“RE/Search No. 8/9: J.G. Ballard” Copyright © 1984
“Hiding Man: a biography of Donald Barthelme” Copyright © 2009
I am alive today because of them. I am dead today because of them.
The “Best of the Doobies” vinyl LP album spins on a record player, the sounds playing quietly through the needle like the thumping of an automobile audio system nearby, flexing my eardrum at the threshold of my thoughts while stopped for a red traffic light.
According to people who grew up with me during our years together attending primary school, my label was “nerd.” Despite my dislike of labels, people label me and each other anyway. I cannot change people’s perception of me from that time period.
I want to die. I did not plan to live this long. I do not plan to live this long. I have had enough of people and their labels. I have had enough of my labeling animals “people” just because they happen to look like me. I have had enough.
I have nothing left to contribute to this world. It will and does exist without me. I am not a megalomaniac. I do not need to rule any part of this world. I do not want to prey upon the fears and desires of others, even though that is essentially what I’ve done my whole life, in my own small way, from baby life onward to other lives and incarnations but never, I think, as a carnation.
I have tried but never succeeded in escaping the world of words. Instead, I perpetuate it.
Tonight, I’ll eat dinner with my wife and two of our friends. After dinner, the four of us will attend the traveling version of the musical, “In Recognition Of Your Achievement,” loosely based on the movie, “As A Member In Good Standing Through The Year.” I saw the Broadway version of the show in NYC back in February 2007. Two years ago this month, as a matter of fact. Tonight, I am reliving my personal private history, adding other humans to the memories of laughter, frowns, and boredom I experienced by myself for a $180 ticket to a Broadway show while on a week-long training session in the “art and nuance of creatively wasting people’s time unknowingly” at the Crowne Plaza during a New York winter, where I also experienced a taping of the ever-popular television show, “Laughing with Llamas,” down the street.
I have relived history my whole life, too. Speech and writing in itself is a reuse of our history of learning to talk, read and write. Damn. I guess there is no social human future that is absent of the past.
I don’t remember how old I was when I realized I was ambivalent and ambiguous but not ambitious about sexual orientation. I first understood the feelings when I was five or six, sensing that I was attracted to no particular person, regardless of gender. Then, as I grew older, when I reached the edge of the slide down into the sensual pool of sexual maturation, I knew what my body was saying even if the thoughts had not sufficiently been trained or developed to understand the chemical attraction I felt for no one. Once, seeing my behavior, my father asked me if I was a homosexual. I honestly answered no. I had no specific attraction to people of the same sex. Instead, I was attracted to neither sex but silently suppressed any personal desires to act upon my chemical needs, knowing that my successful participation in the suburban subculture of my hometown meant that I should maintain a general healthy sexual attitude toward others. Thus, throughout high school, I kissed two people – publicly displaying affection for a couple of months with a woman a year younger than me and privately sharing a kiss with a man a year older than me. Otherwise, I was celibate, sharing the majority of my years in primary school with a woman, Helen, who did not desire sexual relations with me so that I didn’t have to pretend to want to kiss, hug or otherwise feign sexual interest in her, which in turn let me suppress any sexual attention I knew I wanted to pay to no specific gender. I maintained my sanity by adopting a jovial attitude, perpetuated by my schoolmates even to this day.
My sister and others in primary school thus called me a “nerd.” Yeah, that’s right. Me, Gus!
When I started college at the Good Citizenship College, I had only one schoolmate from secondary/primary school upon whom I could depend to help me maintain my sanity and false self – Cambie, who was my roommate at the dorm during my freshman year in college. To shorten that story, I flunked out of school as my persona fell apart. Cambie was too interested in girls and not enough interested in school to pay much attention to his roommate’s sanity.
I returned to the subculture of my youth in an effort to reestablish my connections to a false sense of self, living at home with my parents. In that mode, I completed college-level courses at Flunkin University, left home to attend the Institute of Model Rocketry Appreciation (where I also reconnected with my female friend from primary school, Helen, who helped me once again fully function in a dysfunctional funk for a while, until I started spiraling downward) and finally, after running away from home on a 10-day route from my hometown to Seattle, WA, to Los Angeles, CA, and back in late September/early October 1984 and a detox visit to my grandmother at the end of that year, I returned home one more time and graduated from Questionable Character College, where, in the midst of taking classes, my first official mental breakdown occurred in 1985, followed by a short series of psychological counseling sessions. You should have seen the fuss they made over a guy named Gus. I did tell you my name is Gus, didn’t I?
So, by 1985, I had lost myself, found myself, realized myself was not myself and still had not accepted who I was. Well, what’s a guy to do but find the woman with whom he knew would not want children by him and marry her? In 1986, I married the one woman from my childhood who waited patiently on me to “grow up” and become a money-earning man. For many years, we stayed interested in each other sexually, diverting any nonmarital sexual attraction back to one another. Chemically, we were compatible (and still are, as far as I know). In our years of marriage, I have had only one full mental breakdown, in mid-1991, and one partial mental breakdown, in 2006. In the first one, I was able to stay employed with the aid of counseling to keep me within the bounds of my subcultural social upbringing. In the second one, I lost the desire to project my false self any longer. Since then, I have been essentially unemployable from a personal point of view. I leave the house occasionally, always fearful that others can see or have seen the real “me” and will label me incorrectly. I am not heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, androgynous, transsexual, or any other label of sexual orientation that I’m aware of. I prefer sex with myself, basic autoerotic notions of masturbation having satisfied my sexual needs my whole life, while I can think about anyone or anything I’ve seen in fantasies as a personal turn-on.
In other words, I do not need contact with others to satisfy me sexually. Is that the definition of a “nerd,” a person who is satisfied by one’s self and no other? If so, then I reached the limit of myself much too long ago. All else, this investigation, a so-called self-discovery, is for naught. But I’ve always known that, haven’t I?
In this cage of words that surrounds me, I limit myself, I know. But I have no other understanding of the world without words. I do not understand infinity although I know how to spell it. I see a rotating mass slowly cooling down and call it a planet, giving names to pieces and parts of it, claiming ownership of a section of thin crust that floats over the roiling magmatic core and call that piece of crust my home.
Did I tell you my name is Gus? I can’t remember. But I remember something. The temporary intransigence of others, who led me to believe one thing while I have led myself to believe another, makes me laugh. We try so hard to give permanence to that which does not exist in perpetuity. We want to save species whose end time may have come due to our population explosion but we cannot accept the inevitable wholesale elimination of creatures that found a way to survive on Earth’s crust for millennia before our species swept all before it. We especially cannot see that no species is permanent, including ours, but the magnification of a few thousand generations of us makes many believe in the concept of “forever.” So be it. Let the masses keep massing. They have and will do so without me. I have found me and now can let myself go on.
As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. As I have said more than once, no need to keep repeating myself. Oops, sorry about that. Sometimes, these old records of mine skip a few times before I notice. Did I tell you my name is Gus?
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