Venus Of The Delta With A Chicken Foot On The Rear-View

Back in 1991, right after the Soviet Union collapsed, save for its Dallas, Texas, outpost, which remains Soviet to this day, only under a different name, I had almost too much time on my hands.  The winter of 1990 had to have been one of the most fraught seasons of my entire life.  In many ways, all through the summer months and into the following spring, I was trying hard to get sober in an AA group, I'd learned, that was considered renegade by the AA national office--all for reasons I did not understand.  

As I've briefly mentioned before, the Dallas Central AA group was more a networking cell of high-rollers-to-be and a miasma of assorted high-roller wannabes than it was a relatively equitable place for anyone anywhere to simply sit in a circle with others and blow off steam, ask questions, share conventional and unconventional wisdom, and basically help one another.  Certainly, there was a great deal of that, but for those of us who seemed to be ill-fitted for that group, the options for relation to others were often bleak ones.  

This is not to say I couldn't relate to anyone.  Hard though it was at that time, due to all sorts of circumstances I had yet to begin to dig into, I did meet a few kindred souls, typically a few artists, one a Grammy-winning jazz guitarist, and another, a lovely Delta girl with the kind of blue eyes one sees only in animations.  Colette, however, was much more than merely pretty.  She was accessible, kindly, approachable, and like I was, ready to have a few laughs, and to resoundingly celebrate being a little different from the usual cut.  

Was she the target?  For some kind of "heat seeking missile"?  Not really.  Only relatable.  I like relatable women.  

Right at the outset of my attempt at using AA as a tool to help me to address the jittery anxiety, the depressions, the fits as I called them, and the bouts of binge drinking that had plagued me for years, I'd been fired from my job.  There's really no reason to look back in any ridiculous anguish of being cut down just as I was trying to scrape myself together, a typical occurrence for some reason, the point of losing financial security at an important turning point in my life left me with enough unemployment to pay my then low rent of $350.mo, a telephone bill of around $13, and some food.  Not awesome food.  Not delicacies.  Beans.  And rice.  And rice.  And frozen veggies.  And cans of tuna.  I had a lot of time.  In the hot afternoons, I'd ride my bicycle--race it, really--sometimes riding more than my typical 21 miles around White Rock Lake and back.  

If I rode in the mornings, I could make it to the three p.m. meeting at Central--a building only around a block away.  Kismet, right?  Not so fast.  Many of the denizens of that group were awfully harsh towards those they found problematic.  And since I was fairly eloquent, and also because I already knew the 12 steps forward and backward due to a stretch in the Seventies when I was a successful member of a drug abuse program, for some reason, I was seen by the big shots as some kind of troublemaker.  Not humble enough.  Not groveling enough.  Whatever.  I was there, more than anything, to find community, likeminded people, people who could positively support me socially as I made a sincere bid to shift away from a psychological dependence on alcohol.  

At the three p.m. meetings, I met Colette.  Those meetings, sparsely attended, and mostly attended by people who worked nights--often at local clubs and elsewhere--I'd met a few likeminded people.  I liked those meetings.  And I'd sit with Colette.  And giggle, cut up and then get serious about the reasons we both were there.  What I liked most about her is that I could be friends with her.  I had no ulterior motives.  I don't think she did either, really.  We just liked each other's company.  Sometimes, after the meetings, small groups of us would go to a local deli--where I'd get an all-you-can-eat salad and a glass of tea for under six dollars.  And of course, I'd joke with Colette.  

Colette was an artist.  She was between semesters at Southern Methodist University, close to getting her MFA.  Gosh she was nice.  She struck me as guileless.  And funny.  We definitely hit it off, and that's when I asked her out.  By the time I did casually put her up for a movie, we already knew a little about one another.  Her story of self-financing her way through SMU, an expensive school, fascinated me because of her wit.  

"Where did you get this nice car?" I asked her.  

"I bought it.  I worked for a year as a dancer at Casino Royale.  I made enough money there to get a year of school and a car."  

Wow.  I complimented her.  "What was that like?" I also asked.  

"It was OK.  That place is a little more sophisticated than average topless bars.  I knew enough to keep from getting pawed at so much.  And besides, if you've got it, flaunt it."  

I couldn't help but laugh.  "You don't seem like the kind of woman who'd be a topless dancer..."

"You'd be surprised at the women who are like me.  I wanted to get through art school.  That was an easy, and fun, job.  I could make a heck of a lot of money without even trying."  

How do you marvel at someone like that without either rolling your eyes or standing awestruck?  Sure.  There might have been more to her story (I never asked), but to be honest, I suspect Colette was being honest.  She struck me as far too unassuming to be anything other than a young and pretty lady who found a quick way to work her way through art school.  

Mind you, in 1991, after all that working out, I wasn't having too much trouble with women.  I liked that.  I'd spent a long time so withdrawn (and suicidal) that it had been awfully difficult to relate even to myself.  Colette was a true breath.  A wonderful inhale.  

"I'll have to ask my sponsor," she told me when I asked her out for a date.  Her sponsor?  A nice military wife.  One time, as I walked Colette to her car, her sponsor, having given her blessing to a date or two, murmured to me, "Get behind them and put 'em in the middle."  Great crack, really.  Her sponsor had seen what a hard time the big shots in that group had given me.  What are you supposed to do when you're basically a nice (but troubled) man who simply happens to get into people's way?  I've always been in that predicament.  I don't politic so much as tell the truth.  I've always valued authenticity or "getting real".  Perhaps that's the old hippie in me still shining through.  

The afternoon before our big date, after I'd walked Colette to her car, as I typically did, careful to walk around, open her the driver's side door for her, well, I still laugh at Colette looking me straight in the eye as I mentioned when we'd get together later in the evening.  

With her big blue eyes widening, she smiled and breathily exclaimed, "Gordon! My head's gonna explode!"  

Mine too.  

Just before dark, Colette showed.  She had black tights and a tight Batman tee shirt.  Hint?  You bet!  

"It's Bat-girl!"  A big hug. A body hug.  Were we getting ahead of ourselves?  Perhaps.  But hey.  I liked her enough I'd be willing to wait a little.  Why not?  Life is fun, and is best taken slowly, even if the action plan seems to tell us otherwise.  Colette was the kind of person I'd like to have seen long-term.  

Inside her car, which was a mess, a backseat so overloaded with art supplies it seemed like a comedy episode, I noticed the chicken bone foot dangling from her rearview.  

"It's for good luck!"  She hooted.  "We do this in Mississippi."

"What else do they do in Mississippi?"  

"That has yet to be determined," she grinned with the characteristic side-eye.  I took her hand.  We held hands the entire date.  At a bookstore, we wound around like a couple of cats, perusing all the books.  We stopped at an ice cream shop for ice cream.  Then, in the movies, Gerard Depardieu in "Green Card", I remember I had some trouble following the plot, mainly because the main interest entailed holding hands with Colette.  I felt like a high school boy.  

"He's an odd looking guy," I told Colette.  

"I think he's French." 

"Maybe that's the Gallic look."  

She smiled.  

"Do you like Gallic salt?"  

"On pizza." 

A couple of airheads in the dark, two cooing friends in the act of falling for one another perhaps.  Sometimes someone is so easy to get to know that the effortless is refreshing--no games, no suspense, simply two people who seem to know they like one another and are both willing to dispense with the formalities.  Once out of the movies, we wandered around the luxuriant shopping center known as Highland Park Village.  Lots of the finest shops in town.  A haven for the wealthy.  

"You should paint me!"  Yeah.  Why not flirt a little?  At the end of the date, as Colette pulled into the parking lot outside my apartment, we chatted awhile, and then I reached in to hug her.  That's when she planted by far the best kiss on me I think I have ever experienced in my life.  Seriously, she took the breath right out of my mouth.  

"Wanna come up?" 

"I'd like to but I have to be at work tomorrow morning."  

She worked at Toys R Us.  "I like all the gadgets and talking to the kids."  What?  I felt the feather of some intrigue in all that.  But nah.  Colette was so unassuming that I simply took her at face value.  She was too groovy to be up to anything.  

We continued to flirt after that.  Around that time, I remember, I came down with an ear infection.  I'd gone to the doctor, and had been prescribed some powerful antibiotics.  My doctor had warned me: These antibiotics might be really strong.  If you feel really agitated, eat some yogurt.  Yogurt has probiotics that will dampen the power of the pills.  

Which is what happened.  I got pretty hyper.  But I was also a little ill.  Not too bad.  But I didn't have much money, and indeed, when I ran into the anxiety, it was odd, but Colette called.  

"How you feeling?"  

"Hyper."  

I told her the story, what the doctor had advised.  "Mind if I come over?" she asked.  Of course, any time, any time she wanted to come to see me would be welcomed.  

In only 20 or so minutes, Colette arrived with a large tub of yogurt.  "Here.  You need this," she said.  I began to take the tub from her, but she pulled it back, pulled out a plastic spoon and fed me yogurt.  Exactly what I'd needed: someone to simply be kind to me.  Wow.  I was about to get all woo woo.  

I was in good hands with Colette.  And my cat, Loopy, adored her.  A good sign.  When Loopy liked a lady, I knew the lady had passed the kitty inspection.  

Nice to have a little good luck with a Lady Luck Cajun Delta Queen.  No pressure seemed necessary.  We just were what we were.  

Colette and I saw each other a few more times--then, per her sponsor, she began attending a group far to the north.  This is not to say she didn't want to see me.  I think she knew that, were we to continue, that we'd move too quickly.  We really did like one another.  Could we pull of the long distance thing?  Sure.  We met at the deli with various groups.  And then, the Bipolar pulled me away from her.  I began rapid cycling,  

In those troubled times for me, I could rapid cycle, serious mood swings unrelated to any reality-based stimuli.  I could go absolutely bat-shit crazy in a matter of hours, and then be like that for days.  After a series of those, the rapid cycling had literally eroded what trust that Dallas Central group had for me.  I was so overwhelmed at the time, that any thought of Colette seemed too distant, too far away, too out of the way.  Consumed by illness, I finally left Dallas Central in a series of sarcastically dramatic events I'd designed to show those high-rollers exactly what it feels like to be treated with complete neglect and disregard.  I doubt if any of those people have forgotten my editorial comments.  

I never did see Colette again.  I really don't know what was wrong with me.  I spun out of control for at least a year.  She may have called.  I don't remember.  Riding the proverbial tilt-a-whirl seemed like a second job for me.  

Colette was good juju.  She had the mojo.  A kind woman.  I sometimes think of her.  Years and years later, when a faraway friend in St. Louis published her second book of poetry, "Imagine Not Drowning", I thought of Colette and how I drowned, not over her, but over a serious illness that was like a hurricane that didn't stop blowing down every shelter I could erect for another three years.  

That chicken foot.  On her rearview.  For some reason, that's a memory totem to me.  Yes, she was definitely good luck for me during a desperate time.  While the fireworks were slow and unassuming, sometimes those kinds of fireworks are the very best.  Why is it so many people go for the real stadium-sized rocketry only to come to the sad realization as a relationship mellows that, no, big fireworks do not mean big love.  

The best love always starts slow--and with the kindness of a friend.  

  

Tell Me A Tale Of Sometimes Saddened Bodaciousness

How can anyone forget a real live Cat Ballou?  She was an actress, beautiful, just weird enough, often outrageously funny, a natural absurdist, a lady, of well-heeled background, a Houstonian, and most of all, Robin was, when I knew her, a sensitive woman who was being bullied by a Brazilian man to whom she was little more than a manifestation of his machismo insecurities.  

Take the time Robin called and asked me to attend a silent movie at a place called Club DADA.  The old , 1927 Fritz Lang classic in black-and-white, "Metropolis", a tale of a huge city divided between the owners and the workers.  A local postmodern hybrid of a band, popular at the time, a band named B. L. Lacerta, would be propped beside an indoor screen within the club, and would play a sort of soundtrack.  

Sounds fun, I remember telling her.  Most of all, I wanted to see her.  I really liked Robin.  Robin, I gathered, also really liked me.  In some ways, we were two weirdos, cut from the same castoff cloth: We liked upsetting apple carts.  In that regard, Robin showed intense professionalism, and that, of course, augmented her attractiveness.  

As in wow.  Was she ever lovely.  

I hear a honk or a beep outside.  She and her boyfriend are in the tattered asphalt lot outside the old apartment I laughingly called "the bomb shelter", mainly because the place was such a wreck, a wreck that seemed to have landed in an urban wasteland that had once been part of a sort of hippie hollow--before the rents went up long before I even rented there.  Her boyfriend: sitting like a statuesque hero in the drivers seat of a Jeep convertible.  Robin, who turned to flash her almond eyes at me, grimaced a little when I jumped into the back of the fast-rolling contraption.  her boyfriend?  He barely even nodded.  

Hence the grimace.  

Yes, he was jealous.  His jealousy seemed to betray (to me at least) his inability to see Robin for what she was: an immensely loyal person, a caring and lovable woman who, as chance would have it, had been lunge-leashed by a controlling man.  Muscular, curt, and often exuding an almost childish need to feel in control of all situations, perhaps he was the apple of all female onlookers eyes.  I sort of knew how that felt, but mine is a far different story, I gather, than his.  

We blew out of the lot.  Air pulsed in waves as the Jeep plowed through smoggy air, Central Expressway already a little too close to Saturday night gridlock.  At the time, although I felt emotionally drawn to Robin, I also chose to remain wary of crossing anything remotely connected to her relationship to the Brazilian.  

Thus, once inside Club DADA (he was already fussing with her), I decided to sit cross-legged on the floor along with the rest of the audience, including Robin and her "coupler"--only I made a point of sitting in front of the two.  A gesture of respect.  Nevertheless, the boyfriend seemed intent upon making Robin miserable.  

Maybe he sensed how I felt about Robin.  Maybe he sensed how Robin may have felt about me.  Maybe he simply designed to turn Robin into a complacent, obedient housewife type.  Ha!  I knew that'd be next to impossible.  As did Robin.  

This is not a story about any rescues of a damsel in distress.  While I knew Robin felt trapped (she'd indicated she simply did not have either the money or the job to allow her to gain her independence), I also had the good sense to not interrupt the flow of what to me looked like the decadent decline of something that may have felt good at the outset.  

Robin was solidly entrenched in the local bar culture.  Both she and I drank far too much for our own good.  In fact, this is how I met her.  One night, friends invited me to a local musician's house party.  Betty, one of my best friends, told me it was going to be a small affair.  Once at the nice home of the New Age musician and his lovely wife, a woman I'd met years before, I noted there were six of us.  That couple, Tom and Betty, and Robin--and me.  Likely setup perhaps?  I didn't take the gesture all that lightly.  I decided to sit back and see what the future was likely to say to me.  

Of course, I was high and drunk.  I was always high and drunk.  As Tom, Betty and the Skinners chatted, I hit the backyard: a nice, clean swimming pool.  It seems through blurry fog we all actually did go swimming.  But I remember how the woman, Robin, was already "drunk beyond recognition".  All I wanted to do was horse around.  

Meanwhile, outside a high wooden fence, a neighbor's dog barked incessantly.  The house stereo played New Wave, and apparently the barking dog figured that meant danger.  Protecting the fenced-in homeland, the dog--and I.  Ready to make an absurd gesture about dogs.  What did I do?  

I began running back and forth along the fence line, wildly barking.  I had everyone laughing.  I was a wild man imitating an even wilder dog.  Robin, prone on a chaise lounge, grinned.  She liked that.  I noticed.  

Thereafter, once again inside, as Kent, the New Age musician, gave us an audio tour of his latest piano and synth compositions, I sat next to Robin.  She seemed ready to pass out, and when she leaned into me, her head on my shoulder, I was somewhat amazed.  I put my arm around her and squeezed.  As usual, incessantly joking, I'd note Robin would snicker through the haze.  And the room was pretty dark.  That's when I put my hand down her pants.  

Whoa.  What an animal.  Had she resisted, I definitely would have backed off.  But her hand on my wrist said, "Proceed".  

Proceeding, whatever I'd planned didn't take long.  Robin entered Shibumi in around one minute.  Was this victory?  I kept quiet.  Robin drifted into sleep, still grasping my wrist.  

How's that for "whatever at first sight"?  In 1987, by the way, I was so out-of-control as to cause me some shame today.  My hobby?  Defying expectations, something akin to culture-jamming: I wanted to break through stereotypes.  I wanted to cut the butter.  As a fly in the butter.  Weirdly, enough, I often succeed.  I was more popular than I realized.  I'd had a few blow-out parties at "the bomb shelter", and strangers later, in bars, told me they'd heard about one--a party some claimed was one of the best apartment parties in Deep Ellum's countercultural history.  Quite a compliment.  Most of the time, I felt sad, alienated, lost, and worried about a future I could barely even grasp.  As a writer.  A poet.  And accepted for both.  

That's a longtime hurt that sometimes triggers me into a sense of exasperation.  In Dallas, if one doesn't tow the line of "rightist paranoia", one isn't about to get a chance.  That situation is especially saddening for writers and poets who choose independence over any kind of factional or partisan loyalties.  Dallas' big social club of socialites can be awfully harsh, commanded as they are by the notorious "Highland Park Housewife", a generalized image of "steel magnolias with money", women who went wild-angry when a local journalist produced a series of short stories featuring his impressions of them, impressions not altogether positive--and thus impressions to be excised from history.  Why?  

Apparently creative people in Dallas are either going to be lapdogs or outlaws.  I've seen the process far too many times to actually like what I see.  At the time, while rebellious, however, I was too politically naive and real-world innocent to have anything resembling "leftist affiliations".  Did that matter?  Maybe not.  I couldn't be a lapdog.  I am a human being.  Not a puppy who bends to the will of often less-than-literate socialites.  

Socialites, socialists, and social misfits.  What's the connection if not "social"?  

Best to be anti-social.  That was my take.  And take it to the limit I did.  

Betty: "I can't believe you did that, Gordon!"  Chuckling, she made as if to scold--as her husband, Tommy, giggled.  This is before high-fives were a thing.  

The next night, another party.  Cliff Martinez, a friend of the ladies of the Old Vic apartments, had a new, pretty cool space.  It was a sort of loft.  At the time, as artists scrambled for art spaces, sometimes those who had more money got the really nice digs.  Cliff is an eternally kind spirit.  We all liked him.  I still like the guy.  

I remember Robin standing on the other side of a bright, yellowish threshhold in Cliff's space.  She looked at me, and said, "I believe we have met."  

I looked at my shoes.  To be ashamed or not to be at all?  That was almost the question.  OK.  Robin's controller was with her.  I was safe, sort of, at least for the night. She and I were like two electrons, energy fields included, as we watched the machismo mind-meld with everywhere. Polite, I really didn't want to rock that boat--but I did want to rock Robin's boat.  

It's necessary to know that, 1985-87 was a milestone (or millstone) year for another relationship: the one Bipolar was having with me.  It's frightening to be beset with an emotional disorder you don't even know you have.  I'd known "something" was wrong for a good eight or nine (likely more) years.  I'd have what I called "fits".  No sleep.  Agitation.  Constant anxiety, and worse, deep depressions where I would isolate for weeks at a time.  Beyond all that, I was so overwrought with the poor self esteem that is an adjunct to Bipolar.  Then, out in outer space as it was, my awareness was often near zero.  With bipolar, one's instincts are marred.  And with Bipolar, one has either of two emotions: Up or Down, or Day or Night, Black or White.  Hence, I couldn't read intentions.  I could see the cues and gestures--sometimes. But all too often I misinterpreted them.  Lucky me.  This had been something of the case for my entire life.  

Good times, eh? 

Even worse is that I had been repeatedly traumatized as a child, the suicide of my father in 1970 being a real TKO that led me to see the entire world around me as rejecting me.   As I later learned, I'd had other reject-o-ramas along the way.  My mother, for example, was confronted with enough tragedy for a lifetime around the time I was born and very small: Her father--a vegetable after a stroke, in an iron lung for nine years.  That destroyed her family fortune.  Her sister--a lovely woman who had a nervous breakdown at 16 after accidentally running over and killing a little girl, right after her father had given her a new car.  And my father, a problem all his own--he had sexual issues no one knew anything about, and those were literally making him miserable enough to not want to live.  As Daddy saw it, he was nothing but a problem.  I have long wished he'd have lived to see some of the changes that ensued after the 1970s.  He didn't live long enough to experience a little release and freedom from the anti-liberty crowd.  

My mother also had panic attacks.  If Daddy didn't come home (she assumed he was getting drunk), he'd fly into a panic, shouting, waking me even when I was tiny.  And as many realize, small children feel their parents' emotions, and often blame themselves.  I know I felt them all.  Not too long ago, in fact, as my counselor and I continue to investigate the effects of both Bipolar and trauma on me, I've discovered that what even as a small six year old who'd been entranced by Alfred Hitchcock's TV show and "Vertigo", had experienced that kind of disorientation and confusion many times--I was repeatedly traumatized by in-home domestic shouting.  Stevie Ray Vaughn wrote "Caught In The Crossfire" about similar experiences.  This malady of shouting parents is not uncommon at all.  

My mother'd panic and yell--I learned to yell when panicked.  My father drank due to intractable circumstances--I drank when my intractable circumstances involved the Bipolar I didn't comprehend.  

Bipolar is hereditary.  My mother's sister, Helen, confused and institutionalized off and on since the Thirties, was seen as a schizophrenic.  She had Bipolar.  My mother's panics? Bipolar--albeit possibly to a lesser degree.  My sister--she has anxiety and is often a little emotionally isolate.  It's run a literal railroad track through my mother's side of the family.  Her father? He was a strong, warlike, and violent man.  Willful. A true fighter.  I laugh sometimes when I tell my friends that the family's "progenitor", a man named Jon Rives, served as William the Conqueror's Chief of Military Police.  I can only imagine the sheer brutality of that man.  To keep the Norman army in line.  Don't even think about the cruelty that must have involved.  Which brings up a suspicion: How many Viking berserkers were manic-depressive?  It's a thought I sometimes find interesting.  What makes a man wild-angry and happy to kill?  

I'm a peaceful man.  And a weapons violence survivor. I am pretty good at keeping my temper at bay.  Outlets for bad temper are everywhere.  I write.  I don't have to write mean things to drain energy out of me.  I continually work at stress reduction, and it really works.  

Back to Robin.  And another party.  This time, one of the ladies of the Old Vic had moved to a new, larger apartment, and held a housewarming.  I'd always liked Daun.  She's one funny lady.  She's now a comedian.  And deserves to be one.  Anyway, I remember standing with my back to a patio railing as I peered through a wide-open glass doorway of a bedroom.  Who did I see on the opposite side of that room if not Robin?  I decided to "make a move".  

Striding with casual mien, jauntily greeting no less than three of Robin's amazingly beautiful fellow actresses, I strolled midway into the room, and leaned against a dresser.  In minutes, Robin filtered to the dresser.  Then her hand crept into the space between our thighs.  The move?  I slowly slid my own hand over hers.  It was warm, and small.  

Suddenly, Robin grabbed my hand--hard!--and jerked it into the air.  

"Look what I caught!"  

Her friends were laughingly saying things like, "Throw it back throw it back!"  One of the most amazing meetings of bodaciousness I've ever experienced.  Robin said "bodacious" is her favorite word.  Boadicea The Victorious, I've later learned, was a Gaelic general, a woman, who went against a Roman legion outpost at the interestingly-named Camulodunum, and literally beat the holy crap out of them.  This British national heroine is from where "bodacious" stems.  

Bodaciousness was a way of Robin's war against the conventional wisdom.  For example, at a dinner theater, Robin played, I think, Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire".  What I remember most is when Robin, with a saxophone, practically takes the theater down with some of the loudest, most garish honking I've ever heard.  

Daun: "She got the sax from Johnny Reno!"  He is a reasonably famous leader of a band that was really popular at the time.  I still laugh as I remember Robin leaning way back and just belting the hell out of that reed.  

Later, we went to see Robin perform, I believe, at the area Shakespeare In The Park, in Romeo and Juliet.  That was after a number of strange collisions with Robin.  Not bad collisions.  Good ones, really.  

I'd asked her out.  For a Sunday morning picnic in Tennyson Park, a place famous for two things: the homeless population, and the high society golf course.  Robin decided to jog around the park, and when she returned, I opened my bag with the goodies I'd bought: strawberries, brie cheese and--what???--crumpets.  But when I gave her a pink rose blossom off a nearby rose bush, she started crying.  Poor woman. I know she was hurting.  

For one thing, possessor or not of an MFA in theater from SMU and University of Houston, Robin, as before mentioned, didn't have the money to escape what may have been a living hell for her.  And she liked me.  There was no way I would have allowed her to live with me in the roach-infested hole in the wall where I lived.  I did have a reasonably good job, but even so, I was drinking heavily.  As was she.  

We had a nice visit in the park.  But I was beginning to yearn for more.  Of course I was.  We'd generated real contact.  But you know: interruptions.  And I know Robin wanted to help me.  Of course, at that time, nobody, especially me, had any idea what was wrong.  Nevertheless, Robin "came to the rescue"--with a nice Chinese bowl with two lovely pills containing Ecstasy and a little heroin.  We drank beer, listened to Cat Stevens and James Taylor, and no, Robin didn't want to make out.  I think she may have seen this as a sort of medical mission.  One that failed.  

I now know X is not good for people with Bipolar.  Within two days after our all night X experience, I had a serious manic relapse.  On the job.  At an immensely powerful law firm, one top shareholder of which happened to be the head of the IRS at the time.  Not good.  I almost got fired.  I was in bad shape, and the office Human Resources director sent me directly to a psychologist--who prescribed Thorazine.  Was not allowed back to work until he said I could.  

My aunt with Bipolar, the Bipolar everyone thought was schizophrenia.  She'd been doing "the Thorazine shuffle", and I knew that.  The use of that drug, while it did clear my head at the time, also made me feel shame and fear.  What's next?  Terrell State Hospital for the Mentally Ill?  

This bit with Robin ended in a way when, the following summer, once the longing to get to know her had become too much for me, I managed to drink nearly a quart of citron flavored vodka.  I called her.  Got her message machine.  Said to the machine that I knew I couldn't have her and that I didn't want to live.  This was the first of a series of suicidal threats I'd begun making, something that alarmed friends.  

Then I passed out on the couch.  

Awake the next morning, I found a note pinned to my chest.  The door was wide open.  I'm not certain what the note said, but it was clear Robin had come running to help.  I don't even remember her presence.  

Whenever Robin came to visit (which she did subsequently), I told her to wait in her car and simply honk.  My neighbors, a nice pack of undocumented people from the outskirts of Guadalajara, included a couple of young men who'd hoot and say all kinds of nasty things to the women who came to visit.  Hence, in order to protect Robin from that, I had her wait in the car.  Except that time.  

A few years later, one of those neighbors, a really nice guy, told me, "That lady.  She come to see you.  She crying.  She love you!"  

Nice to know.  A little late.  But then, that lack of awareness had me shut down tight as a packing case at the airport.  

I did see her a couple of other times.  Always something in the way, something between us.  The last time I saw her had me drinking stone drunk in a punk bar called Loose Change, drowning my sorrows after winning $50 at the poetry slam across the street.  I was newly homeless.  Robin pranced in, looking bombshell and in a black tee: "Buy me a beer!"  Which I did.  And then told her of my sorrows.  

Interruptions.  Sometimes love is not fated.  This was no Dr. Zhivago situation.  The bottom line is that I had a really long way to go before I was ever ready for the stresses of a relationship.  I'm a little glad we had near misses--because, had we gotten involved, even toward the end, I would have been "hell on wheels", mainly due to the long aftereffects of Bipolar and trauma, combined.  

So much of that is now past me. Panic attacks sometimes do occur.  Sometimes those around me who haven't a clue seem to think those are hilarious.  After really unloading on a couple of doper friends of mine around 11 years ago, one did a "performance art" routine ostensibly about Quasimodo, the Hunchback Of Notre Dame, in part because I have a sort of William Barber stoop due to the same syndrome with which he lives.  

Robin, I hear, now is a theater professor at the University of North Carolina, married, with kids.  Sometimes I feel a little saddened by that near miss.  

It's hard to find people as weird as I am.  I know now I'm much safer among those who, as I used to proclaim during acid trips in the Eighties, serve as "my last link to reality".  

Yeah.  Me, trippin'.  I hope Robin is OK.   

Let's Dash Off With Some Cheap Notes About Outsiders

I remember ponderous ponders that involved me, pondering over what it might mean to be "an outsider poet".  Since I like to write, I figured that actually going meta- within the ever-ongoing progression of my critical skills, something I used to believe was important should the goal of writing well, or catching inspiration well, or simply being well be more important than one's status.  

Status.  Rhymes with stratus.  Stratus is a cloudy, January day, unlike this January day--which is sunny and blue, but as usual, hovering under a different sort of stratus: the blue sky.  Which isn't blue at all.  The blue sky is nothing but a trick of light.  Physicists tell us that.  

So.  What is an outsider poet to do?  Live in outer space where everything is either the absolutely black void or something like an entire planet upon which to, once again, place one's poetic outlook into the context of status?  

From total blackness, 

I don't think the planet is round enough.  

See?  I'm a big

critic.  

What then is outsider art?  I remember thinking about that one hell of a long time ago.  Since I wasn't quite professional enough to recognize how to get a poem into a literary magazine (which is often far more arbitrary than many imagine, most of whom, at least those I've encountered, still rapt under the belief that the quality of a poem is all that matters), I asked myself: Is this what it means to be an outsider?  A poet who can't get his (or her) work published?  

Maybe then the predicament slipped deeper than mere literary journaling and magazines of verbal or nounish ammo.  Perhaps being an outsider has to do with one's station in life, one's stance within a much broader context.  

That, once upon a time, seemed sensible.  

Look and listen: I've long felt I'm an outsider.  I'm someone who, it seems, has not yet been allowed indoors by those who lord the indoors as if only the indoors is where competency lives.  It's not as if I've been reacting against an amorphous "them" so much as looking for a context within which to place myself.  Context does not necessarily mean a status.  It's more like one's station, one's position, a point of view, a frame of reference.  From there, we move outward to where that station, that position, that point of view and frame of reference no longer makes any practical sense either to ourselves or to anyone.  

But how to express this?  Weirdly, I decided to post at least one poem a day on Facebook.  To me, this has been a sort of play on words: our faces.  If our faces are clean and spiffy, people will like us.  And though we can't seem to get permission to come indoors, at least we can smile and show all the others who've been so uncaringly tossed to the so-called wolves at the door that, nope, what has occurred just doesn't work in a world of reasonable sanity.  

So yeah.  Post poetry as good as what appears in big journals, and then say, "See?  This is what happens when you don't let good poets in."  

What happens?  It means the externalities of one's existence in context have become a matter of statement.  See?  Isn't it nice to live in the "electronic rough"?  

Ruff!  See?  We dogged poets can still bark at the house cats.  

Besides, having lived through a very real existence where life itself has seemed an uncertain prospect, or circumstances which have amplified this common experience, the day-to-day validation that, yes, I can contribute something to a virtual society allows me to continue to grow.  

Now I'm at the point where I no longer have to parade my very best work before the eyes of my valued peers and Facebook friends.  Nope.  I can continue to express my outsider status as long as it takes to convince all the insiders that their sense of high status isn't really so high after all.  

That, then, indicates to me that, indeed, outsider poetry is not merely a political event, it is also a spiritual, and even erotic one.  

Being seen as "third person objective" by many so-called insiders--professional lawyers who intimidated me when I worked with them, powerful individuals who wouldn't bother to give a pip-squeak like me the time of day, and even countercultural mavens who, while resistant to status, nevertheless proclaim their status as somehow "superior" in many arcane and even occult ways to those who are part of a greater culture.  

I've got a friend.  Without trying to point him out as if to humiliate him, I note he seems capable of overcoming the acne that has cursed his face.  He's a lovable guy.  He's kind.  Smart.  Compassionate.  And assertive.  Like many who are sophisticated enough to express an unwillingness to simply buy-up or gulp-down the generic nature of contemporary commercialized pop and rock music, that man goes for some really obscure stuff.  To him, this is a matter of both knowledge and taste.  It's also an expression of outsider status, subjective or not.  

Those of us scarred on the inside like burn victims understand what it must seem like to be part of the ever-stereotyped "walking wounded".  Pity.  So-and-so is a such-and-such and so-and-so is always incapable of fully fitting in.  So?  What happens to a suicide victim, a sort of orphan, a person who lived with Bipolar his entire life, a person who endured nearly five full years of homelessness in a deeply unappreciative city, who then experienced the horrors of leukemia?  

Welp.  He's gonna fit right in, isn't he stoner doctors!  

I remember only months after enduring six hard months of chemotherapy, a group of poets invited me to read one (1) poem at a sort of carnival that mixed poetry, music, stand up, burlesque and even an amazing fan dancer.  As we got ready, during the dress rehearsal, I sat down on a riser.  I was by myself.  Man.  I knew I was numb.  I was having trouble relating to the world.  Across the room, poets and performers, many of whom I had acquainted to a limited extent as a member of a spoken word troupe that advertised outlaw and even beatnik status; there they all sat together.  I did sort of feel "a vibe".  Why no one crossed the room to bring me into the circle seemed to be a two-headed Janus of beast: 1) people never thought of that; 2) perhaps this was a gesture of respect.  I felt like being alone.  Yet I also felt alone.  

During the actual warehouse carnival, the fan dancer literally blew everyone's minds.  She danced like a lithe live wire, and then, to top it all off, she used weights on the tips of her bared nipples to then rapidly rotate them as if propellers.  It was actually amazingly beautiful.  

Weirdly, I'd become an acquaintance of her in a "meta-" sort of way: She was the herbalist at a Whole Foods location near me.  I'd immediately taken to her as she aided me in selecting the best vitamins to strengthen me on the road towards surviving a near-fatal brush with cancer.  I could tease her--not sexually, but as friendlies.  She liked that.  I liked that.  

She was the fan dancer.  Thus, while I sat alone at a table next to a family of friends, especially their son, once the fan dancer bounded off-stage, she crept up behind me and gave me a hug:  

I knew it was you!  How are you?  

Surprised stares from the family next to me.  I still chuckle a little.  I knew her in the context of herbalist.  They only knew her in the context of a fan dancer and risque performer.  

How to make those two fit together?  

That was a fun night.  I'd written a short poem that, at the time, seemed to me to be a breakthrough: the first time I'd been able to write in nearly one full year.  I guess my reading went OK.  It did with me.  I enjoy it when I read poetry to other people.  Even if sometimes the political or social context within which some of the poetry I read in a political and social context writ small, i.e. literary society and politics, jarred some of the more controlling and muddy-headed personalities which generate much admiration for themselves by posturing and posing.  Sometimes, though, posing can be a sincere form of commentary.  Punk and New Wave both had a great admiration for posing.  And both musical and artistic forms sort of did what I was doing: using a pose or position in order to generate an unease in context of literary society and politics.  

How did I express that to an audience of relatively uneducated people?  I said nice things about them.  After all, I'd come for community, not to relocate my station to a much higher plane of existence.  

Why that disturbed the anal personalities, those who continually point out their so-called Alpha status to anyone who will listen?  What's that supposed to be in terms of humbly allowing oneself to be subject to the greater whims of inspiration and imagination?  A military mechanic's take?  

I rebelled against that.  I really did.  The machine.  Who needs a machine bigger than a laptop computer, a printer, paper, and a nice place like this to take notes?  At least the major dude had a motorcycle.  No one could sit next to him.  Only behind him.  Psychology 101.  

That of course was a quiet rebellion.  I didn't want to harm anyone.  I simply managed to do what I always do: put it into a different context.  Because in my opinion that's what poets are here for.  We have a destructive intent in some ways in that we question the machinery.  Nothing wrong with that--unless the machinery decides to make it hard on the so-called Person of Questions.  

Right.  A person of disinterest.  That's me.  I've been a sort of outsider all my life.  I like my solitude.  I grew up relatively solitary.  Being alone is not solitary confinement to me.  I have a great deal of freedom.  We can call that an imagination, but I also know a sense of expansiveness can actually walk right through the walls around us.  Which is actually fun.  

Is that outsider status?  What's my context?  Hell if I know.  After spending a good 10 years focusing on the craft I love, 10 years of devotion to expressing and developing a deep communication with both the written word and the spaces between words and even beyond those, I find that other poets competing with me on spurious grounds is nothing but static.  But oddly, being resistant to static is often reinterpreted as static itself.  

That's when the boot heels point you to the door.  

To where?  To the outsider.  Kerouac.  He was an outsider.  He lived outdoors for stretches of time.  He wrote On The Road in a tiny shack in Mexico.  He did nothing that wasn't outside the so-called pale.  The pale.  Where does such a word issue?  It issues from a vast territory on the western edge of Czarist Russia, an area reserved for Jews.  It has nothing to do with either white space or white people.  Some people seem to think "the pale" means "paleface". 

Pity.  

What bothers me, isn't that, as an old friend once quipped, we should develop a special store called Bed, Bath & Beyond The Pale; but that we sometimes meet with nothing but resistance when we even dare to come back indoors.  What's up with that garbage?  

You resist status all your life, and then, after one has become inured to what status seekers might see as barbarism or an oddity, what do you get when you decide to come back inside?  

Barbarism.  Oddities all demanding you leave the room.   Which is crazy as in "crazed plates", all those porcelain statuettes with a big chip on the rims of their shoulders.  

Outdoors is scary to the housebound. 

But am I making a bid for power?  Or am I posturing?  Perhaps I merely speak the truth.  I do my best every single day when I post an outsider poem for the entertainment of my circle of online friends.  Sometimes I hit, other times I miss.  But I keep all the first drafts.  I save them.  I wait until they become useful.  The better poetry I keep to myself.  

So.  When is writing for the drawer nothing more than literary masturbation?  Should that be trivialized or mocked?  No, perhaps it's a matter of training, training to not be too dependent on acceptance.  After what I have been through, the alienation, the nihilism, the sense of being treated like a stupid domestic beast of burden by those with more resources than I can even imagine, I have a right to train myself to not be wounded any further by those who superficially depend on their drapes, their wingtips, their social connections.  

Being honest is unfashionable.  It always is.