Enlightening Nonsense

I had just come from a short jog in the Central Park with Abandon and found myself, as usual, pushing time—as in I had about forty minutes to meet my friend “Crazy” on a train to Long Beach and I was hoping to feed my dog, take a shower, make a shake and maybe air trumpet to a Louis Armstrong song before I left. I figured starving my dog would shave a few minutes off my “To Do” list and really allow me the luxury to enjoy my air trumpeting. As I passed by the post office I saw Michael, a semi-regular fixture who is often standing there asking people for money.

Michael and I have a fairly long history, as I have attempted to engage him deeply on many occasions over the past year or two with something other than the carrot on the end of the stick, “If you say you love Jesus and blow a few priests, we’ll give you food,” technique that the church uses around the world to force the needy to convert. I had given Michael a dollar once for “soup” but when I saw him the next morning soused to the nines—despite him telling me that he didn’t do any drugs—I realized that the only pint he was buying was the kind that fits in your coat jacket’s inner pocket and that was the last greenback I ever gave him.

When I told him that I saw him on Saturday morning at around 10:00 a.m. completely wasted out of his gourd, he came clean that he was an alcoholic. I told him that someone’s word is worth more to me than his character and he had really challenged my ability to trust him. Michael seemed genuinely penitent but having been good friends with a drug addict in the past, she schooled me on how most addicts will say or do anything just as long as it leads to their next fix.

I remember pissing Michael off one day when I said that a drug addict would steal from his mother if it meant getting a fix. This pushed one of Michael’s buttons too far and he jumped into the schoolboy reaction that one used to give if someone said, “Your mother wears combat boots!” When someone used to say that to me, I would respond, “Yeah, and she takes it up the ass, too. How does it affect me that my mother’s a whore and dresses like a dyke?” Ah, the innocence of youth…

Whether it’s his personality or, as I suspect, the drugs, Michael is very volatile. One day he’ll tell me, “What you said touched me very deeply” and the next week he might shout at me that I’m a “nigger.”

I was rolling by him on my blades on “The Day of Many ‘Niggers’.” Michael was wasted and throwing punches in the air and as I passed him, one punch was thrown in my direction that, although out of range, was closer to my person than it needed to be.

I turned around and said, “Hey Michael, what are you doing?” His response clarified things immediately: “I don’t know you, nigger!” I reminded him that we had just had a cathartic sharing the day before but this only resulted in a hailstorm of “niggers.” For a moment I was proud of how far our country had come, that in the mid-1800s whitey was whipping blacks as slaves and today a black man could call a white man a nigger with impunity. Who knew where this could lead—maybe even a Socialist, Fascist black man in the White House? Now I was just being silly.

I found myself getting pissed from the constant berating, as if “mass’er” had just beaten me one time too many and I decided that it was time to turn his whip into a suppository. Probably more so than that was that I felt hurt that all the care and attention I had given him was quickly swallowed and blacked out with the tilt of a bottle.

I quickly took off my skates and put on my shoes. I ducked and weaved a few more “niggers” on my approach but once I stood firmly in range and exerted my strong masculine in the form of a potentially lethal force, Michael’s mouth kept flapping but his body language showed fear.

As someone who fought in the ring in Chinese full-contact fighting for seven years and observed many other fighters in the ring, it was always fascinating to me to see that it was most often the spirit or will that was defeated before the body. Even before two fighters touched gloves, I could often predict who would win the match based on whose spirit was already starting to contract. I saw that Michael was all bark and no bite and probably wouldn’t even take a swing at me if I backed him into an alley, when either the junkyard dog comes out or one becomes immobile as the piss runs down their pants leg.

The next time I saw Michael he said hello to me and I questioned whether he remembered our interaction the day before. He said he did but it seemed obvious that when the bottle takes possession of him that he is not in control of his mouth.

Michael started to become predictable to me. We would usually share some nice thoughts or philosophy and he would look at me with eyes that seemed to see me as the big brother he always boasted about. He would then try to manipulate you by saying that you looked down on him. I would then point out how he was being controlling and manipulative in his language or I would say something that temporarily overloaded his circuits and his countenance would turn suddenly angry and he would walk away, no longer saying it vocally but I’m sure silently calling me a nigger.

On the day I said how a drug addict would steal from his mother, when he turned combative I gave him a little crystal ball reading and said, “And now you’re going to storm off angrily.” He assured me that he wouldn’t but in less time than it takes Hillary Clinton’s face to make a child cry in hysterics, he was off.

So being a little pressed for time, I wasn’t in the mood to play our same routine like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and so I was, dare I say, a little prickish in my dismissal of him.

As I passed he said, “Swami, can I ask you a question?” Without slowing my pace I said, “You just did.” He asked, “Can I ask you another thing?” This time I turned to face him and said with an annoyingly big smile, “You just did again.”

He then asked me if I knew about the Kama Sutra. I wasn’t sure what road we were going down and I didn’t really have time for nonsense. I responded how it was an old book from the East that showed you how to stick your dick in a woman’s ear and make her beg for more. He said he had a book he wanted to give me. I said, “Thank you.” He said, “You don’t want the book?” I said, “I just said ‘thank you’.” He pulled the book out of his backpack and the Universe let me know this was no random event—it was a book I saw at an Ayurvedic spa in India and would have bought it if they weren’t charging “tourist” rates, knowing that some foreign perv who could afford a day at their spa would probably pay top dollar for a book they could jerk-off to and still write off of their taxes as “professional research.” Michael told me that he was planning to give it to someone else but hadn’t seen the guy in a long time and was tired of holding onto it and thought I would like it.

My attitude melted immediately and all of a sudden I was back in Union. I asked him what he liked and he said that he loved Mad Magazine and was a collector of old stuff. I pressed more into what he liked, as when you step into Union with someone, you suddenly feel a desire to give or do anything to make them happy. It’s sad how many marriages keep the “structure” of the asana (yoga pose) but lose the underlying “union” of the yoga.

Michael then asked me for a couple of bucks. I was like, “I told you, I’ll never give you money. What do you want it for?” He pointed to his box radio and told me that it required eight “D” sized batteries to run. “You need another box radio that isn’t such an energy hog is what you need!” I said, while in my mind thinking about a smaller box radio I had at home that if he didn’t like at least would keep Al Gore and his minions of fear-mongers happy. I said, “Michael, don’t ever ask me for money. Ask me for what you want.”

Because our society has marketed to us that having more “stuff” is somehow better, people don’t even focus on the “stuff” anymore but only the means to acquire it. Probably by the time they acquire it, they will have long forgotten or care to buy what it is that they put their wife and daughters into prostitution in order to pay for. It has only been in the last few years that I have come to the understanding that having less stuff is actually much more empowering, that the accumulation of several decades of garbage has only gotten in the way of not only my ability to stay in touch with the essence of my being but also my ability to walk in my apartment without tripping over something!

I told Michael how I thought about him often, in a non-gay way of course. He told me how he, too, thought about me often; I wasn’t sure but I thought it was hetero as well, despite the slap and caress of my ass as he said it. I told him how the other week I had met a girl who was a social worker and the center where she was just starting to work was involved with drug rehabilitation. I said asked if he was interested and said I would go down with him if he wanted me to. He said he was.

I told Michael, “You’re always saying to me, ‘I’m a good guy. I’m a good guy,’ and I know you are. But when you drink, it takes a serious set of eyes to see the good guy behind all the bad behavior.”

Michael modified my statement, “It takes the heart.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But most people have difficulty opening their hearts enough to see and your wild behavior doesn’t make it any easier for them.” We both laughed. I went on, as we all by now know that my mouth is like the Eveready Bunny, pink and always ready for cock, “I may smile at you, I may yell at you, but do know—I never stop seeing the good guy in you.”

“I know,” said Michael.

At that moment Michael was my brother and not just some charity case that I wanted to “save” with my own dogma. While we had shared different thoughts and interests in the past, perhaps it was the first time I had actually moved past playing my role as “teacher” or “spiritualist” or “judgmental ass” and was present just as a friend. I had taken off my masks and remained as an actor without a script. And you know what? The words still came, only this time instead of a character speaking a playwright’s words, I was a BE-ing speaking God’s play.

I told Michael I felt uplifted and asked how he felt. He said he was boosted as well. I back peddled before turning forward as I pointed to him and said, “Keep that feeling with you all day, brother.” He assured me he would and I turned and headed for home.

And as tears of gratitude filled my eyes for a lot more than a book on ear-fucking, it seemed of little matter whether I made the train to Long Beach or not. I was still going to give it a shot, though, and Abandon was definitely not getting fed!