Here I am, more than a year later (almost). I am, miraculously, alive! And doing somewhat well. I have a new apartment –– renting for a flat $350 from a man whose past I once formed a part of. Five years ago, while attending UT-Pan Am, I talked to a man living in a tiny town in West Texas who had three children, all of them adopted, all of them living a perfect life of football games, Sundays in church, and trips to visit distant relatives. His name was Scott. After a couple of jumbled, awkward conversations, he was subsumed into the background of my life as I transitioned from school to home, from neatly stacked and ordered days to long stretches of tortured, amorphous time. And somewhere, last August, an e-mail from Craigslist showed up after a rough three months battling near-constant worry: “I’m a 39 year old divorced father of three living in the SW portion of Lubbock. I’m quiet and don’t make much of a mess.” So I have had to live with this man for almost a year, and have had the unparalleled privilege to a room to myself, a large, comfortable bed, and my own bathroom just across from it. A quiet place. No more awful, loud roommates. No more cramped dorms. No more contending with the uncontendable. Just peace, with added responsibilities. And no visible bills, other than groceries, to worry about.
Some people tell me I’ve got it easy, but then I always have had it easy. I just have a way with making things happen that make things easier for me. I am not sure if I am good at storming the gates of Heaven or just being really good with people. Some people might accuse me of being cunning or dishonest (maybe, but not necessarily so). Maybe I am just a good person and am good with people. I really don’t know. But one thing I do know is that I have a knack for making difficult situations easy, because I have had such a difficult life (really, a cheap apartment with air conditioning and food will always make up for a poor wood-frame house baking in the South Texas heat). My mother says I am just good at breaking bad situations. Or maybe just getting away from them, entirely.
Lennard ferried me up here in August. We left on the feast of the Assumption in an old blue pickup truck. Prior to that, many eventful things happened in the summer. First, and foremostly, I had to deal with actually getting the apartment –– that was tough for the first three months or so, right up until the last day of my vacation in Harlingen, when Paul and I had to storm the library for internet access so I could find a place. There I found Will, my old best friend, my old junkie best friend, and his wife, Sarah. I love Sarah and Will because they’re the last link I have in my old Valley-based family, a family that included Javier and many other people whose names have been left in the dust of almost ten years. But he hugged me and was glad to see me again. The news is that he is still together with Sarah, still working menial jobs, apparently still doing lots of hard drugs, but still interested in music, still horribly unkempt, still horribly interesting. Paul and Sarah always flirt and act outrageously. While we were there some kid apparently from high school recognized me and I said hi back. Funny how these things happen, reunions.
The next day I was driving across the vast expanse of Texas, some 14 hours progressively away from home and with each passing mile even more afraid of the future. I had no money, no idea of when my first rent payment would become effective, but had lots of faith that I would be seen through with income and lots of good times ahead. About four hours out of Lubbock we hit a flat, and there in the black darkness of a practically moonless Texas night, with 18-wheelers passing by, Lennard changed the tire and was in terrible spirits afterwards. When we got to Lubbock it was close to four in the morning and he was almost on the verge of not speaking to me for the rest of the trip.
After Lennard left things began to change. Within a week I had to go to the hospital because I got sick with my wisdom teeth (terrible abcesses), a resurgence of the horrible pericoronitis I got earlier that year, which almost sent me to the hospital. I have never experienced pain that horrible, neither in my own athletic performance nor in any injury I have yet sustained. To compound my destitution, I was taken via ambulance to the triage, where I was given a strong dose of ibuprofen and told to stay off of my feet, and there had to ask my friend John (who miraculously was out of bed and about to retire) for a ride home. I made it up to him by buying him dinner, and later, Shawn came by to enquire about how I was doing, and to return certain items I had left for him when I went home in the spring of 2010.
And then, something interesting happened. Once I was in school again, I stopped going. I didn’t care about going to school anymore because for the first time in my life, I realized how futile school was. I didn’t care because it was ridiculous to care, with all those personalities, all those incredibly different things to be involved in, all those pretensions which now seemed to me just problematic. And the loneliness ate me up inside. I wanted to talk to anyone and everyone in the world. I wanted to travel. I wanted to focus on just me. I fell in love with loneliness. It’s such a lovely feeling because it’s so invasive and yet, so not invasive. You have everything you want, if you can pay for it. A trip out to the mall (I live just a few blocks from the mall in a well-to-do neighborhood) offers a little luxe when one wants a new book. Paying for my first cell phone in years (wow! responsibility). And all the while, thinking (or pretending) someone is there with me, holding my hand, or talking to me about how their day is, or what sort of thing they remember. I remember feeling so alone and so blissfully at ease walking through Dillard’s, searching for a new pair of shoes. I liked that I had class, that I had anonymity. I liked the fact that I was alone, and that I was being looked at by handsome men, who wanted my money more than my attention, who wanted my time more than just me. I liked telling them, “I’m paying with credit.” It felt good to say that.
Life is so odd. The people we love, all so varied. I have had many many loves over the course of my life, some authentic, some not so authentic, some hysterical, some really, genuinely based from the soul. I can only think of the three men I love in my life with certain credulity: Cameron Davis, Frank Newmyer, Jr., and Scott Stallings. These three men are all different from one another, all with their own lives and worries. Out of these three I’d have to say the prima inter pares, the first among equals, is that little love, that budding, incipient love, that I have for Cameron. I have never loved someone as much I as have loved him, even if it’s from far away. I can only say that it’s because of that long, listless, endlessly torturous love that I’ve been able to survive in some way emotionally, even now. I cried over how far apart we were. Someone like that, someone with class, with verve, with all these talents greater than yours –– makes the world a difficult place in which to live. Someone like that makes you want to be someone else entirely. Someone like that makes you suffer. Frank is the great love of my artistic life because he makes me want to set fire to the whole world. Also someone who has a great many talents, who uses these talents to give meaning and bravely lives out what he wants, what he believes. How can I do that? Sometimes, I have trouble even getting up out of bed. How do you do that, honestly. How does all that fit together. And of course Scott, the great moral love of my life, who wants me to be me, like everyone does. But I am still learning –– I do not even know who or what I am. I’ve gotten lost in the loves of these three men, and I don’t know what to do.
So now, more than a year later, I am a little better off in the world, yet still beset by problems. I am facing an uncertain three months (June’s rent having been paid, I am officially out of groceries AGAIN). I am writing a new novel, the first serious work of long fiction in a while. I am trying to finish school once and for all so that I can move to Portland, Ore., where I will reinvent myself anew. And I am depressed. I pray to God, now, Help me finish what I have started. I am not a quitter. I will see this out and make everyone astonished as to what I have accomplished.
