Ellen the Blue-Eyed Cowgirl Knew She Was Gay

So how this whole shit started was that Martha from my office decided I needed to go out for the Fourth of July, that my drinking alcohol all alone had become a problem and that the solution to this problem was drinking alcohol around other people.

This seemed counter-intuitive to me as, in my experience, drinking alcohol all alone was the solution to my problems and not a problem in and of itself. But Martha from my office was very insistent so right away, I suspected she had ulterior motives.

The bar on the northwest side of town was built to look like some kind of a big boat and the band played Jimmy Buffett cover songs.

Badly.

I suppose there may be no other way of playing them.  

A Christmas Reunion... of Sorts

I might have come across a bit crazy.

Maybe.

It occurs to me that I might have been well-advised to have just waited. Maybe not approached you and the kids while you were picking out your Christmas tree. Maybe not told you all of it right then.

Maybe not told you all of it at all. Ever.

And my speech might have been a bit… erratic, from too much allergy medication and those steroids they prescribe for the rash I get on my elbow, and you know how too much medication makes me talk in constant run-on sentences, and talking in constant run-on sentences might make anyone come across a bit crazy, right?

I also might have smelled like rancid meat. This was not my fault. I might tell you that story one day, too, but I didn’t on the day at the Christmas tree lot, and as it turns out, it was, you know, probably just as well.

You might think I looked like I was stalking you, kind of hiding like I was behind that tree. Watching you and the kids from across the lot. But I was not stalking you, and actually I was hiding because I didn’t want it to appear as though I were.

Maybe that plan kind of blew up in my face. I don’t know. Maybe you tell me.

Everything I remember about that day is dark green and grey.

But I do know it had to have been you who asked me. You must have asked me, “What’s been going on, Katy?”  You asked me, and so I told you.

Maybe I just should have said, “Not much, Dana.” 

Maybe that was the kind of answer you were looking for. But “Not much, Dana”  would not have been the truth, and so I told you the truth, and the truth involved you… kind of.

I told you the truth about Tarab. Now, Tarab is the panic-induced hallucination who comes in the night to crush the air from my lungs during bouts of sleep paralysis. And no, I did not have bouts of sleep paralysis back when I was with you, but that was because I was drunk and on drugs back when I was with you, and now I am not drunk or on drugs.

Well, I mean, yes, I was on drugs the day at the Christmas tree lot, when I was telling you this, but that’s different.

I told you what Tarab told me. I told you he told me I’m a maniac. Or, rather, in some possible future, I am like a Hitler or I am like a Pol Pot or I am like a Billy Ray Cyrus. I am so bad that people take notice, and they send signals back in time or somehow alter the past to prevent me from ever becoming this… this… this maniac that I might become.

I told you Tarab told me that they’re the ones who introduced us. Introduced you and me. Back in 2004, Dana. We did not know each other the first time through, but they brought you in when things got changed.

To domesticate me.

I am living the wrong life, Dana, is what I told you. They  derailed my real life to prevent me from living a real future that I’ll never live now.

So you might think that sounded crazy, that day at the Christmas tree lot, and I might even have agreed it sounded crazy – what Tarab said – but the thing is, what he said makes a lot of sense. What he said explains so damn much about everything that has happened since 2004.

Maybe Tarab will tell me more. Maybe I can find proof of all he’s saying – mistakes in the fabric of this fake life I am living.

I might have said too much, but you did ask.

And maybe – probably! – if I had not told you all of that, at the Christmas tree lot when I saw you that day, then Rachel never would have snapped this photograph of our happy surprise reunion.

And what a poorer parallel future that  might have been, not to have ever included this photograph: 

Flophouse #7 (Mauve)

It begins simply enough.

An old flophouse, too impossibly ancient to exist within the city of Houston. Three to a room and there are many rooms. How many is anyone’s guess. Every Monday you nail rent, $50 cash, to the front door. Someone comes and takes the money away but no one ever sees who.

The tenants get by however they can, food scrounged from dumpsters behind some of the city’s finest eateries, petty theft, day work competing with Mexicans down on Washington, but mostly it’s just death in slow motion.

When is My Brother Not My Brother?

I imagine that you would use the mattress I found as a mattress.

Is that a fair assumption?

That you’d use it to sleep on? For its stated purpose – a stated purpose maybe even appearing on that Do-Not-Remove-Under-Penalty-of-Law tag, if that Do-Not-Remove-Under-Penalty-of-Law tag had not been torn off this mattress I have blocking the entrance to my little closet?  

Yessir. Torn clean off and gone. Lost. It’s no wonder so many of the homeful view all of us homeless as criminals.

But I am not using the mattress as a mattress. It is doing me more good blocking the entrance to my little closet. And anyway, a mattress would only cramp my style. You cannot readily sustain a transient lifestyle if you have to worry about lugging around an enormous mattress from place to place to place.  

So I do not sleep on a mattress, in my little closet beneath downtown Houston, but that is okay by me. There is nobody here for me to try and impress.

I do not expect visitors.

I do not believe “MTV Cribs” will be popping by for a surprise visit.

Grunewald's "Temptation of Saint Anthony" (1516)

I am under no illusion that this is where the magic happens.

I do not intend to stay long, at any rate.

This little closet of mine beneath downtown Houston, I think maybe it was once a server room. Or maybe a place where they kept backup generators, back before the big flood of 2001, when they all realized that underground was a lousy place to keep server rooms and backup generators during a big flood.

When I push past this mattress, then I walk further up and I look out on an old elevator shaft. There is a truck hanging there – vertically – held aloft by something-or-other hooked to its rear axle.

This is how I gain entrance my little closet: I climb down through this truck. I bet the truck has been there since 2001, too, hanging. There’s gotta be a story behind how it came to be hanging like that. I do not know that story.

But what my point is is that it’s not all that easy to find my little closet, what with the elevator shaft and the truck and the mattress-that’s-not-a-mattress and whatnot. And that is why, roundabout noon this past Thursday, I was so surprised to hear someone on the other side of my mattress shouting my name.

“Katy! Katy? I know you are down here somewhere!”

The voice was correct. I was down here somewhere!

Now normally, a voice’s accuracy would not – in and of itself – convince me to allow the voicer entry. I mean, would you answer a late night knock upon your door merely because the knocker proclaimed, “The square root of 529 is 23!”?

I imagine you would not. Is that a fair assumption?

But this voicer who voiced the truth so unexpectedly outside my little closet was not just any voice. No, this voice was in fact that of my own twin brother, Anthony. Anthony, who also happens to be the husband of my husband, Aesop, and of my wife, Dana.

Salvator Rosa's
"Temptation of Saint Anthony" (1645)

This was an important voicer! So though my closet was not really set up for visitors, I pushed the mattress aside and I let Anthony in.

He had an enormous backpack packed upon his back.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” my visitor said. Then he handed me a carton of cigarettes. I do not smoke cigarettes.

“I know you don’t smoke cigarettes,” he said. “I thought maybe you might need them to, um, you know, trade for things or something.”

“Thank you,” I said because I am polite. I set the carton of cigarettes on a shelf.

Then I said, “But you know, I am not in prison.” This was demonstrably true. I looked around me. The Supreme Court would never have allowed the State to store its criminal humans in this manner.

“Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving!” my visitor tried again. Then he reached into his backpack and he showed me some food.

“This is just like the first Thanksgiving,” I said. “White man goes out into the wild and shares food with those who do not believe in the concept of property. Bring on the smallpox-laden blankets!”

At this, Anthony looked sheepish. He pushed the blanket he had brought me further down into his backpack.

We ate food for a little while. I was moderately thankful.

After we had eaten most of the food, Anthony said this: “We found your blog.”

He meant him and Aesop and Dana. He meant this blog. He meant “Lesbians in My Soup.”

“In your blog, why do you call me ‘Anthony’?” said Anthony.

I shrugged. “It is a masculine pseudonym I use sometimes,” I said. “After Anthony of the desert? … The fourth century Egyptian monk?”

My visitor with the blog-name “Anthony” shook his head. It seemed my brother – who had lived in Nepal for a little while in order to meet Tibetan monks – was not familiar with Western monasticism!

Salvador Dali's
"Temptation of Saint Anthony" (1946)

I said, “Anthony of the desert lived for many decades in a hut on a mountain near the Nile. Other contemplatives fashioned their lives after his example.”

Anthony chewed a piece of bread. “Christian monk, though, was he?”

I ignored my brother’s question. I said, “In art, Saint Anthony is famous for the temptations. Demons came to his hut in the desert and they descended on him. People at the bottom of the mountain could hear Anthony screaming. But he withstood the demons’ temptations, people say, and he kept on living alone on only bread and on water and on contemplation.”

I said, “So ‘Saint Anthony’s Fire’ is a medieval term for hallucinations due to ergot poisoning.”

Then I was quiet. We ate a little bit more food.

My brother stared at the mattress, which was blocking the entrance to my little closet. The mattress was dirty. Probably, it was too dirty to sleep on.

Finally, my brother said, “So are you hallucinating demons, Katy?”

Then there was a long pause.

“There are no gods here,” I said to Anthony. “There are no gods here, and there are no spirits, and there are no temptations, and there are no demons here.”

This was correct. I had never slept so soundly in my life! Saint Anthony of the desert could not have hidden so well as me. I knew that nothing and nobody – no matter how long and how deep they searched and searched – could ever find me in my little closet behind my mattress below the hanging truck.   

I said, “Why, not even the Devil himself could ever find me down here! Not even –”

I looked around my little closet. I looked at my shelf.

There was no carton of cigarettes. There was no backpack. No smallpox-laden blanket.

No Anthony.

I lay down and I slept.

I imagine you would sleep, too.

Marten de Vos' "Temptation of St. Anthony" (1594)

White History Month: A Needs Assessment

Yesterday kicked off another Black History Month, and that can only mean one thing: Today, there are a whole lot of white folks running around asking, “Why can’t we Caucasians have a history month of our very own?”

I think I’ve read about the need for White History Month three or four times on blogs this morning alone! Everyone seems very committed to the idea.

He has been waiting to party
for a long, long time.

Now, obviously, it’s always a beautiful thing to see so many people coming together for a cause greater than themselves. And in the case of White History Month, you know it’s a selfless act, because practically none of its public advocates is even taking credit for all their hard work. No siree-bob! Each year, they write long and thoughtful pieces and post them all over, on news sites, blogs, and bathroom walls anywhere and everywhere they can, but they always remember to credit their words to “Anonymous”…

And buddy, that is what you call selfless commitment!

Personally, I find it inspiring. So this year, I’m going to step up to the plate and rally the troops. I’m going to circle the wagons and mix my metaphors. I am going to put my good name and fair to middling reputation on the line.

Right here and right now, I – Katy Anders – hereby go on record and say to my fellow palefaces, “If white people finally come together, put our noses to the grindstone, and keep our eyes on the prize, this can be the decade when we achieve our greatest dream: to have 30 to 31 days to sit around and study history.”

Stumbling Towards Domestication

Somehow or other, I got myself invited to join Dana and the kids at her folks’ house in Oklahoma for the holidays.

Dana’d deep sixed me early in the fall, put me on ice over some ugly incident I can’t for the life of me remember anymore. But she thawed me out for Christmas, she dressed me in acceptable clothes, propped me up in the passenger seat and off we went to the land of Sooners.

Once there, I was actively encouraged to interact with the children, some of whom were very young and presumably breakable. I tried to go through the motions and wear an expression similar to what I’d seen other adults wear when confronted with tiny, underdeveloped humans.

“Awww, look at him… spitting up like that all over my sleeve… Adorable!”

I’m not sure it fooled anybody. The adults all looked skeptical the whole time – like they’d agreed to let the kids take turns riding a bear or something. That look that says they know you are not like them and they resent you for it.

Did they believe I could not see the looks they were giving each other? The looks that were like spelling out curse words in front a ten-year old who already knows how to spell?

Hasn’t anyone ever told these people not to whisper about the paranoid where they can hear it? It only gives substance to the delusions.

The weekend didn’t improve anyone’s opinion of me. “Aunt Katy didn’t have a mental breakdown on Christmas” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. Beyond that, it blew several days that could have been spent reading and/or writing and/or working.

But it got me back into the house, so roll out the “Mission Accomplished” banner. It had been a couple months, and no good can come of me living by myself in the long run.

Plus, now I can check “do the happy family holiday thing” off my mental checklist of things to do before I die. Bad sweaters, bad eggnog, and bad hypocrisy: it was all there, as promised, and in spades.