Tag: Pulse

How You Gonna See Me Now

I had something go a little viral (in a very small way) on Threads; New Year’s morning when I saw, after what happened here, that garbage “humans” were blaming “the border”1 for it (um, well actually it was an American military vet, bitch) and posted MTG needs to keep New Orleans out of her hellmouth and at last count, I was at well over a thousand likes and an equally insane amount of reposts–and no “libt@rd” replies for me to block, either. Now, imagine had I put that on Twitter (fuck you now and forever, Elmo, I will always deadname your shitty app). Would I have escaped being swarmed by right wing trolls? Probably not, which was one of the many reasons that helped me break the addiction to Twitter and delete my account. Sometimes I miss interacting with people there (Jericho Brown, for one, and other friends, too), but I do not miss the toxicity and the really bad takes from trashy trolls and bots.

The energy around town yesterday was very off. Of course we all talked about the incident all day at work–the clients, too–and the vibe that’s always there, even when you’re not paying attention, just didn’t feel right. I saw a lot of social media posts yesterday that were love notes to New Orleans, and the love notes far far outnumbered the disgusting bottom-feeding ones (see MTG reference above). And reading those, I started remembering back over the years. Not just the years I’ve been so blessed to live here, but the ones going back to the day when Bienville came up Bayou St. John from Lake Pontchartrain to the island surrounded by swamp alongside the Mississippi River. New Orleans has had this kind of horror before; the biggest mass death event for gay men until Pulse was the Upstairs Lounge Fire in the early 1970s. Hundreds and thousands died during fever season. There was bubonic plague during the Wilson administration, and a massive hurricane a few years later that wiped out entire communities. New Orleans has always understood that death is a part of life, and no one knows when Death will come for you–so live every day like it’s your last; squeeze every bit of joy and pleasure and happiness out of life you can because it can all go away tomorrow, chér. And I remembered back to that time I came here for my birthday in 1994, and an entire new world and life opened up in front of my eyes as I got out of the cab at the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann–and I’ve said before, the city whispered in my ear come live here and I will make your dreams come true.

I love my city, and it will do what it does best. It will mourn its dead and raise money for survivors and celebrate the lives of those lost in this horrific act, the way we always do. New Orleans will not stop being what it is or who we are. We held Carnival after Hurricane Katrina and it was marvelous, absolutely fucking marvelous, and exactly what we needed when we needed it the most. New Orleans will always celebrate being alive, and that’s really part of the charm of this city; not only do we welcome everyone we encourage and celebrate difference, and find joy in finding community all together. What will Carnival be like after this? Joyous but cautious, I would imagine; but as always, Carnival puts everyone into a great mood and we celebrate that we’re still here.

I was tired yesterday–didn’t rest enough I guess after returning to the gym, which I am hoping to do again later on today–so I didn’t get as much writing as I would have liked to get done; I did take Chapter One to over five thousand words from slightly more than three thousand; not bad for a working week. I am hoping to get through the rest of the original chapters this weekend (no college football, nor do I have as much to do as I usually do on a weekend, either, which is absolutely 1000% awesome. The drive home was an exercise in Security Theater; cops and police cars everywhere, and they’d closed off the CBD around the Superdome completely, which was a nightmare as the CBD is the area closest to the interstate–how many people get home from work–so maneuvering around stupid drivers and closed streets and blocked lanes was quite the adventure in irritation and frustration.

Sigh.

Also: I am sick and tired of white racists saying “it’s not safe!!!!” about New Orleans when what you really mean is “too many Blacks live there.” This usually goes along with some pious weeping about how much they used to love New Orleans back when it was safer…newsflash, K-K-Karen: New Orleans is as safe as it ever has been. When you were a child, your parents never talked to you about crime, but when precisely was New Orleans this paragon of safety? New Orleans was always a major port–and major ports aren’t exactly known for decorous behavior and peace and quiet. Was it safer when the Mafia ran the Quarter? When the Upstairs Lounge burned with over thirty people inside? When prostitution was legal in Storyville, or when New Orleans was the liquor capital of North America during Prohibition? Crime has always been rampant here, and this vile racist pretense that before desegregation New Orleans set the standard for law-abiding American cities? Hardly. Just admit your parents or grandparents didn’t want the kids in your family to go to school with Black kids and be done with it, okay?

I feel pretty confident that twink-in-barely-more-than-a-thong will trigger the puritans.

I wonder how long before this post gets flagged by social media puritans as “adult content?” Yesterday’s post was flagged as porn by the cosplaying Puritans at Threads–a man in his underwear is pornography; bare female breasts or some woman with an enormous ass in only a thong proliferate everywhere. Seriously–fuck all of the way off, censors–and think about the message you are actually sending women with your selective application of “oops, this is porn! Shame on you!” to shots of men in swimsuits or underwear, but okaying degrading and demeaning pictures of women every fucking day.

But…Facebook began as a way to rank and score girls who wouldn’t fuck Zuckerberg by a hotness scale, so here we are.

It’s a work at home Friday for me today, and we’re going to Costco later, after I finish my work at home duties. The house is in better shape than usual (thank you, day off on Wednesday and cleaning), so there isn’t as much housework to get done this weekend. My muscles are tight this morning, so I am going to have to do some stretching, and then head back to the gym tomorrow. I also learned something else about myself yesterday–I always rush through my workouts and get extremely frustrated if I have to wait on a machine. When I went the other day, I took my time. I moved through the exercises relatively quickly, but I did them all slowly, didn’t allow myself to get frustrated, and didn’t try to rush through it. And again, I realized I was so focused for so long on using my time effectively and efficiently and trying to do everything as quickly as I can that…it was much easier to get annoyed and frustrated and cut the workout short or something like that. This time, taking my time and actually feeling the muscles work instead of going through so fast that I don’t notice any burn until I am finished isn’t the best way to exercise. I also don’t have the anxiety anymore, so I also don’t feel like I need to get through everything as fast as I can because I don’t have as much to do as I used to. But the good news is my shoulder and arm do not feel any more sore or fatigued than anywhere else; in fact, it actually feels better than it has in a while.

Louder, for those in the back: clearly I should have continued exercising after I was done with Physical Therapy. But…I wasn’t in a good place for the most part last year, so it is what it is and I can’t change that now so move forward and remember. And also remember how good it felt to go to the gym and exercise in the first place.

I also started writing a synopsis of The Summer of Lost Boys last night, too–which felt good and was kind of fun to do. I also need to work on some short stories this weekend, run a few errands, and do some picking up around here. I want to write some today after work, and I think I’m pretty much done with the college football play-offs. There’s no one left that I care about watching; in fact, not a fan of any of the final four, to be honest. LSU already played their bowl game2 and so…who cares? It’s Gymnastics season now, and LSU is the defending national champions, so that’s very cool.

We’re watching Cross, which we’re enjoying; we also finished Hysteria! earlier this week, and it was a lot of fun.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a terrific Friday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later today; one can never be certain.

  1. They still are blaming illegal immigrants despite the fact the killer was born and raised here and was a veteran of our military! They are quite literally the fucking worst humans ever born. The next four years are just going to be a shit show. ↩︎
  2. They did win, by the way, beating Baylor 44-31. ↩︎

Take It on the Run

It has been seventeen years, more or less, give and take, since it happened and my life–and my worldview–went through a significant change.

It’s weird how it sneaks up on you when you aren’t expecting it, isn’t it? In the weeks leading up to Memorial Day I am vaguely aware of a sense of unease and discomfort, a feeling like some sort of impending doom is waiting for me just over the horizon. I’ve noticed in recent years that times and date have little meaning to me; at my day job every form I fill out requires a date–month, day, year–over and over again, and this constant use of dates makes them seem to lose their meaning as I write them down, recording them by rote; sometimes glancing up at the display on the telephone mounted on the wall above my working table to remember when my brain seizes up–as it is wont to do from time to time–and the date slips out from my short-term memory and cannot be retrieved by the processor. These meaningless days continue passing, recorded on form after form after form, until one day a date I am recording catches me off guard and I am startled by the rapid passage of time and think something like my God, next week is Paul’s birthday or next week is our anniversary and so forth.

And yet every May, without fail, as I go through the motions of my day to day life and run my errands and put gas in the car and make meals and clean up and work with my clients and try to make it to the gym, I forget about Memorial Day looming in the future, just around the corner, up ahead, waiting to land like a sucker punch in the solar plexus when I am least expecting it to happen. Is it a protective thing, I wonder, my subconscious pushing the memories deep into the darkest corners of my brain, to keep me from reliving some of the darkest hours and days of my life? I’m not sure–and the weird thing is that somehow I am vaguely aware. The memories don’t get pushed back into the cobwebby recesses completely, because I always, inevitably, feel unsettled every May, vaguely off-center, knowing there’s something back there I don’t want to remember, and it makes me tense, stressed, anxious.

And then, between episodes of a show we were streaming (The Drowning, on Acorn or Britbox, I cannot remember which) I got up to make garlic bread as a snack. As I sliced the loaf of French bread to spread the garlic butter paste on to broil in the oven, Paul was telling me about how crowded the Quarter had been on Friday afternoon when he’d gone down there to get his haircut. “It was more crowded than it would usually be before the shutdown,” he said with a shudder, “and all I could think was how awful it seemed.” I agreed with him, expressing that I had little to no desire to ever go out in the Quarter again–while thinking ah yes, you have become the tired old man you always feared you would–when Paul laughed and said, “Well, it’s not like Memorial Day is my favorite time to go out and do anything” and I laughed and kept spreading the paste on the bread as the memories and realizations all came flooding back to me; why I have been so tense and anxious lately; why I was so desperate to get my Xanax prescription refilled (telling myself it was because I needed them to sleep) and WHY I had been unable to sleep in the first place; why there was so much tension and so many knots in my neck, shoulder and back; why I have been unable to focus and why it has felt like I’ve been living under a dark cloud of looming depression for so long.

Memorial Day weekend, 2004, and that horrible phone call that Sunday morning, that Paul was at the emergency room at Charity Hospital and all that ensued from there.

I’ve only written about what happened that weekend once; in the wake of the Pulse massacre, that horrible morning in 2016 when I woke up to the horrible news and sat, glued to my computer screen, refreshing social media and new sites and worrying about my friends and acquaintances in Orlando to check in, so that I would know they were alive. Pulse was horrifying in and of itself, without it being a triggering event for me personally; watching those friends and family outside the bar in the morning hours in Orlando, terrified and wondering if someone they loved, someone they knew had been inside Pulse that night and hadn’t yet heard from, was alive or dead. I’ve never felt that the story of Memorial Day weekend 2004 was mine to tell; as I said to a friend recently, as we talked about the HBO show It’s a Sin and how deeply it affected me, “I’ve never written about my own experiences during that time because I was a survivor and a witness, and to me, writing about it and making money from it seemed wrong to me somehow.” Part of this mentality–which is probably wrong, but I can make a rational case for it from either point of view–comes from being raised to keep personal pain private; I’ve always called it ‘bleeding in public.’ I’ve never wanted to be seen as a victim; I’ve never wanted to publicly dissect my pain for others to see, comment on–especially to belittle or demean.

We survived it, and isn’t that the most important thing?

I’m not sure that I’ve ever really processed it all; dealt with it properly and adequately. I saw a therapist for a few years, and obviously we discussed all of my traumas, all the PTSD from everything I had experienced, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever faced it, dealt with it, handled it. I wrote a short story about it once–“A Streetcar Named Death”–and of course I wrote that blog entry after the Pulse massacre.

But now as I approach sixty–only a few more months–I find myself wondering, about all of the pain and trauma of the past, and whether I have dealt with it in a healthy manner, and if writing about it, which is how I inevitably deal with almost everything, is the way to go with it?

I don’t know. But…I can’t help but feel that I need to; that somehow, despite whatever blowback and snark might come from doing so, that it will finally help me to deal with it and maybe–just maybe–Memorial Day weekend can go back to being what it used to be for me, and I can finally be free from it all.

True Colors

I wrote this entry two years ago, in the wake of the Pulse shootings.

06/16/16

The phone ringing woke me up that morning.

I sometimes wonder if that is when my aversion to the telephone really began; I’ve always blame my dislike of telephones on jobs that involved a headset and taking phone calls. But I can remember, before that Sunday morning, always answering the phone; I never screened calls. I always checked the voice mail the moment I got home and called people back right away. Now, the ringing of the telephone, any phone, grates on my nerves and tears at my subconscious. So maybe that was it; I cannot say for sure because my memory is foggy and I’ve learned, far too many times, that my memory has lied to me.

But the phone was ringing as I woke up, and as I started to sit up in bed I seemed to recall hearing it ringing earlier, in my sleep; aware of it but too asleep to get out of bed. But this time it woke me, and as I considered ignoring it and going back to sleep, I noticed on the alarm clock that it was nine in the morning…

…and Paul wasn’t home.

As I put on my glasses and slipped my shoes on and ran over to the phone, I remember the number on the caller ID was one I didn’t recognize; UNKNOWN CALLER with no number. I picked it up and said “Hello?”

“Is this Greg?” asked a very small, quivering female voice.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this but Paul is on his way to the emergency room at Charity Hospital,” she went on.

I sat down in the desk chair and listened to her tell me the story, hiccuping and crying and trying to keep her voice steady. I listened, not entirely sure this was really happening to me, hoping that I was asleep and this was a bad dream, as she told me how she and her roommate, both waitresses, had gotten off work and decided to stop by Verti Mart and get something to eat on their way home from work. They were on bicycles, and they were both college students, I think she said at Tulane. She told me how they were standing at the counter, deciding on their order, when they saw a lone guy walking by himself on the sidewalk across the street. As they watched, a white van pulled up to the corner, five guys jumped out and attacked the guy, punching and kicking him and screaming at him even after he went down. Her friend shouted at the store clerk to call the police and the two girls, college students, ran outside screaming. The guys jumped back in the van and took off….with the girls getting on their bicycles and chasing after them, trying to get their license plate number, to no avail. When they finally realized they weren’t going to get close enough to seem the plate number, they went back and stayed with him until the police and the ambulance came.

“He just kept saying you have to call Greg, please call Greg,” she said, finally starting to sob. “I’m so so sorry, I don’t know if he’s okay. I just know they took him to Charity Hospital, and he told me the number to call, he made me promise I’d call.”

I said thank you, thank you very much, and didn’t think to get her name or her phone number or any of her information, which I regret to this day.

I hung up the phone, and knew I had to get to the hospital.

I know at some point as I brushed my teeth and put on clothes, I was aware that I was going into shock. It was the first time in my life I’d ever heard my heartbeat in my ears, and I had no peripheral vision, and I couldn’t really hear anything. It was a very very strange feeling; I don’t remember every feeling that way before, or experiencing anything like it (I may have, but as I said earlier, my memory lies to me). I was shaking, and I knew I couldn’t drive.

So I called my best friend, who answered the phone the way he always did whenever I called him, cheerfully, “Hey whore!”

“Um, I need a favor. Paul’s at the emergency room and I don’t think I can drive. Can you come pick me up and take me?”

“I’ll be right there.” He hung up.

Charity Hospital was enormous. It’s still there, even though it’s not longer open. It became, of course, notorious after Hurricane Katrina, but before then, it was one of the top trauma centers and training hospitals for emergency trauma in the country. I vaguely remember sitting there in the emergency room waiting area, on those hard wooden benches that were so like church pews, while people were being brought in and rushed past, as other people sat there around us, worried, crying, some screaming every once in a while in pain while they waited to be taken in to see a doctor. It was surreal, and again it felt like something I wasn’t actually experiencing but was happening to someone else. I felt like I was out of my own body, watching.

And then finally they called my name.

A nurse led me back into the triage area, I guess it was called, I don’t know. On television emergency rooms always seem to be big rooms with sheets or dividers up separating the areas, but at Charity they actually had rooms. As the nurse led me back, she told me they were about to take him into surgery, and the surgeons would explain everything to me before I was taken in to see him.

All this time I didn’t know what was going on, and had been hoping it was something minor; a broken arm, a concussion, ribs, something where I’d be able to take him home.

Surgery. They were taking him in to surgery.

“He’s been given pain medication so he’s also going to be kind of out of it,” she said gently, and I will never forget her squeezing my arm when she said it.

She led me to a door–it was big and wooden and there was one of those small windows set into it at about eye level, with crisscrossing mesh wires set in the glass, where two men in scrubs were waiting for me.

In a low voice one of them, who had a Japanese last name, explained to me that he had sustained a lot of cuts and bruises but nothing serious; they had examined him and there was no concussion or internal damage. “But his eye–” he hesitated for a moment. “His eye was damaged.”

“His eye?”

The nurse was holding my arm still and she gave it another squeeze.

“Think of the eye like a grape,” he said softly. “If you put a lot of pressure on one side of a grape, it will explode out the back side. That’s what has happened to his eye. We’re going to try to save it.”

I think my knees buckled a little bit at this point, both in horror and relief; relief that it wasn’t something life-threatening, horror that his eye may have been destroyed.

The doctor also took me by both arms and looked me in the face. “He wants to see you. But you need to be prepared. It looks really bad. The surgery will also take a couple of hours. Once we take him in, you should just go home and relax, take care of things. Waiting here won’t do you any good, and just come back in a couple of hours. We’re going to take very good care of him, but if we’re able to save his eye, the recovery is going to take a really long time…and the psychological trauma can take even longer. You’re going to have to be strong for him.”

I nodded, and the nurse led me inside. Paul was lying on a hospital bed and when he saw me he just kept saying, over and over again, in a broken voice, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

My heart broke. His eye…even now I can’t describe what that looked like. He was covered in dried blood. I just kept saying it was okay, everything was going to be okay, and then it was time for them to take him into surgery.

I felt so helpless. It was the most horrible feeling in the world, when someone you love is suffering and in pain and there’s nothing you can do to make it better.

The nurse handed me a clear plastic ziploc bag with his clothes and shoes inside of them.

They were soaked in blood.

I had Mark take me home. I don’t really remember the drive back home, I don’t really remember anything. I know that I didn’t break down until I was safely inside my apartment, and I sat on the couch for a really long time holding the bag of bloody clothes before I remembered that, no matter how much I wanted to wallow in it, I had to be strong.

I had to call his mother.

I had to call his boss.

I had to let friends know what was happening.

I know I did all of those things, but I don’t remember that afternoon very much. I just know that I kept calling Charity Hospital to find out if he was out of surgery but every time I called, I went into a nightmarish phone tree that I couldn’t figure out how to navigate, and finally I called a cab and went back.

Charity Hospital was enormous, as I said before, but one of the things that was really strange was I wasn’t able to find a reception desk, anything, anywhere, where I could find someone, anyone, to tell me anything.

There were phones in some places where you ostensibly could call for information, but a recording answered and I was too upset, too numb, to be able to figure out their phone tree system inside the hospital anymore than I had been able to at home.

I wandered around Charity Hospital looking for anyone for what seemed like hours.

Finally, I just sat down on the floor near an elevator bank, buried my face in my arms, and started sobbing in frustration and grief and pain.

Then someone knelt beside me and asked, in a very kind voice, if I was okay.

It was a nurse, a young African-American man with braids, and I sobbed out that my partner had surgery and I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t know how to find him and I couldn’t find anyone to ask.

He got me up, took me to a lounge, bought me a bottle of Coke from the machine there, dried my eyes, and made some calls. “He’s still in surgery,” he finally said, sitting next to me again. “I can take you up to the waiting room for that surgery. I’m so sorry.”

And he did, and he talked to the nurses on the floor, who came and checked in with me every half hour, making sure I was okay, making sure the television in the waiting room was on something I didn’t mind watching, or asking me if there was something else I’d rather watch.

They were so unbelievably kind.

This was before everything changed, you know, when I’d heard horror stories about how gay couples weren’t allowed to see each other in hospitals and how badly we were treated.

This was Charity Hospital in a state so red it practically glowed; yes, it was New Orleans, but it was also a city where my partner had just been beaten badly for the crime of walking while gay.

And they couldn’t have been nicer to me.

Finally, at ten o’clock, a nurse came to tell me he was now in the recovery ward, and she took me to see him. His head was bandaged but they’d cleaned off all the blood. He had tubes hooked up to him and monitors, but he was breathing, he was asleep.

I leaned over and kissed his forehead.

The recovery ward nurse told me I could stay if I wanted to, but she added that I’d be better off going home and sleeping in my own bed. “He’s going to need you to be rested and strong for him,” she said, rubbing my arm, “and so you’re going to need to make sure you take care of yourself. Will you promise me that? That you’ll take care of yourself? Because he’s going to need you.”

I nodded. “I don’t want to lose him again.”

She gave me her card, and wrote her cell phone number on the back. “I will call you and let you know where we’ve moved him, once he’s ready to be moved out of here. But you keep this card, and if you have any questions or anything to worry about, you call me any time. I’m so sorry you couldn’t find him earlier.”

I sat with him about an hour, and then I went home in a cab.

It was the longest and definitely one of the worst, days of my life.

I have never told this story publicly before, and I do not tell it now to try to make the Orlando tragedy about me. But what happened last Sunday wounded me very deeply, and dredged up a lot of these memories. As I tried to avoid social media, the news, etc., as much as possible–but you never really can–because of the arguing, the nastiness, the absolute viciousness, the attempts to erase the sexuality of the victims, and so on…I started thinking about what I personally have been through.

Paul wasn’t saved by a ‘good guy with a gun,’ he was saved by two brave college students–girls--who saw something wrong happening and did something about it even though those five assholes could have turned violence on them.

Two girls whose names I never knew, but to whom I will always be grateful.

And I also realized that in not telling my story of that awful day, that I was also being complicit. Complicit in not letting people know what it’s like to be gay in America, even in a tolerant city like New Orleans: that we are always at risk, we are always looking over our shoulder, we never can feel truly safe.

Ever since that day I have always, always made sure I was aware of my surroundings, of who was where and doing what. I observe and I watch, no matter what else I am doing, when I am out in public. I do it in the grocery store; I do it in the CVS; I do it when I am walking in the Quarter.

Tonight I have to go do bar testing, and it’s Pride Weekend in New Orleans. I’m not afraid; I have never been afraid. Being aware that you’re a target doesn’t make you afraid, but it means you just have to always pay attention and never let your guard down.

I never wrote about that day because Paul was the victim, not I; because it was Paul’s story to tell rather than mine. But I also realized that it is also my story.

The recovery for both of us from that day took a long time to heal, both physically and mentally. Reading the news reports about Orlando, paying attention to what was going, what had happened, the grief, made me realize that it’s still there, buried deep inside my soul.

My life changed that day. I changed. I am aware of some of the ways I’ve changed, but at the same time I also know I’ve changed in ways that even I may not be aware of. I didn’t write this for sympathy. I didn’t write this to try to make the tragedy about me. My heart breaks for everyone in Orlando. Even now when I run across things on my feed, stories of the survivors, stories of the dead, I can start crying again–so I try to limit my time on social media.

Orlando made us all change, I think. I think for the first time many people realized, maybe just a little bit, of what we as LGBTQ Americans go through, experience, on a daily basis; what it is like for us to live in a society and a culture where some people want us to die and celebrate our deaths.

Maybe things can change now. As I said the other day, I always try to make sense of the senseless; hope that things happen for a reason.

I just hope that those who died so horribly last Sunday morning, those whose last hours of life went from happiness and celebration to horror and fear–I hope that their deaths will mean something to this country, that their awful deaths weren’t just another statistic.

They are all at peace now.

May they never be forgotten.

I am posting this picture of two of the victims, a loving couple who hoped to be married but whose families will now bury them together, in a happier time, so that I, too, will never forget.

515769_300

May none of you ever be forgotten.