ReGenesis
081510
7:31A
081510
7:31A
Watching Peter Outerbridge because he & his hairline & voice
remind me of who you might be by now --- not scientific or powerful
in the sense of this made-up TV world
but in the ways your pheromones are permanently branded on my brain
your scent, your clothes, that mixture of cedar wood and musty attics,
photographic chemicals, Marlboros and Camels, cheap weed and the occasional 8-ball.
And as much as I tried to lie to myself, the smell of men, goth-boys, whatever you could lay your hands and your needy mouth upon... as long as they weren't me.
Mommy issues, typical bisexual-man need for plump women who'll keep you alive and comfortable while you deny them their love, you take it from them, but they never get to feel it, they never get it back.
I wonder if, in the intervening 10 years, if you've ever grown up enough to let anybody truly love you.
I still wonder why you wanted me around (aside from the obvious ways in which I was “useful,” especially when some heroin-skinny whore or coked-out goth boy had rejected you and bruised your ego...), when you knew that I fully and wholly and utterly loved you, gave myself and my life to you, when I would have been SO much better-off if I'd been taking care of my NANNIE, rather than nursing you back from the brink of yet ANOTHER alcohol-poisoning episode, like when you abandoned me to go drink in the Quarter and I had to drive myself home on half-way decent blotter acid. And then the phone rings @ 4 or 5A, and off I go, all the fucking way across town, unrested and unheeded, to rescue YOU again. You achingly sing along with Vedder, about the dead girlfriend who never existed, y'all ALL have dead girlfriends, don't you? --- and you play-out the verbs of “Black” in MY car, dreaming of a woman who dumped YOU ten years prior.
And for 3 days, I blacked-out all the windows, called-in sick to work for you, fed you soft food, got you re-hydrated, cuddled and snuggled you on that old couch with the television sound a bit too low, I was your mother whore, a woman who loved you in all ways and was nothing but a convenient cunt on a couple occasions, and a mama to care for you all of the others. You never had the money to pay for your own beer, despite the fact that you made over twice as much money as I did --- but then you'd “find” a hundred bucks or more and go blow it on an 8-ball and disappear from me and from the world whilst you cajoled and regaled strangers on Decatur Street with the adventures you never had. You knew how much I hated cocaine, and I think that THAT was part of the attraction for you, because you KNEW “mommy” didn't approve, so when you can hurt her by disappearing and making her worry, when you can suck and fuck and do whatever you want with the magic-asshole-powder that you loved, you're thinking of me, at home, alone, or at the Dungeon or the Club, drinking to forget how much you didn't love me.
Even now, when I'm craving you like oxygen, when I hurt so badly from every possible angle, when poverty and the inability to pay ANY of my fucking bills gives me fucking panic attacks (it was so easy to ignore that shit in our twenties, wasn't it? If we each had 7-10 bucks, that was a whole night out, in the right places...), knowing that I will NEVER pay my own way, especially while I'm incarcerated in Crackery, Lousy-ana, I can recall every dime I wasted on you and on trying to love you, and still never doing or spending enough or being good enough for you.
But we grokked. We GOT each other, even the horrible parts that we chose to ignore, the lies and past-lives stories that never existed, we didn't need to finish one another's sentences because of all that never needed to be spoken. We could go six or eight hours, lying in one another's arms, or just front-to-back sharing the couch horizontally while the Simpsons and Ally McBeal were on, arguing about her douchebag ex, the married guy who still wanted her, and you always defending HIM. Yeah, 'cause OUR lives were SOOOO similar to a bunch of rich yuppie lawyers in Boston. There were plotline parallels, sure, but not enough to call it a doppelganger by any stretch of the imagination. Because I, unlike Ally, had and have (well, remainders...) hips and tits and a stomach and long strong thighs and big forceful feet and small but strong hands that tempted you but never truly held you.
I try not to be a hyperventilating drama queen about Jada, a child who, in three years, I've held maybe 20 times --- but I can't stop seeing the world through her eyes (ironic, coming from a hyperlexic freak, I know, but there it is), fearing the terror of becoming more alert, more aware, BECOMING MORE, and yet enslaved, chained-down by a body that is rapidly disintegrating and somehow “needing” that Terri Schiavo feeding tube. My worst nightmare, and even my paranoid imagination can't begin to grok or grasp the truth of what that baby is living.
If our “mistake,” OUR “child”/zygote had made it more than five weeks, Jon, I'd have kept it, as much as I hate breeders for all of the bonuses and incentives for them to KEEP breeding, mindlessly and selfishly. People who are not QUALIFIED to raise children and don't DESERVE the children that they DO get --- I would've been willing to be a hypocrite on that one score, to have see what the DNA Russian-roulette wheel/chamber would have produced out of you and me. Hopefully the brains that I had before the attempted-murder brakes-cut “oopsie” of '86, the potential that I was born with and will never see. Our mutually-mercurial mood-ring eyes, ranging half the color spectrum, depending upon our moods. I could always read your eyes, even if the lies went straight over my head, I read your eye color the way that I read the formerly-known-as-BeastMaster's evil bored-deep eyes from birth, so that I'd know when to go hide under the bed or inside my toybox or wherever I could get to... I read yours not out of fear, but out of hope, that someday, even if we were never the same color at the same time on the same day, that someday, somehow, I would finally see “true” love in them. Love, yes. Need, certainly. Even craving a time or two. Pain (though the veracity was never confirmed, nor the sources), aching, melancholy reaching back to a past that never existed.
Eric The Greek's sperm-shot made it just as long as our fertilized egg did, but I was planning to have it removed anyway. He was a douche. A remarkably well-muscled douche, after a couple years of less drinking and more work, but a douche nonetheless, and an intellect that, wellllll, not really worth measuring. Persistent, nagging really, until I finally DID fuck him, but after that, he split away from me faster than all the rest. I must really have been a lousy lay --- two years with you and only 2.5 couplings, and then a year with Closet Case, the lamest little excuse for a “male” (NEVER a “man), not to mention the 3 months with the Crack Whore, sex that I never enjoyed except for the foreplay, and then the animal would hold me down and fuck me raw and LAUGH when I couldn't even piss afterwards. How could I have been so stupid? Not to see it coming? Oh, I saw it, I just ignored those giant billboards as they flew by.
I tried to “love” them, some of them, a very rare minority, over the years, after and before you, but I never truly loved anyone the way that I loved you, you bony-arsed Irish-German redneck from Rome & Derby, NY. That mole on your wrist, that arrogant grin, the laugh that made me want to smack you and fuck you all at the same time. Those strong wiry arms, those bowed bandy legs that were SO perfectly-suited for fucking and that flawless, incredibly artistic, beautiful ass of yours. Nobody else saw my all-consuming attraction to you, even the two oldest “nieces” (now ungrateful, disloyal cows) loathed you on sight. Especially after your behavior towards a total fucking stranger bitch on that damned riverboat; they wanted to cut you & throw you overboard for trying to humiliate me in front of them. Similar behavior in front of them later resulted in a certain half-assed tattoo artist losing QUITE a bit of customers due to karma... Fuck that midget and the chihuahua he rode in on. It was a long time ago, though, that those girls gave a fuck about me, or about how anyone treated me. If you were to magically reappear now, they'd laugh and make jokes about how “perfect” it would be for me, how I “deserve” whatever you'd dole-out now.
On 9/11, I called all the fuck over Houston trying to find you, to see if your Uncle Ray in Shanksville, PA was okay, to make sure that the plane hadn't landed on HIS farmhouse (seeing as how the whole fucking TOWN is named after y'all), and the twunts wouldn't even let me TRY to find you. But after I'd called all of my people, the people who loved me back (or pretended to while I was fiscally advantageous), you were the one that I thought about most on that day, because I could not forget the man for whom you were named, Jonathan Raymond... Fat lot of good THAT did me. I'll never know, will I, and I'll never find nor see you again.
Because you don't want to be found, whomever you are now, ten years after you ditched, after I fucked-up your lied-to sugar-mama set-up, after Nannie died and you didn't give a fuck. Yeah, she hated you, she was jealous of you, she DISOWNED me once OVER YOU, whilst you were FUCKING ANOTHER GIRL RIGHT UNDER MY FUCKING NOSE --- she thought that the NYC road trip was FOR you, not MINE. Thankfully, Miriam's mother made her see that I really WAS just WITH THEM, and that you were nowhere in the state.
So many stupid, silly, facile memories. But dammit, when I ache, when I fear, when I need, why are YOU the first motherfucker who pops into my mind? Why does the smell of your sheets haunt my nose and my brain when I need to be held? Why do I remember those cold mornings, hiding under the sheets and sleeping-bag “comforter,” as we whacked the fuck out of the snooze button because neither of us wanted you to go to work? Not like there was any dick or head in it for ME, obviously, but just to be held in your arms, to absorb your heat, naked or clothed, was enough. Most of the time. I learned to settle and to treasure the small pleasures, which has basically been the format for the rest of my life. I took what little I could get, what I could scavenge from what you'd always wasted on others who used you like a rubber, I joyously savored the scraps from your table, and wasted two years when I could've been taking care of my Nannie, trying to pretend that I “really” had a life “of my own,” when in truth, I was nothing but a servant to you.
Yes, I blame myself, my neediness, my stupidity, my baggage and blatantly-obvious damage --- but I hold you responsible, too. You knew what you were doing, you knew how much and how HARD I loved you, and all you saw was a free ride, not a grown woman, not anything to be valued, not anyone to be loved, just more beer & cigarettes, please.
But my hypothalamus, my cerebral cortex, my cerebellum, they won't fucking give up the mythology. They won't give up the hopeful love in all of those excruciatingly-painful rants and poems that your rejection drove me to write. They won't turn loose of the infinitesimal details that gnaw at the inside of my skull like termites. The scent of your freshly-showered body, the smells of our sex, the texture of your skin beneath my kneading hands as I taught you the massage techniques that have undoubtedly kept you in good stead in the past 10 years, as I'm sure that you have continued to use them on EVERYTHING WITH A FUCKING PULSE. You don't just owe me that camera, son, you owe me a FORTUNE for the most-intense massages that you'll ever get, and the knowledge of them that you use on every willing body that crosses your path. But I still miss it. I still miss massaging damned near every single muscle in your lanky body, upon which my cooking packed a good 30 pounds of new muscle, ya fuck. I still miss massaging your scalp and smelling your essence wafting up from that thick, wavy, almost-auburn hair. I miss being spooned and cuddled through the night, waking up here and there, and before the days when you drew lines down the bed, you pulling me in closer, whether intentional or instinctual.
There've been so many others, before, during and since, especially since you had to rub all of YOUR conquests in MY face, I tried to keep up my end of statistics... but none of them ever loved me, even as a “friend.” None of them ever KNEW me, even the self-deluded would-be “pretty-boy” closet-case schizophrenic who made me hate sex. None of them accepted my body, my scars, the innumerable stretchmarks, my baggage, my damage, all of it, and then romanced me anyway --- not in SPITE of MY flaws, but because our flaws were almost perfectly-matched. I'll never forget that first night outta the spank tank, in my kick-ass dom boots and no underwear or pantyhose... Best 13 hours I've ever spent with a man or a woman. I still have that little figurine you'd created & painted, that you dug-out for me as soon as we got to your house, appropriately naming it “The Beastmaster,” your first gift to me, aside from the flattery and other pretty words that meant so little in the end. The corpulent little critter lost an arm somehow, in all my many moves, but I've still got it. I've still got the great head shots that you took of me, as if you were looking at me with eyes of at least CARE, if not “love.” I've got the tattoos that you were witness to, even though you never let ME see YOU get poked, thankfully only in the tattoo-needle sense.
And I've got the memories of how you were THERE for me after the Crack Whore tried to kill me, when you held me and held me and held on, so strong, but so... pained, to see what he'd done to me. That night outside the Dragon's Den, when you held me and grabbed my ass (“as a joke”) after you'd wrapped me in your arms and told me that I was “doing so much better.” Never knew how you meant that, but it did mean that you were, for once, paying attention, and I treasured that. You and that idiot phony Heckler being jealous of one another, even though I was ALWAYS “just friends” with him, and forced to be “friends” with you... nobody's ever been jealous over me before. Too bad that Heckler never really meant any of his friendship, he was just, as always, out for what he could get out of whomever.
So here I sit, long after losing the house that you helped me rehab (and THE worst electrical & phone wiring in HISTORY!), long after losing everything else, especially Nannie & Tater (you weren't a fan of teh Dick, so I doubt you'd miss him anymore than you miss me), and soon to lose Jada, and I wonder if you're still in Houston, or back to NOLA or somewhere in upstate NY. I don't doubt that you've finally “settled-down” by knocking some other girl up and probably even sticking around (unlike the daughter you allegedly had but had no contact with, yet another of those classic psycho-boy legends, eh?), as long as the food is good and she asks no questions as to where you go “out with the boys.”
I don't know you anymore, all I know is a memory. Millions of memories who will never leave me go. Like the day that you came through me as Teh Dick had tried to assault/intimidate me with that cast-iron finger towards my chest, as he'd done for over 20 fucking years, ONLY ON THE GIRLS, though, he NEVER corrected his almighty dick-extension, did he... and somehow, without there ever being actual tutelage or discussion, without you ever pushing me to give a fuck about karate, you were there in that room, that tiny utility room with me, and I grabbed that big manual-labor fist of his and shoved him clear across that fucking room, at least six feet, because he had NEVER expected it, had raised me all of my life, along with the F.U. and her almighty son-king, TO NEVER FIGHT BACK, to NEVER defend myself. I not only got the momentum and the surprise, I got the physics on him and surprised the living FUCK out of that neanderthal. Grabbed my soaking-wet/unfinished laundry, said a tearful goodbye to my Nannie, as they'd kidnapped her to West Redneckistan by then, so the only way I could see her was going to THEIR almighty fucking property --- and I hauled-ass for your house and ergo, The Buddha Belly, one of Igor's best laundry-and-food bars in the chain. And we shared the not-fun mushrooms, a big-assed cheeseburger, fries and the lot, and though I was still vibrating with indignation and upset, you sat with me, so close, and you were PROUD of me. Pretty fucking proud of yourself, too, I would imagine, but you'd earned that brownie point. Changed history, ya did that day, as did I. One of your few gifts that weren't five-finger-discounts or takesies-backsies, and one that I treasure to this day.
I never said that you were “all bad,” as you damned well know; you were almost always there @ the Dragon's Den, listening to me rip my heart out on stage OVER YOU, and how you stood it, I've no idea, but you did, and somehow, acted like you RESPECTED me for calling me on your bullshit. None of which slowed you down from hitting on little horse-toothed heroin-skinny bitches RIGHT IN MY FUCKING FACE, granted, but at least you had the balls to HEAR THE TRUTH, like it or not. And somehow, you managed to tag a couple of those little skanks, yet THEY left you on the curb every fucking time, didn't they.
Yes, I'd happily gnaw-off an arm or leg to get the FUCK out of this SHIT-HOLE THAT I WILL *NEVER* BE ABLE TO FUCKING ***AFFORD***, or to have the money to get the fuck HOME, subsidized-housing scams be damned. It'd be nice to feel like I actually have a “life” again, though I won't hold my breath. But whether in Miami, West Redneckistan, Crackery or Orleans proper, I still have to carry you on my back, no matter where I go. Maybe it's some stupid OCD thing of a hyperlexic dork who's never truly BEEN loved, not in the “romantic” sense (though I do think that I've snagged more than my fair share of platonic love on all counts). Maybe it's because I am such “damaged goods,” that I hang onto every tiny memory that I do get to keep, as they are so few & far between. Maybe all of this is just another wasted hour of transcendental masturbation... most likely.
But dammit, for the life of me, when I hurt, when I'm afraid, when I'm so fucking alone, YOU are the one that I crave. Like walking into that shit-hole The Club an hour after you'd left it, and trailing your scent like a bloodhound, KNOWING you'd been there and when, and how much you'd had to drink before staggering home, you really do seem to be, involuntarily as it surely must be on your part, permanently etched upon my shriveled, useless old brain. Thirteen-plus years since you first started flirting with me at the Dungeon, over ten since you told me to fuck-off and die... and I can still recall your voice, whether laughing, yelling, or us singing-along to Pearl Jam & Janis Joplin in the car (sometimes, we even hit the proper keys!); your smile and smirks and kisses; those gold flecks in your teal-to-mossy-green eyes (and that pale-mint HULK green when you were hungover, involuntarily outta bed, and pissed the fuck OFF!); the feel of your strong, artistic hands on me (and pouring tepid water into the well at the base of my back was NOT funny, dammit!); the talents of your lying, Irish-bullshitter mouth; all of our copious hair getting tangled on the same pillow as we slept (or didn't sleep...), so that we'd have to sit there and gently pull away, so as not to rip the other's vainly-treasured locks out.
But most of all, I miss you BEING THERE. Yes, I have many true, to-the-bone friends now, thanks to teh innernet toobs and years of online misadventures, but in terms of someone actually being in the room, and being willing to hold me when I'm weak enough to cry in front of somebody else (on the phone is easy, in person is humiliating and debilitating) --- nuttin', honey. It'd be nice if there were some non-shitkicker/hypocritical-”christian” joint to hang-out in, anywhere near here, but there aren't, so I will not meet people like that until I can get back to civilization. Oh, to have a time machine to take me back to 1997 Napoleon Avenue and to un-make so many mistakes, and to avoid all of the ways that you hurt me, so that these good memories, these parts of you that I still crave would have truly MEANT something TO YOU, TOO... Hell, to go back to 1993 WRNO would be even better, especially in a career sense, but then, if I'd never gotten screwed out of any radio jobs, I'd never have wound-up schlepping down to the Dungeon to make SHIT tips beating the snot out of idiotic fucking tourists, and you'd never have finally spoken to me, Mr. Quiet, World's Skinniest Bouncer. Ironic, or sick? --- that I met you AND Teh Crack Whore in the same place, my former “other living room” ? What difference does it make, can't go back and fix any of it or save anything from either clusterfuck.
But as I freak-out over illegally-high electric bills and phone/ISP bills that will NEVER get fucking paid, as I sweat my badly-aging tits off with the thermostat locked on EIGHTY, as my chirren, the formerly-tiny black balls of fluff who developed a FETISH for your stinky work loafers and who pounced on you every time that you came into my apartment --- as I watch them aging so quickly that it terrifies me, as everything around me continues to change in ways that don't do me a DAMNED bit of good, and I have no control over anything that I'd want to change --- as my life is ruled more and more by the fear of more pain, more spine damage, more nerve damage, and the IQ-killing fucking drugs that haven't been “fun” in ten fucking years... you, ironic or sick as it is, are the still-living comfort (well, I hope, anyway; not like I can hold Nannie's hand or call Tater on the phone, is it?) for which I crave.
Some days, it just doesn't pay to turn yer brain on at the fuck all, especially when you get lost in one of those dead-end labyrinthine wrinkles that always point BACKWARDS.
I wish to fuck and back that I had half the brain of the character “Bob” on “ReGenesis,” the Asperger's Russian who is so sweet, so real, so fragile and yet SO indelibly himself (the character; the actor Dmitry is THAT good) --- yes, there are good female leads on the show, but Bob's Asperger's is a helluva lot closer to me than those size-two young hotties. Plus, he was able to have ENCOURAGING “parents,” who WANTED him to succeed, and he got through a couple of PhDs with the SUPPORT of his universities. Y'know, in some mythical land where the Disability Acts are actually ENFORCED and ENCOURAGED. No, I'd never have made microbiologist or anything remotely that high-up the academic food-chain, even if my brakes had never been cut, but DAMN, what it must feel like to actually ACHIEVE that... I'll never fuckin' know. Nope, not trying to transfer to another flavor of pity-party, just jealous as fuck of a fictional character. As twisted as my attraction to this show is, I ain't ashamed. Hardly the first man I've ever seen on screen who reminded me of you, although a much more cultured, worldly, HONEST version of you that may or may not ever exist. Other girls may fail to see my attraction to you, but I never gave a fuck about that. Your adorable, if slightly bony ass was just fine by me, though Outerbridge's butt is a weeee bit more fleshed-out, if not quite as muscular. Can't recall the others who bring you to mind at this hour, but they're out there. Wish I knew where the fuck YOU were, out there, and up to what... *sigh*
