't pretend like I didn't then he'd cast me off forever and never talk to me, never ever even look at me ever again. But then I think that, no, in some ways it has gotten better. And, anyway, I think, it's better with him than without. So much better than it would be without.

Later, Marlon comes over to try and convince me to go to some movie with him, and I feel so disgusted with him that I start laughing and tell him how frustrating he is and that I know he still wants me. He takes my hands in his and tells me that I’m trembling and he smiles at me with warm, bright eyes. “Hey,” he says gently, running his knuckles gently along my cheek, “why are you always following Julio around for? What are you looking to get from him, aside from a sore heart? Why don’t you take one night off and come with me?” And then he kisses me, and as he encircles me in his arms I feel tired more than tired and I want to stay there, but when the buzzer sounds I know I won’t be able to. Marlon's voice is rich and deep and makes me feel guilty. He's saying something about how he worries about me and I'm telling him not to, not to even talk. I'm telling him that I know he cares about me, and that it's not as bad as he thinks it is. And we start to talk about the times when we were together, because that's what he wants to talk about, and mostly I'm just agreeing and letting him talk, because that's what he wants. I'm not listening for most of it, but then I tell him that if it were too bad I'd leave. When it gets too bad. And in the meantime, I tell him, I will go when Julio calls.

Julio is talking so much, I think he must have gotten some coke and not told me, and he is sounding like an idiot. I hate him for sounding like an idiot, and I can’t stop watching him. He is wearing little shorts and a v-neck sweater even though it’s night and not really warm. Up at Grant’s, the party is already mostly over, and there are a few old men there who look to be the last few guests. In his living room he has bottles of expensive liquors on a cart near the window, and there is a wooden box, open, with coke inside and nice metal straws and spoons. One of the old men starts trying to talk to me, and he looks pale like he is sick, which only makes him more ugly. Grant immediately starts touching and talking to Julio, and I go straight to the cart to try some of the coke. I ask Grant if I can have some of his drugs, but maybe I must have mumbled because he just looks at me and he's only pretending to be interested in knowing what I said. “What was that, lovely?” Grant says with that Southern drawl that I think is fake. And even before he finishes the sentence, he’s looking back at Julio, who is running his hands along the Grant’s neck.

I cut a line, but as I do I notice Grant’s view out the window, and then I see the Golden Gate for the first time since I first arrived in the City three months ago, and maybe I should feel something, but all that goes through my mind is the question of how much does that kind of view cost? One of the old men is asking me if I’ve ever seen a Kenneth Anger video and I’m telling him, “Awesome,” and “I love it,” and I’m not listening anymore because I’m watching Grant and Julio go back towards Grant’s room and I want to follow them. I want to watch them, I want to see if Julio does everything the same with Grant like he does with me. The old man is telling me that he has the gay cancer. Only gays get it, he says, and then he laughs and I think he's joking but I don't know and I guess I don't really care, I feel bad for him, and I want to be nice to him, because it seems like he really is dying. But then I'm thinking about Julio in the room with Grant again and I'm feeling like I'm going to puke or leave, and then I'm getting really upset so that I can't leave, I have to yell or cry and I feel like cutting myself up and smearing the blood on the walls. And then I really am crying and twitching like I can't control it anymore and one of the old men gets up and the other one puts his arm around me and says something about understanding and I scream and kick over the coffee table and something glass shatters and immediately I think that I can blame this on bad drugs.

I don't want the two old men to be able to stop me because I want Julio to to hear me do this, and so I fight and kick while they try and stop me. Grant comes out in a bathrobe yelling, and I break away from the arms that are trying to hold me back because they weren't holding tight enough, and I go to the cart with the drugs and liquor and flip it over and spill everything everywhere and when I turn around Julio is standing there his tan and perfect and his arms at his sides without moving, like marble, perfect. I reach towards him, saying things that immediately make me ashamed, and he turns and walks away.

Marlon is over and he's looking through my records and telling me about the new Wham! album, and he's going on and on and sounding really serious like I almost expect him to start shouting or get really emotional, and I'm gently sucking on my cigarette, gently, gracefully but deeply like deep breathing, so that I'm full of smoke, my whole body feels hollow of anything else except the thick rich smoke and it pours out of my like water, out of my pores and my eye, and I feel sick but like God is sick. "Hangovers make me feel like my life is a storybook," I tell him playfully.

He looks at me for a minute and then comes over to sit next to me on the couch and I can tell he wants to talk about something serious because he's frowning. I sigh and he says, "You haven't come out of the closet yet," he says, "pretending not to hear the big, bad hetero-fag-hating world is not the same thing as not listening." He says that my mom is wrong, the state of Indiana is wrong and that my father is wrong and that a gay man can fall in love for real and that what I'm doing to myself is just proving all the people who say gay is sin right. I groan, about to act exasperated, but then I change my mind and get angry and I tell him to get out instead and I say, what does he know about it anyhow? He doesn't know my father or my family, and he's never been to Indiana, so what can he say, what can he tell me about them? And he just says that I don't have to be ashamed, that's all. He tells me that I don't have to be ashamed because the way that I am isn't wrong and I say that I know that, glaring at him, and then he asks, why do you act like it is?

The last time I see Julio, he looks pale and strange, like the outer layers of him have been wearing away and he looks old or sick. He approaches me on Liberty Street one day when I'm out walking and he looks skinny. He comes up to me without smiling or anything, and he stands in front of me the same as he always would, statue-still and completely upright, only now there's something different and instead of looking hollow in the way that nothing hurts him he looks hollow in a way that maybe everything hurts him. He tells me that Grant is in the hospital and he tells me this in a way that does not betray any kind of emotion or empathy or desire for sympathy from me, he tells me that Grant's wife has come back because the doctors say that Grant is dying and Julio hasn't been allowed to see him even though Grant asks for him. The nurses told him so. One of the old men from the party that night has already died, the other is dying and Julio smiles a little after he says this. Julio got fired when he got sick, and he is going back home to Michigan to live with his aunt for a little while. And he looks me straight in the eyes with this seriousness that wells up from all of his insides and makes me shudder and he says that if he made me sick, he is sorry. He has never said sorry in all of his life, he tells me, he never said "sorry" for anything that he ever did or felt or was, and that this is the first time he knows how it feels to be sorry because he's sorry if he got me sick.

And my mind is racing, trying to decide if I feel scared or sad or sorry for him, because I don't believe him, exactly, even though I can see that he's dying, because it doesn't seem real or it seems like it could be real but only in the way that if it is real then the world is truly forever a nasty, terrible place because if Julio is right then God is a monster that hates beauty, even though He created it. And I'm thinking all of this as Julio says to me, softly, "I used to be 'Haniel.' I changed my name when I left Michigan, and I've been thinking a lot about my old name and how I miss it. I changed it because I was trying to change, and because it seemed like the old name belonged to the kid in the closet. But I always liked my name, honestly. It makes me think of the Upper Peninsula, when Mother would take us to visit my grandmother. Since it was a strange name, everyone always called me "Danny," except for my grandmother. My first boyfriend liked it, as well, and he'd call me 'Haniel' when we were alone together. It sounds like so much sweeter and so much joyful a name than Julio, which I always suspected just sounded cheap. I've been using it again. I remember my grandmother said it was the name of an angel in the bible."

He looked at me and smiles. "'Haniel.' Isn't that pretty?" He repeats it slowly. "'Haniel,'" and he stands there for a minute, remembering.