GIVE A YELL. GIVE A LARGE, SUBSTANTIAL YELL

I grew-up under a dictatorship of yelling.

While it took me years to untangle this mystery, my mother yelling so loudly at my drunken father come home at three in the morning just about any night of the week without even a warning telephone call that he was going to tie one on that I really cannot remember how many times I was awakened to loud shouting, left unable to sleep because of the shouting and thus going to school, even as a small child, exhausted from anxiety, shouting and two gods in the house going at it over beer and attempts to escape while trapped like a wild animal, I finally did untangle the mystery.

Sometimes, when the terror and alienation that arrives like an unwanted guest when I am having a manic episode, I also yell.  But I also know how shouting at people, even over the telephone while in the middle of one of those no-direction-left panics, is "disturbing" and "difficult".  I committed this "error" two years ago when, in March, 2014, literally at wit's end and consumed by a manic panic, I called two former drinking buddies, begging for at least a little friendship.  One totally dismissed me as "wrong" or "out of bounds" or whatever other excuses he utilizes to justify simply offing another for "infractions" such as just pile-driving a woman who had propositioned me for two years running, only to bail the instant I took the bait, the heartache so hard it triggered my already reeling mood swings into a full-blown disaster, worst in 21 years, and other reasons for "condemnation" I will probably never really understand short of conversation and the typical hashing-out from which I will be forever deprived.

Loud shouting: Last resort when one is trapped in a topsy-turvy room, feeling so alone and abandoned and mood-struck, left to act-out long-standing domestic emotional abuse like a soldier in combat getting fire from both sides.  Some people, afraid of psychotherapy, simply do not understand what acting-out is.  Here's a short explanation:  When one has been traumatized, and when a present experience looms in the vicinity of the original trauma, one repeats the trauma.  Especially in terms of emotional abuse, a child laying innocently in his bed while listening to emotional outbursts that honestly shake-loose any sense of security from mom and dad, acting-out both sides of an ontologicaly destructive trauma is quite common.  In terms of me, acting-out, I used to play both sides of the big drama at home.  Sometimes, I would act-out my father's role in the game, getting drunk, withdrawing in shame and fear and even going so far as contemplating suicide, something I did repeatedly until my Bipolar Disorder was reined-in.  Other times, I start shouting, exactly as I had in 2014 when I felt so alienated by two people who basically had been ignoring me, not answering my telephone messages, and one even so vacant as to not bother to respond to those times I posted links to music on his own Facebook timeline.

Yes, I was frightened.  I wanted help.  I started shouting.  Apparently a capital offense.

Who needs any abnormal behavior, right?

It finally took a 911 telephone call to get me a little rescue.  But that's not the point.  People sometimes yell and shout.  Yelling and shouting are normal human experiences.  Why do we yell and shout?  In my mother's case, she felt trapped by a man who would not even let her shop for school clothes for her children, who wouldn't allow her to have the only automobile.  He had her so bound-down and trapped that, when the injustice became too much, she burst out the only way she knew: Shouting.

In 2011, I accompanied my mother and stepfather to New Mexico, happy to tag along on what I knew was going to be my mother's last visit to the mountains of Northern New Mexico, mountains she missed, mountains she loved.  Sitting-up one late night with my cousin, I asked her what my mom's domestic life was like when she was young.  My cousin, 11 years older than I, said the obvious: "There sure was a lot of yelling in that house...."

My mother had picked-up my grandfather's Bipolar, and his acting-out.  This is a sort of cycle of abusive behavior that is almost impossible to break.  For the first time in my life, I knew where my mother had learned that self-defensive tactic.  Her father was a fierce man.  He helped Pershing hunt-down Pancho Villa.  He is legendary in the family for the night he hurtled out of the trenches at the Somme during World War I, enraged a friend had been hit by a German bullet, shouted his way across No Man's Land, jumped in the German trenches, found the killer, cut the killer's neck with a Bowie knife, ripped-off the killer's Iron Cross, and then hurtled back across No Man's Land, shouting the entire way.  Now that is fierceness.  But mostly my grandfather was a quiet man.

Being a descendant of William the Conqueror's reeve, his right-hand man, his chief of military police, I've got that Norman "berserker" blood running in my veins.  I wouldn't be surprised if the manic-depression has been in the family tree for millennia.   One famous relative was Great Britain's first Military Magistrate in Ireland, one devil of a son of a bitch.  Another, Charles Gordon, a.k.a. "Chinese Gordon", famous for leading the British invasion of China during the Opium Wars in the 1840s, fiercely defended Khartoum from the marauding troops of the Mahdi, and died there.  Another less-distant relative commanded U.S. Army troops at Los Alamos during the construction of the first atomic bomb.  He called Patton a "punk".

Good blood or bad blood, at least it's blue blood, right?  Much bluer than that of the two pips who decided to condemn me over "social consequences" when I yelled at them through a freaking telephone in 2014.  Talk about two Little Lord Fauntleroys.  Do they both wear satin pajamas?

I once had a friend, Chris Z., so agitated on a Monday morning after a weekend-long cocaine binge, that he shouted like a maniac right there in his family's warehouse.  I don't remember what he was yelling about, but whatever it was, he was in bad sorts that morning.  I walked over to him as he swung his arms around like Mussolini, yelling his skinny bird's butt off, and when he paused for a breath, and asked him this:

"You done?"

Right about that time, I'd gone to an afternoon guitar jam at his East Dallas house, only to be waylaid by a group of friends who all decided to wack-out on coke, so much of a cluster-fuck that his girlfriend, seeing my frustration and disgust, gave me 20 bucks for a cab so I could escape.  I finally told Chris Z. that I really did not want to be around him if he was launching himself to the Pleiades with white powder.  Not only did I not want to be carried-off by the cops, a guilty by association companion, but he simply wasn't the kindhearted Chris Z. he is when he's not on a coke binge.  He was so angered by me reading him the riot act that he decided not to call me or visit me in the hospital when I had leukemia.  Then, at 12:30 a.m. early in January, 2008, he was on the telephone, sheepishly telling me he'd been in a recovery hospital.  He was quite discomfited by his admission.  I told him I was happy he'd taken that bull by the horns--only he went back to the crack or powder, an addict regardless of the invasion of reality into his world.  He once argued that I was on drugs too.  "You take an anti-depressant! See?  It's the fucking same thing!" 

While shouting.

Is there really no difference between recreational drug use and drug use designed to stem "the crazy"?  Shouldn't I have known this?

Bottom line.  I feel like writing a "user's manual" to explain to those numbskulls what kind of gun I live under every single day.

Damn right, I yell.  I'm a yeller.  I can go from 0 to 11 on the yelling scale almost instantaneously.  Sometimes that's the only way I can get the garbage out of my system and clear my mind when the moods spill over into dysfunction.  Yeah, I always knew I was only a cartoon.  How about you?

   

THE DROOGS POSITIVELY FOREVER IN THE SUNSHINE

Got a bit of a laugh the other day when I noticed Mad Swirl's webpage is premiering its next Wednesday night Sportatorium spoken-word reading as Dr. Googily-Eyes Healing Circus & Mad Swirlin’ Medicine Show: Inciting the Rise of YES and the Fall of NO.  I still keep-up with the goings on at the reading's e-page even though I do not participate, mainly because I enjoy reading an odd mashup of both beginners and some fairly experienced poets.  While this mashup is only odd because the page's editor, M. H. Clay, seems to have zero understanding of what makes a poem and what does not make a poem, sometimes the rides are fun, sometimes not so fun.

I don't object, really, when younger poets, hobbyists or dilettantes get their literary hard-ons in public.  I actually empathize with such folks, mainly because I spent 40 years of my life trying to be a poet.  Saddening to me sometimes is that my mind was so mangled by Bipolar Disorder that writing a poem that communicates was a seldom achievement.  I remember one poet commenting years ago at Chumley's, the big gathering in Deep Ellum in the early-to-mid 1990s, that I was writing what is known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and when I look back at my "grand opuses" of the time, I decide to take the compliment, mainly because my spotty poems often made little to no sense at all.

I really do not blame myself for having a scattershot mind at the time.  In 1973, before the Bipolar Disorder had manifest, I was asked to audit an MFA course in poetic composition by the Dean of Liberal Arts, all because a poem I had written in high school, "The Transient", had impressed him.  I was only 19 when I scored an A minus for the course--although the good grade never appeared on my transcript.  After that first hard manic episode struck me like a sledgehammer in September, 1977, this after years of anxiety and phobias hinting and foreshadowing the disasters to come, confusion was a way of life until 1993.  Even then, because I continued to drink out of habit (self-medication medicating what was no longer there), my recovery out of that confusion took much longer than it would had I stayed out of boozing it up and gotten serious about my life.    

I remember sitting in my apartment for an entire month, summer, 1993, astounded to know silence for the first time in my life.  All that racing thought had ended.  I was frightened by this but also quite happy that the noise had stopped. 

But let's get back to Dr. Googily-Eyes Healing Circus & Mad Swirlin’ Medicine Show: Inciting the Rise of YES and the Fall of NO.

The meeting's MC, Johnny O, has always advocated positivity and nothing but positivity in all thoughts, actions and deeds.  That in itself is positively frightening, mainly because the world simply does not operate under those principles, everyone seems to know that, and yet there he is, thinking that getting wacked-out on chronic dope is going to mask what very could be Narcissistic Personality Disorder with a taint of arrested development.  He has done some very negative things to people, and his "victims" sincerely think he is one of the ugliest human beings they have ever met.  I think of one acquaintance, now remarried, who, while in the middle of a difficult divorce from a woman he still loved, had to endure Mr. O shagging his erstwhile wife "just because".  I sincerely did not know this the afternoon Mr. O and M. H. Clay stood beneath a Denton, Texas, billboard while waiting to perform as featured guests at a local reading.  Mr. O loudly complained that his wife, Lisa, was shagging a man other than Mr. O, and that this was "unfair" and "mean" and "unforgivable".  Unaware of his bestial behavior, something he hides behind under the pretense that he's a "swinger", I sympathized.  Until I learned the other side of the story of the former soldier who played a bit part in Operation Gulf Storm, something he holds onto as if this is the only achievement possible in the entire world.

Yep.  Let's be positive about every little thing in the whole wide world.  Mister Sunshine.

Depression and mental or emotional dysfunction simply doesn't play in that poetaster's Peoria.  Why should it bother to play there?  It's not "positive" to be stricken by a congenital illness that is physical while manifesting in terms of all kinds of emotional and mental difficulties. 

I remember him kicking me out of Mad Swirl because I had posted a joke about him on another poet-hobbyist's Facebook photo panorama.  The joke had to do with homosexuality and whether Mister Sunshine was "the catcher" or "the pitcher".  I posted a link to Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", a seminal novel about a young boy rebelling against "phoniness" in the middle of the lead singer propositioning Mister Sunshine with a dippy smiley face winking signal, and then I smiley-face-winked back.  This apparently incensed the poor sex addict.  I was not "part of the club" even thought the other sex addicts had been hitting on me for several years.  How many times of not responding to some woman placing her cheek on yours before she realizes, nope, she's not getting anywhere?  How wrong is it to ask a woman with whom you are interested to "talk first, then maybe"?

What's really laughable about all that "swinger" garbage is that they actually believe they are shining a lamp in the "super secret underground" while the rest of the world is a very dark place.  I do find this fake co-optation of The Age of Enlightenment for purposes of partying fairly amusing, and the few conversations with women who are part of the swinger scene indicated to me that a lot of emotionally-battered people have been taken-in simply because they are trying to fill-in a hole in their psyches that otherwise cannot be filled.

Let's be positive: All is not sunshine and light.  I'd certainly not want to be inside of one of Mister Sunshine's psychic back rooms.  Would you?

Mister Sunshine is "all about being positive" because Mister Sunshine is afraid of the darkness hiding within him.

Great dope is one way of jacking oneself into "the positive".  Bob Marley advocated "the positive", something Mister Sunshine may not understand was a message of hope to several million Jamaicans living in super poverty while attending to the whims to the rich and famous in resort communities carved out of the jungle.

I never went for Pollyanna anyway.  I'd grown up with all too much darkness: a childhood of familial discord, a father with serious problems, a mother yelling at the top of her lungs because she felt trapped and betrayed for years and years, a suicide, the "big secrets" the entire neighborhood knew anyway, and then having to decompress from all that tragedy while coming of age.  Nope.  Life was not a positive experience for me as a child.  Then Bipolar Disorder was the icing on the cake.  I am happy I survived.

A prominent American social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich, published a book about the nonsense of positive thinking a few years ago.  "Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America" tells the story of how that stuff invaded our personal space.  Oddly enough, positive thinking is a commercial invention designed to keep employees from complaining and as productive little worker bees.  I remember getting the positive thinking propaganda seminars while working white-collar.  I snapped to the ulterior motive almost immediately.  I never thought allowing that "emotion smack" to bleed into my personal life was appropriate in the least.  In the real world, "difficult" things happen, and all too often the sealing-away of "difficult" things results in physical illness.  We have feelings like anger, sadness, depression, hostility and the "meh" because we need them to survive.  Refusing to express "the negative" is unhealthy. 

People who are afraid of their own personal darkness hide behind the "sunny side of life" because, like drug addicts and sex addicts, they are simply not brave enough to face real life. 

Sure.  It would be "nice" to have a non-stop peak experience from birth to death.  But then what would be the point of having peak experiences at all? 

Mister Sunshine refused to allow me back into the Mad Swirl readings because I had said "bad words" about him.  Meanwhile, he was doing "bad things" to people.  This "bad words" bit is laughable.  Poetry without criticism, like life without criticism, is dull and sometimes quite criminal.  This is not to say I am some sort of enforcer, but I do have the odd proclivity for telling the truth.  I am an honest person.  I don't pull punches.  When I see something I do not like, I speak-out about it, and the brutes hiding behind positive thinking can lump it. 

THE OBLIGATORY ROBIN AND THIS DOWNWARD-FACING DOG

Sometimes I think of Robin, one of the best actresses I have ever seen, starring as "Stella" in Tennessee Williams' "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", raunchily blowing Johnny Reno's saxophone onstage, outrageously beautiful and kindhearted, and feel that old sadness that was striking me so hard in 1988 I'd become suicidal.

None of that emotional drama of mine had anything at all to do with Robin, yet she tried valiantly to save me from what many around me simply did not understand.  One buddy, now a current "king" of the local jazz scene, called me up in 1988 to say he was abandoning me because he did not want to be around if I committed suicide.  Indeed, the pain Bipolar was wreaking on me had its social consequences even after several years in a therapist's office working to untangle the family dysfunctions that had surrounded me as a child, the eventual "super-rejection" of my father's suicide when I was 16 and many more, even deeper, difficulties I had to face.  By 1988, I was beginning to realize that something was seriously wrong with me, the evidence being these repeated "fits" I had that often scared friends and worried family.  Was this my heavy drinking?  Was it the dope?

Seriously, I did not know.

I met Robin just as I was entering Hades.  Friends and I attended a birthday party of a longstanding friend of ours, and besides me running back and forth along a fence and barking back at the barking dog on the other side, something my doped-up buddies found hilarious, all sat amazed as we sat in the dark--where I found Robin, so drunk herself she reached-out and hugged me, a perfect stranger, hugged me so hard I could barely breathe.  Robin also had an alcohol problem.  But I was worse.  Sitting close to her in the darkened den, I unbuttoned her jeans, feeling her up as we kissed.  She had an orgasm and vomited at precisely the same time.  Such was my friendship with Robin. 

That incident became comedy gold among some of my more irreverent friends.  "Gordon can't even grope a girl without her throwing up".  I laughed too.  It was funny in a saddening kind of way.

In 1988, I was so drunk so often that often I did not remember people.  I didn't remember Robin as the woman I'd felt-up at that party the night I "met her" again.  We were at a birthday party on King Street off Maple Avenue when I spotted a real beauty across the room.  The beauty and I locked eyes.  The Jacob's Ladder of electricity mounted between us.  So I thought, "I'm making a move", and stepped forward into the bedroom, sat down halfway to the beauty on a dresser.  The beauty then moved forward and sat next to me.  I noticed her hand between our thighs, and I carefully placed mine over hers. 

Suddenly, the beauty's hand clamped around mine and she threw our locked hands into the air while shouting, "LOOK WHAT I JUST CAUGHT!" 

Yeah, that was Robin.  Same woman, different blackout. 

Problem was, Robin was "attached"--to some Brazilian guy who had that typical Latin dominance thing going.  Robin was "his property", never better expressed than the night she called me to ask me out to see the silent version of "Metropolis", backed by a popular band at that time, B. L. Lacerta, playing behind the screen.  She rode into the parking lot of my complex beside her man in a Jeep convertible, and all the way to Club Dada, he refused to acknowledge my presence or even speak to Robin at all. 

Inside the club, I sat on the floor a couple of paces ahead of the couple to give them some space, but the two had a whisper-fight the entire performance.  Robin hung her head, mortified, the entire drive homewards.

One Sunday, she called and asked me if I wanted to go to Tennyson Park.  She was going to jog.  I eagerly agreed, and sped up to the Safeway, where I bought crumpets, strawberries and some whipped cream for a picnic.  We laughed all the way to Tennyson about the crumpets.  She jogged, I walked. When she completed her run, I led her to a rose bed and plucked a plump, pink rose and gave it to her.  Robin cried.

So, yeah.  We were falling in love a little.

Being a gentleman and showing her respect, I didn't violate her relationship.  She had to make that choice herself.  One night, the longing and ache became too much.  I'd been writing late on Saturday night, drinking a bottle of Absolute Citron, until I was so drunk, that bottoming-out crossed-up with the depression I was in, and I called her.  Message machine.  I told the machine I wanted to die, then passed-out on the couch. 

I awakened Sunday morning, the door wide-open, a note from Robin in my lap.  She'd called 911, and once they realized I was breathing, not dead, she and the paramedics left me to sleep it off.

Exactly.  That's where I was in 1988.  Everyone was talking: I was going to off myself.

My last memory of Robin is a sober one:  Robin and I reading one another passages from "Romeo and Juliet" on my couch as she prepared for her role in the play at Shakespeare In The Park, Robin pointing her toes like a ballerina as we spoke in rhyme.  Never has a woman made me laugh like Robin.  She was a bodacious woman, an MFA in theater arts from SMU.  She had participated in a Metallica video as one of the vampire women bullying a scared blonde. 

She told the blonde after the shoot: "My hair used to be blonde too--until I lost my virginity." 

Robin rocked.  Then I isolated, left everyone behind and began a long road to discover what was wrong with me. I got much, much worse before I got better.