Dream

Here’s a dream from last night: 

My wife Kate and I are at a comedy show at a small bar venue. We’re seated separately. She’s opposite the stage. I’m under a platform tech nest. I wave at her and she smiles back. I indicate that I’ve brought a French press of coffee if she’d care for some. She takes a cup and returns to her seat. I continue to watch the show, though my view is obscured by a paper set list dangling from the platform above. I’m enjoying the show and began to interact from my seat; not as a heckler, but as a spontaneous participant. I indicate to Kate that I’m going to return home to make more coffee, but I’ll return. She waves me off, laughing at the performer.

I walk through our small camp town to arrive at my back porch. Inside, I find my siblings, a swarm of teenage brothers and sisters (who are not identifiable to me, though siblings in the dream), noisily interacting, preparing food and enjoying themselves. I wave and smile on my say to the sink, where I began to wash the press and prepare more coffee. Also in the mix is Ann Carlisle and her four children, who are staying in our home. I’m keeping track of various conversations as I prepare the coffee, and keep messing up. I add sugar to the coffee grinds and realize my error, as Kate doesn’t like sugar. I dumped the grounds to begin again. I’m amused more than frustrated by my mistakes. I wait for a break in conversation to tell Ann about my mishaps, thinking she’d find it funny.

My brother Greg stands next to me to bathe a baby in the sink. The baby is oddly shaped, very extenuated with an elongated head. My brother focuses on preparing the bath and doesn’t support the baby. He seems to believe that due to its size, it’s old enough to stand. I encourage him to support the baby’s head. He grows frustrated and walks away, leaving the baby to sink. I put aside my coffee carafe and go to the baby. I begin to bathe the baby, which shrinks as I do. I whisper to the baby, “Here we go get ready!” before blowing on the baby’s face and push it fully under water. I gently repeat this process of near drowning, calling it “pressing down.” The baby is content. My mom, watching, tells me I’m “pressing down” just right.

One sibling pulls me aside to ask if we can talk later, as he thinks he may be having sex with an ex and wants to consult me on the wisdom of this. I laugh and say sure, we can meet later. A young woman joins him and introduces herself. I realize she’s my sibling’s ex. I’m surprised that he wants to ask me about the wisdom of a new sexual relationship when he’s already decided to go ahead.

Kate enters the back porch. I apologize for not returning with the coffee, but we can go back now. She smiles that there’s no need as the second host had not arrived so the second show was canceled. I tell her I know another show a friend is hosting and we can go there. I tell my brother we’ll talk later. Kate and the young woman seem cofused by the plan. I explain that in large families, siblings meet in the middle of the night for private conversations. That comes after the tumult of an evening, the playfulness of shared baths and the quiet time of listening to stories read. As I describe this, I think it would make a good setting for a British television show, about a large family with boarders who make clandestine meetings. 

Dream

Here’s a dream from last night. 

A disused porch is reduced to a passage from the kitchen at the rear of the house to the yard; we rarely play there any more. There’s not much of the house that I’ve ever known, just the kitchen, though I know it well. My brother G is excited for a party at the house tonight. The party is soon and I’m anxious. I can see that no preparations have been made, and the house is fragile and worn, barely standing.  People shouldn’t come here. They should go elsewhere.

The kitchen is clean and presentable. I stand in its door looking at the mess on the porch. For the party, we can just close the door, but that would block access to the yard, and it’s better to have people outside the house. I start to move broken furniture and withered plants to open a path. The junk can be pushed aside so no one thinks to bother it or explore beyond it.

I find a ball of flowers on a strand. It occurs to me that I can unravel the ball and drape the strand over the junk, making it look deliberate, like a festive ruin. My mom is at the kitchen door, saying this is right, that’s how it used to be done. I’m angry and bothered. Let’s not think this can be fixed, I think, only made a temporary passage. It’s still a bad idea that people are coming.

My brother pushes into the porch, making his way to a sink in a corner near the yard, disrupting piles as he does so. He wants to wash up and brush his teeth. He’s oblivious to disrupting my tasks. I’m annoyed but keep it to myself. I’ll wait until he’s done to resume. He’s using a complicated electric toothbrush that is filthy, its parts stored on a plywood shelf more suited to a garden shed. He’s talking over his shoulder, excited about the party.

In the corner, I see a small toilet with water in a disgusting bowl. The seat is partially covered by a glass shelf holding a withered plant. I think that I could cover the shelf with more junk so no one sees the filth or tries to use the toilet, but I find myself moving the pot to clean the shelf and the toilet bowl. It’s not useful but at least it doesn’t look repulsive. My brother lifts a foot into the bowl and flushes, repeating to wash both feet. Now I think I should removed the glass shelf so those who use it won’t be injured. Someone standing could piss into the small space left by the shelf, but no seated person could use it. A woman, oblivious to me, sits on the shelf and uses her fingers to direct her stream into the space. I think, well, if that’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me.

My brother and the woman leave. I clean up after them, resenting the extra work. A friend of my mom’s sees me cleaning the parts of my brother’s toothbrush and offers to give me a new one. I resent her intrusion but reply politely that I don’t need a new one, I’m only cleaning an old one. She replies that I need one as well. I take it, thanking her, and return to my task. She suggests I try out her gift. I begrudgingly examine it before admitting that I don’t understand the attachments. She shows me how it’s used and, I admit, it’s nice to use. Only now I need to clean the shelf, which I had intended to skip. I try to group the items I find: toothbrush components, shoeshine kit, sewing items.

People wander into the porch as I clean. A large man in black pants and a cheap white shirt looks around. I know he is providing security for the party and I feel love for him; still, I want him to move on. Hearing a noise in the yard, he pulls out a handgun, pointing it into the darkness. I’m annoyed that his will keep him on the porch. The noise is revealed to be children playing in a field beyond the yard. The man puts away his gun.

I move to the next corner, crowded with untended plants. Two kids in fairy costumes join me. I move them away from fragile, dry plants, offering them a narrative detour in their play, indicating another area where they can explore. (This is the only interaction I initiate in the dream.) I notice a small sprig and move away some weeds to plant it. Now I’m weeding the pots and sweeping up around them.

I remember the strand of flowers, still a ball attached to the parts I’ve already draped. I return to lifting it over potted trees. The lower leaves are just about my head; above are spindly dead branches. Mom returns to the door behind me with friends. They encourage me to lift the strands over the dead branches, reminding me that this is how it used to be done. I feel another surge of anger. I can’t make this how it was or better it, I can only make it more passable. Still, I stretch to raise the stands higher and see that it does look nice.   

The kids are playing in the yard. I can hear guests talking and laughing in the kitchen behind me. I’m alone surveying the porch. I’ve tidied it completely. Nothing new or fancy, just clean, lived in, cared for. My brother joins me, happy. He tells me I’ve done a good job, adding he’d never before noticed that the floor slanted. Of course not, I think: no one had ever bothered with upkeep so no one has seen this space in our lifetimes. There’s nothing I can do about the sloping floor, I think, as though to a rebuke. Anyway, I like the way it sags. As my satisfaction in the completed tasks gives way once more to anger, I decide to wake up, though I’ll miss the party. 

Waking, I remain in bed, eyes closed, revisiting the dream, holding the anger and then letting it go. I reflect on these words: let go of the things people take from you.  

eXmas

This story was originally posted on December twenty-eight, two-thousand four. It is also told on Kevin Allison’s Risk!

Leaving Marla at the subway, I walked quickly through a drizzle to pick up the kids. I arrived about ten minutes behind schedule.

The kids were excited to see me. Lucy was there too, for an after school meeting. When she saw me, she rolled her eyes and sighed loudly. She took me by the arm and led me to one side, telling the kids to stay put.

She gave me a quick, familiar lecture on the importance of being on time. I nodded, listened, agreed. That ritual completed, I returned to the kids and took them home.

That night, Lucy was picking us up to go to her mother’s house for Christmas. Last year had been the first Christmas since our break up. Per our tradition, we spent the holiday with her family at her mother’s house. It had been awkward, but we bit the bullet for the kids’ sake. There had only been one fight—between Lucy and her mom, about her mom being too familiar with me about details concerning our divorce—but fights between Lucy and her mom were also a family tradition.

Lucy and I had a good Thanksgiving this year. She’s been very civil with me lately. I hoped for the best.

Mind you, this holiday had enough landmines to blow us all sky high.

My ex wife and I would be there, with our three kids. My ex mother in law, a lesbian, had invited an ex girlfriend to join us for dinner on Christmas Eve. My ex father in law would be there, at the home of his first ex, and bringing along his second ex wife (he has three from which to chose). My ex brother in law was bringing his ex boyfriend.

To add a dollop of optimism to the occasion, my ex sister in law would be there with her fiancé.

So many exes. Another ex-mas with Lucy’s family.

After school, I fed the kids and cleaned up, packing a few things to see us through the weekend. I poured a stiff drink to fortify my nerves.

Lucy arrived around bedtime, and we packed the kids into the car. I sat in the back between Lillie and Collie; Jason rode up front. We talked about Christmas until the kids drifted off to sleep. I talked with Lucy to keep her company as she drove, catching a few moments of sleep myself.

After few hours, we parked in front of Lucy’s mother’s house. Her mother was asleep and everyone else was arriving the next day, on Christmas Eve.

Lucy roused the boys, and I carried Lillie inside. We undressed the kids and tucked them into bed. We unpacked the car. I took Lucy’s bag upstairs to the room we used to share. I carried mine into the study off the dining room, where I would sleep on a futon.

We repaired to our separate quarters to put on pajamas. Lucy came downstairs to have a drink and watch television with me in the study. We talked and began to unwind.

This was going well. We were being nice to each other. It felt very familiar. Fingers crossed for the weekend.

eXmas continues with eXmas Eve, eXmas Morn and All SalesFinal.

Nineteen-Sixty Eight

As my marriage deteriorated six years ago, I argued with my wife that we had put in too much time to let it end. We had three children, a home in the suburbs and fifteen years of shared history.

We were fighting over a business trip. She argued that I should not go to the Persian Gulf during the invasion of Iraq. I argued that the trip was perfectly safe and provided a great opportunity. She was accustomed to getting her way, as I kept the peace by acceding most things on a day-to-day basis. I only stood my ground as I built my career over her objections.

Whenever we fought because I stood firm, she would declare that we were “finished.” We were “finished” when I wanted to move to New York, “finished” when I applied to graduate school, “finished” when I took the job that started my career. She declared us “finished” to win this fight, but I had heard that before. After fifteen years, I was pretty much finished with “finished.”

In the end, I went on the business trip. It was uneventful. I watched the invasion of Iraq on CNN just like everyone else. I did my work and came home.

The business trip was over. I was home safe. But these facts did not end the fight. I had defied her. She ordered me to sleep on the couch. I replied that if she didn’t want to sleep with me, she was welcome to take to the couch. She responded with the silent treatment, one of her most effective ways of controlling me. This was her tried and true standby. She knew I was humiliated if anyone detected her rage.

Above all, I wanted people to think we were normal. That meant hiding her depression. Her employment of the silent treatment was an effective way of asserting power over that subterfuge. She refused to speak to me privately in order to punish me. She refused to speak to me in front of friends, family, neighbors and, later, the children, to humiliate me in front of others.

At times, Lucy hit me. She gashed my flesh with her nails. She woke me with pummeling fists, outraged that I was snoring or that she had had a dream in which I angered her. I knew these assaults and I knew how to defend myself from them, within the context of our relationship. It generally happened privately. The humiliation of her silent treatment, though, left me defenseless. I could not make her speak. Her refusal withstood any argument, any geniality, anything I could say or do. The longer she remained silent, she knew, the more she controlled me.

Controlling others by controlling her environment was a lesson Lucy had learned as a child.

When Lucy and I started dating in nineteen-eighty eight, following the threesome of our first date, we sat on my front porch to unload our baggage. I had an unmatched set. I was bisexual, which everyone knew. But also, I had a six-month-old daughter, which no one knew. I had agreed to keep silent about that as my daughter’s mother wanted her boyfriend to believe my daughter was his child. I told Lucy these things knowing she might beg off any further relationship. We were just out of college. My life was already complicated.

She listened, nodding and smoking. Finally she asked, “You’ve never met your own daughter?”

“No,” I answered. I took a swig of Rolling Rock. “I probably never will. I don’t see how that would work.”

“Look, you have to meet her.” She stared at me intently. “You have to do that. You have to be in her life. Promise me you’ll do that.”

I shrugged. “How can I promise that? Rachel lives with her mom and dad, you know, the guy who thinks he’s her dad. The live like a hundred miles from here. How screwed up would it be if I just showed up and got in their lives?” I took another drink of beer. “I don’t even know Rachel’s mom all that well. The only thing we have in common is Rachel.”

“Look at me.” Lucy sat on her knees and grabbed my wrist. “Look at me and promise me you’ll meet your daughter. You have to do this. Promise me.”

I shook my hair from my face. “Um, okay, maybe. I guess I can. I talk to her mom all the time, so . . . I guess you’re right.”

Lucy released my wrist. “Of course I’m right.” She reached for a beer. “You know I’m right.” She twisted the top from her beer and took a drink. “Look, I’m sorry, this is just really important to me. I didn’t really know my dad growing up, and I can tell you, it’s not healthy.”

“Wow, seriously?” I rubbed her leg. “That’s awful.”

She nodded, avoiding my eyes. “Yeah, he left my family when I was four. My brother was two. It was the Sixties, he didn’t want to have a family, so he just left.” She picked up a lighter. “He worked for Playboy, so . . .” She shrugged.

“God.” I rubbed her leg. “What an asshole. Who does that?”

“No, it’s cool, we're cool.” Lucy reached for her purse. “We get along okay now, he was great when I was in college. He really helped me out.” She retrieved the Ziplock bag that held her pot and her one hit. “It’s just this: when he left, it was because he didn’t want a family. He abandoned all of us; me, Mom, my brother.” She used a finger to scoop pot into her pipe. “But then he met someone else, got married and had another daughter, my half-sister. He said he didn’t want a family, and then he got another family. He got another daughter. It wasn’t that he didn’t want a family or a daughter.” She toked on her one hit. She held up a finger, waiting. I waited. She exhaled. “He wanted a different family. He wanted a different daughter. It felt like he didn’t really abandon us. He abandoned us because of me. I wasn’t the daughter he wanted.”

I leaned forward to wipe a tear from her face. “I already hate your dad. Who does that?”

Lucy sniffled. “Look, my dad is fine. Don’t worry about that. The thing is, you have to be there for your daughter. You have no idea how much a father matters. Can you promise that?”

I sat back, grabbing my hair into a ponytail. “Okay, look: I’ll try. Okay?”

She nodded. “You’ll see. I’m right.” She sniffled and then laughed. “So, this is some date.”

I laughed. “I’ve never had a date like this.” I looked over my shoulder. “And look—no William!” She laughed and reached for her one hit.

Later that night, she told me that her mother and brother were both gay. “You’ve got a father who abandoned you, a lesbian mother and a gay brother,” I said. “Now you’ve found a bisexual boy with a daughter he’s never met.” I held out my beer bottle. “I’d say we are well matched.”

Lucy tapped my bottleneck with hers. “That’s right. We’re both broken in the same ways.”

I took Lucy’s words to heart. I asked Rachel’s mother how she would feel about including me more deeply in our daughter’s life. She thought it over and didn’t object. As a result, I was a part of Rachel’s life as she grew up. Rachel knew Lucy as her stepmother and knew my other children as her siblings. She bonded with my family as her own, and also regarded Lucy’s family as an extension of her own.

As my relationship with Lucy deepened, I got to know her family. I met her father as the man he was twenty years after he abandoned his family. Lucy said she had forgiven Bernard for leaving her, so I bore him no grudge on her behalf. I could take him as he was. He was charming and welcoming to me. I enjoyed his conversation and felt I could go to him for advice. Well before I married his daughter, I regarded him as family. When Lucy and I had our first child, I wanted his family name in our child’s name. Lucy and her brother are the end of the line for their lineage, and her brother had no interest in having children. I am the eldest of four boys in a family that favors prodigious progeny. Lucy’s father regarded this passing on of the family name as a special favor. I felt it was just what family does.

Years later, following my business trip to the Middle East, as Lucy dug in and refused to speak to me, Bernard interceded. He suggested I leave our home to stay at his empty apartment in Manhattan. “It won’t get better so long as you are both fighting,” he reasoned. “You should leave and let her cool off.”

“I can’t leave,” I said. “We can’t give up on being married. We have the kids, the house, our whole lives.”

“Just go,” he said. “Let her calm down. Just go to the apartment and wait it out. Leaving is the only way to solve these things.”

“And do what? Wait until Lucy isn’t mad? What if she is always mad? Then what? Do I stay until we divorce, I fall in love, marry again, have another kid? When does a separation end?”

Bernard chuckled. “When Lucy is angry, you just need to give her what she wants and keep quiet. You can’t do that if you live in the same house.”

I saw the wisdom of that. I knew the only thing to do was to placate Lucy’s anger. Her father was right. And so I moved out to live in an apartment Bernard had inherited from his mother. Lucy knew it as her late grandmother’s home. She had visited it throughout her childhood. We had moved into it during graduate school and conceived each of our children there. Now, it was to be my place of exile.

I accepted that Bernard was right in placating Lucy’s rage. A few years later, I saw things differently. Lucy had long ago learned that the best way to earn her parents’ attention was to be angry with them. I had long since inherited her family’s expectation that Lucy’s anger should always be placated.

If Lucy was angry with her mother, she was rewarded with a fight. Throughout our relationship, I was impressed with how often they spoke and how often they fought, “You know, you are much closer to your mother than I am to mine,” I observed. “My mom and I talk now and then, but I can’t imagine getting into a fight with her. You and your mom argue almost every day.”

“I am not close to my mother,” she snipped. “I hate that bitch.”

If Lucy missed her father, she would pick a fight or create a crisis demanding his attention. I doubt they were ever closer than when Lucy and I divorced. Lucy simply refused to talk to me. Our attorneys stayed above the fray of the personal, keeping the divorce on the level of passing papers. Lucy used her father to communicate the day-to-day needs of two parents trading children back and forth.

“Why doesn’t Lucy just talk to me?” I would ask, exasperated. “I have no idea what is going on unless you tell me.”

“She miserable,” Bernard would say. “Just miserable. And she has no one to blame but you.”

“But what did I do?” I asked. “I went on a business trip. She treats me like I abandoned her. But when we broke up, I only left home because she absolutely insisted on it. She was punishing us all. You, me, the kids, all of us. You know what it was like.”

“I know what it was like,” Bernard said. “I don’t remember her mother being so distasteful. This isn’t like any divorce I’ve seen. I don’t think you’re to blame. I don’t think it’s her fault either. It’s my fault. This happened because I left Lucy’s mother in nineteen-sixty eight.”

I didn’t get that. “Bernard, Lucy’s divorce wasn’t fated. You didn’t make it happen. It’s a choice she made.”

Bernard hesitated. “I don’t see it that way.”

The divorce and its aftermath gradually separated me from Lucy’s family. This saddened me, as I had come to regard them as my own extended family. I had no experience with divorce, but I assumed that, after fifteen years, we had forged our own familial relationships.

That may happen in some families, but Lucy wasn’t interested in allowing me to continue in her family. She needed to cut me off from her parents and siblings and, ultimately, our own children. She voluntarily cut herself off from my birth family and, saddest of all, from her stepdaughter Rachel.

Divorce, in Lucy’s mind, was definitive. That’s how she had experienced it at age four. Her father left her and he was gone bye-bye. He had decided he liked another little girl better.

I would come to survive our divorce. I adored my four children. I made new friends, enjoyed new romance, and, to my astonishment, I fell in love.

Lucy seemed unable to let go of the past. She was the abandoned child left alone in the house we once shared, afraid to move the furniture lest it mean moving on.

Her family had taught her that the past is ever present. The future requires a break from stasis. The past, whatever its terrors, offers the comforts of familiarity.

The past is a fight always ready to be revisited. Fights, in that way, offer the constants of love.

Fleshbot and Summer Vacation

This week’s Sex Blog Roundup at Fleshbot gets it up for cock. Reading these stories, you realize that dick is not always a simple animal.

Those of you who enjoy stalking me will find me imitated, inspirational and frustrating.

Sakura and I enjoy being girls on a date that soon has our feet in the air.

Janie and I want to share a submissive boy. Candidates may apply to either blog.

Lynsey wakes up with a hangover and fewer cherries than when I last left her side.

Eden looks up from her sidewalk whipping post to smile at me.

Mariella polishes off her first knob polishing. I’m more of a blowjob man myself, so I brought in an extra cock for the occasion.

Bridget keeps it real.

Adam gives me a blowjob, or rather, he sends one my way. It was interrupted and remains unfinished, come to think of it, with a raincheck pending.

Reversing earlier denials, Avah comes clean to admit that she anonymously harassed another woman for over six months, and regrets that this adversely affected our relationship. She chalks it up to her youth, and there may be something to that—though I’ve seen people twice her age acting out no less viciously, with no more cause. I’m chalking it up to the consequences of living one’s intimate life in so public a forum as blogging. It’s just too easy to gain momentary satisfaction by venting anxieties better addressed in private, and neglecting how such actions may harm real people.

Not to dangle meat over the sharks who stalk, but that’s pretty much all you’ll read about it here. There’ll be no brutal tit-for-tat, no excruciating he-said-she-said, as our relationship is dissected for your entertainment. This may disappoint the hens who use my life and blog for gossip, as well as the bottom feeders who troll my life and blog for sex partners. Over on this side of the screen, there are two real people who blog as Avah and Jefferson. They care about each other, and they want to take care of that offline.

But for now, they are each on vacation. Avah is off on a long-anticipated month in France. I’m down south for my annual visit with family, collecting freckles and reminding my folks what their Yankee grandchildren look like.

Today my father asked, “Now, what are you going to do down here for all this time, with no women anywhere around?”

“You’ll never manage,” my brother agreed.

“Frankly,” I said, “I can use the vacation from that.”

My father laughed. My brother said, “Tell me all about it. I want to live vicariously through you.” He doesn’t know about this blog, of course, so I didn’t add that I think I’ll also enjoy the vacation from being vicariously lived through. For now, I’ll just live, and enjoy a fresh breath away from drama.

If life cooperates.

By the end of my first day back home, I’ve learned the following.

My mother’s empty nest has been filled with Maltese dogs. Nine of them.

My seventeen-year-old nephew is planning a shotgun wedding with the eighteen-year-old girlfriend he knocked up. He also wants to adopt her first baby by another man—boy?—even as he seeks visitation rights with the son he had last year with his sixteen-year-old ex-girlfriend.

My daughter, the teenage bride, hasn’t spoken with her husband in two months.

Already, New York is looking much more relaxing.