Mothers of Mine
My real one died (to me) last summer—my Real One died (really) last month.
When I was 18 I was sleeping on the floor of my mom’s one bedroom apartment. My brother got the couch until 4 AM when his alarm would go off to head to work at a Hot Dog Factory repurposed from the crumbling ruins of the GMC plant in Flint, Michigan. Birds chirped as I went back to sleep.
I’d graduated HS at 17, decided I didn’t want to go to college, but had been given something like $15,000 by my non-biologically-maternal-grandmother-figure for… college. I elected instead to use that to move to Chicago to live with a boyfriend I met off MySpace. Before my, and Tila Tequila’s accounts were deleted in a sort of raid, I was a MySpace celebrity (ok, brag) at the time having 100,000 followers, soft-won mainly by writing burn-book level shit about people I went to HS with.
In Chicago, after haunting my inbox for 6 years, Guillermo (MySpace boyfriend #1) and I broke up after about 6 weeks. I decided if I was going to live in a big city, it might as well be NYC and booked a ticket with a hostel reservation. Perchance that’d’ve been my Forever Home, had I not managed to become ensnared with Alejandro, (MySpace boyfriend #2) the son of a billionaire (not using his real name) with bodyguards, bulletproof cars (see why?), a helipad on the roof his father would land on when he visited (… in his helicopter) and other cutenesses like a Glock beneath every driver seat to flash to motorcycle gangs who’d pull up on either side and try to get you to pull over.
I learned most of the above when I visited, after, not having a place to stay yet, Alejandro reasoned, I might as well visit for a week. Naturally I returned to NYC and then got back on a plane a day later to move to San Salvador.
Ale: what to say? Took around 6 days. Topping the list of whys was that he watched—and laughed and laughed1—at the show Two and a Half Men. I would be in the other room with earplugs in reading Nietzsche’s Gay Science or Anne Sexton’s Collected Works, the two books I’d brought. Bracing myself as if for repeated waterboarding, I would hear the laugh track and his own superimposed’pon it, and my shoulders’d rise level to my ear lobes.
Alas, I recall one night reading this poem, shortly before I left back for Flint, MI, a nano failure-to-launch, given that my Biological Mother2 controlled what great-graunt money remained:
Suicide3 Note, Anne Sexton
Better,
despite the worms talking to
the mare's hoof in the field;
better,
despite the season of young girls
dropping their blood;
better somehow
to drop myself quickly
into an old room.
Better (someone said)
not to be born
and far better
not to be born twice
at thirteen
where the boardinghouse,
each year a bedroom,
caught fire.4
Dear friend,
I will have to sink with hundreds of others
on a dumbwaiter into hell.
I will be a light thing.
I will enter death
like someone's lost optical5 lens.
Life is half enlarged.
The fish and owls are fierce today.
Life tilts backward and forward.
When I wasn’t on the couch, or listening to semis go down I-696, P, another friend I met, on MySpace, who would turn out to be P-much-MySpace Boyfriend #37, who lived in an adjacent suburb of Flint, had started taking me with him to go to raves in Detroit and hang out with friends he met while attending Wayne State University. One was named Hilary (foreshadowing). Me n P would leave Friday afternoon, go out both nights, and couch surf until Sunday night.
I then got a job at Nordstrom’s in the purse department—because gay—and wanted to pen my own suicide note after a few months. Again, not suicidal. Woulda been had the next ¶ not avant eu lieu, eugh.
Post purse shift, leading purse first to a party at Scarlett’s, I took 2 (Many) Tabs of Acid. Next misfortune befell shortly thereafter when everyone but me then went to sleep. 3rd “mis”fortune was deciding, still in wrinkled American Apparel dress-shirt, that it would be a great idea to look in the mirror alone in a bathroom that was what you would imagine a college-student apartment in Detroit was like: full flickering fluorescence, oft shared toothbrush taped to wall (not by me, Jesus, jesus*), the tiles looking like a MOAB had been dropped on the block, etc. Next “mis”fortune, I decided I would buy a one-way ticket to NYC, while staring at the empty space that my pupillary diameter did then afford me, walking directly from bathroom to the computer, wasting precious funds on extra legroom option. The illogic of the time had me confident I’d Simply Figure It Out When I Landed, with $2,000, leaving in 3 days, knowing nary a soul.
The plan was to just find a place on Craigslist when I got there. This was much harder than was imagined, esp. showing up in the condition I’d show up + you know, no job, no former residence here, no reccos, no possessions, no prospects.
That + I lost precious time when I decided I would instead I explore the city first, resulting in walking around for 5 days, 6 days, 7 days.
Hilary texted me on day 7y. I smelled. She was in town visiting her cousin and did I want to hang out. I did. Hilary was < 21, and I < 19, but said it’d be no problem to gain admittance into bars on the “coolest” part of Brooklyn, one Bedford Ave., which happens to be a few blocks to my west from where I write this 15 years later. Hilary has a will-be-carded-till-50-looking face.
She/we failed at except for all but one. The buildup and rarity thusly prompting Hilary to black out, promptly.
The night before she said to stay the night at her Aunt’s house, which was vacant, off the Myrtle-Broadway stop on the J (foreshadowing).
Hilary, The Bar Night, phone dead or lost, stumbling, attempting to speak in French as was her wont when inebriated back then (foreshadowing: she now lives in the Swiss Alps bc Endurance Mountain Runner), led us repeatedly down multiple side streets she état sûre were her Tante’s, despite my protests, knowing it was decidedly not, as, me = stone cold sober, and after a week of suffering from exposure, was hypervigilantly cértain we were In Fact Not The Correct Street, Nor Even The Correct Métro Stop.
In a huffing and puffing way that did not admit her wrong, after walking in circles eventually sobered her up—So Long Did It Take—that I eventually convinced her to get back on the train, go the requisite 3 more stops, and led her directly to 27 Arion Pl.
When we got in, birds were chirping, my age ole sign that bedtime was near. I remember taking off the Dr. Martens I was wearing, for a week straight, in same socks, in same August heat, (Leo Szn! - during which I had turned 19) and the entire length of skin covering my boot-submerged portion of feet came off with them in a recursive blister on blister on blister on blister, a feat that I got that off before collapsing on sa tante’s couch.
When I awoke, her Aunt, Jackie, who had been living with Courtney Love at the time in Union Sq. because it was closer to her Cancer treatment center, had came back to grab some stuff, and was walking down the stairs from the lofted-area bedroom where Hil-dog snored at her sick pad8. I remember the first time I saw her, maybe like 4 steps down, saying hi with toothy ass fucking smile (FCK—pause) (OK back) and she was all Hey, hi, how ya doing, etc. after Hilary introduced us and then was on her way back to Mmme <3’s House.
Hilary left after those two nights and after an undisclosed amount of additional homeless time (it was now September), I finally did get a place with two lovely MHs (meth heads) in lovely Orthodox South Williamsburg. I type this now from the extremely opposite geographical and Italian Enclave North End.
I had never met a Jew before nor lived with MHs, who had—the MHs—somehow (rent controlled?) were the only gentiles (gentile controlled?) apartment in the building—and the entire block for that matter—of otherwise Warm Welcoming Hassidim. I was clinically lonely.
Actually, re never having met a Jew, Lie detector determined that’s that was a lie, as Jackie is… wasughNO9.
While the MHs were busy rifling through their rotting leatherette couch I slept on for any and all loose pocket change of mine that’d spilled there whilst I tossed n turned, I spent the day looking for a job and at night to stave off chest-concavity-loneliness decided to ride the subway to find friends, reading books—conspicuously, title always present for anyone taking the bait—usually taking the L to 8th Ave and back10.
Turned out while no one took the book-bait I did make my first friend in the Bedford L station.
A guy who I espied, a certain bagpipist Franz L, was performing, him and I doing a dosey-do as I’d see him one night at 1st, then Union Sq., then 6th, then 8th, and back again. Sitting next to me was Eduardo (friend #1) who’d started doing that thing where someone makes a show of leaning just a little past your face to look at something beyond your face but then also looking at your face in a way that must be detected by skin’s infrared-receptors. So, looking at the bagpipes, and the side of my skull, etc.
I, fight or flight-ly, turned to him and said “he plays Lady Gaga on that thing sometimes.” The resulting conversation continued on the train, which I was—cough, busy—taking to 8th, we talked until he had to get off at 3rd. Before he did, he was promptly handed my MetroPCS T9 purple brick of a phone and entered his number11.
I played it cool and waited about 12 minutes to text and ask if he wanted to hang out and after he was done at a friends get together, a suspiciously short function, we went to this—also now dead—place called Yaffa Café on St. Marks that was open 24/7. We talked until birds started doing their thing, went back to Williamsburg together to go hang out on these rocks by the beach looking out across the East River at the power plant that did that purple alien invasion explosion years later.
He ended up introducing me to my friend who he knew from a stint in Sweden, one Gewet, who as it were came over and cried with me yesterday, Jan 13th, her mom having died too, also of a blood cancer, a little too recently.
Turns out he also introduced me to this dude Tiny, another Swede like Gewet, who I decided I wanted to date more than Eduardo. Sorry E. He at this time was also couch surfing at a friends who were similarly staying somewhere else in the city similarly to Hil/Jackie situation, weirdly common here.
My Craigslist thing had ended, so I slept there a few nights, and with his friends imminently coming back, I was thusly going to be imminently homeless again, unless I could find a place for ~54.00 initial payment. It was now Cold outside.
In said cold, in a sort of sustained panic at my prospects, I was walking down Broadway in SoHo from my job at a pastry place on the Upper West Side that will not be given free promo, where I was paid under minimum wage [allegedly], and so had to save money by walking thither-and-fro for 2 hour one way each shift at first. “Luckily” my diet consisted of unlimited pastries they would throw out at end of night. Later, after a month or so of working there, the button on my only pair of black jeans shot off at supersonic velocity, hit the wall, and bounced in front of customer, my rapidly expanded waist causing a critical seam structural failure…
Anyway, yes, uhm, right, walking in my safety pinned together jeans, on my way to the Williamsburg Bridge, I’d just passed by the parking garage with blue neon sign by Astor Place, I heard
TylErRRR!
from somewhere near the Ole MacDonald’s, which turned out to be—Jackie! Who, having met me for like 2 minutes 2 months prior, had recognized me from across the street on dually-crowded sidewalks, and persisted saying my name, which I could not really compute was meant for me, doing a sort of romcommical glancing for ppl with Tyler name tags behind me, as my list of known entities at that moment was 3, all with accents decidedly foreign.
I crossed the street unlookingly with my bag of pastries whose butter would have rendered the paper bag translucent by then to Hilary’s cousin.
She instructed me to sit with her on the ledge of a door. <I’m crying, my throat literally hurts from it AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHh. She, a talker, asked me if I wanted to split a pack of “fun size” Oreos she had also pilfered from her cancer-treatment center. I declined, being so dainty, but sat there enthralled as she held court of 1 for the duration of the pack. She was sort of looking at me with what I would come to recognize as the opposite of the serial-killer look through you gaze, but one just as intense, something like a Calculation of Need. In parting, she impressed upon me to anytime let her know I was doing, what I was doing, where I was living, and pocketing the birds chirping blue sky packaging said if I needed anything to text her when I handed her the T9.
Playing it cool as I had with Eduardo, I waited approximately 6 minutes, texting her, recrafting, ashamed at my need but also knowing she was sort of the best and only chance that I had, being as connected as she was, wondering if She might know of any places I could potentially move into for < $600 (2011) to be furnished in as little as a few weeks. She texted no. Then she texted Also But That I could come sleep on her couch, that same couch, for as long as I needed.
Turns out I needed a year. Andddddddd, plz hold I can’t see the screen.
OK—so yes, I walked me and my lil backpack over to Jackie’s for the second time.
Jackie and I did not make fast friends, at least for the first few months. Yet I never heard a word of admonition, expectation, heard tell of a late fee, chore list, nada. Was she motherly? Yes—she was a—literal—Cool Mom. And also, look where “actual” motherhood had got me. The best kind of mom. I wouldn’t have dreamed for the first few months that I’d ever be referring to her as such, being—see above, below—mistrustful of maternal emanations.
I just did my lil bakery job, dated Tony, and sometimes walked her Dachshund Flonaise. Quite possibly one of the most a******* d*** I **** ever (!) met. Anyway. This is not to say that we didn’t have fun—we just slowly bonded, me revealing a little more here and there while she sort of came out with it all at first—she’d shoot the shit when we would link up here and there, despite having zero wall separating us giving me a sort of psychic privacy and space, as if just letting me, a very recently homeless clueless teen who she’d met a single time sleep there one, two, or three weeks weren’t enough.
She’d sometimes give me a $20 to get her something not-$20, or just to do stuff like drop off her Fuck Cancer (literally) hats that she sold a shit load of because, while ubiquitous now, she’d basically coined, and speaking of coins, monetized it first, to where I’d frequently have a Baggu® of hers stuffed with mailers that she wrote a shaky handed note personalized with each12. We’d have these moments never forcedly when I’d bring back a coffee for her & I. Dream roommate.
Then, one day, one Aimee popped up. Jackie explained that this girl who worked at the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, Jackie’s cancer, had seen her in a documentary about cancer Jackie’d been in, was televisionally taken by her, sent Jackie what I suppose amounted to fan mail, to which I guess Jackie was like come on up—a pattern emerges, come on over, come on up, stay a while ;’)—because one day there was Aimee. They hung out all day, Aimee leaving late that night. Aimee, like Jackie, was another person who sort of immediately put my soul at ease as if it were unknowingly chronically inflamed. A terminally cool chick.
Then there was Aimee another time a few weeks later, and then again, and then again until I started looking forward to her visits, as, Jackie liked to Sleep In and so until she awoke Aimee would sneak downstairs (did I mention they had started to totally platonically sleep in the same bed, despite another couchlette next to mine? Oh.) The visits increased in frequency to fever pitch levels with multiday stays until FINALLY Jackie got a clue and, after calling me up to her room one night said, “Tyler, I think Aimee likes me likes me…?”.
As previously explained in footnote who cares, her money during Our Year of Paradise was allthewhile was dwindling, and when she’d reached a Critical Low on the savings she’d been living on for very many years and decided to move to Atlanta to live with her Mom.
When it was clear that I would no longer be living with Jackie for much longer, I realize in hindsight basically that if it weren’t gonna be with Jackie, I was not down to re-pound the pavement and live anywhere else.
Whilst Aimee and Jackie fell in like, I too had begun to like-like Tiny. Poetically or whatever, Jackie and I had both been witnessing a falling in love of the other while falling in love with one another.
With impending move, I decided next logical thing would be to get married (? don’t ask—Prefrontal Cortex had a few more years of cookin in store / a decade), me having just turned 20 so as to expedite an upcoming move to anywherelse. Änevär elts turned out to be Stockholm. The whole marriage thing happened in a bewildered Downtown Brooklyn by Jay Street MetroTech. Jackie and Aimee and Gewet came. Jackie took the only pic of us outside the downtown Brooklyn court room, but, as Tiny was 6’7” 13. Tiny—ha ha.
Months or weeks or a day later, Aimee, desperately in love, rented out her house in DC and got a place in Atlanta “to be closer to” Jackie aka have her move in.
A year later, visiting from Sweden, which was let’s just say at the time literally and figuratively Dark, in no tiny part to the fact that I would get up at 5:30AM (in the dark), take a subway, to a commuter train, to a bus (still dark), to Hjulstaområde, where Acne has a warehouse (swathed in darkness), where then thither I would walk endless rows of jeans packing boxes that consistently included (the ones I did, charted on a thing in break room) unasked for jackets, vests, snus cannisters, spare tape rolls, you name it, which, not to belabor the point of my labor at the time but twuz taking place in a totally windowless environment, until (!), my break at 3 aka 15h00 at which point I’d burst through the doors and it’d be… Dark! and then would leave at 7 (d), and then do the inverse of bus, commuter train, subway, and be home around 9 (), etc. 5 days in a row.
That, plus certain irreconcilable differences between Tiny and I, to where, on my final farewell nite chez East Atlanta saw me tearfully admitting I wanted desperately to move back to NYC, but had to stay because I had a stupid ass phone, another brick if you will, that I needed to pay $700 off of, not to mention needing additional fund$ once I flew into JFK. Jackie the whole time was looking at me in her way.
I woke up and was presented with this note slipped beneath my door, whose first sentence upon rereading has my screen doing the blur thing again—
Voilà, I move back to NYC, and stay on my friend Alison’s couch (Couch #415), until moving in with… Gewet : ) then <a decade passes> and I’m home.
Many m00ns14 later, after many sometimes-impromptu-weeks-to-months long visits to Jackie and Aimee’s15… actually I don’t want to write about the happy times, because I am not happy.
Or—I am happy, like euphoric, throughout the day(s), smiling with glint of madness in my eyes at passersby, knowing what they probably don’t recognize in that moment, the preciousness of their current state, but then, a few sidewalk squares later, scared my dog by beginning to smilingly sob and let out a primal grunt at the top of my lungs because 99% of former things I would be self-conscious or wary of or concerned with, Do Not Matter, in a good way, when I get a peep of that perspective.
So, yeah, I get a text that Jackie on had entered hospice on Jan 10th. But I’d just seen her some 6 weeks before?
Actually, no, wait, I should share some happy stuff, which is viz alas I guess going to be her beauty16:
Sunday, January 12th17 I woke up to a text that she had died at 3 AM, precisely after texting my friend to come over at 3 PM, tired was I from arriving home from the hospice the night before at midnight, 3 hours before she Found Relief.
To go on speaking of death indirectlyesque, behold, the continuation of this much b’footnotèd mess (“the more freely, the more truly | then, sobbing verse is realized”) which should meanderingly presently and lower jaw a’tremblingly for first time in my life experiencing that which actors attempt to do, congeal it does ugly atop this Regina Spektor song called Après moi, le déluge that came to me as I sat down to transcribe what was partially hand written at her bedside on our last night together, here; yea, here’s another song, whose import at first was an unclear (unconscious) connection, but then, hearing the Russian poem by Pasternak which makes up the ending of the song18 made horribly clear (that is to say it made conscious) why (its unbidden coming):
February19. Take ink and weep,
write February as you’re sobbing,
while black Spring burns deep
through the slush and throbbing.
Take a cab20. For a clutch of copecks,
through bell-towers’ and wheel noise,
go where the rain-storm’s21 din breaks,
greater than crying or ink employs.
Where rooks22 in thousands falling,
like charred pears from the skies,
drop down into puddles, bringing
cold grief to the depths of eyes.
Below, the black shows through,
and the wind’s furrowed with cries:
the more freely, the more truly
then, sobbing verse is realized.
— Boris Pasternak23, Untitled24
and Laughed and laughed and laughed… also, I can’t bring myself to edit the monster that this thing has grown into, so if you notice inconsistencies, atemporalities, errata… ur mom.
This is what Jackie and Aimee called my mom, so I’ll honor that, with little fear of familial guilt or phone calls, as she’s now dead (to me) too, and blocked (biopsychosocialspiritually) as of last summer, after a protracted Boomer-Accountability-Battle I lost for like 10 years in a row. The paint chips must damage some crucial part of the brain, candidates of mine (no joke) including some circuitry connected to the hippocampal-amygdælic lizard loop/HPA axis—the cortex responsible for assigning emotional salience to stuff, memories included, or maybe the dACC (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), responsible for detecting and deciding a course of action when faced with conflicting drives, or the as yet uncharted Accountability Cortex, susceptible to neurotoxic lead inhalation.
Ah, Regret: that she was only able to NonMySpace forever boyfriend (#∞) once. Maybe eternally, if Nietzsche is right tho... yes, the eternal dinner of meeting the eternal boyfriend. We had a dinner together the last time she could come up to NYC, because of oxygen issues after her lungs were damaged from a clinical trial gone wrong. It was testing something called Car-T which can either cure your cancer ∆, or cause something called cytokine-storm which basically pops popcorn out of your lung kernels, thusly requiring her to be on increasing amounts of oxygen until she was at the max amount that could be done at home, thereby precluding her from getting treated for the ORIGINAL disease, and so entered hospice the second week of January AGHHHHH HHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. At the dinner she was able to have this chic little shoulder bag containing a portable oxygen concentrator with the stupid fucking plastic nose nozzles. Oh, anyway, I was super proud to be in position to secretly pay for the dinner after all she and Aimee had done for me throughout the years, and have a boyfriend I was proud enough to introduce them to finally ;’).
∆ Or, turns out speed your demise from something totally not cancer-related. So, I guess, luckily (? ugh), seeing her at hospice was not the first time I’d have to rush somewhere, images of her dying. When the trial had clearly gone south, Aimee told me I better come to Hackensack, NJ, just over the bridge from NYC, ASAP, as it looked di(e)re over there at what was thereafter referred to as “The Sack” ‡, ‡‡.
‡ Jackie was really good at coming up with stupid hilarious names for stuff, beyond the aptly named Sack, one Mouse-olini, for, one night when she’d gone down to visit Aimee, I was left alone and to my devices, watching this show Damages, with the peerless Glenn Close (for my 10th bday I asked for and got a DVD of Fatal Attraction that subsequently lost its microgrooves due to > 10th play), while also listening all the while, to what you just knew had to be a > 10 lb. rat that just loved to enter the cabinetry beneath the sink and rustle around in a hurricane of plastic bags through some undetectable hole and traipse about, until I would run up and kick the doors and it would scurry back whence it spawned (DYK that most live within 600 ft. of where they were born their entire lives?), as I did presently-then do in order to boil some pasta, which, in a state of distracted anticipatory terror I forgot about it, to come back to, very trepidatiously, a congealed mass of gluten about 45 minutes—or one Damages episode—past the suggested 10 min rigatoni cook time, and, the garbage being beneath the sink, I thusly had to open the door to the very pits of hell—hey Car-T folx!—to throw it away, less I actually glimpse and thus infarct The Thing traipse across the stovetop or something, and in my panic I missed the garbage and the mass went with audible plop next to the garbage, necessitating then the frenzied plan of grabbing some Borax, and countless kicks later, reopen the pit to coat entire blob with entire can as a deterrent, and so never heard from the the thing again. Of course until I finish the series, which ends with Ms. Glenn being found out, crazy eyed as no one else can do, at the end of a dock, and I, birds chirping (I have dumb habit of staying up for the short-lived antidepressant effect deprivation provides—current time 4:30AM), and, to my horror discover that the noiselessness was actually Mouseolini eating the blob and licking up (!) the borax as if it were powered sugar around a flourless chocolate cake from Réstaurant 9ème Circle d’Enfer, and so, Close-ing, went to the roof and smoked an entire pack of Marlboro lights while relating the story and wondering when Farry’d be back—which, now, turns out to be NEVER… but actually always literally so many lives did she touch more than most do 0.5 lives—and during which call she coined Mouseolini on the spot.
‡‡ Bizarrely, my then boyfriend (#0, figuratively, as in zero, nil, null, nothing) at the time, knowing the circumstances, elected to send me pictures of random profiles on Grindr, accusing me of being behind them based on geoproximity to the hospital. I received these accusations while (literally) wringing my hands in Jackie’s darkened hospital room, where you had to basically be silent as a mouse (foreshadowing) so as not to wake Jackie who would then start cough-talking thereby causing bells to start ringing. So when it turned out that she had not died there, instead, merely-hugely nonetheless being killed there, I decided to take impromptu road trip with them down to DC for a few days, whose photos I just discovered:
Shout out to another dead (at least hopefully, and at least psychically to me) mother of mine, the only in her class of Step-, who tried to burn down my bedroom with a Poland Springs bottle of butane and a lighter when I was 7.
I was lying in bed pretending to navigate a nuclear sub around a heavily mined Bay of Pigs when suddenly the curtains began fluttering from no Earthly wind, the glass commenced radiating heat, then forming bubbles, then the flames, of course. Think that’s bad? Cf. [4]§, ibid.
My uncle **** put * shotgun ** *** ***** *** ** *** ******, after placing * **** ** ** Aunt ** *** *** ** *** ****** ****, my cousin, tragically *** relayed ** ****; ** ****, *** *** ***** *******, ** *** *** ***-******* ** ****** the shattered out back window £, ≠, ª.
£ Thank you, but rest assured, I am by no means suicidal, having seen what it does first-, second- and myriad-hand.
≠ Jacky too had a ton of suicide in her life, be it friends or ppl she worked for, which were commonly one in the same, à la Kurt Cobain friend/nanny/baddie, Elliot Smith, whom she tour managed, the tallest and sickest haired guy in this Ramones pic she’s in, (“interestingly”, all other 3 members are gone now too, the rest of c*nc*r, bile duct, prostate, et al., Jesus… or rather jesus* […]), and those are just to name a few.
ª for ªnne Sexton, who started her car in the garage (door closed) at age 45 §
§ My Dad also had the pipe hooked up to his car, lacking a garage, thereby creating, as it were, a sort of portable garage, when it (his corpse, car) was found on some bleak-ass road in the bleaker-assèd Michigan winter. On paper, that’d’ve been case closed ›››, were it not for the attempted-arson-of-my-bedroom, combined with unoverlookability of fact that someone kept calling and saying “find out who bought the flex pipe [thing that funnels CO in exhaust fumes from muffler to window, displacing, namely, oxygen, which, apparently, after Jackie, is the great fucking slayer of them all, with, too little, or, perversely, too much (huh!?) being nonhormetically toxic, [oxygen in excess that is [I don’t want to write this, but I also do, not to feel, but to share, so I will hide, temporarily, triply, [now quadruply nested in here]]]?],” and if that wasn’t obvious enough, turned out to be my stepmom’s incestuous cousin Darrel at ye local Ace Hardware as Pied Piper Pipe Purchaser, oh and of course, she told everyone she did it at a bar, alas. ºº, ºººº
››› and in some divine tragicomic laugh after writing the above, what episode of House of Cards season one should I watch to unwind but the one where Peter Russo is driven into his garage by Kevin Spacey (ew), who turns the car on after basically alcohol poisoning Russo (my stepmom had allegedly poisoned my dad before staging it too), and after wiping down the prints closes the door ‡‡‡.
‡‡‡ which really the punchline not being enough, as I took my sweet dog Doris for a walk (whom Jackie never got to meet either… literally shaking my head, nor, again, her Daddy but more than once, nor attend the maybe-probably-would-be-actual-wedding himwith), Doris decides to take a dump in front of a building whose buzzers I glance at, and, well:
ºº Similarly, but distinctly, to how when I say Flint, MI it’s followed by the non-question°°° of “Is that the place with the water?” the times that I’ve shared this about my step-mother, it’s followed by the question that elicits this response: No, she’s not in prison, she didn’t get caught for it, as the place where it happened didn’t have a dedicated police department and she had him hastily cremated the day after the funeral (Cf. [23]Ω, ibid.) before another toxicology report could be done, but later would get pinched multiple times for stuff like check forgery, or prescriptions for Tylenol 3 (which like, go big or go home, Tylenol 3???), slashing my BM’s tires when we were at a bank, or the park, or… the post office, or for opening credit cards in my BM’s name to buy random stuff, and other truly petty crimes throughout the years.
°°° People know that that’s The Place, but also want to place themselves as Knowing that.
ºººº Maybe someday with advent of SkySenseDNA and when blood can be drawn from stones, or bones—marrow—I’ll be 69 years old (smirk) on some NeoBritain TruePast Crime show about how his B’Coldèd Case was solvèd.
I keep having this replaying image of the three times Jackie could open her eyes at hospice and look at me, in mine, all were successively for more periods of time, the first two were unclear whether she was looking-looking at me » but the last one, the one that replays, was more of an eyeroll, that telegraphed, via the air between us, and through the wires, recognition of the situation, and, eyebrows still kinda mobile, quickly signaled humorless humor with a “Can u fucking believe this, ugh...” message.
» In tragicomedionarrative fashion, my BM suffered from DID, the one that’s easily falsifiable and thereby prevalently self-diagnosed on TikTok, which featured SFFS *(Super Fun Fugue States), for which I was the charge nurse when they occurred—other adults being predictably unpresent or uninformed; my shift starting when said SFFSs were touched off by an eerie optical non-responsiveness, echoing a distal cortical distance, with a sort of staring-through-you look, that was similar to my step-mother’s, and is talked about in crime shows as “the unforgettable” experience of looking a serial killer in the eyes. Something all 3 of my mother’s shared—and blessedly, where all overlap ceased concerning Jackie.
My white noise of choice ever since.
Oh my god, I’m wrong, regarding order of boyfriends I met off MySpace—P (the one I went to raves with counting as like a—consistently—molly induced #0.5), Zach (the true #1), Eric (the true #2), Aaron, of the identical twins Aaron and Kyle, (true 3/4, but actually just 3, for while I talked with both, I did not incestuously date both you sicko—I’m not Darryl) so that makes Aaron (the true #3) µ, then Guillermo (true #4), and Jorge (true #5). There we go.
µ Having boiling-ass-fuck-ass-suck-ass-hot-tears, raw throated crying spell post wave of grief #54,321 just now [I’m reading thru this for a single time before hitting the P button] I recalled that the last time I felt like this like what when Aaron #3, a year ahead, broke up with me before moving to Baltimore for school, leaned over the washer/dryer after school «
« At my BM’s at that time 2 bedroom apartment, where, not wanting to share a room with my brother, I slept on another couch for my last 2 years of high school, and on the weekends would lie and say I had to work but would actually drive an hour and a half to Aaron #3’s place in Detroit, where, his parents not really into the idea of him having his boyfriend stay the night, next to his parent’s washer and dryer in the basement, literally everything totally ◌̥
◌̥ = symbol for voicelessness in linguistics, so as not to alert his parents, at any upstairs squeak of which we would hide behind the furnace in adjoining basement room lol
Def not the sickest ever—when she’d been diagnosed, at that point nearly like 10 years ago, with multiple myeloma a blood }} cancer which she’d had misfortune to discover when, boarding a plane as tour manager to some siQQ band, she coughed and her rib broke. They’d initially quoted her weeks or months or something—Morgan Freeman narrating: she would have it for 20 more years—so she’d up and left her place for a $12,000 a month penthouse in SoHo on corner of Broadway & Houston, deciding to live it up if it were going to be over soon (:: her vibe emerges ::). When more than a few months had gone by, she got a pad pictured below with balcony over the library in West Village. Then a house in Cobble Hill ••. Then, etc. downgrading each time, to where she was where I slept °°°°°. My best, her worst.
}} synchronicityly I’m beset by signs of marrow and bones breaking too:
•• I always remember for some reason this image she told me of when 9/11 happened that she’d looked out her window in Cobble Hill (across the river from FiDi quite a distance) and seeing office papers scattered all over the lawn with more surreally falling from the sky, some on fire, charred.
°°°°° I was wearing these pleather skin tight pants + an 3XL poly-blend faux-Dior shirt, which didn’t help either, but I highly recommend against the experience of getting onto a crowded uptown 5 train, in August heat, having not been able to shower effectively for a week, save for Monster (2003) style sink-scenes in the only 24/7 Starbucks chez Columbus Circle. Many (~20) a night, I’d read my Sexton & Nietzsche combo until I found myself becoming tired around 5 am, dash to the bathroom for Charlize Theron-style mirror-full auto-reflective bathing not unlike the LSD-trip mirror-gaze that’d brought me there a few weeks prior, then would dash out, Marianas Trench level depth of Shame at having used the resources of would-be Israeli-genocidal supporting Starbucks Corp, FOR FREE, thither to the side entrance exit, when the birds would’ve started chirping and the promise of relative safety found in sunlight would afford an anxietyless stroll to the SW-corner of Central Park, where a lumbar-supporting slope and the backpack as pillow provided not-uncomfortable rest. There was a few slip-ups where I awoke to such scenes as those at the Alabama Ave. J Train stop where two women, both with eyebrows cocked, nudged me awake, their bosoms plentiful in the way the 2009-10 model periwinkle MTA-employee button-ups would create, telling me that I oughta “get of here and head back into the city,” with a baby that did cause a hairline crack in both spine and heart, in its sweetness, juxtaposed as it were with the relative Marianas Trench abyssal horror of inhumanness of NYC knowing nary a soul provided, that wasn’t matched until I would meet Jackie months.
Additional lying indicated that I knew Jerry Springer Quite well, having been plopped in front of him by my oft pilled-out BM for like two months straight after an incident at her literal trailer-trash boyfriend’s (Mom’s Boyfriend #WhoCouldCountThatHigh?) Mom’s (the boyfriend’s) trailer. Granted I was born in one too, but not all trailers are trashgenetic, especially our gorg double wide (after the termite infestation was taken care. After a night of watching WWF’s In Your House/Trailer 6: Rage in the Cage on… February 18, 1996, where I sat in the privileged position of most proximity to the white python tank in the dank living-room that frankly oozed criminality. When the pay-per-view viewing was complete around 21h00 picture me¬¬¬ playing patty-cake with my BM’s boyfriend’s BM atop the kitchenette counter, swinging legs, which, turns out, the family Rottweiler 3x my weight decided presently that it’d probably had enough of seeing, ostensibly—allegedly—my BM’s BF’s BM B Beat Up (I can cast these aspersions because my BM’SBF did the same to my BM before my very eyes more than once ∏) so the Rot presently then decided to rip my entire calf off my right leg. Anyway, where was I, right, Jews I knew.
¬¬¬ no need to engage the imagination here’s a picture of me from the time, mullet to prove recounting’s veracity:
∏ and yeah, BM had a rough life, obviously, but decided she would not do the right thing and gaslight me for a trauma **** *** ******* ****** **** ** ** ***** ****** and after some Jungian shadow work, it decided to bubble **** ***** *** ****** *** **** last summer while I was making noodles come to think of it… **** ***** ****???? *****! In any case, traumatic upbringings are not notary publics, like, licensureing one to be a dirtbag, see: Jackie Farry, who grew up in a fucking cult and who nonetheless found time to save many lives […]
Once I was reading a Thomas Pynchon novel, doing this subway cruising, before I knew what cruising was, and in it he mentioned a character yo-yoing on the subway, basically going back and forth on same train. Yo-yo turned out to be what a lit teacher might call Symbol in the book V, and had other synchronistic connections to my life at the time. I once almost had made a friend, the first person to comment on the book I was reading after almost a month of doing it every night, but alas it was not to be.
Since his discharge from the Navy Profane had been road-laboring and when there wasn’t work just traveling, up and down the east coast like a yo-yo; and this had been going on for maybe a year and a half. After that long of more named pavements than he’d care to count, Profane had grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this. They hand in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street, which come the full moon he would have nightmares about . . . receding in an asymmetric V to the east where it’s dark and there are no more bars
Oh wow, another memory comes unbidden, ladybuggish in nature (cf. [26]).
After giving all my money to MHs for two months and it being about a week before my newfound bakery job paid me, having precisely $0, which I hadn’t yet been apprised of, at Mr. Kiwi’s on Myrtle-Broadway trying to buy two apples and a coke, the coke to press to my hand which I’d burned almost clean off when making a latte whose milk boiled over and scalded and had troublingly begun to Really Throb. There was this lurid lime-green backgrounded card with a ladybug on it. I called my mom on the purple brick and asked her if she knew what it was, for it’d had my name on it, but I never used it. Turns out it was some starter card, which, literally cackling like a witch, she informed me that it was cancelled as of a yesterday when I’d attempted to use it for the first time ever at another mortifying “be right back for these things let me call ‘The Bank’ retail fail”—a BRB Not 2 B, if you will—and that from here on out “YR ON YR OWN NOW”, punctuated by another cackle whose noise dopplered in and out as I spiked the purple brick onto pavement. The battery shot out at high speed and hit some girl in the shin. I apologize, popped it back in, and lo, it, by grace of goddess still worked. Sorry Sr. Kiwi and Sra Kiwette! Those in line probably kinda then knew I wasn’t coming back and had $0 so I red cheekily high-tailed it out of there, only daring to show my face again when my importunaeity became portunate and I secured a spot not a block away.
Including, up to the very end, cf. this msg shared in the GC, shared my a member who was friends with The Last Hat Recipient:
®Gewet, a photographer, did snap this pretty pic tho. And before you ask, the garb was Tiny’s idea, he being Assyrian, thusly… buying traditionally buying what turned out to be two traditionally Pakistani outfits…
Lol, jk that was for some nodeling thing §™§ I did at a church as the closing acte, if you will. Here’s the decidedly uncancellable if appropriatory pic:
§™™ well now since this has become a memoirette making it here on account of her, speaking of nodeling, there was this You’re (Not) On Your Own Moment when all the yellow cabs in NYC’s TV’s featured yours truly—for 7 months in a row… eliciting calls from former teachers, a babysitter on honeymoon, coworkers, friends, frenemies, you name it. The last 30 seconds of that year’s Jimmy Kimmel (side eye) “CaN U bEliEve THiS NYFW oUTfiT” episode where his staff hastily sews imitation garments and makes the audience wear them. The final look is always worn by his henchman Guillermo—note: not MySpace Boyfriend #3—taking the metaphorical cake as most outrageous—then there twaz I, flashing upon screen and eliciting a studio audience groan †††† for the finalè, wearing what my friends at Moses Guantlett Cheng had me wear in the VFILES show:
†††† lol this also reminds me this wasn’t the first time I hadn’t Gotten Groant At—from the very first show I was the closer of—and granted, I looked like a greased up porcine twink after rolling disturbing a sandy zen garden pumped into the church across the corner from Veselka in the Lower East Side—I mean… as pigs are wont to want to roll around, amirite ladies?—and granted, pig did I appear, but what does she think she looks like… amirite… ladies?: (should be a colon-question-mark as there is a the colon comma in form of ;… amirite… ladies.?) ‡‡‡
‡‡‡ Why am I sharing this? I asked myself this, uploading the above. It’s because without Jackie none of this fun stuff would’ve happened. I owe her my literal life ªª.
ªª The first time I cried at the hospice, 1 of 2 times, was when Katie the Death Doula held phone up to Jackie’s ear and a woman, whom I momentarily glimpsed on the FaceTime of Katie’s phone, some impossibly gorgeous woman from California—gorgeous in the way that only certain people from California can be— impeccable in a word, had said to Jackie’s into Jackies ear at first a sort of general good bye, then said that Jackie had, y’know, like, when she most needed it, “literally saved her life”.
moons… huge groping ache, oh right:
mOOn Over tOwns mOOn, ee cummings
mOOn Over tOwns mOOn
whisper
less creature huge grO
pingness
whO perfectly whO
flOat
newly alOne is
dreamest
oNLY THE MooN o
VER ToWNS
SLoWLY SPoUTING SPIR
IT
fawjefijaweofijaweffawefawefa afwef awjefiajw;efoijawef awefjawiefjaw;efijawoefjawefa awefawefaw‡‡‡
‡‡‡ dhjaqfjaweiofjawef awefaw ef afawefawfjawiojflsllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
This pic is from a month+ visit. Also, wow, nice, french toast was the last thing Jackie ate, while she still could, isn’t it so fucking stupid that truly good people die decades before the most evil cunts the world’s ever known.
And ofc bc why not, I STG, and I reject the lyrics to this POS doubtless bop of a song, that, when I go to pull up photo-hot-tear-producing-dropbox-of-doom-joy, after putting on that Smashing Pumpkins one, YouTube has diabolically decided to put on one never before heard by yr ears truly (sue me—all these mentions of Jackie’s cool famous friends—oh did I mention she had her own MTV show Super Rock, celeb in her own right—are decidedly not because I know any of their music, being a teeny bit a tween and her arc being a teeny bit before my time, no never for that, but more so to attempt impossibly to capture some nanoscopic sliver of her badassery via her proximity to culturally recognized badasses…):
In the Grief Lounge I drew the Queen of Cups ≥, associated with the waxing gibbous or full moon—the 12th was waxing gibbous, the 13th, 2025’s first full moon, aka Wolf Moon, at which I will be howling. ≤
≥ Associated also with a mother figure who is nurturing and emotionally intuitive.
≤ Astronomically also a comet, heaven-sent if u will, identified as being potentially earth impacting, reaches perihelion today; a comet breaking up and vanishing from view as it approaches the sun while at its brightest is poetically Too Much: ¶
¶ Oh, also, Mars was visible, as a red dot next to the moon, I like to think that it has something to do with warring, as Jackie had cancer she had somewhat increasingly pyrrhic victories over for OVER 20 YEARS BROOOOOOO UGH.
Among other songs, a Smashing Pumpkins song, Stand Inside Your Love Æ, which I’d last listened to maybe 10 years ago, but of course, the lyrics ‡
Æ:
‡ Jesus, the title card to the music video ‡‡:
‡‡ and, then? later browsing the Dropbox of Doom, lo & behold, it’s them at some party:
January is decidedly not February, but spiritually might as well be.
Or last minute Amtrak to DC when it had seemed like things (life) had taken a turn (toward death), to then have a mere but beyond meaningful 24 hours.
Upon arrival, those friends (innumerable) who’d stayed with her over the past few weeks and her Death Doula, a literal God-god*-send, looked, well, they all frankly looked like the D word themselves, sunken around the eyes from sleep deprivation. I encouraged them to sleep while I stayed at her bedside. The lights got turned off and they were out in seconds.
So, right, wrap it up Tyler, end of this Compulsive Need to Share to stave off another end: our last hours together were her own last few hours as it turned out.
This last night of ours I spent pressing a button every 15 minutes in between reading the psychoanalyst Karen Horny Horney’s Self-Analysis (1950), and when that became Too Real, switched to Infinite Jest *(1996 - around the time I was getting my fibula gnawed on by the rott) (also—ironic title?) ß, and while reading the two simultaneously burning through the journal I’d brought on the train ¬, I just sat and watched her breathe until another 15 minutes had gone by and I would click a button which’d administer 2mg hydromorphone trade name Dilaudid §, ∞, ∆
ß and when that title became too funny and incongruous for the moment, despite Jackie being one of the funniest ppl I know-ew, fuck, ew: knew—I switched to studying Internal Family Systems via AI chat bot, because my therapist who piqued my interest in the modality, only to, as it turns out, seemingly read half the Wiki intro on it (? ) (I’m mad, I’m noticing, writing this, OK), then stopped, but anyway, piquèd as I was, I decided to teach myself in earnest…
… and do I recognize that here I am reading about the feasibility of Self-Analysis, and (another) therapeutic modality that is meant to connect one with feeling their feelings, while in a emotionally-overwhelming situation—literally responsible for keeping someone who I was desperate to talk to again if but to say I’m here, which I know she knew I was, but a word, a phoneme, beyond the binary of toe wiggles and eyebrow raises or conversely furrows and hand squeezing, but yet also Totally Sedated, with the drug visibly setting in a minute or two after my finger pressed it? Ya, I do.
I’d like to say two things on the subject: 1. I’d like to see you try to just sit there, and 2. I am aware.
No, but really: I would like to meet a beast capable of sitting in a dark hospice suite with just their eyeballs roving their dying younger (well, middle-younger, too) self’s savior allthewhile my list of stopwatch “Laps” growing on the Apple clock utility (final count was 7 hours straight sat on a folding chair with unspeakable dearth of cushion and a diet coke which laughably failed to meet the dryness of yrs truly’s throat, but then each time I’d think of rising to go to the en suite sink to get something to drink, I knew I’d have to contend with the idea that I’d 1. wake her up and spur on a coughing fit and, even more horribly, 2. I’d also have to look at the opened and unused horrifically medically hermetically sealed Tongue Sponge, and knowing Jackie had had an ice-cold water dispenser machine installed at their Takoma Park bungalow with custom ice dispenser because of how important wetness of mouth was to her would send me the mind reeling on Was she thirsty? “In” “There”? and praying to lower case g she wasn’t… and anyway so forth hence there I remained seated—but, I guess, in closing, who among us could do without Clinically Heavy Distraction? Feel free to cast the first hunk of agate, (where tf was I…)) … […]
¬ Aye, journaled did I 50 pages worth on Self-Analysis, Infinite Jest, IFS, that I’d burnt through the only journal I bought, so then things necessitated switching to one of the Christian notepads pilfered from the Family Lounge’s grief bookshelf upon which I began writing a sort of how-we-met in an attempt to forestall the future le déluge and Final Goodbye, which this whole mess began to be a mere transcription of but has grown to ghastly proportions, and anyway boy did I need a Button Press or two, preferably in my own port, of some opioid analogue, direct to the aorta, and indeed, I still kinda do…
§ from a study “The drugs produced different effects on VAS ratings of ‘Feels Like Heroin’∂, a Heroin Identification Test […] Hydromorphone produced similar subjective and physiological effects as heroin, but was more potent than heroin.”
∂ Heroin played a yuge role in J’s life, having grown up in what initially was a heroin rehab that turned into a cult called Synanon. How Much Of a Cult Was It? It now has a documentary on HBO that appears searingly in the popular just added section that I can’t bring myself to press play on. And, well, Shaving of Heads was often a thing, (V for Vendetta inspo (?)), as seen in this uncannily lovely photo ≈
≈ eerie because, not only those two astral beams coming down over Jackie, pictured foremost, and the person to her left, one Nancy, plus not only also the one over Nancy also featuring a cross but eerily because it looks like an adult me in a way that has had Quite The Effect on those I’ve pointed it out to:
∞ but why would someone have to press a button for 7 hours? why not just increase the base dose of the medicine… which… was the same medication? ask the inept hospice on-call NP at a place whose initials are, no joke, SMH.
∆ Indeed, Jackie took Dilaudid ∑ normally in doses exceeding those she was on, so thank the triplet spiritual blobs I know she’s now floating with that I saw in one night in a meditation on death once at 16, for the concomitant Ativan which, in The End’s Ending, had her somewhat serenely sedated.
∑ the first place I heard of Dilaudid in the book… Infinite Jest… yes, the very same book I read the Night of the Button: indeed, there are 33 mentions of it by name:
cf. above
Or, one, in absence of horse drawn carriage might take a Lyft from Union Station for inflation adjusted 1,853,217.39 kopecs.
The title of the song: Après moi, le déluge, “After me, the flood”, ¢, Ω
¢ There have been many interpretations of what Pasternak meant here. One is that it came from a missive penned from Louis the WhateverthVII to his “Favorite Ho” ª ¥;
ª Jackies’s term of endearment for Aimee ;’).
¥ Funkily enough the the line also appears in Marx’s Das Kapital: “Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.”
Ω Personally? The song’s title now refers the cry 2/2, a corneal flooding occurring after leaving her room, which, I had attempted to steel myself against, not wanting to cause a sort of fissile reaction of tears, dominoes of doom, so I went to just have it out while pretending to be looking out a window giving myself a good hour before I had to go, down at the end of the hallway of SMH LLC, to y’know, Silently Flow My Tears, The Departing Said, if you will, watching the last sonset sunset ostensibly playing out simultaneously on Jackie’s face back in the room, whose poetically nauseating bleakness was reduced by a coincidence beyond coincidence, a synchronicity, one of 10+ occurring that night, when a ladybug should alight on the frame, exploring the window frame from inside.
When my Dad was murdered by my Stepmom, I was 6 or something and ofc failed to conform to gravity situation presented, electing instead to play The Ladybug Game, invented by yours truly, autistically played with allies of similar age, whose rules I don’t remember, but were predicated on a ladybug landing on window of the stained glass variety at the church. What with the credit card, it has to be a sign of something… right? Right? ?
Ambivalent grief is a term I’ve seen bandied about in response to query “Why Do I Feel Nothing ßß Regarding Father’s Death?”
ßß Un- and -fortunately I’ve realized that whenever I say this it is basically the opposite, and huge feelings are incoming. ®
® And… Un- and -fortunately, after 3 days of Perma-Crying re Un-ambivalent Grief w/r/t Jackie’s dying, I feel, looks at wrist watch, 3 weeks after, welp, I feel Nothing ¶••
¶•• Supermassive Black Hole Something For Sure »
» What’s 1 2 do tho? “Have You Tried Journaling” “Notice mebbe where in ur ribald bawdy balling balding Emotional Pain where the feeling Resides Psychesomatically? (would say IFS) Or take a Soma? Still nothing?” “Speak with a local lobotomizer who specializes in somatic or trauma-focused dorso-lateral prefrontal fontænelle lobotomization”
love this definition: “a gregarious Eurasian crow”, so gregarious as to frequent Russian café’s apparently:
💕💕💕
I love u