VIENNA, 1992

In a rat-infested box under the bed, I found an old photograph of me looking rather tired, perhaps sneering for the camera, with two horses, who were also pretty soured, I might add, from hauling mindless tourists. The cart owner, didn't want me to touch them, not that there was any love lost between them, but our Viennese hostess, Claudia told him, she knows horses. And all I could think of was that this is what happens to dancing Lippizanners who don't make the ecole grade, they wind up plodding along as carriage and cart horses. The only sound of music they hear is the honking of car horns. But every once and a while, they hear the strains of a Viennese waltz, and they lift their ears skyward, perhaps an ancestral memory shaken loose from the fetters of time.

Letters to Celia Woloch

c/o Vins van Neerven, 

Hogerbeetsstraat 97 III, 

1052 VV Amsterdam, Netherlands 

   
Celia, my grlfrnd—                 Aug. Sept., 1992-93?

In the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. —Omni

AUG 20—Even in between sobs, it’s good to hear your voice via the Ma Belle satellite. And yes, I’m not writing much, lacking the focus. Where are the poems hidden? Why won’t they come?

Maybe this letter will open up the dam (Amster-dam: the 16th c. dam on the Amsterele river is real, not a metaphor. I’ve given into the timelessness of being at loose ends—with no agendas, hidden or otherwise—in a country not my own, seeking what oddities life has to offer.)

Where do poems come from? Page One of my notebook documents the oddities of The Final Frontier: After fighting nearly three years with Soviet bureaucracy for permission to hook up a computer telecommunications system with the Ukraine for a cultural exchange program, I finally let go of the idea. 

Then, shortly after April Fool’s Day, I received my first E-mail message from Oleg via GlasNET. Was it incongruous to read a satellite message transmitted half-way around the world that began with: “Cosmonaut lands, doesn’t recognize his own country?” 

Ex-lovers aside, how ironic: my first message from the new independent nation, Ukraine, is not about freedom, but about space, the final frontier. O-oh K.!?

Yes. Forgotten during the 1991 August coup, stranded Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev helplessly watched his country disappear: changing its name, anthem, and political order. The abandoned space program was officially broke with no way to get him home. 

Secret calls in the night; someone trying to sell Soviet space ships for hard currency. When Krikalev eventually returned to Earth after ten months in space, he didn’t recognize his own country. It was then discovered in the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. 

Moral: be careful of hasty conclusions and hearts stranded in space. Complex metaphor swiftly approaching from the starboard side. Will I regret not going to Russia after the Fall, and seeing for myself, the changes?

Presidents' Day weekend

Monday, Presidents' Day weekend, I'm in the city, staying at Jill Singer's flat with Celia Woloch and Ken Bullock. Saturday night we ate at Café Albona, one of my favorite North Beach restaurants, and last night we ate at Anchor Wat. We were ostensibly celebrating previous birthdays and missed holidays as well. I don't know if I can afford any more overlooked holidays.

Last time we ate at Café Albona was three years ago, all three of us. It was interesting to see that Celia and Ken had formed a friendship over the years that did not include me, or need me to bridge the gap—as it often is with friends and friends. They shared some wild times traveling in Eastern Europe, and they now share friends in common, whom I know only of by hearsay, or poetry. And so it goes. But I feel a little left out in the cold.

Jill is almost in the same friend category, she is a friend of Celia's, and is fast becoming a friend of ours, or Ken's, except we haven't all quite clicked yet. The enemy of your enemy is my friend sort of thing. But she's posh English so I keep my distance.

Yesterday after seeing the play, Twilight, about the LA riots, a monologue, we went to the San Francisco airport to pick Jill up from her London flight which was delayed 2 1/2 hours due to bomb scares and engine troubles. So we spent the time in the airport hotel lounge nursing bright red wine through the afternoon and evening talking of war.

Meanwhile, in Israel, they have planted trees for the man who smuggled the Chagal paintings out of Russia.

Dream Journal, Shroud of Turin, Ken Bullock at the Mayflower

I kept dreaming I was lying next to someone who was wrapped in shroud, someone I knew. Perhaps they were alive, perhaps dead. I wasn't scared or grossed out by it. Mimi the cat sleeps on my right side these nights. And I have to fight for covers sometimes. 

There was another similar shroud, but I wasn't sleeping next to it. I kept waking up and it was still there, and I dreamed about it some more. This went on all night. I petted the cat, who was snoring, for reassurance. I was swaddled in bedcovers, sleeping like the dead. Then I woke myself up snoring. Cat on my chest.

I had another dream where Ken Bullock and I were on the at the old Mayflower pub on 4th St. in San Rafael, drinking whiskey to the dead lovers and relations. My cousin Sinead was there too. We drank whiskey out of an odd assortment of bowls and cast-iron frying pans, like cats. Toast and after toast. So many dead. I was worried about driving home because we had at least two more toasts to go.

Kelly Slattery was there too, along with all the Woodacre drunks: Ken's father Keith Bullock, Cal Davis, Old Man Slattery and Sinead's father, Bill Dinsmore—they all drank together at that tiny corner bar on Railroad in Woodacre. Did Kelly's father die too?

It was busy at the bar. So many dead. So many toasts. Where did my dead father fit into this dream memory, except as a young man? Did we remember to toast JFK?

In the third dream, Ken and I take a little red wagon out for a spin down the steep Lagunitas roads. We nearly get hit by cars while towing the wagon up to the top of the hill. Each time we felt a little braver, and we took the wagon a little further up the top of the steep hill, then rode it down like bats out of hell. Seeking a thrill ride with death.

November 22

Journal entry, 1/4/93, San Francisco, with John McBride, Jan Bogaerts

1/4/93 I spent last evening with John McBride and Ken Bullock drinking wine and in Enrico‘s. John gave us the key to his uncle’s house on and we wound up hanging out in the Mission district going to used bookstores. I got a full length man’s tweed coat for six dollars. It’s freezing, I relish the warmth.

Jan went off on his own into the night. We didn’t have a preset time to meet up, he had no key so it was a bit touch and go. I’m sleepy, crabby, not particularly interested in either John nor Jan. But John looks better and better these days, he will never leave the memory of his exwife behind. I’m feeling a bit jaded these days myself. Confusion has fled and I am left with sheer crabbiness. 

We staggered around Washington Square afterward, and I was definitely feeling the wine, we were listing a bit. I was esconced between John and Ken so I wouldn’t get lost. We were laying hands upon each other quite a bit at Enrico‘s. Like raccoons at the cat bowl.  

Most likely it was the wine but John didn’t just put his arm around me to steady me, and I still can’t tell if there’s interest, or it’s merely politeness. John was looking particularly attractive, but it didn’t do anything for me. Timing is everything. And John tells me that Enrico‘s is where, after a couple of “far out motherfuckers,” which is a deadly cocktail, John proposed to Marianna Rexroth. It didn’t end well. Kenneth didn’t like him, mad their life miserable.

The trouble with all this attraction stuff is that once acted upon, you cannot go back to being friends, no matter what they say. There’s an easiness that flees when we become lovers. I thought love was supposed to draw people closer together. Instead, the walls grow higher. Maybe there something wrong with me that it happens so. 

I’m sorry for the vast gulf between Jan and me, I know there’s nothing I can do, after the fact. Again he tells me I’m so beautiful and that I should believe it. I’m perplexed. He takes myriad photos of me that I will never see.

After a meal, some harmony is restored, something that was there before all this craziness started, resurfaces. Friendship abides. We have a shared history to anchor us, when I stayed with him in Lissel, and Vins. We are torn between virtual realities. He was so pleased by my photo proofs, they’re not the best that I’ve ever done, but I just don’t have the time to work on them. 

Ah yes, the interim between shifts, we are off again to Enrico‘s. Who knows where it will take us this time? I may wind up coming home alone. I walk on, Jan photographs Columbus Street from inside Enrico‘s, I feel at home, the waiter recognizes me from last night. Ken is a few minutes behind me. 

Ken and I managed to kill off most of a bottle of Beaujolais before Jan returns. He has shot over three rolls in less than 45 minutes. I thought I was fast. But he has a sweet and stealthy Leica camera. Ken tottered off, and we headEd for the Saloon. I have been inside more bars during the past two weeks than I have in an entire lifetime.

Jan is working the crowd. I am alone, but not alone—which is an interesting phenomenon. He is very good at working his way into people’s psyches. He both charms and disarms. He will do anything to get the photo. I watched him get right into the singer’s face, rhythm and blues, heavy on the rhythm.

It truly is interesting hanging out with him. I can observe in a way not necessarily available to me if I was on my own. He’s like a satellite knight. The world really is a stage. Some drunks turn up, break the 4th wall. 

Before dinner, we tore down the walls that had risen between us. Jan said, I am a servant of the light. We talked about the stories of who, and what we are. We were in agreement that we have met in previous lives, that everything is circular. He said, you don’t have to explain it to me, I know. 

We listen to 60s music and have trouble with our relative age. Are we 40 and 44, or are we 20 and 24? How ironic, he’s the same age as Bob, my old boyfriend. He tells me about Mark’s story, how his father came home looking for his wife and she was upstairs, dead, having killed her daughter as well. Mark was only six when this happened.

Jan says he loves Mark’s vulnerability and wants to have sex with him. I say I hope you want to make love as well… Need I remind him that he is in the AIDS capital of the world? He wants to fill this trip with as experiences as possible—soon he will fly home to Amsterdam.

When Jan tells me Mark’s story, I cannot stop the tears from falling, maybe it’s because my own mother tried to commit suicide so many times. Maybe it’s the immediacy of words following between us, across the dinner table, the intimacy of shared meals softens the harshness. Jan says, as a man I know what a man wants, I like to have a cock to hold onto so I won’t fall out of bed. I can’t begin to know what a woman wants.

We wind up in the Castro, at Moby Dick‘s, he’s saying goodbye to his new friends—it is a dead night in North Beach as well. We stumbled into Spec’s on Saroyan Alley, the poet’s bar, I an on home turf. I haven’t been there in years.

Jan wanders off to take photos. I’m sitting at the bar, taking it all in, and it’s OK really, though he claims to be a gay lover, there’s also the heterosexual attraction but he can’t negate it, hence the dilemma. Spec asks me about Herman Berlandt, and how the writing is going, offers me a drink.

Weird, I can sit in a gay bar and feel OK. I am as sexual as I want to be, and I don’t have to worry about fending men off. For Jan, it’s the possibility of an endless meat market, and all I can do is to be a buffer for him. Who’d a thunk that I’d be in such a predicament? Jan thinks I should document the lesbians of Castro Street as my assignment, but I don’t have an interest in lesbians. I am content just to watch him in action. I tell him I am looking for poems, not women.