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Me outside the Rothko Chapel. April 2022.
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I walked in Menil Park in the Montrose
neighborhood of Houston. A group of fifteen young people in their
early twenties lounged in the cool morning sunshine. They were probably
students of the nearby University of St. Thomas. They were enjoying
themselves and were loud to my middle age years, but not loud for college
students. Maybe they were not loud at all and I just have sharp ears.
I neared them and adjusted the strap of the overburdened leather messenger
bag on my right shoulder. I was glad for my dark black Ray-Bans so
that the students could not see my eyes looking at the ground. I was
nervous. The San Antonio incident was less than twenty-four hours ago
and my third cup of coffee had not yet fixed my morning mood.
My sleep was the standard eight hours
of dead-to-the-world goodness that I can achieve in a hotel as long
as I sleep on the side nearest the wall and I can see the door –
old habits? Perhaps there is no way to rewire my brain after
thirty-eight years. As a bonus I did not remember any dreams and the
dose of melatonin must have seen to that. Before the beginning of
this trip I had one vivid dream that ended in waking up covered in
sweat. I dismissed it as fatigue; work on the house and the novel for
the past six months caught up with me that night. Someone had written
something about abuse that bothered me too, but I kept pushing it
aside and knew that I would find a way to address that in time.
Montrose is hip, arty and the closest
thing Houston has to a gay neighborhood, but this is Texas. I hated
to concede to that thought of fear and reminded myself that yesterday
was San Antonio not Houston. I remembered all of the good times I had
years ago in Dallas and Fort Worth dancing and stumbling around S4
and Throckmortons. Texas can be cool. It was Cobb County, Georgia in 1995 when I was assaulted over a rainbow sticker on my car.
I was dressed in a black jacket, a dark
blue shirt and dark jeans in Menil Park. It was my invisibility cloak. It was my do-not-notice-me outfit. I wished my hair was longer, but I cut it off last
month and I am not twelve anymore.
Keep walking. Always keep walking. Do
not stop on the side of the road in New Hope, a trail in the woods,
or the streets of San Antonio. Walk.
“Hey faggot,” he called at me.
A man in his twenties secured my
attention that was elsewhere. He leaned against a railing on N. Presa
Street in San Antonio that I was walking past a few feet away.
I matched his voice to the background
noise I heard before he called to me. I had not understood what he
said before as he was of no interest to me until then. I was walking
down the street in my own world in a new city to me. The surrounding
streetscape was of little interest on that block and my mind must
have been steps ahead on the beautiful Riverwalk.
It was early afternoon on a sunny April
weekday, people passed between his menacing smile and my rock hard
glare. I was stunned for seconds then my anger brought me back. I
assessed the threat and my middle finger saluted the guy.
He smirked at my digital reply.
I walked away, glancing back twice to
make sure I was not followed..
That was the end of the face to face
encounter with the bigot. Had this been a duel we had both fired and
winged each other, in chess it was a stalemate and in reality it was
unfortunate. Had I been of a younger generation, I suppose I could
have whipped out my phone and confronted the guy for a viral moment,
but despite what the eager sales lady at the Houston Saks department
store would say to me the following day, I am not of the younger
generation. I am not wired to think phone first before anything else.
I am grateful for the emotional maturity that I have earned.
I passed through the students in Menil
Park as a ship coming into a fogged over port.
Inside the Rothko Chapel, I signed the
register and sat in the security enforced silence. The worn wooden
benches without backs looked like something from a rustic wilderness
campground. I examined the dark paintings on every wall. This was
depressing and if this experience was intended to be spiritual then
the outlook was bleak. All I had was a thought of how they resembled
the black monolith from the Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I
loved that film, but these paintings were like staring at the soot
covered back of a fireplace. Rothko's other paintings held such power
and intensity, these were as if he was resigned to the nothingness or
The Nothing that wanted to devour all of Fantastica in The Neverending
Story. He killed himself in 1970, not long after these were painted.
I left after five minutes. The weight
inside was too much. That was a tomb inside a coma where dreams were
impossible. Outside I laughed. It was the appropriate response a
living person would have to shake off that darkness. I did not want
that to cling to me like yesterday. The loud college students were
the sound of life.
I came expecting to hear Morton
Feldman's Rothko Chapel playing in the background; that might have
helped with the experience some and made it more spiritual. Feldman
wrote Why Patterns? which I consider to be the natural sound of New
Hope and mentioned it in Dweller On The Boundary.
In the reflecting pool I saw myself. I
was not invisible, but my profile was low. There was no rainbow
sticker on my forehead, but the contradiction I cannot solve floated
in the water like oak leaves.
A contradiction exists in how I write
and how I live. It is difficult for me to reconcile this and it was
the same problem when I was in broadcasting. I hated to tell people
that I worked at The Weather Channel and was on radio stations across
the country from New York to Los Angeles, but people would ask what I
did for living as a way to measure and judge me. Work for most people
is a means to an end and I no more impressed with a physician than I
am the cashier at Home Depot. It felt like boasting to say that I did
television voice overs, commercials and had been a disc jockey too.
It brought unwanted attention from the woman that cut my hair, to
drive-thru bank tellers and I suspect one guy slept with me just
because of how I made money. People did not think of me that way when
I had worked in a warehouse and drove a forklift between radio gigs.
My two books (and my next one this
fall) are very revealing with midnight dark secrets long kept under
lock and key, but I like for those books to speak for themselves. I
wrote them and I lived them, but they are detached from the person I
am today, though I am uncertain what the audience thinks. I live in
the present, not in 1980 or 1990 or even 2021. Sometimes I believe
that people expect me to be looking at the sky for a bird, sweeping
away the stars on the ground, running through Rabbit Tobacco Field
and being a reactionary chess player. I understand that people
connected with that boy, my family,the tragedies or another part of
the past on some level – all those things are me, but I do not live
or think precisely the same in 2022.
When something big occurs in the
present, I sometimes do share it on social media and it might not
always be something good. Bad things do happen in the present and I
am not one to construct a faux social media persona that consists of
sunshine, rainbows and filtered selfies. The incident in San Antonio
was such an occasion. A problem arises when it is expected of me to
react in the same way that I would as a boy, teenager or a young man
in my twenties. Life experience teaches humans to adapt in ways that
lead to self improvement and for me that would be more restraint and
patience. It does not mean that my passion for life is extinguished,
it is a matter of keeping it under a more firm control. I learned
that the only part of my existence that I control is myself.
My reaction to the asshole in San
Antonio was adequate and the incident did me no lasting harm. I was
unhappy that it happened, but I was not about to give that stranger
or the word faggot any more power over me. The incident shocked me, I
thought about it until the next day and I let it roll off into the
gutter where it belonged. My adult perspective was shaped by having
been physically attacked in the long ago past and other experiences
that I have written about from my childhood. Another person might
react some other way and had it happened to a child or teenager then
it may have caused them more lasting harm. Restraint was my best
weapon against this fool on the street on this particular day. Had I
reacted in kind towards him then it possibly leads to an escalated
situation that could include violence. I walked away with my dignity
and he will remain a miserable asshole that I never will meet again.
I understand my limitations and I cannot change him if I wanted nor
can I change the world; idealism is a luxury of youth and the
inexperienced. There will be random assholes on the street, the
highway, the mall or out hiking on a trail and I accept that. Some
might think it was the perfect opportunity for a 'teachable moment,'
well let me see you try to educate an asshole like that. There is no
utopia and if one did exist, it would be as boring as my white sock
drawer. The only safe space is in your own home and head and for some
they do not even have that.
In today's culture exists a tendency to
overreact to every situation as if it was a choice between life and
death. I am no sociologist, but I believe that social media is in
part to blame for this. Most of our challenges, setbacks and losses
are not that crucial and as adults we should remember that. Another
troubling trend in contemporary culture is a belief in some circles
that words are equivalent to violence. If you believe that then you
likely never have been subjected to actual violence. I suggest you
take a fist to the face and tell me that feels the same as someone
calling you a faggot on the sidewalk. They both hurt in different
ways, but words do not make a face swell, make us bleed or die. As
children we would say, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but
words shall not hurt me.” It was a defensive rebuttal to taunts
that sounded nice at the time, but it did not provide me Teflon skin
against the hurtful words. I felt bad from being called a queer or
faggot or other things as a child, but not once did I suffer a
physical scratch from a word. It was the hidden cumulative effects of
those words over years that did me harm.
Words can incite violence, but they
cannot jump from a printed page, a phone screen, or a fool's mouth to
break your bones. An aunt slapped me into the next day when I was a
boy, the only time I was slapped as a child, and that was violence. I
was in two school fights when I experienced the sick feeling of my
fist driving into another boy's flesh and that was violence. A word,
any word, will not make knuckles hurt. Words may grab the heart,
arouse the mind, generate goosebumps, make us laugh, cry or feel an
emotional response of some kind, but show me one cut, bruise or x-ray
of a broken bone caused by a word.
As I have written about in Dweller
On The Boundary, I was a reactionary chess player growing up and
that style of play cost me more games than it won. I am not the same
little boy under Robin's wing getting worked up at the stupid games
of the Cannon Creek Boys. I am less reactionary as an adult and the
words hurt me less. The internal scars that I wrote about do however
remain. Sometimes people trip over them without knowing. I forgive
them. I trip over them too. I do not easily speak of some of them. I
should not have to do that, there are two books that lay out in
detail what happened. You either want to know or you do not.
Thank you for reading. I keep walking.
