Ever so slightly more
Jan. 19th, 2007 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Of the story... this is really slow going.
We each of us, every one, have that one thing inside of us, that beast that dwells just below the surface, itching for a perfect timing, a full moon of circumstances that can set it off; to give it its divine-sent permission to throw the fetters of self restraint to the proverbial wind.
That is the attraction, the giddy, loin tightening tingle that the beast has: Self restraint is thrown to the wind and no one can blame us. Inhibitions crumble like sand castles in the stalking tide, and who can possibly blame a tide for flowing? It just is. It is a force of nature and morality is ridiculous in its presence.
My full moon rose in the shining shape of a young man. Downy and hard and smelling of salt and sin, he rose innocently; as the tide has no knowledge of its own rising. Once unfettered, my beast snarled and lashed out, and painted my life in hues of reds and purples, in colors passionate and regal. Only once did my old ways, my morality of shame and guilt, rear its ugly, scolding head and cry out for the old currents of my life to flow again. My shame looked back once, and the all powerful presence of my beast smote it into a pillar of salt to be blown away by the wind of his shining and sweet submission.
I grew up the only child of parents who, for all their faults and bad decisions, nonetheless managed to lavish a love on me that was the perfect combination of wild adoration and sensible direction. I wish I could blame my time spent in exceedingly successful mediocrity on a childhood fraught with strife and booze soaked nights of terror and tyranny. I often, and probably unjustly, secretly wished for a more tumultuous upbringing; something to explain my absolute terror in the face of anything remotely resembling a courageous step to improve my life. I was miserable and bored and I had no explanation for it.
I had a wholly pleasant childhood. It was full of all of those comfortable and comforting magics that childhoods should have; it was not boring, or dry, nor was it especially adventuresome or dramatic. I grew up at the foot of a fog shrouded mountain in Northern California, and the climate of my childhood was cotton soft and mild. There were no sticky Southern summers to ignite julipped passions, nor harsh Northern winters lashing stark lessons or stoicism.
My people instilled my values in me in the quiet, taciturn and WASP-y way of middle class California. There were no Sunday morning sermons, no regal pageantries to our beliefs. God was accepted, acknowledged, and even loved, but histrionic demonstrations of any kind were not encouraged. The edicts of my upbringing were a clear and crisp chardonnay: work hard, love your family, fit in.
High school tumbled its way to me full of predictable and routine troubles. Being so close to San Francisco, even my gayness was absorbed and judged to be unremarkable, despite my almost salacious need for it to be an issue. I fought for uniqueness tooth and nail, and branded myself with a scarlet G to parade in front a lovingly and benevolently unflappable community of peers and elders. Even my parents, after a fleeting and unsatisfyingly quiet moment of mourning the loss of grandchild-filled expectations, shrugged their shoulders, offered me a hug of acceptance and went on with their tweed and denim lives. Their love for me was a fact, and nothing as unimportant as homosexuality could even be considered a bump in that well paved, straight and true road. At the time, it seemed an unforgivable insult not to be rejected. Eventually, even my righteous wrath was turned under by the sheer force of good will and the well developed and delighting humor of my folks. It wasn’t long before we were all sitting down to cracked dungenous crab and white wine on a linen shirted Christmas eve and laughing over it all. All it required was a slight shift in focus. Instead of a Laurel Ashley Little Woman on my arm at future holiday meals, if Mom and Dad squinted just right, they could see the Ivy League, Penny Loafered Gentleman I would bring home to break sourdough and bandy about bon mots with us. And while Mom may have secretly mourned the loss of girl talk in the kitchen, she dismissed such negativity with the certainty that future holidays could be hosted in the flawlessly laid out home of her son and his toothsome and equally successful partner. Dad may have fretted over the ramifications of lost Republicanism in his chip-off-the-old-block (there was no hope for that anymore), but he dreamed of the possible treasured fourth in the Sunday morning golf games with his wife’s grinningly competitive brother and his adult son-the-lawyer. My rebellion was taken in, evaluated and deemed an acceptable fit with the expectations of my upbringing. If it wasn’t such a kind and loving thing, I would to this day find it maddening.
And yet for all of the love and cheek-aching smiling of my youth, I some how managed to come out of it having learned of the darker side to this suburban acceptance. It was graciously decided that being gay did not make me any different, which was their way of saying that I was golden. And it was clear by that message that I was expected to embrace that homogeny. They had told me that I was still one of them, now it was put upon me to behave like one of them.
It was a burden and a path that I took upon myself with nary a hint of defiance. For all the bluster and mohawked rebellion of my adolescence, I settled into this khaki conformity willingly. Being martyred on a tree of ennui in one’s twenties is an ugly and pretentious thing. And yet there I hung, in all my glorious and apathetic conceit.
I had decided, somewhere, unconsciously, that leaving school would force me to make too many decisions, and so I never left the world of academia. Much to my parents’ chagrin, I took my education and decided to teach at a local (but not too local) community college. I lacked the fortitude to become the lawyer/doctor/business tycoon my parents lusted after.
Much to my surprise, I found a passion and a knack for teaching, and so while I settled into the routines of my suburban life, there was a kind of contentment at work. Eventually, my folks’ genuine and innate sense of pride in me finally won them over and Dad could be heard boasting of his son, the English “Professor.”
The teaching I did was raw and basic. I drilled students in the basic training of grammar and punctuation; vocabulary and essay writing. I taught students who were not privileged: adults struggling to correct mistakes and regrets, teens and young adults with mediocre brains and extraordinary drives. My parents may have told haughty-eyed tales of my Socratic discussions of Flaubert with the intellectual cream of the current generation’s crop, while sporting elbow patches and a pipe, but I rolled up the sleeves of my denim shirts and paced while reading aloud The Call of the Wild with housewives and teenage mothers. These students may not have possessed erudite wits and the ability to pen an ode to make grown men weep, but every time I taught one the correct usage of an appositive phrase, or the basic stylistic elements of a five paragraph essay, a difference was made. In all of my years of teaching, as far as I know, not one of my students went on to write the Great American Novel, but a surprisingly large percentage of them went on to get living wage employment that supported their families. I provided a means to self improvement at the rate of fifteen dollars a unit, and nothing in my short life had ever felt so important.
As soon as it became apparent that I had settled in where I was, my parents helped me with the down payment on a small condominium near the campus. I took great pride in decorating this hobbit home, and was very proud of my Cost Plus imported wooden candlesticks and Scandinavian Designs modular furniture. I quickly became a cartographer of my kitchen and learned to stew and sauté and poach foods with which I fed my small group of young, idealistic and professional friends, while we sipped mediocre sauvignon blanc and pontificated on the politics of suburbia. My group was the pinnacle of blue-blood-on-a-budget. We bought our shoes on sale, but we bought them at Nordstrom’s.
And while I was no great Casanova, there were opportunities for sex and romance that I was just adventurous enough to not let slip by. There was a local bar, located in a strip mall, behind a convenience store, that catered to the men and women of the small Gay community. Often times, after one of my over-the-top, self-important soirées, the group would head down there to have a few watered down cocktails and stand around, posing like strutting peacocks and studiously trying to avoid getting caught staring at a handsome face, while desperately hoping we would be.
It was during one of these Friday evenings when Giovanni, the teeth-achingly handsome and swarthy Latino bartender (who told everyone he was Italian) strutted his toothpaste commercial smile over to me and stage whispered that someone wanted to meet me. I glanced at my group of friends, all of us moments before standing around and caustically trashing everyone in the place and had a moment of realization: I did not like my friends, or who I had become around them very much. The surprise on my face was due to the shock of this epiphany, but Giovanni took it for delighted acquiescence, and took my hand to drag me to the other side of the bar.
Giovanni led me to young man, standing in the dim light of a corner. My attraction to him was cymbal crash of symphonic and wise clichés: Instant and homespun and devastating in its completeness. Every banal, sentimental, dime-store romance novel descriptor of beauty flooded my brain and was transformed into Shakespearean sonnet in his presence.
His build was Spartan; compact, every curve of his body utilitarian and reasoned. He was dressed simply, in jeans and a white tee shirt and his obvious comfort in himself radiated a style that was immutable. He was dark, his skin singing arias of olive toned generations of Mediterranean sun and salted wind. He had a thick, dark beard that hid nothing and highlighted his full and sensuous mouth. To describe his eyes as brown was as ill-defined as describing a storm-tossed ocean as blue: they were layered; golden and green and the deep dark brown of fertile earth. Simply put, he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“John,” grinned Giovanni, gripping my shoulder, “I would like to present Nico. Nico, this is my good friend John.” And having lit the fuse, Giovanni retreated, smiling and certain that these fireworks would not only fire, but provide a licentious and sensational show for the garrulous bar crowd.
I stared, stricken and deer-eyed at Nico, taking moment to collect myself before stammering “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Nico. Actually, my name is Justin.”
A laugh escaped him before he answered in a deep and soothingly even voice “Giovanni means well, but being such a social butterfly renders things like names difficult to remember. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you as well, Mr. Pratchett.”
My obvious surprise sprang to my face, eliciting another rumbling chortle from him. I racked my brain in a futile effort to place an unforgettable face.
Again, that small laugh bubbled from him. “Don’t panic. I attended Kentfield Community College for a year before I transferred to Cal. I never took your class, but I used to see you around campus.”
“When was that? I am surprised I do not remember you as well. You are…Noticeable.”
“It was about five years ago, before the beard and about eighty pounds heavier. I camouflaged well in the teenaged geek set.”
As always, still rough. And I can't get Lj to indent the paragraphs... Damnit.
We each of us, every one, have that one thing inside of us, that beast that dwells just below the surface, itching for a perfect timing, a full moon of circumstances that can set it off; to give it its divine-sent permission to throw the fetters of self restraint to the proverbial wind.
That is the attraction, the giddy, loin tightening tingle that the beast has: Self restraint is thrown to the wind and no one can blame us. Inhibitions crumble like sand castles in the stalking tide, and who can possibly blame a tide for flowing? It just is. It is a force of nature and morality is ridiculous in its presence.
My full moon rose in the shining shape of a young man. Downy and hard and smelling of salt and sin, he rose innocently; as the tide has no knowledge of its own rising. Once unfettered, my beast snarled and lashed out, and painted my life in hues of reds and purples, in colors passionate and regal. Only once did my old ways, my morality of shame and guilt, rear its ugly, scolding head and cry out for the old currents of my life to flow again. My shame looked back once, and the all powerful presence of my beast smote it into a pillar of salt to be blown away by the wind of his shining and sweet submission.
I grew up the only child of parents who, for all their faults and bad decisions, nonetheless managed to lavish a love on me that was the perfect combination of wild adoration and sensible direction. I wish I could blame my time spent in exceedingly successful mediocrity on a childhood fraught with strife and booze soaked nights of terror and tyranny. I often, and probably unjustly, secretly wished for a more tumultuous upbringing; something to explain my absolute terror in the face of anything remotely resembling a courageous step to improve my life. I was miserable and bored and I had no explanation for it.
I had a wholly pleasant childhood. It was full of all of those comfortable and comforting magics that childhoods should have; it was not boring, or dry, nor was it especially adventuresome or dramatic. I grew up at the foot of a fog shrouded mountain in Northern California, and the climate of my childhood was cotton soft and mild. There were no sticky Southern summers to ignite julipped passions, nor harsh Northern winters lashing stark lessons or stoicism.
My people instilled my values in me in the quiet, taciturn and WASP-y way of middle class California. There were no Sunday morning sermons, no regal pageantries to our beliefs. God was accepted, acknowledged, and even loved, but histrionic demonstrations of any kind were not encouraged. The edicts of my upbringing were a clear and crisp chardonnay: work hard, love your family, fit in.
High school tumbled its way to me full of predictable and routine troubles. Being so close to San Francisco, even my gayness was absorbed and judged to be unremarkable, despite my almost salacious need for it to be an issue. I fought for uniqueness tooth and nail, and branded myself with a scarlet G to parade in front a lovingly and benevolently unflappable community of peers and elders. Even my parents, after a fleeting and unsatisfyingly quiet moment of mourning the loss of grandchild-filled expectations, shrugged their shoulders, offered me a hug of acceptance and went on with their tweed and denim lives. Their love for me was a fact, and nothing as unimportant as homosexuality could even be considered a bump in that well paved, straight and true road. At the time, it seemed an unforgivable insult not to be rejected. Eventually, even my righteous wrath was turned under by the sheer force of good will and the well developed and delighting humor of my folks. It wasn’t long before we were all sitting down to cracked dungenous crab and white wine on a linen shirted Christmas eve and laughing over it all. All it required was a slight shift in focus. Instead of a Laurel Ashley Little Woman on my arm at future holiday meals, if Mom and Dad squinted just right, they could see the Ivy League, Penny Loafered Gentleman I would bring home to break sourdough and bandy about bon mots with us. And while Mom may have secretly mourned the loss of girl talk in the kitchen, she dismissed such negativity with the certainty that future holidays could be hosted in the flawlessly laid out home of her son and his toothsome and equally successful partner. Dad may have fretted over the ramifications of lost Republicanism in his chip-off-the-old-block (there was no hope for that anymore), but he dreamed of the possible treasured fourth in the Sunday morning golf games with his wife’s grinningly competitive brother and his adult son-the-lawyer. My rebellion was taken in, evaluated and deemed an acceptable fit with the expectations of my upbringing. If it wasn’t such a kind and loving thing, I would to this day find it maddening.
And yet for all of the love and cheek-aching smiling of my youth, I some how managed to come out of it having learned of the darker side to this suburban acceptance. It was graciously decided that being gay did not make me any different, which was their way of saying that I was golden. And it was clear by that message that I was expected to embrace that homogeny. They had told me that I was still one of them, now it was put upon me to behave like one of them.
It was a burden and a path that I took upon myself with nary a hint of defiance. For all the bluster and mohawked rebellion of my adolescence, I settled into this khaki conformity willingly. Being martyred on a tree of ennui in one’s twenties is an ugly and pretentious thing. And yet there I hung, in all my glorious and apathetic conceit.
I had decided, somewhere, unconsciously, that leaving school would force me to make too many decisions, and so I never left the world of academia. Much to my parents’ chagrin, I took my education and decided to teach at a local (but not too local) community college. I lacked the fortitude to become the lawyer/doctor/business tycoon my parents lusted after.
Much to my surprise, I found a passion and a knack for teaching, and so while I settled into the routines of my suburban life, there was a kind of contentment at work. Eventually, my folks’ genuine and innate sense of pride in me finally won them over and Dad could be heard boasting of his son, the English “Professor.”
The teaching I did was raw and basic. I drilled students in the basic training of grammar and punctuation; vocabulary and essay writing. I taught students who were not privileged: adults struggling to correct mistakes and regrets, teens and young adults with mediocre brains and extraordinary drives. My parents may have told haughty-eyed tales of my Socratic discussions of Flaubert with the intellectual cream of the current generation’s crop, while sporting elbow patches and a pipe, but I rolled up the sleeves of my denim shirts and paced while reading aloud The Call of the Wild with housewives and teenage mothers. These students may not have possessed erudite wits and the ability to pen an ode to make grown men weep, but every time I taught one the correct usage of an appositive phrase, or the basic stylistic elements of a five paragraph essay, a difference was made. In all of my years of teaching, as far as I know, not one of my students went on to write the Great American Novel, but a surprisingly large percentage of them went on to get living wage employment that supported their families. I provided a means to self improvement at the rate of fifteen dollars a unit, and nothing in my short life had ever felt so important.
As soon as it became apparent that I had settled in where I was, my parents helped me with the down payment on a small condominium near the campus. I took great pride in decorating this hobbit home, and was very proud of my Cost Plus imported wooden candlesticks and Scandinavian Designs modular furniture. I quickly became a cartographer of my kitchen and learned to stew and sauté and poach foods with which I fed my small group of young, idealistic and professional friends, while we sipped mediocre sauvignon blanc and pontificated on the politics of suburbia. My group was the pinnacle of blue-blood-on-a-budget. We bought our shoes on sale, but we bought them at Nordstrom’s.
And while I was no great Casanova, there were opportunities for sex and romance that I was just adventurous enough to not let slip by. There was a local bar, located in a strip mall, behind a convenience store, that catered to the men and women of the small Gay community. Often times, after one of my over-the-top, self-important soirées, the group would head down there to have a few watered down cocktails and stand around, posing like strutting peacocks and studiously trying to avoid getting caught staring at a handsome face, while desperately hoping we would be.
It was during one of these Friday evenings when Giovanni, the teeth-achingly handsome and swarthy Latino bartender (who told everyone he was Italian) strutted his toothpaste commercial smile over to me and stage whispered that someone wanted to meet me. I glanced at my group of friends, all of us moments before standing around and caustically trashing everyone in the place and had a moment of realization: I did not like my friends, or who I had become around them very much. The surprise on my face was due to the shock of this epiphany, but Giovanni took it for delighted acquiescence, and took my hand to drag me to the other side of the bar.
Giovanni led me to young man, standing in the dim light of a corner. My attraction to him was cymbal crash of symphonic and wise clichés: Instant and homespun and devastating in its completeness. Every banal, sentimental, dime-store romance novel descriptor of beauty flooded my brain and was transformed into Shakespearean sonnet in his presence.
His build was Spartan; compact, every curve of his body utilitarian and reasoned. He was dressed simply, in jeans and a white tee shirt and his obvious comfort in himself radiated a style that was immutable. He was dark, his skin singing arias of olive toned generations of Mediterranean sun and salted wind. He had a thick, dark beard that hid nothing and highlighted his full and sensuous mouth. To describe his eyes as brown was as ill-defined as describing a storm-tossed ocean as blue: they were layered; golden and green and the deep dark brown of fertile earth. Simply put, he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“John,” grinned Giovanni, gripping my shoulder, “I would like to present Nico. Nico, this is my good friend John.” And having lit the fuse, Giovanni retreated, smiling and certain that these fireworks would not only fire, but provide a licentious and sensational show for the garrulous bar crowd.
I stared, stricken and deer-eyed at Nico, taking moment to collect myself before stammering “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Nico. Actually, my name is Justin.”
A laugh escaped him before he answered in a deep and soothingly even voice “Giovanni means well, but being such a social butterfly renders things like names difficult to remember. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you as well, Mr. Pratchett.”
My obvious surprise sprang to my face, eliciting another rumbling chortle from him. I racked my brain in a futile effort to place an unforgettable face.
Again, that small laugh bubbled from him. “Don’t panic. I attended Kentfield Community College for a year before I transferred to Cal. I never took your class, but I used to see you around campus.”
“When was that? I am surprised I do not remember you as well. You are…Noticeable.”
“It was about five years ago, before the beard and about eighty pounds heavier. I camouflaged well in the teenaged geek set.”
As always, still rough. And I can't get Lj to indent the paragraphs... Damnit.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 08:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 09:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 09:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 12:39 am (UTC)use this if nessesary!
Date: 2007-02-04 10:28 pm (UTC)See you.