Steele

          Steele could feel history in the hands touching his face
 repeating themselves.

They touched his body without touching him.

  A kind of hollow indulgence Steele had become accustomed to

 in his marred, drunk mind

 which he had long ago permitted to thrive in the absence of 

true affection.

  Both could not recall the others name

 but remembered how to unbutton pants with one hand

 and unbutton with the other

 the shirt of their nameless partner.  

          Steele met this one after finishing a 2 am. meal
at Little Orphan Andy's Diner

 chicken fried steak being his favorite meal 

 Little Orphan Andy's being the only diner
in the Castro still serving it after midnight.

  He went threw the kitchen down a small flight of stairs

 to the bathroom

 unaware that a virile Indian man was quick behind him.  

         "Sorry I didn't see you there,"  said Steele

 they both reached for the once copper door knob

"you can go first." 

          They looked each other up and down

 after a short time deciding to go in together

 to leave together

   to sleep together.  

          When they finished

 the caramel colored man was fast asleep

 leaving Steele sitting on the strangers bed

 the only light coming from a dim lamp on the edge of a night stand

 which casted a red loneliness on the walls and on his skin.  

He could see hand prints on his torso

 stamped with warming lube

 he pretended for a moment that the lingering sensation was a real hand

 extending a warm touch.  

          Finding himself in these types of situations often

 Steele would pass the quiet hours in which sleep never came

 picking out nicknacks tenderly placed about the room

 by the strange men who invited him in.

 He looked for a long time at a picture frame

 beneath its glass a photo of the sleeping man snoring beside him

he was standing next to an old woman 

dressed in traditional Indian garb

.

          The woman bore a bendi on her forehead

 her hair turned gray by sun

 thinned by age

her teeth fiercely perfect

 broke from a smile backed with a lifetime of love

for the man which her arm rested upon.

  Steele noticed in the picture 

that the man sleeping next to him

 was slightly older than the one in the photograph

 his jaw line less jagged and more plump.

  He imagined the old woman to be the man's grandmother 

that the picture was taken during a religious ceremony.  

Pulling from his memory

 the sounds of Indian music he had heard in Bollywood movies

 and Indian restaurants

  he imagined himself there dancing with the women 

behind the two smiling faces. 

          Steele also noticed that by an old oak desk in the corner

 scattered on the wall it faced 

were hundreds of sticky notes with English words and their definitions

 written on them in fantastic swirls of handwriting not from this country.

         

       One of the sticky notes read;

         Withdrawal:
        noun
           removal; retraction.

          Steele carefully and quietly dressed himself before sitting at the oak desk.

  By red light and the sounds of snores 

 morning street cars passing by a dawning window

 he picked up a Hindi-English Dictionary

 resting on a pile of unread male. 

Translating the words "thank you, goodbye" 

the best he could into Hindi, on a blue sticky note.

          When he had finished writing the note reading,  

"शुक्रिया नमस्ते," 

Steel stuck the note to the photo of the old woman and let himself out.

          

Not a sound was made.

Time Difference

I do not like
being at the mercy of telephone rings,

counting them, knowing after enough of them,

I will not speak to him before sleep.

There is a time difference.

Even though I have not a speck of an idea what it is

that I am doing with him, seeing as how he lives 

1,500 miles away in a town I ran
1,500 miles away from,
I call.

At times, growing in regularity, I find myself reaching

for the towel of relief.
Relief from the ravaging of my brain for an answer

that is buried in a small crevasse in my heart,
which knows exactly what it is I am doing with him.

That small crevasse has a small stream, where there 

was once a canyon, and before it became dry,

it was filled with waves of youthful whims, 

the current of which was strong enough and 

far reaching enough, to have once carried me 

from Kansas City to Chicago.

People tend to dry out when exposed to already parched hearts,

and mine has nearly dried in my pursuit of a solitude.
I found it.

But there is a small fissure in my heart

and in it a dying stream,

and sometimes he fills a bucket 

and pours himself into that stream,

and I for him.

That stream,

it knows the answer
but I do not.

Sidewalk Santa

           Business men read their morning paper, folding them like tacos, sardined against each other in the train car.  No one is without head phones not even me.  No one is without something to stare at, a book, a news paper, a phone.  People will do anything to forget their morning commute, an hour pressed against a strangers shoulder requires either an admirable set of social grace or the more popular ability to acknowledge nothing but what is in ones hands; sometimes feet. 
          I look at the words above the seats by the sliding door of the train, they read, "Federal Law requires that these seats be made available to seniors and people with disabilities."  To the right of those words is a woman comfortably in her sixties on her way to work, yielding a brief case and a cane.  I wonder to myself, given that it is 7:30am what time she must wake up to put makeup and clothes on.  She moves slowly, and I agree with myself after a carefully worded debate that she must wake up at 5:05am, the reason for the :05 is that she allows herself one snooze, the five minutes of which she does not sleep; she just thinks about work.  In the seat next to those words sits a man comfortably in his thirties pretending not to notice her struggle to stand as the train stops and takes off, his socks match, his lapel is new and just the kind of man you'd figure to lay out his outfit before bed.   I could give the old woman my seat, but I'm tired and my compassion does not stir for yet another hour.
          I get off at the 16th Mission B.A.R.T which is notoriously dangerous but given the time of day I had hoped the 8:00am light would shine away the horrors of the Mission, but crime and poverty do not sleep; they are always awake twirling their thumbs on bubble gum benches and making hand puppets in the shadows of street light brick.  There is an art gallery I hope to place my art in near this stop, my canvas's protrude from my backpack as a declaration of my artistic undertaking and for a moment I worry that they will be stolen. 
          I arise to the streets of the Mission from the depths of underground transportation and within seconds witness a cracked out man steal as much produce as he can carry from a small storefront and a homeless man feed pigeons off his lap and hands, the birds pecking at the grains fallen in his beard.  I walk briskly with the cold and see a man across the street puke onto the cross walk, and the pigeons who have tired of grain swoop in to clean it up.  It was Heroin puke.  There is a difference between Heroin puke and alcohol puke.  Heroin puke usually does not have food in it, but when it does it is only minutes after being consumed, leaving undigested, half chewed food glazed in stomach acid sprawled out in a pigeon buffet on the concrete.   Alcohol puke is mostly liquid and ultimately scoffed at by city birds.  They can't teach you these things in College.
          I decide to meet my friend Krista for breakfast in the Castro District a mile up hill, I figure I'll wait until there are more witnesses before I make the pilgrimage to the art gallery.  I get passed by a man in possession of the most beautiful ass I have ever seen and I struggle for six blocks to not loose the sight, but his walk is my run and I can't keep up.  Everyone in this city has legs and ass's of Gods and walk up steep hills as if rolling down them.  I however take cigarette breaks half way up a hill, on Van Ness I take several. 
          I meander by doorways that despite the frigid cold, smell of urine; I pass, despite the cold, boy prostitutes wearing shorts so short their butt cheeks jiggle underneath the cut off seams, exposing fleshy goosebumps and scuffs from side walk slumbers.  I encounter sidewalk Santas, one asks me, "Can I have 13 cents?"  I tell him I have no money with an apologetic tone and he screams through his white turned brown beard, "Then get a fucking job faggot" and tries to spit on me.  Another Santa leans against the brick of the Castro Theater beside his mobile home shopping cart stolen from a local pharmacy.  Sitting on his shoulders is a full grown tabby cat which he affectionately calls Allen while scratching its bedraggled head.  On the corner of Castro and market, a group of homeless men huddle for warmth between the trolly and sidewalk chairs which during the summer, before the ban on Nudity last month, naked men congregate over coffee. 
          The morning light beams through buildings and I see twin peeks from where I stand but in spite of the beauty I can't take anymore.  Like a kid playing tag, I retreat to base in a coffee shop.  The bars are not open yet, and I could go for a Hot Toddy.  Krista meets me at the coffee shop unfazed by the trenches she has just walked through to get here, her purse loosely hanging from her shoulder.  People that live here or that are from here, show no signs of fear or sadness when they see what I have just seen.  It is part of every day, part of the charm inner city San Fransisco has to offer. 
          After we drop off this art I plan to go back to the water. 
          Nothing ever bad really happens there.
 
         

H. E. Double Hockey Sticks

         My mother is getting on a plane in the morning from Kansas City to San Francisco and I can't begin to describe how tremendous my excitement is over this fact. I have not seen her in over a year.  It occurred to me, maybe about an hour ago, how badly I have missed her; when I began sobbing on my porch for the duration of an unsmoked cigarette, the ash of which resembled a long burnt green bean when it fell.   It was one of those cigarettes that you only light for a reason to get up and go outside, one of those cigarettes that once lit hits a play button of memories and for me, this night, those memories were of the past year and a half of my life .  It occurred to me how badly I've missed home, and how even though I tell every new friend I make that I hate Kansas and never want to go back, it is my home and one more than one occasion since I have been gone I have needed nothing but its air in my lungs.
         I write a lot about all of the fun I've had, about all the sex I've had, love I have lost and gained and then lost again.  I write a lot about how much I've grown, but in spite of those personal growths, those sexual encounters in public places, those parades, the unrelenting beauty that engulfs the hills of the west coast, in spite of the unabashed drug experimentation with company God would envy, I have also broke in ways I cannot write or tell.  In ways only the trinkets on my desk could tell if you listened to them whisper on a silent night, in ways only the bits of finger nails I have scattered over Chicago sidewalks and the dirty tiles of San Fransisco train stations could recount, or my walls can scream.  Those things could tell you.  But I cannot.
         I can only write what happened, and what happened was I spent the past year and a half wondering streets of alien cities looking for an answer I staunchly believed existed outside of the choke hold Kansas City had around my neck, and what happened was that feeling of being choked never left, of being constricted so tightly you know you should just stop, that like quick sand, if you froze it would stop, but I couldn't stop.  What happened was I kept going until its hands stopped the flow of air into my lungs and even when I should have begged for air I did nothing, and even when I should have asked for it, help would have done nothing.  And then something inside of me died, it shriveled like a leaf and waited for a breeze to pluck it from my flesh.
         I lost my best friend, the closest thing I have ever known to that feeling when a kid finds the missing puzzle piece and slides it's plastic coated cardboard into place, and that all that time spent working on the puzzle all the sudden seemed worth it again.  Jen was my puzzle piece for a long time, and I miss her terribly.  I can also state with as much veracity as my admitance to how much I miss her, that her decision to separate herself from my puzzle, which is now in a box in a closet and mixed with pieces from other puzzle boxes, entirely my fault.  I have been, an awful friend to her, and like the ways in which I have broke, only walls, street lights, and finger nails can tell you just how awful.  I can only write about what happened. 
       When I was a kid I remember very vividly having breakfast with my friend Josh's family, who was made up of himself, his grandfather and grandmother.  I would go over there every morning before school and they would see that we got on the buss safely.  We had two pieces of sausage with one piece of burnt toast, with no butter, on a Styrofoam plate like clockwork at 6:45 a.m. We would all join hands to thank God and I would often think, "It's just toast and microwave sausage, why be thankful?"
       One morning after we thanked the higher power for our radioactive sausage links, I asked Josh's Grandfather if Hell was really that scary, because I though that a lake of fire would be kind of cool to see.  He leaned in close to me and with eyes like coils said, "those are just words in a book boy, words can't begin to tell you the horrors of Hell.."  I think of that now as I write this, not to compare a place of eternal suffering to my past year of momentary suffering, but to state how little my words are able to convey and that when I cried on my porch an hour ago, and as I cry now, I see what people mean when they say something hurts like Hell.
        What it's like to miss something like hell, what it is to be grateful for sausage links on a Styrofoam plate.
        

The search for God under rocks under the sea.

         I remember very vividly playing a video game when I was about 10 and when I couldn't beat it, I went into my room and buried my face into my pillow, letting out the hardest scream I could before ripping apart limb from limb a stuffed teddy bear, which was actually more of a stuffed bunny given to me by an ugly girl at school named Sophia, who in spite of my repeated attempts to convey my revulsion towards her, wanted very much for me to like her.
         I got down on my knees and I prayed to God, bartering that if he help me beat my video game I would clean my room.  My mother had been begging me to clean my room, almost to the point of tears, for weeks and in an attempt to make both God and my mother content with me, I used it as leverage.  After I prayed, my fingers hurt from how hard I was clasping my hands into one another, my forehead was indented with flakes from my bedroom carpet which I had pressed my face firmly into.  From birth to age 10 the hardest I had ever prayed was over a video game, so much so that it caused my hands to ache, but not so much so that it impeded my ability to use the controller of which I used to beat the game the very next try and I cleaned my room happily.
         Last night I saw a shooting star while waiting for a taxi in Berkley with my friends, and upon it I wished to God for the fortune of happiness.  I told no one what I saw, what I wished for because in the fog of the night was a whisper that it fell for me only. A few nights before that I cried out to God in a nightmare so horrifying I could think of no escape other than his name, a name that for me has no meaning in a Christian sense but holds weight in the sense that sometimes, it is faith that is all I am left with.  I have never questioned the existence of God, if for no other reason than I have seen enough of the Devil to merit belief in his counter. 
         It struck me odd, as I made my wish upon the falling bits of alien universe that I wished for happiness, because it is a wish I have always made in the form of material wealth and success.  Every birthday candle I have ever blown out was extinguished with the requesting winds of a selfish thirst never to be quenched.  I remember one year I wasted a birthday wish on a boyfriend, which I got and quickly wished I hadn't.  Every shooting star before last nights shooting star was gazed upon with eyes that sought out desires of flesh and things I could touch.
         It struck me odd because it was the first time happiness became something to wish for under the power of God, and because it was not that long ago, in the timeline of my life on the timeline of time, that I strained my fingers into themselves begging God, suffocated by the strain of tears, to help me beat a video game; and to come from that being the prayer that needed to be answered in order for me to continue living, to now being a time when happiness is a prayer so badly in need of answering that all I can do to keep from jumping off the Golden Gate bridge is to have faith that the same something that helped me beat that game when I was 10 or get that boyfriend I thought I wanted but didn't, will guide me to the very answer I need in order to continue breathing now.
           I remember watching a documentary on meteors a few years ago, in it it was said that most meteors burn up in the atmosphere and hit the earth or the ocean at the size of a bean or a softball and as I watched the star disperse into the West, I wondered to myself the size of the splash a falling meteor would make in the middle of the ocean, of which my wish was surly bound.  I wondered how many of those splashes sailors might see, or cargo ship workers coasting from the coast of Japan across the Pacific to deliver toasters and televisions to department super stores on the coast of California, how many of those splashes are witnessed by people and how many different things are wished upon those sinking stones from space.  How many of those sunken meteors rest at the bottom of the sea with mine and how many of them were bestowed the responsibility of happiness, the responsibility of God.
         When I was little, my father's friend Yolanda gave me a yellow stone about the size of my palm after I was forced to attend a gruesome baptist sermon and engraved into the stone were the words, "If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it would move. Nothing would be impossible."  And I think it's funny how my faith has grown since then, from the size of a mustard seed to a bean.
          And sometimes from a bean to a softball. .
        
        
         

Stella Steele

I don’t know when my inclination to dress in drag was born but I remember always feeling ashamed of it.  I remember getting home from school as a young boy and putting my mother’s lingerie gowns on, and as simply as the silk night garments slipped over my hairless shoulders, I was empowered.  As simply as my soft feet slid into my mother’s heels, I felt like I could walk anywhere.  Like I could walk up to the terrorists at school and tell them to fuck off, walk up to my parents and tell them to stop using me as leverage, or click and clack my way onto the platform of a train, with a mink stole wrapped tight around my young neck and let it take me somewhere with lights and tall things.
            I would stand in front of my mother’s mirror and admire the way my body looked in them, put on her lipstick and blow kisses to myself, I would have imaginary conversations with important people and I would laugh like a movie star, placing my fingers on my chest and throwing my head back with half closed eyes while my brother, waited in the living room watching cartoons, for our mother to get home.   Sometimes my mother would get home early and I could hear the garage door opening, and on when that happened, I furiously scrubbed the makeup off my face and put her gowns in her dresser, making sure the laces and folds were exactly how I found them as to avoid suspicion.  She would walk in the door and I would be out of breath and full of fear that I had forgotten the cap to her eye liner or that there might still be some blush on my cheeks and that fear lasted for days.  I must have been 9 or 10 years old.
            I don’t think my mother ever knew, I still haven’t told her, and if she does know then she’s never said anything.  My mother knows a lot of things that she doesn’t bring up, our family has many closets and in them are delicately laced boxes containing delicately wrapped secerets.  Although she did take the news, when I was 20, that I would be moving to Florida to pursue my dreams of being a stand up drag queen comic pretty well.  My drag name was to be Stella Steele, after my mother’s madden name. “Well if that’s what you wanna do honey…” she said changing the subject.  I suspect she was relieved when I never made it to Florida.
            It wasn’t until I fell in love and moved in with Evan and his apartment above a haunted antique shop in Oswego Illinois, that I recognized my proclivity for drag queens, when I became enchanted by his roommate Daisy .   Daisy Star stood six foot six before stilettos and was formally Frank Murphy.  I guess Daisy was more of a transsexual, a permanent drag queen who injected hormones into her ass daily to achieve a more feminine shape.   She does tranny porn in LA now but at the time she was stripping at a nearby bar called Manuvers and I would watch her rehearse in the living room often.  I studied her mannerisms, the elegance of her fingers, the dexterity of which masterfully applied makeup between snorts of cocaine and shots of dry gin.  Even the way she shoveled cocaine in her nose, off of the glass table in our living room was a sight for sore eyes.   She garnished her drug abuse with a raised manicured pinky; a beautification of the closeness to rock bottom.  Daisy represented what I loved about drag and that was in her ability to evoke glamor and poise in filth and in nothingness.
            Daisy once indulged in a radical cocaine bender and for four days and four nights she did not sleep.  She instead, put on her roller skates and rehearsed her soon to be preformed stripping routine to the song “I’ve Got A Brand New Pair Of Roller Skates,” by Melani Safka.  She put the CD containing this song into our DVD player and hit repeat, and I swear to God she did not take off those roller skates, or stop listening to that song for four days.  She just rolled around the living room, all seven feet of her, singing “You’ve got a brand new key…” taking breaks only to inhale more powder.   I eventually came home on the fourth day to her slumped over the couch, wearing her roller skates and the song still blasting through the speakers of our old TV.  She was supposed to perform that night, but I didn’t wake her and she slept through her curtain call.
            She seemed to only sleep when her body gave up and once took a nap in the bath tub, only to wake up underwater to the scratches of a heroin cat on her bloated face.   In spite of her obvious vices, I had my own (one of which was my addiction to Niquil martinis), I still loved her because she possessed a power I had fantasized about possessing since I was young and played with my mother’s clothing and cosmetics.  It is the power of confident femininity, which I think is the closest thing to a super power human beings can hope to have; even closer is when a man masters it. 
            Daisy first flaunted this power for me in the bread aisle of a grocery store, where we were attempting to buy a week’s worth of groceries for twenty bucks.  She was wearing a pin up dress, the patterns of which were checkered red and white like a picnic table cloth and her hair was in braided pig tails.  Her dress was low cut and exposed her full back tattoos, the swallows on her chest, the flames crawling up her thighs and arms.  Her lip stick was as thick as her confidence and as she stood posing, selecting her bread of choice I heard a woman talking to her daughter a few feet from where Daisy  and I stood, “What the hell is that?” she said in a loud whisper. 
            Later, in the potato chip aisle I asked her, “does that bother you?”  She took her sun glasses which were on her head and placed them in front of her eyes, “does what bother me?” she asked.  I looked at her until she couldn’t avoid what I was asking and she responded, “Oh that?  No.  It happens all the time, and to tell you the truth I like it, I’m more beautiful than any woman in this town and even if I’m not I feel like I am, so she can suck my tits.”  With the elegance of Ms. Golightly herself, extended her pinkies and put her sun glasses back on her head.   She read aloud, the ingredients in the bag of chips she was holding, “Potatoes, canola oil, sea salt.”
            Ever since that day in the potato chip aisle of Jewel-Osco I have idolized transsexuals and drag queens, and Daisy is still one of my biggest hero’s.  She taught me many things in the year we lived together.  She taught me to alternate nostrils when snorting cocaine so you get less nose bleeds.  She taught me how to do a champagne enema.  She taught me the power of femininity.
           
 And that is the closest thing to a super power I can ever hope to have.      
           

Short #2

           I once tried to love a botanist named Jesse.  He lived in a trailer in Wichita Kansas with a fat video game nerd who was also a queen. Our long distance romance was upheld by the telephone, the wires of which transmitted our deepest secrets of regret, failure and hope.  He said to me once over the phone that all he wanted to do, more than anything in the world, was to smash a bunch of glass, “I just think it would calm me down,” he said. 
            I only met Jesse in person twice, and I must admit I had high hopes for us, if only for the fact that he loved plants, and I was aware of my own heart’s frailty which at the time was as easily torn as the petal of a rose in the hands of a clumsy child. 
            I met him the first time in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, where we went to haunted houses in old factories and clung to one another both because we were scared shitless and because we both needed so much to hold on to someone’s arm.  Sometimes I get like that.  I need to hold onto a man, physically, because if I don’t, I feel like I might float away or fall down.   What I found out though, through years of leaving gay bars with handsome strangers, is that I’m not alone.  On several occasions I got to these strangers houses or them to mine, I told them I didn’t want to have sex, I just wanted to hold them in the nude. On those occasions those men let out a sigh of release comparable to the air pushed through someone’s lungs when they are told that they do not have cancer, or that their mother will be okay. And I held a lot of beautiful lonely men that way, and they held me.  I also slept with a lot of beautiful lonely, angry men that way.
            The second and the last time I met Jesse was in Topeka Kansas.  I drove him and I to a creek on a road that enveloped the world in its vast grey flatness.  The creek was tucked between trees and an old semi truck loading dock, it glittered with boulders and pebbles.  I opened my trunk and motioned for Jesse to look, “I have a gift for you.” I said.  I had filled my trunk with plates, vases and coffee mugs from every thrift store in Kansas City.

            We smashed every single piece of glass.
            He was right, it did calm him down.