François: A Memoir

By Kyle Thomas Smith

I keep forgetting I have a blog.

AND I have a new book out! A memoir called Francois.

Nearing fifty, author Kyle Thomas Smith looks back on the days when he was a struggling young writer and hapless office temp. At the end of yet another workday when all he wanted was to go back to his little apartment, turn into a cockroach, and expire in a puddle of Raid, Kyle instead went out on the town and met a highly accomplished, globetrotting filmmaker named François. A romance ensued, but François flew out the next morning, leaving Kyle with nothing but a napkin on which he’d written his address in Paris.

Kyle wondered if this napkin could hold the key to his future, and what would his life be worth if he were to lose the napkin?

In this slice-of-life memoir, Kyle Thomas Smith meditates on how tightly we cling to our prospects when the real gold is buried deep inside the life we already have.

“A relatable and transparent memoir that readers will find as endearing as it is vulnerable.”

– Publisher’s Weekly

“An entertaining, poignant look back at a man’s fight to find his place in the world.”

– Kirkus Reviews

Check out the interview I did on the UK’s “Roaring 20s Radio Podcast” (58:30 – 1: 37).

And make sure to buy your copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor, or wherever books are sold!

On Pause

By Kyle Thomas Smith

Writing at a cafe where I used to go on a regular basis—Joe’s on 13th, right next to New School. It’s only a few blocks away from where we live now.

This place used to be packed with students at any hour. For the past hour, I’ve been the only one in here. There have only been three customers coming in for to-go cups. There’s also a We’re Hiring sign on the window and at the register. No line has developed for that since I’ve been here either.

Before we left San Francisco, we went to say goodbye to our favorite waiter, Duccio, at Montresacro, our favorite pinseria. I got there first. Julius was still at the gym. I sat at our table and read the news on my phone.

A good-looking guy, early thirties at the oldest, wandered around my table. He had trimmed blond hair, parted to the left. He stared intently at me with hazy blue eyes. He was wearing a buttoned-up polo shirt and blue Levi’s. He was walking around, wearing a mask like Duccio, so I figured he was one of the new guys working there. There are always a few new employees from Italy, mostly, on hand any evening. I smiled and seeing that he wasn’t about to clear one of my glasses or plates, I glanced back down at my phone and went back to reading about Ted Cruz’s latest self-sabotage (and yet he always gets re-elected, no matter how venal and unlikable).

The guy said, “Excuse me,” his hand on the chair opposite mine, which Julius would soon be occupying. He had a thick Russian accent. I looked up again. “Do you mind if I sit here?” he said. Before I could even answer—and there were empty tables and chairs all around me, so why my table?—he yanked out the chair, plunked down, yanked down his mask, put his hand to his chest, and started labored-breathing.

I jumped out of my seat. Duccio shouted at the guy from behind the counter, in his thick Florentine voice, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! You can’t-a do-a that! No harassing customers!” The host, named Giacomo like my cat, ran up to remove the guy, but the guy bolted out of Montresacro. But not before he’d left some small but visible spots of spittle or clear nasal discharge on the edge of the table and starter plate.

My guess is the guy had tested positive for Covid and had come in to Montresacro to share the wealth.

Duccio apologized profusely, even though it wasn’t his fault. He cleared the table, scrubbed it down, dried it off, and replaced everything that was on it.

Julius came a few minutes later. I told him what happened. He said, “Well, we’re both vaxxed and boosted. We should be fine.”

But my nephew, who is only 25, was also vaxxed and boosted and omicron still knocked him out for a whole week.

Yet this is how things are now. We all know that. So we put the whole worry on the shelf and ordered our pinsas and wine and even a slice of molten lava chocolate slice. Duccio sat down with us when we finished off with two cups of decaf. Duccio has just gotten married. He and his wife want to come visit us in New York. He says they want to live here a few years before they go back to Europe. He can work at the Montresacro that opened in Brooklyn. (We went on Sunday. It’s not as good.)

He hugged us goodbye, said arrivederci, and we walked out and turned the corner on to Market Street.

Normally Market Street is full of crack addicts, homeless encampments, and head cases howling at the moon when it’s not even full. This time, it was pretty barren.

Except for this one little white man whose white trousers ballooned around his chicken legs and hiking shoes. He was walking toward us. He had silver and white hair. He was wearing glasses. His hands were in the pockets of his wide open green down coat as he walked with a gleeful determination. He looked up at me as he drew nearer and our eyes locked. He could tell I recognized him, so he looked away.

“Julius,” I said, “That’s David Sedaris.”

Julius turned around. Sedaris was well on his way down the street, clocking in the Fitbit steps that he so famously writes about. He must have been doing a show somewhere in the Bay Area, speaking to a masked audience, but I didn’t check.

I just wondered what he’d have to say about the night we had: the two of us meeting up for a last goodbye with our favorite waiter; a guy coming by to give me Covid. I wondered what he’d say about how it reflects life in these times. But what is there to say? Nobody has the distance to take an overview yet.

In any event, I’ve gotten myself tested a few times before and after leaving San Francisco and I tested negative each time.

The sidewalks are still high-traffic in New York, but not Joe’s for some reason. I hope the few people who’ve been coming in tip big. The baristas are so bored they’re reading the backs of sugar packets, now that they’ve scrolled social and read all the websites they could think of offhand. They’ve given up to the point that they’re letting SiriusXM’s Lite station take care of the music. In my day, almost the only reason you became a barista was so you could show off your taste in music! That’s why so many great club dj’s cut their teeth behind the espresso maker. All that has changed.

And yet it was only in this dead zone that the events of our last night at Montresacro came back to me. All this deadness has given us all pause, I guess.

But how long are we going to stay on pause? When will it be safe to hit play?

(Posted on FB on 1/16/22)

Extras at CVS

By Kyle Thomas Smith

A guy walked in to CVS naked.

No, this is not a joke.

A guy just walked into CVS naked, right before I did.—Right before I walked in, I mean. I didn’t walk in naked. He did. I had everything on. I just went there to use the ATM. It’s catty corner from our apartment.

Anyway, he was holding some sort of summit about his attire, or lack thereof, with the staff.

The sales assistant, who’s clearly dealt with this kind of thing before, had come out from behind the counter. I heard him say to the guy, “Ya gotta cover up, man.”

The guy immediately buckled, put his hands over the family jewels, and made an “O” shape with his mouth. Then he tried to scuttle over to aisle one like a crab, thinking nobody would notice his having moved a few paces.

The sales assistant shook his head into his hand and said, “No, man! Ya gotta mask up!”

The guy looked this way and that, dropped his O mouth, and said, “I don’t have one.”

The sales assistant said, “We have extras.”

The guy pulled a startled face and ran out on to Haight St, the family jewels still encased in his hands.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the mask mandate. But this CVS treated it as if, once he cleared that hurdle, this stallion could run wild, run free through the store.

Didn’t they even have a free athletic supporter to offer him from aisle 8?

You just keep doin’ you, San Francisco!

(posted to FB on 12/20)

Where I’m Writing From

By Kyle Thomas Smith

Today I’m blogging from the Center SF.

I’ve been coming to this hidden gem for a couple months now. 

It’s not literally a gem, of course, but it’s literally hidden, or almost hidden. You have to know about it through word of mouth if you’re ever going to find it. I mean, there is a rickety shingle with its name out front, but the center itself is tucked away behind a nondescript, yellow-brick apartment building, which is flush against a former cathedral that’s now a disco roller rink. That could explain why it’s as empty as it is right now.

I only found it because I came to an EFT Tapping event that my friend Kate was facilitating. That’s when I discovered that the Center SF is a commune where people in the healing arts live and work. They have moon dances, solstice events, yoga, and drumming circles. There are tarot decks laying around. It’s a bona fide nonprofit, where the café is staffed by volunteers.

That’s probably why the tea is so expensive. When you’re not turning a profit, you have to charge more.

But that’s a minor complaint.

This is where I’m writing from today.

I tried writing this post yesterday, but it ran over 20 pages and I still wasn’t done.

So let me size it down. Yesterday I was thinking about how, when you’re truly ready to leave a city, you’ll notice things falling away from you.

Take the café where I used to write—Cosmo Café (not its real name), which is owned by Faizah (not her real name).

Cosmo was the first place I went to on my first day in San Francisco and Faizah was the first person I met in San Francisco. Cosmo is only three doors from my apartment. I’d sit and write and she declared me the resident writer. She introduced me to her neighbor, who had also published two books, and he would have Julius and me over for dinner. Faizah had told us about each other and we gave each other our books through Faizah and read them and loved them before we ever even met in person. When I would have readings around town, he’d come to them with his partner James. He’d invite me to read with him at his group readings too. It was a wonderful introduction to life here.

I even helped edit his new book and blurbed it.

COVID hit, though, and I never saw him again. He called me once or twice for editing advice, but that was about it.

The pandemic didn’t stop me from going to Cosmo, though. When cabin fever got to be too much for me in my basement, Faizah gave me a table to sit at in her café, behind all the tables that had chairs stacked on top of them. It was illegal. She wasn’t supposed to have people sitting indoors. But she wanted me to. She enjoyed the company and the semblance of normalcy it brought and I always wore a mask. When some Karen would stomp in and demand that Faizah tell her why a man was sitting inside, she’d shrug and say, “He owns the building. He’s doing the books. What can I do.” It was a lie, of course, but the Karen would be so dazzled by my “status” that she’d tuck tail and shut up for once in her life.

I didn’t tell Faizah that Julius and I were thinking of moving back to New York. We’d only planned to be out here a few years and lockdown was giving us pause to see that our time was up. 

The universe took note too. I saw this reflected in what started happening at Cosmo round about early December 2020.

A local jewelry artist, a young African-American woman who hadn’t been in in a while, suddenly stopped in one day. I would look up from my notebook, where I was scribbling away, and see her having a heart to heart with Faizah. The more they spoke, the more Faizah seemed to back away from the counter. As the young woman talked, Faizah would busy herself with things like unstacking and restacking coffee cups and dusting off things she’d already dusted. But my AirPods were in and I had Beethoven playing, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Eventually the young woman left with a to-go cup.

I said goodbye to Faizah on my way out. “Wait,” she said, motioning me to the counter. “Did you see that woman I was talking to?” 

I said, “Yeah.” 

Faizah said, “I said to her, ‘Where you been?’ She didn’t come in for a month, two months, something like that. And you remember, she used to be in here every day. So she said to me, ‘I gotta talk to you.’”

According to Faizah what happened was, the young woman had once mentioned to Faizah that she used to be a lawyer. Faizah’s mouth dropped and her eyes bugged out, “You? A fucking lawyer? You?” Well, the young woman told Faizah that she took major offense. She thought Faizah was saying that she couldn’t believe that she, as a Black woman, could pass the Bar and be a lawyer. She said it upset her so much, she couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t bear to come in. Finally, she decided she had to confront Faizah about it.

Faizah told her that’s not what she meant. First of all, Faizah is also Black, from Eritrea. Secondly, anyone who knows Faizah knows she’s got the subtlety of a slaughterhouse. Her whole counter is festooned with things like signs saying “Fuck Trump,” a pencil sharpener that has Trump on all fours with the sharpener in his butthole (and yes, in case anyone had any questions about what they were looking at, she did them the courtesy of sticking a pencil up Trump’s ass), a reproduction of the black-and-white photo of Putin riding bare-chested on his horse with a flabby, bare-chested Trump clinging to him and sticking his tongue in Putin’s ear. She used to text me porn vids for fun and shock value. Her saying, “You? A fucking lawyer?,” is way on-brand. Third, Faizah told her what she meant was that she knew the young woman as an artist, not a stuffed-shirt attorney.

The young woman sighed with relief. She said she was sorry she took it so personally and Faizah said she was sorry she was so careless with her words. She gave the young woman her latte on the house and the young woman thanked her saying she’d be back soon.

Faizah seemed to change her tune about the whole thing now that the young woman was gone, though. In a voice spiced with exotic inflections, her hands gesticulating wildly over the counter like a witch conjuring spirits over a cauldron, she said: “Obviously, she’s holding me responsible for something somebody else did to her in the past. You know, somebody did something racist to her at some point, and now she’s turning around and telling me I’m racist. I’m Black! How can I be a fucking racist? And she wants to take everything so goddamn personal. Somebody did something to her a long time ago. Why’s that my fucking problem?”

I balked. I said we all have to be mindful of our speech. She said, “This is my place! I don’t have to be mindful with my speech!” And she went on a tangent, saying more of the same: that she resented that the young woman resented her. She reiterated that she’s Black too, barely acknowledging that there is a cultural difference between coming from a country where almost everybody looks like you and growing up in a country where most people don’t and you’re subjected to all manner of discrimination for it. But I didn’t think it’d be cool for me, a white dude, to whitesplain this situation to another Black woman about another Black woman, so I backed off.

It would have fallen on deaf ears anyway. Faizah would most likely deflect, talk over me, talk past me. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Plus, anything I ever had to say about anything—politics, relationships, the weather—I’d have to say in a twenty-second sound byte or she’d lose interest and check out. Start walking away, rearranging the tea bags, whatever.

I wished them both the best and left.

The next week or so passed without incident. I’d go to Cosmo, shoot the bull with Faizah, and write. The city had let restaurants operate at 25-percent capacity, so she was able to have more people in and she looked about as happy as she could for a woman who has a bumper sticker on her cash register that reads, “Everything Sucks.”

Then one Saturday I walked in and she wasn’t talking to me anymore. I was my usual self but she wouldn’t look at me. “You want your green tea?” I said yes and got my money out. She brought the hot water and the tea bag. She wouldn’t look at me when she took my money or gave me change. She didn’t thank me when I sunk a dollar in the tip jar. “Something wrong?” I said. “Everything’s wrong,” she said, and she made no eye contact as she got up from the bar stool she sits on behind the register and started talking about food orders with the guys who work for her.

I’ve seen her have these kinds of days. I didn’t think much of it. I went to the back and started writing. When I’d look up, though, I’d see her talking to customers, randos and regulars. She would smile. She was charm itself. I made a note of it, but told myself not to take it personally until I had a better read on the situation. I continued to write and the next time I looked up, she had already gone home for the day.

When I walked in the following Monday, Faizah seemed to be in a way better mood than I’d found her in on Saturday. A flamboyant gay man was at the counter, regaling her with tales of nights out in the Castro, back when we could have nights out. He waved his arms around like a traffic cop, his voice carrying to the sky as Faizah smiled and cooed and got into his shtick. I walked past the counter and she didn’t say hello or introduce me like she usually did when there was another gay guy around.

I took note but again told myself not to jump to conclusions. I set myself up at my table. By the time I went up to order, the gay raconteur had left. I heard her friend, an old lady a couple tables over, say, “He’s darling!” Faizah smiled and said, “Yeah, isn’t he?” So now I was all smiles now that I saw her in better spirits. Yet when I came up, she frowned and said, “Green tea?” I said yeah. I paid. She put my change on the counter instead of in my hand. She got off her stool, got the mug, got the water. This time, though, she ripped the wrapper open in front of me and plopped the tea bag in, leaving water to jump out of the mug and leaving the empty wrapper in a newly made puddle.

I couldn’t bring myself to say thank you. I did put a dollar in the tip jar out of habit. And she said thank you in an odd, perhaps accidental, moment of politeness. She still wasn’t looking at me, though.

I went back to my table. A little voice inside my head said, “Watch how she treats other customers.” I did and she was laughs and chatter and smiles. A young gay man who lives across the street from me went up for something and she doted on him like a second mother. Other regulars would sit down and she would come out from behind the counter and sit down and catch up with them.

I couldn’t imagine what I’d said or done. I’d been in all last week and all we talked about was the special election in Georgia and what Trump might do on his way out of office. Our only mutual friend was her neighbor and I hadn’t talked to him in almost a year. I certainly never said anything bad about her.

When I was finished with my tea, I walked up for some more hot water. With a face of stone, she said, “More hot water?” I nodded.

Faizah walked over to the hot water boiler, pulled the handle and whipped the mug across the counter at me. She stalked off in the opposite direction and the mug stopped just at the edge of the counter. Water splashed out on all sides of the cup, narrowly missing me. I looked at it and at Faizah when she walked back in my direction. She looked right through me.

“Faizah!” I said, my eyes cold and hard.

“What!” she shot back, throwing her hands up.

I pointed at the puddles. She wiped them up with the napkin that she had in her hand and walked away.

When she walked back, I said, “Faizah!” and pointed at the inside of the mug, which had lost about a quarter cup of water.

She said, “What! What’s wrong with it?”

I leveled my gaze, looked her dead in the eye, and said, “I want more.”

Faizah sighed again, took the mug to the hot-water boiler, pulled the lever, and filled the cup. Once again, she whipped it at me and walked in the other direction. Only this time, she’d left the wet napkin, the one that was in her hand after the first spill, hanging off the top of the mug handle.

That did it. I walked back to my table, put my stuff back in my bag, and walked out. On my way to the door, a handsome man stopped in with a baby carriage. Faizah took time out of her day to rest her elbow on the counter and her chin on her knuckles and talk to him about how things were going in his life.

On the sidewalk, I took out my phone. I blocked her on text, IM, and WhatsApp. I also unfriended her on Facebook. I don’t care what kind of day someone is having. I don’t care what kind of problem they have with me. The kind of shit she did is never acceptable.

Six months went by. I wrote from home or from whatever cafes had outside tables free. I had also started wearing a Fitbit after my doctor’s scale revealed I was fifteen pounds overweight. I’d thought I was ten pounds in the black! I started putting in upwards of 30,000 steps a day and saw more of the city than ever before as I walked. I wouldn’t pass Cosmo, though. I didn’t want any reminders of it. And without its falafel, hummus, and poppy seed pound cakes, the pounds melted right off me. I didn’t drink alcohol for three months and only had apples for snacks. By now, I’ve taken off 50, not 15, pounds.

The more I walk, the more I can feel our future is out east. Julius and I watch multiple Scandinavian series and movies on Amazon and Netflix over dinner. They help us to dream of places away from here. 

One day we got the letter that every other unit in the building got. It was from Vanguard Properties. It said if we ever think of selling, give them a call. They’ll come by for an assessment. “Interested?” Julius asked with raised eyebrows. “Up to you,” I said. A few days later, he told me they were coming over the next day. I showed them in. They said don’t change a thing. They left us a contract. We hired a lawyer to look over it. He gave it the green light and we signed.

On my walks, I stopped taking detours to avoid running into Faizah. I figured it was bound to happen some time. And it was my street as much as hers or anybody else’s. I’d walk in front of Cosmo with my mask on and wouldn’t look in. She probably saw me. She sees all. But we were done and, though it put a crimp in routine, my writing and life went on.

One day, Julius said he’d been walking past Cosmo and Faizah had sent someone out to call him in from the sidewalk. He went in and she said, “Tell your husband I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend him. I miss him.” 

I unblocked her and texted her:

“Faizah—Julius told me you two spoke. I’m willing to talk it over, but I’m still pretty upset about how you treated me the last couple times I was in your cafe, especially since I was the only customer you treated that way, and believe me, I was watching.”

I pressed Send. I expected to hear back. But the only texts that came for the rest of the day were from Nancy Pelosi, the democrats, Julius, and my friend Sébastien.

Still, I decided to give her another chance. I went in the next day. It was the first time in six months that I’d gone in there. There was a short line, three people, myself included. Faizah had her back to the counter as she steamed a pitcher of milk. She turned around and saw me. She gasped and laughed nervously. I was wearing a mask so she couldn’t see any expression on my face.

“Oh, hi,” she said, pouring the milk in a cup, “I saw your husband and…I’m sorry.”

Bandaid apologies weren’t going to work with me. I said, “I have a lot to say about it, Faizah.” She nodded, albeit with incredulous eyes. “Could we sit down and talk about it?”

“Not now,” she said, placing the milk pitcher behind her, “I’ve got a lot of orders.”

She didn’t. There were a couple drink orders and the guys were handling the food orders. It’s nothing she couldn’t wrap up in a few minutes and, when a line ends, she more often than not goes out back and smokes out on the patio with customers.

“I’ll call you,” she said.

“Okay,” I shrugged, “I unblocked you, so…”

She nodded. I left. I never heard from her again.

I still walk past Cosmo a lot. Not on purpose. Not in the hopes that she’ll call me in from the street like she did to Julius that one day and like she used to do to me when we were still friends. I’m not hoping that she and I can finally talk and that I can finally tell her my side of the story and tell her how what she did made me feel, so I can hear her say she’s sorry and that it won’t happen again. It’d be nice but I’ve seen enough by now to know who I’m dealing with.

And it’s nothing for me to take personally. It’s just life moving me on.

My friend Tosha is always reminding me to offer all situations up to the Divine, the Universe, the Higher Power, what have you, for the highest outcome. And so I do. Everything I can think of, I offer, including our upcoming departure. In the process, I’ve found certain things and people falling away. It’s just what happens when you’re being moved on.

Tosha tells a story about how she once found some of the only good bagels in the Bay Area. It was at a shop not far from where she lives in the East Bay. The problem was, she couldn’t stop herself from going there. It was getting in the way of her workouts. So she offered the compulsion up and asked to be freed. The next day, she drove through the Drive-Thru and ordered a batch of bagels. They gave her one kind but she said she’d ordered another. The owner exploded at her, said she was a troublemaker, and told her to get off his property. At one point in her life, she might have burst into tears or fought back. Instead, she laughed, thanked the Universe, and drove off to Core Power Yoga, guilt-free.

I remember this as I consider that my loss of Cosmo has actually been my gain. If Faizah hadn’t mistreated me, I might have gotten too cozy in my writerly watering hole. I might never have been compelled to leave this city. I’d never intended to stay even this long. 

And calm as the music and atmosphere are at Center SF, there’s only so long your back can take sitting on a meditation cushion as you sip your tea and blog. It gives me just the right amount of discomfort to get my ass in gear.

Laila Berzina

By Kyle Thomas Smith

My friend Pierre and I were chatting—well, chatting via email.

The curious thing about Pierre is he’s Canadian but he’s not Quebecois. He’s from Ontario, currently living in Toronto. He’s not even of French descent. He doesn’t even speak French. He’s Italian on his dad’s side and Hungarian on his mom’s. But his mom loved all things French, so that’s how she named him. That’s gotta give someone a mixed-up sense of self.

Anyway, Pierre and I met on Insight Timer. It’s a meditation app. (I’ve made some great friends over the past seven or eight years that I’ve been on it.) In our most recent chat, we were discussing how so many of us try to accrue prestige in order to be well-liked and fabricate an identity for ourselves that we can point to, hold on to, stand by. Yet, from a Buddhist perspective, any such sense of identity would be doomed to dissolution. Circumstances and conditions are in a constant state of change. We’re subject to the eight worldly winds—pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute—and in the end, we die. Yet we put so much time and energy into constructing an image of ourselves that we and others will find acceptable. 

I’m not knocking anybody for doing it. I catch myself doing it all the time, mostly unconsciously. I don’t think there will ever come a time that 99.99999999% won’t do it on some level. But it’s something to be mindful of. And when we do catch ourselves doing this, we might catch a glimpse, however brief, of freedom.

Pierre said he’d always had some awareness of this. One of his earliest memories is of himself climbing up to the mirror above his parents’ bathroom sink and peering at his reflection, thinking, “This isn’t me.” This too, too solid flesh was not him. It was an archetypal moment that he’s carries with him even now that he’s in his fifties.

I threw in how I’m glad to grow older. I’m 47 now. In my twenties, I was busting my ass to be the best writer I could be so I could make my name. I was always coming up short and whipping myself mercilessly for it. I look back at my old self and think, I’m so sorry I treated you that way. 

“I used to want to be the next [insert the name of a super-impressive author here],” I wrote in my exchange with Pierre, “Now I want to be the next Laila Berzina.”

Who is Laila Berzina?

She was my 79-year-old neighbor back in Brooklyn. 

Laila is married to Andris, who is 80 years old and head of the block watch. (He’s nosy, but harmless, and he can spot a no-goodnik before any of the many dogs on Third St even manage to start barking, so his front step is covered with baked goods from appreciative neighbors every Christmas season.) They met at a dance at their Lutheran church in Brighton Beach when they were 18 and 19, respectively. They never had kids. I don’t know what, if anything, Laila did for a living before I met her.

What I do know is that Laila leaves her house and goes to her painting studio four blocks away, wearing a straw sunhat in summer and a blue tight-knit cap that covers her ears in winter, every day without fail. She carries her paint brushes over her shoulder in a brown canvass container like a quiver of arrows, her weathered hand clutching the handle of her paint case. I don’t know how many hours she paints at her studio per day, but she does do it for hours.

Is she any good?

I have no idea.

I think I saw a painting she did of sunflowers once and it looked pretty good. Or maybe I didn’t see it. Maybe the painting I’m thinking of wasn’t hers. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s. Maybe it was just a figment of my imagination, me telling myself I’ve seen one of her paintings. 

Honestly, even though I lived in the next house over from theirs for ten years, I didn’t know Laila and Andris so well—although given the tabs Andris keeps on people, he probably knows me better than I know myself. It’s not that I wasn’t curious about Laila’s paintings. I just didn’t want to pry. Also, I didn’t want to ask to come over and end up getting the third-degree about my life and whereabouts from Andris. 

What I have heard on good account, though, is that she rarely shows people her paintings. She’s definitely not a Name. 

She just loves to paint. And she does it every day. For hours, she just paints away.

To me, that’s a rich life. And it’s completely irrelevant to me whether she shows her work, sells her work, or receives the slightest attention for her work. 

I’m glad I’ve come to the point in my life when I’m learning to “aim low,” as some might say Laila has done. These days, I write just because I like to write. 

I at least have the goal of giving up my erstwhile writerly ambitions and only producing work that really sings to my soul and tugs at me to produce it.

I haven’t quite met this goal. Perhaps I never will. There might always be a part of me that tries to goad me into proving myself. (I do have a Capricorn moon after all.) But I’m not in my twenties anymore, and invisibility in my late forties is seeming more like an ideal state than something to dread or fight against.

I’m so glad I have a friend like Pierre to come to these realizations with, however randomly.

And next time Julius and I go back to visit our house on Third St, I will drop by and see Laila and Andris. 

If Laila offers, I’d like to see her paintings. That is, if there’s time left over after Andris is done grilling us. We’ve been away for three and a half years. We have a lot of explaining to do.      

Direct to Mercury Today

By Kyle Thomas Smith

Mercury goes direct today.

So what? Hasn’t helped us so far. 

We were supposed to go to Julius’s office today. Even though lockdown is over, he’s still the only employee who’s allowed to be there. I go with him on Tuesdays and work from there while the cleaning ladies are at the apartment. During lockdown, I had to give them the run of the place. I guess I don’t have to anymore, now that we’re all vaxxed. But I still go to the office to put them at ease.

It ain’t happening today, though. 

Like I said yesterday, we’re putting the place up for sale.

We have some cracks in our floors and the real-estate agent gave us the name of a guy who could fix them. We got in touch. He came over a couple weeks ago and looked things over. We agreed on a price. He was supposed to have everything done when he came in last Thursday, but he painted the broken pieces the wrong color. It was a color that had nothing to do with the rest of the floor. So he had to schedule time to come back on Friday. He could only get half his stuff done due to another commitment he didn’t mention when he came in that day and said he’d come in again on Monday. Then he called on Monday to say he had an emergency dental appointment, so he’d have to come in on Tuesday. 

So much for putting the cleaning ladies at ease. They don’t know the guy. He said he’s vaxxed, but is he? Still, they were good sports about it.

Better sports than I was. 

You see, the guy has to do a lot of repairs and painting on a floor crack by the front door. That means, he has to leave the front door open while he works. 

And we have cats. They can’t go out. First of all, we told their adoption agencies we wouldn’t let them out. Secondly, I don’t let cats out as a rule. We had a cat growing up that we’d let out and she ended up getting hit by a train. From then on, all mine have been indoors.

And it has to be that way anyway. One of our cats has one eye. Some waste of space had shot him multiple times with a bb gun when this cat lived in the country. Animal Care & Control rounded him up, put him on death row, but he got a reprieve from the SFSPCA, where we got him. His pupil was deviated and his eye was clouded. His head x-rays looked like a ransacked haunted house, full of broken mirrors and cobwebbed furniture. We took him to an ophthalmologist who said that if we didn’t have his eye removed, he’d grow malignant tumors that would metastasize straight into his brain. We got it done. Now he has a prosthetic sown up behind his eyelid. Our other cat is 16 years old and has multiple cancers. Neither of them would last a minute outside.

That’s one of the many reasons I’m always on guard when it comes to them. If the front door is going to be open, I have to put them in the bathroom. It’s an ordeal. They meow their heads off and paw at the door and make you feel like a heel. It doesn’t matter that you woke up at three a.m. that morning because they were hungry for a snack and wouldn’t let you have a wink of sleep until you gave it to them.

Anyway, so the guy said he’d come early this morning, which meant I had to wake up extra early so I could get my writing and meditation done before he’d come in. I asked Julius where he’d be starting. By the door? Julius said he didn’t know. I said I had to know. I had to know when to put the cats away. Julius said, yeah, yeah, and walked away. This was last night.

Before I was able to go to my meditation cushion this morning, Julius said, “He’s here.” I said, “He’s here?” Julius said, “Yeah, and he’s gonna start by the door.” I said, “But you need the bathroom to shower. Where am I gonna put the cats?” Julius said, “I don’t know.”

And I told him this wasn’t well-planned.

And that’s all it took. Julius got defensive, went up in arms. This led to the most tedious and deflective squabble you could imagine. It made the cats’ 3 a.m. boxing matches look like a love-in. He accused me of saying things I didn’t say. He denied saying things he did say. He was well on track to becoming his worst self and accused me of being my worst self when I was doing everything in my power to adjust my tone and hold back. I said he was projecting. He said I was projecting. He said, “You don’t see yourself.” I said, “You don’t see yourself.” And because there was no court stenographer or third-party witness, we were at a standstill. We ended up agreeing to disagree about who was at fault and patched it up with a hug.

None of this would have happened if the guy had just finished up last Thursday like he said he would. Or least last Friday when he came back. Or on Monday when he said he’d finish up for sure. Julius just threw his hands in the air and said, “California!” Meaning, none of this would fly in New York. 

We live in a loft space with no separate rooms. The basement has sliding doors, though, so I put the cats down there and stayed with them, intending to remain until it would be time to leave. The cats used to know how to open those door. Then somehow they forgot. I still stick around when they’re down there in case they suddenly remember. 

Now I’m told that the guy’s still got a lot more work to do, so I should stay in the basement with the cats until he’s gone.

Oh, well. At least I can blog.

Oh, wait. Now Julius is telling me that the guy has another appointment and will complete the job next Monday. The downside is that the floors aren’t done. The upside is that I get to walk to the office.

To walk to the office takes about an hour. An hour there, an hour back, and I get my steps in for the day. It turns what sounds like a negative into a positive. So I’m looking forward to the walk.

But, oh, wait—

This just in…

Julius says that he has a lunch at noon. It’s already 11. By the time I’d get to the office, I’d have to turn right back around and go home. I wouldn’t have time to write in the office.

It’s not worth it.

I have to go to my usual café to write.

Would you believe the café where I usually write is called Mercury Café? They even have a sign up in the bathroom describing their namesake. It reads:

Mercury is the god of:

Bookstores and cafes

The Postal Service

Reporters and journalists

Handwriting and calligraphy

Street performers (so carry physical currency)

Poets and philosophers

Carpet dealers

Dealers

Travelers, tricksters, and thieves

Mercury is the messenger of

Mighty Jupiter.

So I’m going direct to Mercury. A change in plans. You know how much Tauruses like those.

But at the end of the day, the guy is gone, the front door is closed, and the cats are safe.

Recommit

By Kyle Thomas Smith

I’ve probably said this in a dozen posts already, and odds are I’ll say it in a dozen more, but I’ve decided to recommit to blogging.

I’m not saying I’ll be a good blogger. I’m not saying that I’ll hit the hot topics of the day. I’m an offbeat character. I always have been. I expect I always will be. I only seem to be able to write convincingly about the overlookable events of my ordinary life.

And it’s not as though I don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the world at large. On the contrary, I read way more news than is good for me, each and every day, if not each and every hour. Yet I’ve never been able to bang out think pieces on current events, mostly because I don’t really want to. I’d just be another member of the chattering class. And there are far better ones out there than I. 

There are far better bloggers out there too. I’m thinking of one in particular whom I zealously follow on Medium. She’s a young professor who’s had it to the teeth with how the system is run. She came from an abusive home and overwork was her ticket out. It stood her well. In addition to being one of Medium’s top bloggers, she often mentions how she has three times as many academic publications as her boss and colleagues. She’s also racked up ten times as many posts as even the biggest powerhouses on the blogosphere. All this while raising a three year old.

Makes me feel like a layabout. (That’s okay. I’ve made peace with how I’m wired.)

Yet I’ve started to notice something else about her posts lately. They’ve started to run together. She grouses about the one percent. She complains about her job. She addresses poverty and sexism and the climate crisis and the failed state of the American dream—and she ends by saying it’s never going to get any better until we rid the land of all powerbrokers. ASAP. And anyone who’s lived in this country for more than five minutes knows the likelihood of that happening. So does she. All too well. So, consistently, her takeaway is that we’re fucked.

I’ve stopped reading her posts. Even if she’s right, I just can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to read those posts and I certainly don’t want to write them. I watch enough Rachel Maddow and Democracy Now to get the point.

I have a feeling too that this blogger has noticed that the more she posts these things, the more likes she accumulates. It keeps her in clover as a paid blogess. Nothing wrong with that. Again, she’s got a toddler to raise. She probably also relishes the dopamine hit of thousands of likes per post. I probably would too if I had such talent.

I want to do something different, though. Things that might get me zero views. I want to start writing less in my notebooks and more for the public. I’m tired of scribbling into the void. Even the I Ching had told me that I’m hunkering down in a temple that is not helping me to connect with life beyond the temple. I’d like to reach out with musings from my mundane experience even if nobody reaches back. (And my forecast is that nobody will, and that’s perfectly okay. My objective is simply to be back here, posting more often.)

So the news right now is that we’ve put our condo on the market. We’re moving back to New York City as soon as we can. It’s been a nice three and a half years in San Francisco. It’s been an adventure, just as I was hoping it would be. Before we decided to make the move, I was just about to finish grad school and needed a change. I kept having visions of Northern California when I would meditate. Julius was getting job offers out here. We decided to go for it and rented out our house in Brooklyn.

I’m glad we decided not to sell the house. Even when things were at their best for me here, I still always had a sense that this was temporary. I was making friends. I was going to sangha five nights a week, sometimes two a night and one afternoon a week too. There is so much dharma in this city. I was starting to meet people and was far more active in Buddhist communities than I even was in New York. I made one friend whom I’m still super close with. Even so, I had a creeping suspicion that this is not where I belong. My brother and some of my friends couldn’t see why. It’s as gay as it gets, there’s still plenty of bohemia left for a bobo (bourgeois-bohemian) like myself. Something still wasn’t clicking. And it definitely wasn’t clicking for Julius, but his story is his to tell.

Then Covid hit. The sanghas closed. They still held their meetings online, but I never could get into them. Part of the draw of dharma communities was that it gave me a chance to get out of the house and be around people. The online experience just isn’t the same. 

Julius and I sheltered in place and watched international films and TV series. We’d constantly reminisce about the shows we’d go to on Broadway, off-Broadway, and at Lincoln Center. I had plenty of evidence for how I was more prolific in New York. It was teaming with energy and I had a better rapport with people there. Our banter and back-and-forth’s really fed my creativity. 

Pre-Covid, I was unable to recreate the experience in San Francisco. People seemed more checked-out. Even sober, industrious people seemed harder to engage. It didn’t matter whether I’d been writing in a café or taking long walks through the fog-embanked streets, I’d come home feeling enervated. I started calling it “The Land of the Lotos Eaters,” after the Tennyson poem, which he drew from the Odyssey.

And now lockdown is over, and we just want to go home. Theaters will be open in September, we read. One reporter from the NY Times said that theaters needed that time, in part because the performers have gained weight. Since getting my Fitbit for Christmas, I’ve actually become too skinny. I had about 15 pounds to lose but ended up losing over 50. That’s what happens when you get lost in dreams of home.

The guy who helped us prepare our move here came back out to help us again. The real estate agent had us prune back half our stuff for staging. Her photographer came and got shots of the place on Friday. They should be up by the end of the week and the place should be on the “silent market” by next week. I ran into our old neighbor, who moved out last month. He said, with the market being what it is, it should be sold in a week. We’ll see how lucky we get.

So, that’s the news from now.

I will be back with more.

The Rigby Crowd

By Kyle Thomas Smith

My sister-in-law called to cancel on Saturday night. We were supposed to go over for a barbecue. My brother was all excited. He’d asked what we wanted him to cook—salmon for me, ribs for my husband—and ordered a special shipment from his favorite rib joint in Chicago. 

My nephew, who lives only a few blocks away from us here in San Francisco, said his dad has been taking tips from a master BBQer on YouTube named Louisiana Bubba. He says his dad spends his nonexistent spare time practicing Bubba’s moves and couldn’t wait to show them off on his new grill. Saturday was the night they were going to unveil their new outdoor kitchen, complete with a barbecue pit and socially distanced patio furniture, in their suburban backyard. My sister-in-law says my brother had stopped off for a burrito, though, during yet another weekend spent in the office and had gotten violently ill. 

I don’t think my brother is long for this world.

He’s been pulling all-nighters for weeks at work, where he’s the only employee allowed on the premises during Covid. He’s pulled all-nighters ever since I’ve known him. 

When I was in seventh grade, he was in law school and had moved back home for a year while working full-time as an accountant and going to night school. He had burned a hole in his stomach from all the coffee he drank. His face was scored with adult acne scars. He smelled of a stress so rancid, and was so often in such a foul mood from deadlines and lack of sleep, that I couldn’t bear to get within six feet of his bedroom door.

Fast forward 25 years. Right after both of our parents died, my brother was trying to save our alcoholic brother from killing himself. He did everything he could—constant check-ins, interventions, arranging revolving-door rehabs, acting as legal counsel when our alcoholic brother’s ex-wife took out a restraining order. It was no use. Our alcoholic brother drank himself to death anyway.

Rather than reflect on the tragedy, my siblings decided to have a bitch fit over funeral arrangements. Why feel our feelings when we can all have a big fight instead? I climbed out of their toxic Irish stew years ago, and I stayed out of this brouhaha too. My brother took time out of his workweek, though, to say what he wanted to see done about our alcoholic brother’s remains. He wanted one thing, my siblings wanted another. When the two sides couldn’t agree, my brother called the undertaker and informed him that he did not consent to the plans my other siblings had made for our alcoholic brother’s body. Without unanimous agreement among the surviving family members, state law prohibited the undertaker from moving forward. My brother ended up getting his wish. Our deceased brother got a church funeral. And the rest of our siblings—who’d just wanted to say a quick prayer after a quick cremation—cut my brother out of their lives for good.

When I asked him how he was coping in the wake of the wake, my brother didn’t say he was meditating or in therapy. He said, “Keepin’ busy.” But he was never too busy to notice that our other siblings didn’t call him anymore. So my brother tries to cope by workIng, just as our deceased brother had tried to cope by boozing.

At least he has his wife and his two adult children, both of whom are thriving two years after graduating from top-tier universities. And at least he has Louisiana Bubba and his slick grill tricks.

And I’m sure he’ll always have his work to fall back on. I’m also sure it’ll be the last thing he’ll ever do.

And, hey, at least I’m still talking to him! 

My husband and I are moving back to New York City next year, though. We don’t have much more time left to hang out with my brother and his fam in the Bay Area. Not that we get together more than a couple or three times a year as it is.

“So, how ‘bout next Friday instead!” I told my sister-in-law.

My nephew was supposed to go to his folks’ with us that night but ended up coming over to our place. We dished about my dysfunctional family, aka, his aunts and uncles. I had separated from them many years before our alcoholic brother died, so estrangement was second nature to me. Not so for my barbecuing brother. He’d once been the golden boy—model student, model achiever. After the funeral, he became a pariah. 

“For the record,” I told my nephew and my husband as we drank the wine we were going to bring to the gala opening of the outdoor kitchen, “When it’s my turn, I don’t want a funeral.”

“Why not?” my nephew asked with screwed-up eyes.

“I’m afraid nobody’ll show up,” I shrugged, “Eleanor Rigby could probably draw a bigger crowd. Look, just scatter my ashes in Prospect Park like they did with that guy in The Brooklyn Follies. And if anyone wants to memorialize me for any reason, they can show up to the dispersal. And maybe everybody can go back and have a few drinks in my living room. Or in a bar. Whatever they want.”

There are people who fear looking down and seeing a bunch of no-shows on the day of their funeral. And I get it. Who wants proof they were a loser? 

That’s why I’m cutting the possibility off at the pass.

I recently found out that someone I used to be friends with had no funeral. His name was Leo. Actually, Leo was his middle name. It was also his astrological sign. His first name is too distinctive, so let’s just go with Leo. 

I had no idea Leo had even died. I was just on a long ramble down the Embarcedero when I thought about how Leo had once bought acid from another friend of mine in my car when I was 19. It was a random memory and I had a random impulse to Google him. That’s when I saw he died last year. Due to Covid, he was not going to have a funeral. His obituary didn’t even say there’d be a memorial service for him either online or when the pandemic is over.

I must have read Leo’s obituary a hundred times that day, mostly trying to read between its few lines. It didn’t say he’d done anything great with his life. In fact, it seems like he hadn’t done much at all since the last time I saw him, 26 years ago. It only said he studied music in college and that, in lieu of flowers, his sister would like donations to be sent to his old performing-arts high school or to a 12-Step house that I’m assuming he attended.

The obit didn’t go into how he was only in college for one year. I know. I went and visited him there. As teenagers, Leo and I used to go to coffeehouses, where we’d chain-smoke and roast all the friends we’d fallen out with before the two of us became friends. These conversations helped me to heal from a lot of early, petty betrayals that otherwise might have scarred me for life. We’d laugh to the point of bladder breakage as we evolved all sorts of inside jokes that were too many and too abstruse and silly to go into here. I knew he did a lot of drugs, but we didn’t talk a lot about it. My guess is that one reason he liked being around me was that I didn’t do drugs, so he could take a break from using when we’d hang out. Also, I was out of the closet and he seemed to be on his way out, so I might have been filling a bit of a mentoring role. 

I never heard that he ever fully came out, though. That confused me. Unlike me, he had an accepting family. In fact, he once found a cassette in one of his mother’s utility drawers called “Accepting Your Gay Teen.” His mom was also a voiceover talent and stage actress who had all sorts of gay and lesbian friends over on the reg. So why not just take the plunge? I know he didn’t like the catty queens on Halsted Street who’d take out their schoolyard traumas on each other, but there were many other ways of being gay, even back in the early nineties.

Then again, I knew there was a lot of trauma in Leo’s life that he didn’t want to look at. His half-brother died of child leukemia the summer we became friends and he had almost no relationship with his father, who was also the child’s father. Leo wasn’t the kind to grieve, brood, or introspect. 

That’s another thing that confused me about him. He was huge into goth and 4AD bands—music tailor-made for moping. He’d had a history of cutting too. Yet he’d deflect with a joke or spastic-sarcastic remark, no matter how off-topic, whenever a conversation would go into any sort of deep emotional territory. His energy was herky-jerky a la the Club Kids (kind of like a Club Kid without the clubs): he wouldn’t walk down the street, he’d bounce, all while wearing bib-jean overalls and carrying a Mork & Mindy lunchbox. Looking back, substance abuse was probably at the root of a lot of this behavior, but I didn’t know that’s what I witnessing at the time.

Around the time Leo was about to start college, I did notice him becoming increasingly bitter. I don’t know if jitters about going away to school had anything to do with it. He shaved off all his auburn-hennaed hair, got his septum pierced and wore a thick, sterling-silver bull ring in it. He went from embodying whimsical alterna-teenism to looking uncharacteristically butch. He also started taking jabs at me all of a sudden. I can’t recall about what exactly, but I do remember his remarks were harsh enough for me to tell him not to talk to me that way. In response, he laughed and said, “You’re trying to be assertive and I’m laughing at you.” I’d love to tell you that I got up and walked away. I’d love to tell you that I never talked to him again. Instead, I said fuck you. From there, we agreed to change the subject.

In a rare moment of self-awareness, Leo told me that he could “get into the ‘denial gig’” that he inherited from his alcoholic father. I guess that’s what we were both doing: denying that he had insulted me and that there should be consequences. A few times, he even brought another friend along when the two of us had plans and they would talk to each other and pay me almost no attention. I didn’t think it’d be a good look to pitch a fit. It might have actually inspired them to act even meaner. So I’d sit and stoically take it.

Then Leo went away to college at a music conservatory in central Wisconsin. He was a baritone. I saw him sing in an operetta once. He showed promise. His obituary says he also played piano, but I don’t remember that.

I was still living in Chicago and reading godless, saturnine European writers. I was going to be a bad-ass novelist, you see. I’d set my sights on being the next Milan Kundera, even though the closest I’d ever come to experiencing Stalinism was having to sit through Lee Atwater’s Southern strategy during the Regan-Bush era. I would sit in cafés and conspicuously comb the tomes of brooding contemplatives. 

Yet when no-one was looking, I’d watch Oprah. It was the one time of day I could indulge the woo-woo side that I’d suppressed around jaded Gen-Xers. She had Maya Angelou on a few times. I caught her greatest hits: like when she said that you have to stop people in their tracks if they start busting your chops or else they’ll “peck you to death like ducks.” She said that, if she’d be out to dinner with someone who compliments her blouse, but the new man in her life says, “Well, I don’t like it,” she’ll hand him back his keys and say it’s a shame that it’s not going to work out between them. He’d just given her a taste of what she’d be in for if she’d go any further with him and she had too much self-respect for that. Self-respect, self-esteem: these were things I was going to have to learn from the bottom up. It’s not the hippest thing to admit, but Oprah was my first teacher in these areas.

During his first semester, Leo came back home a few times for breaks and we got together every single time. In fact, I spent Christmas with him and his family even though they were Jewish. (My folks had made their disdain for my gayness and my apostasy from the Catholic Church clear, so I boycotted Christmas at their home that year.) Yet Leo didn’t seem excited to pick up where we’d left off. He’d just listlessly smoke and half-listen to whatever news I’d deliver from my life. Then he’d head out and meet his new friends from school. He wouldn’t take me along like I would have. But again, not wanting to be a bother, I said nothing.

Early the following semester, I traveled four hours north of Chicago to go visit him. I got a ride from another friend who had a friend at the same school. When we arrived, it was early afternoon. Leo met us in the parking lot and so did my friend’s friend, whom Leo hadn’t met yet. My friend’s friend was all hugs and cuddles with her. Leo and I were never huggy-cuddly with each other. Still, I had expected something a little more enthusiastic than what I ended up getting: Leo exhaling a drag off his cigarette to cloud the word hey. 

We all agreed to meet for dinner at a spaghetti restaurant down the road. The friend I came with went off with her friend and I went off with Leo, who said to me, “Dinner’s three hours from now. We’re gonna be sooo borrrred.” Just the forecast you want your friend to give for time spent in your company, especially once you’ve come all that way to see him.

We hung out in his dorm room. I can’t remember if he had a single with two beds or if he had a roommate who was away but, in any event, we had his dorm room to ourselves that weekend. He didn’t make his bed or empty the ashtrays, but other than that he’d kept the room pretty clean and my bed on the bottom bunk was made. We did what we’d always done for the three hours he’d expected us to be so bored with: we smoked and drank coffee. (My body hasn’t been able to sustain either of these activities over the past couple decades, but back then they were as natural to me as breathing.)

Leo passed the hours slagging off his school and the people in it. According to him, they were mostly from hick towns and didn’t know how to deal with things that wouldn’t ruffle any feathers in the city. He said a couple guys from the Pride club told someone “Leo is…But doesn’t know it.“ (Leo put it like that: “is” and then points of ellipses. He couldn’t bring himself to utter the word itself.) And that’s when Leo said it: “I’ve known ever since I was little. I just don’t think it’s a big deal.” I just nodded and let him move on to whatever subject he wished to switch to next, even though actually hearing him make this revelation seemed to me a true milestone.

He said his mom wanted him to get therapy. I said, “For that?” He said, “No, no. Other things.” I said, “Why?” He put his cigarette into his other hand and shrugged, “Because I’m troubled.” He didn’t say what he was troubled about but I also knew I wasn’t going to get a more specific response. 

Nor would any shrink, for that matter. The last therapist his mom sent him to, a couple years before, made some of the easiest money that day off Leo, who simply plunked down on the couch and said: “Look, I get depressed sometimes. I do some drugs. They don’t get in the way of my grades or social life. I’ll probably keep doing them.” The shrink had said okay and took Leo off his schedule. Leo flicked a check signed by his mom on to the therapist’s desk and probably went out and took a one-hitter in the alley.

As we smoked and sipped coffee, Leo went on about how he had made other friends at school and how we’d be seeing them later. But now it was dinnertime. We went to the spaghetti restaurant. My other friend’s friend brought some schoolmates. Leo sat with listless smile through each course, hardly breathing a word. I thought it was a great opportunity for him to meet new people on campus, but evidently he didn’t deem any of them his scene. It didn’t help that we weren’t old enough to order wine and cocktails either. We could only drink Cokes and eat spaghetti. 

When dinner was over, we said goodbye to our fellow diners and went to his friend’s dorm room. She was a riot grrrl in a Sonic Youth t-shirt, diesel chain necklaces and bracelets, raccoon eyeshadow and black lipstick. She had a stoner dude in a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt, flopped over on an AmVets armchair, smoking a bowl. He handed Leo a bag of weed. Leo took out rolling paper. He barely introduced me to them. They barely said hey. They all got right to smoking up and slamming their schoolmates. They didn’t offer me any weed. That was fine. I had only smoked pot with Leo once or twice since we’d known each other and never want to make a habit of it. They didn’t talk to me when I tried talking to them. That was fine. I saw there were books in the room. I reached over to one shelf and began to paw through a used paperback copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, which I’m assuming was required reading in one of the riot grrrl’s classes. 

They played Hole’s Live Through This, smoked, rolled, and partied. There wasn’t even any beer involved, which is weird for a Wisconsin college. I continued reading Sinclair Lewis.

Round about chapter 3, from the hinterlands of my isolation, I heard Leo sigh, “This day has been anticlimactic.” I closed the book and glared at him. He did not meet my gaze. I had journeyed over 200 miles to see him and all he could say about the day was that it was anticlimactic. 

I knew I couldn’t lose my shit, though. He’d act like I was the one who had issues. They’d probably come to his defense. And I needed a place to sleep that night. So I read “Babbitt” until Leo was stoned enough to say good night to his friends. We went back to his dorm room and changed into our pj’s. He took the top bunk and I took the bottom bunk. He turned out the light and said good night. I said good night and, in my mind, I went over what Maya Angelou did—at least hypothetically—with the man who dissed her blouse.

Around dawn, I gathered my stuff and snuck out. Leo was sound asleep. I searched the campus and found the friend I’d driven me up with. I explained what had happened. We went to her car, she popped her trunk and I put my bags in. I tagged along with her and her friend for the rest of the day. We went hiking in some nearby woods and later sat by a stream. They were both bio-chem majors and I tried talking science with them. I have no idea how I pulled that off. As it was, I had to go for tutoring at my own university’s lab if I were to have any hope of passing Biology 101 for my science requirement.

I must’ve faked my way through the conversation okay, though, because I made it through the day. My friend dropped her friend back at her dorm and went up to get her bags. I climbed into the passenger’s seat and hid under the dashboard lest Leo might come walking by. I wished my friend would have finished up saying goodbye to her friend sooner, but ultimately I made my clean break. I never saw Leo again.

He did leave me a message on my beeper/call service (remember those?) when he came back for spring break: “I’m here the whole week. Let me know when you want to get together.” It was as if nothing had happened that night in his dorm. Nary a question about where I’d gone while he was sleeping.—The denial gig.—I didn’t call back. He tried a couple more times that week. I didn’t call back. He crank-called me the following summer, stoned out of his gourd, pretending to be a semi-obscene caller, saying, “You have a really nice voice,” with lots of panting and heavy breathing. Someone giggled in the background. He did a lousy job of disguising his baritone. I didn’t call back, of course, and that was the last message he ever left me.

Several months later, I was living on my own in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago and finishing my degree at the University of Illinois. I ran into one of Leo’s friends on Fullerton Avenue. She said Leo had dropped out of that college after the semester that I’d gone up to see him. He had moved into an apartment in the Logan Square area with a friend. I said, “That’s nice.” She said he’d gotten a job with UPS but quit because he had to lift heavy boxes. Now she said he was sitting around the living room smoking weed and his roommate was getting frustrated. I said, “That’s nice,” and went on my way.

It’d be literally decades before I’d think about him again. By then, all was forgiven, at least on my side. I’d come to understand the cringe-worthiness of our youths, the ways we spoke or acted out of turn. Some never improve, but most do. Which is why I could forgive him when I remembered him on my walk on the Embarcadero. I remember how outlaw I felt hosting an LSD deal in my car at 19, even though to this day I’ve never done the drug. At the time, though, I remember thinking it was one in the eye for my holy-roller parents. 

If this were a creative-writing workshop, I’d be pilloried for this post. “Describe the drug deal,” the other students in the workshop would demand. And I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be worth it. I had one friend in the back seat who had some acid. Leo was in the front seat. She asked him if he trips. He said yeah. She asked if he wanted to buy. He said yeah. It was a nominal fee. He paid it. She said, “Pleasure doing business with you, Leo.” They had never met before. They never met again. Not long after, she and I parted ways when she impugned my masculinity with a limp wrist and femme-inflected voice. She didn’t apologize. I refused to speak to her again. There’s nothing more to say about it.

“But Leo sounds like a jerk. Why would you remember fondly?” You didn’t know me at that age. I was reading Thomas Mann and trying to write my own “Tonio Kröger”-inspired stories. I didn’t keep the drafts, but they were my first attempts at writing fiction. In the typical Dunning-Kruger way, the more I wrote, the more I thought I was a match for my literary idol. And Leo actually used to indulge me as I would read him my turgid, misspelled variations on Mann. Maybe he’d gotten stoned when I wasn’t looking and that’s what enabled him to sit through them. Nonetheless he did give me a second-hand copy of Isherwood’s Berlin Stories that he’d picked up from Aspidistra Bookstore. He hadn’t read it, but he thought I might like it, so he gave it to me and I read it. Do you know how much value there is in that for a young writer? 

Do you know how hard it was to be so obviously and openly gay in your teens back then? And to have a male friend who would stick by you? Do you know how crisp the air is in Chicago during the fall and how deftly it leads up to the marrow-chilling winters and how you’ll remember forever anyone whom you’d spent any significant amount of time with during those seasons, if only on account of the cold? And especially if they’d indulge your first artistic efforts? I don’t have to justify to a workshop why this would be meaningful to me. I know in my heart, and through bitter experience of a world where I’ve remained nameless, why it would.

And then the obituary read that Leo died. Again, the Twelve Step House was mentioned. I’m thinking he’d moved on to needles and/or meth, but I hardly knew all the drugs he was doing even in the days when we’d spend most of our free time together, so what would I know now? The obit said his mother had died after failing to beat breast cancer into remission for a third time. It said he was survived by his sister and stepfather, but it said nothing of his father. It didn’t say he had a partner. It didn’t say what he had done for a living. It said he was an accomplished collage artist and I couldn’t help but think, “Vision boards.” A quick Google search showed his address was still in Logan Square. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been in the same apartment with the same roommate and if she was too stoned to kick him out. 

Full disclosure, I had looked him up on Facebook years ago and saw we had a mutual friend whom I didn’t know during the years when he and I were friends. I asked if she knew what had happened. She wrote that it was news to her that he’d even died. Being an official Facebook friend, she had more access to his page than I did. She said she checked and saw that there had been a post from his sister that read that he was in the hospital with a non-Covid-related illness and she requested that people send “good energy.” A couple days later, someone named Ambrosia tagged his name, announcing his passing. Ambrosia said she would give more details to anyone who’d write to her via PM. 

Our mutual friend said she didn’t know Ambrosia. “Was she an old girlfriend?” our mutual friend asked. Apparently she’d missed what was so obvious to me and sundry others about Leo. Had she missed it in Liberace too? She asked me, “Do you want me to see what I can find out from Ambrosia?” I thanked her and said no. Wherever Leo is now, I could see him looking at me and saying, “Oh, now I matter?”

And the truth is, now he did matter. Now he had dropped his human form with all its capacity for pettiness and vindictiveness, made all the worse by addiction. Now I could remember him at his best. I could conjecture what he might have been if he’d turned to healing instead of self-harm. I could remember the laughter and the long nights of reading my early bilge to him. Now the coast was clear and I could remember him at his best.

Leo didn’t have much of an online presence, so Google searches didn’t reveal much. Except that his sister donated his entire wall-to-wall record collection to a local college’s alternative radio station. The station mentioned being thrilled to rediscover, through his collection, old Siouxsie & The Banshees, Dead Can Dance, Sisters of Mercy, and Cocteau Twins. It’s such a withering experience to learn that all these icons are legitimately old now, and so are all of us who listened to them in real time. I recall how much Leo loved the female voice, and so it was only natural that he gravitated to Lisa Gerard and Liz Frazier or that he relished the doppelgänger of the title character in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s“The Double Life of Veronique,” even though the movie confused the shit out of everybody else.

The article about his record collection said that Leo used to DJ at a used record shop in Chicago’s Wicker Park area, right across the street from where we’d spent so much time having coffee and cigarettes in our peevish youth. He must have worked at the shop too. It said he had spun at various clubs once in a while too. It didn’t say what other side-hustles he’d picked up to make rent. All of that is irrelevant is.

The fact is, for however brief his obituary might have been, he led a full life. Why? Because he touched a life, even beyond the family members listed in his obituary. He touched mine. To think that’s all any of us needs to do—just touch one person. And yet we run around trying to accomplish so we can justify our place in this world. So unnecessary.

Leo didn’t have a funeral. I don’t want one either. Unless I have friends who want to throw me one. Then they can have at it. I just don’t want to be disappointed by the turnout. But by that time, I’ll be on the other side and probably wouldn’t care about such things.

I know that if I were my brother, I would care more about having guests over for BBQs than I would about mergers and acquisitions. The mergers and acquisitions probably won’t be printed in your obituary (which, by the way, I’ve recently learned doesn’t have to be that long). But Bubba and the barbecues probably will.

Learning One’s Scale

By Kyle Thomas Smith

“I dreamt that I’d be someone to be reckoned with, you know, in the world. But one learns one’s scale.“

Notes on a Scandal

Thursday, February 20, 2021

It all started with The Scale.

When I go the doctor and get weighed, they’re usually good enough not to tell me how much I weigh. But when we moved to San Francisco three years ago, I got a new doctor and, when I stepped on the scale, his nurse blurted out my weight. 

I was actually thrilled! I was a lot lighter than I thought I’d be. I went out and celebrated with a Margherita pizza, a carafe of Chianti, and a bowl of tiramisu. 

I figured, as long as I worked out for an hour each day on the elliptical, I could eat whatever I wanted and I’d be fine. 

And so that’s what I did. For three years.

I worked out on the elliptical for an hour a day.

And I ate what I wanted: quesadillas with guacamole and chips, full bowls of granola for breakfast, three glasses of wine with dinner every night and sometimes a follow-up glass if we’d go out to eat and polish off a bottle.  

Our neighbors in our building probably thought less of us when they’d see us lugging a recycling bag full of empty wine bottles to the dumpster at the end of each week. But who cares? 

My body looked fine to me. Except when I would catch it at odd angles in mirrors and shop windows. I noticed that I had a bubble butt. But Julius said he liked it. Callipygian, he called it. And there was no potbelly. So, all good. 

For three years, I was able to maintain the illusion that my weight would stay the same, so long as I kept up my exercise routine. So I made sure to keep it up.

And then last December, I went in for a checkup where they weighed me. And once again, I got a nurse who made bold to tell me my weight. And it turns out, no. Over the course of three years, my weight did not stay the same. No, it did not.

I had gained 25 pounds.

Now, this is where all the metta meditation and self-compassion practices that I’ve done over the years came in handy. I didn’t beat myself up. I didn’t get down on myself. I said, “Okay. We wanted some incentive to take long walks in nature every day, and now we have it.” 

After all, I have been struggling with writer’s block ever since my latest book came out two years ago. And every advice book for writers seems to advise perambulations in nature. Maybe I could lose weight and gain inspiration at the same time. 

So I decided to add a daily walking practice to my one hour per day on the elliptical machine. 

I would make it a sort of walking meditation where I would repeat to myself the metta phrases: 

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

And I would repeat the phrases for my teachers, my loved ones, people I hardly know, people I have strife with, and finally for all beings everywhere, without exception.

Voila! I had a new practice! 

I even asked for a Fitbit for Christmas and a week later, I got one. 

I cut all sides, wines, beer, desserts, snacks and all but the necessary carbs from my diet. I’d drink 3,000 milliliters of water a day. I’d fill up on vegetables and herbal tea instead of bread. 

I recorded upwards of 30,000 steps, or, 15 miles a day on my Fitbit. Every afternoon, I would devise routes through the many parks and nature preserves of San Francisco. I’d set my Insight Timer for two hours and just ramble, not coming home until well after the two hours were up.

The mirror shows that I have lost a lot of weight. How much? I don’t know. I won’t know until my doctor’s appointment, which is exactly one month from today. I don’t want to weigh myself before then. I want it to be a surprise. But t-shirts that used to cling are now billowing around my newly compact frame. My cheekbones are jutting out like crags. I’ve gone down one belt loop and the backside of my jeans, which used to hold up on their own, now sag below my buttocks if I don’t cinch my belt all the way. I’m going down to the size I was in college, when I smoked a pack a day and had maybe a Subway tuna sandwich as my daily cuisine. I haven’t smoke in 23 years, though, and now I sit down for three nutritious meals a day.

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

When it comes to inspiration, I haven’t been so lucky. 

All the books keep saying the more I walk in nature, the more inspiration will come my way. I’m getting tired of having to wade through long stretches of writer’s block when it comes to publishable pieces. (At least I remain an obsessive journaller, though.) Nobody ever says, “When I grow up, I want to be a blocked writer.” At yet, at 46, that is what I am.

The Big Idea for the Next Book hasn’t come to me yet. 

I even told the universe, it doesn’t have to be a book. I’ll settle for inspiration for a story. One story. Or a play. Or an essay. Or even a blog post. C’mon! One blog post. Please. It’s not a lot to ask. Just something to keep my hand in. Something besides filling up notebooks with free-writing that no-one will ever see. 

Still nothing came.

Until yesterday. 

I was cleaning out the cat box. Julius came down, showing me his iPhone screen, “Kyle, Rush Limbaugh died.”

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

This is another moment where loving-kindness and compassion practices show their merit. Rather than cursing Limbaugh’s soul and wishing him hellfire, I simply said, “It was not a life well lived.” That’s all I said. No hostility. I threw the kitty litter in the trash liner and got on the elliptical machine. A friend who heard the news texted, “The dick’s dead!” I texted back: “Dead or alive, the damage is done. He groomed plenty more to pick up where he left off.” I went on exercising for an hour.  

After showering and throwing on some blue jeans and a light green t-shirt, I microwaved an Amy’s vegetarian burrito and wolfed it down with a Fuji apple and two clementines. I guzzled a thermos of water and brushed my teeth. I put on my surgical mask and black Adidases and headed out the door.

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

Truth be told, I didn’t want to go on a long walk that day. I would’ve preferred to sit home and read. But I knew walking was good for me and for my diet. 

I live on Haight Street, about a mile and a half south of Golden Gate Park. My plan was to walk up to Buena Vista Park and tramp along its trails, padding my step count with thousands of desultory steps before racking up even more in Buena Vista Heights, Corona Heights, Cole Valley and up the last westernmost incline hill on Stanyan Street. From there, I would walk back down Stanyan Street to Golden Gate Park, circumambulate the Japanese Tea Garden, pass through the de Young Museum plaza, and then head back home via Page Street, thus avoiding the heavy foot traffic and packs of street kids, panhandlers, and runaways on Haight Street who hang out in thick clusters, many of them not wearing masks. There are new variations of Covid from South Africa and Great Britain sweeping the nation right now and even if our current vaccines do prove they can withstand them, I probably won’t be receiving my first vaccination until July at the earliest. I have to stay distant.

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

Buena Vista means “good view” and Buena Vista Park lives up to its name with its panoramic views of the city, the Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s 37 acres of oaks and toyon trees, coexisting with eucalyptus, pine, cypress, and Australian tea trees. Switchback trails rise to a 575-foot summit and there are ridged pine steps to help your ascent. The climb will leave you winded but the park is mostly shaded and the breeze is reliably generous and fresh. Besides being an aesthetic marvel, I’ve consistently found it to be a fantastic place to burn calories. 

After reaching the peak, I walked laps around the sundrenched hill. Once again, padding the step count, padding the step count. Around about my fourth revolution, a couple girls from a local high school walked up and sat down on the hill. They started chatting. I didn’t want to hang around, lest they think I’m some creepy middle age guy, trying to encroach on them, so I decided to vamoose down the wide asphalt path that leads to the park exit.

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept exactly as I am.”

As I stepped down the path, I heard a man’s voice cackling and hectoring passersby both on the path and on the street below. He was yelling racial slurs. He was yelling homophobic slurs as well, punctuated by diatribes like, “Oh, you brought one virus to San Francisco, now you wanna bring another.” Presumably, the former virus he was referring to was AIDS and the latter was Covid. I kept a steady and sturdy gait to the exit, which was roughly two blocks ahead. I didn’t want to stare at him, so I just locked my gaze straight ahead. I did catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, though. He wasn’t wearing a mask and he had a scraggly beard that hung down in stiff clumps. A yellow bandana hung around his neck. A dirty coat and soiled shirt lay at the corroded heels of his rotten sneakers. His ribs protruded and his frame was unwashed and filmy. His pants were full of mud and dirt. He was braying nonsensically about how almost everyone in sight should be a victim of genocide and how he’d be the first to talk to the leaders of a mass alien invasion to tell them just who to take out first. 

I groaned inside. I knew it was just a matter of time before he’d spot me. And sure enough, right as I thought about it, he did. Predictably, he screamed, “Faggot!” 

To roll my eyes would’ve been more reaction than his attack warranted. I just kept my eyes locked on the exit and soldiered on.

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

I have been gay bashed, verbally, three times in the three years that I have lived in San Francisco. Each time, it was by a homeless person who was raving in the streets, clearly mentally ill and/or on drugs. 

The first time, I was standing outside my building one night, waiting for an uber, when a homeless guy, guzzling from a 16 oz. Coors can shambled past me and screamed—you guessed it—“Faggot!” Not only did I not react, I did not even take offense. There was a time in my life when tears would’ve sprung to my eyes. Yet when this man said it, I actually felt compassion for him. He obviously had a hard life. He was most likely struggling with addiction and did not have a place to sleep that night. He might be off his meds or on the wrong meds and whatever self-medication he was doing was obviously going horribly awry. Who knows what had happened to him in childhood. This was his daily life, and I know I wouldn’t last a day in his condition. How lucky I was, standing there in clean clothes, well-fed and waiting for an uber. He was lashing out at the world. So, he saw a gay man and took a cheap shot. And went on guzzling something out of a can that might just prove to be the death of him.    

The second time, I was on my way to see Uncle Vanya at Cutting Ball Theater in the Tenderloin, the Skid Row of San Francisco. It was early spring, just about 8 at night. From across the street, I could see a man sitting on the sidewalk under a mound of drab black army surplus blankets. I hustled up the street to make it to the show on time. The man held a belt in his hand and kept whipping the concrete, “Faggot! Faggot! You fucking faggot!” What struck me was the maniacal rage in his voice. This wasn’t a jock’s chuckling abuse. His voice was absolutely Linda Blair demonic. This sort of dysfunction isn’t unusual for the area. In the Tenderloin, you’ll walk past people freebasing crack in broad daylight. And I’d just passed a guy who was shooting up, a tourniquet tied around his arm. He was at pains to pull up the plunger before he’d faint. I move through scenes like this every day without giving them a second thought. But my harasser caught my attention. His shriek was unearthly. While I certainly registered his bigoted charge, it didn’t really land with me. What did strike fear in me was the obvious suffering and agony that resided in him, enabling him to unleash such a wail.

And now here I was, in Buena Vista Park, the site of my third (verbal) gay-bashing. Only, what I have not mentioned yet was that it was early that same morning that I’d attended a half-hour EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) workshop online on the subject of bullying. The goal of the workshop was to help us release, through EFT tapping, any accumulated tension and hurt over past experiences of bullying that we may be storing in our bodies. I’d had harrowing experiences with bullying and exclusion throughout my life at school, home, and many places in between. As I participated in the workshop, a lot of pain came up. I was still raw from it when I passed the man.

And through some awful synchronicity, he said, “I probably remind you of someone in the third grade, right, faggot? That was, what, 20, 30 years ago.” 

That did it. I wanted to haul off and say something. On the tip of my tongue were the words, “Rush Limbaugh’s dead, asshole. You should be too.” 

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

Yet this is yet another area where metta meditation shows its benefits. Before I could lose my cool, memories of a dharma talk that I attended at New York Insight came flooding back to me. The guiding teacher reminded us of a sutta where the Buddha told his students that, before they begin their metta meditation, they ought to remember a time when they let their anger get the better of them and unwanted consequences followed and, next, they ought to take the time to remember a moment when they did not act on their anger and managed to successfully avoid a rueful scenario. Ever since that talk, I have begun each of my metta meditation sessions with this exercise. I begin each of my walks with it too. I have a whole catalog of experiences to draw from where, as the youngest of seven kids, I’d respond to an insult with one of my own and get smacked to the ground. And then I have had experiences where a bully at home or school would insult me and I would simply move on, knowing they were either bigger than me or had friends who were. I would have only created more trouble myself by responding.

And then I’ve also learned more about my personality over the years. According to the Meyers-Brigg, I’m an INFJ, so I have an inborn sensitivity that I can’t get rid of. I have to make peace with that. According to Human Design, I’m a Projector (2/4, splenic). We don’t have a cage-match presence. Projectors would do better to follow the Tao Te Ching’s instruction to be like water, which seems to be the weakest element, but which can erode the solidest rock as it persists along its course. And what would water do in this situation? It would continue along its course, unimpeded.

And also, it wasn’t be lost on me that, if I’d hurl those vile words back at the man, I would be hurling them at a homeless person. How low can you go? I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I’d done that. Plus, we live in an age where everyone’s got their iPhone’s out. Matters of conscience aside, I could find myself caught on camera. I could become a YouTube villain. Then it wouldn’t matter what good things I might have done with all the other moments of my life. As Santideva reminds us, “Good works gathered in a thousand ages, such as deeds of generosity, or offerings to the blissful ones, a single flash of anger shatters them all.”  

I continued toward the Buena Vista (good view, right view) exit. A couple young women, who looked to be in their mid-twenties, were headed my way. One of them was walking an adorable white Scottish terrier. She let the dog off the leash and it bounded in my direction, enjoying its day in the sun. The man shouted at the dog, “Hey, doggie! Get a job!” (?) He went on, “And stop scampering after faggots.” 

“May I be happy/May I be at peace/May I live with ease of well-being/May I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

And I just thought, “Dude, if you hate gays so much, what the fuck are you doing in San Francisco? Plus, it’s really fucking passé to hate gays. Even Mike Pence has been keeping his trap shut. And Rick Santorum is watching he’s Ps and Qs around Anderson Cooper since he wants to be invited back on his show.”

The man was still letting loose as I reached the exit. But coming my way were a trio of musclebound leather daddies. Two of them were wearing rainbow flag masks and the other a leather pride mask. I’d let them take care of him. I’d leave him to his karma.

And maybe the advice books were right. Maybe inspiration did come to me. I have written this blog post after all! It might not be Medium-worthy, but it’s something.

Thanks, Universe! 

And maybe I can even thank the bigot man, who was suffering and not in his right mind. He helped me to remember the words of the Buddha, which helped me to leave the park in good conscience. I could exercise in peace.

Quarantine Int’l Cinema–“Sholay”

By Kyle Thomas Smith

Quarantine International Cinema—Sholay, 1975, India , Amazon—This was my first foray into Bollywood. I mean, I know I’ve seen Indian movies at some point or another, but the only one I can remember off hand was a live-action, black-and-white version of The Jungle Book from the 1950s. I was five years old and I had chickenpox. It was a lot of fun, actually, having chickenpox! My folks, who prided themselves on being so strict, suddenly set me up in bed with tons of pillows, crackers and a six-pack of Coke, something we almost never had in the house because they didn’t want to spoil us. They brought a little black-and-white TV set into my room too, and I was told that I didn’t even have to go to Sunday school for the next couple weeks. How ya gonna top that!?! They also told me, though, that they didn’t want me scratching at the inflaming blisters that dotted my face and arms. “Scratch your fingernails,” they said and did a quick demonstration of how to use the fingernails of one hand to scratch the fingernails of the other hand. (It’s a quack remedy but it can at least provide some psychosomatic relief when your skin itches so bad, you’d sell it to the first crook who’s willing to tear it off you.) They left the room and “The Jungle Book” came on. I wasn’t really feeling the story at first but then, out of the blue, the boy playing Mowgli filled the screen. So, I was five or six years old, ensconced in pillows, and I thought this dusky, mysterious boy, who was maybe 8 or 9 years older than me, was the most stunning creation I’d ever seen. I collapsed back into my pillows and scratched my nails in a daze of enchantment, while intermittently munching on Saltines and drinking Coke as I watched Mowgli swing from tree limbs and scale jagged rocks in the steaming jungles of Bharata. When anyone would come to the door, I’d shoo them away like a bratty little prince (something I would have never gotten away with if it hadn’t been for the chickenpox). At five or six, I was suddenly living a parallel life to the Iowa divorcee who has cleared out a whole Saturday afternoon so she could lounge around in a robe and mud mask, rustle herself into her mattress, and file her nails while luxuriating in a Paul Newman marathon on Channel 32, bonbons and goody bag at the ready. It was my first gay experience.

But I digress…

This morning, we set our alarm clocks so we could wake up bright and early and get all our working-out and writing, etc., out of the way, so we could watch Ramesh Sippy’s 204-minute, Bollywood hit from 1975, Sholay. Let’s just say, the experience was so mesmerizing, I couldn’t scratch the fingernails of either hand, even if I’d wanted to.

Is there an analogy I can use for it?

View from Sébastien‘s Terrace, One (c) 2020

Well, the closest I can come up with, and it’s not even close, was an experience my dear, dear friend Sébastien shared with me when I was having a lovely, socially-distanced visit with him and his family last month on his fog-embanked terrace in Marin.

View from Sébastien‘s Terrace, Two (c) 2020

Before he was about to begin a second medical degree back in the late nineties, Sébastien left his native France to spend six months doing rigorous yoga retreats at various ashrams throughout India. Amid his disorientation, he felt great exhilaration and mind expansion, yet he also recounted incidents in which more than a few westerners would snap after spending a certain amount of time in the overpowering otherworldliness of a nation of over a billion souls. India was so hot, so intense, so immersive, so redolent with spice markets, as well as less pleasant aromas, so tumultuous, and so devoid of signs in western languages that it wasn’t unusual to find someone from Europe or the Americas either crying in the throes of a lost sense of personal identity or suddenly shedding all their clothes, along with their wallets and passports, to dance ecstatically in the streets. Their countries’ embassies had a hell of a time stitching them back together after they’d get hauled in.

As I said, this isn’t a perfect analogy for my viewing experience of Sholay. For one thing, we had English subtitles to help us along. For another, I at least managed to keep my clothes on. (Julius can speak for himself.) And for yet another, Julius and I were safely installed in the familiar confines of our sofa. However, that didn’t mean we weren’t in for the ride of our lives.

To further illustrate what we witnessed from our couch, I want to gingerly and carefully and respectfully submit another item that my research uncovered—and that is a cinematographic term used specifically for Bollywood movies: “masala.” Let me be clear, lest anyone take offense: THIS IS NOT A TERM I CAME UP WITH! I know that, in Indian cuisine, “masala” means a blend of herbs and spices. In Indian cinema, however, the term has come down to mean a movie that wildly and even erratically blends genres: action melodrama, romance, tragedy, musical, and slapstick comedy—without rhyme or reason, or so it can seem to the untrained (my) eye. Now, I’m someone who writes cross-genre books, so I’m no stranger to experimentation. But “cross-genre” doesn’t begin to describe the full-on, all-at-once-ness of “masala.” And filmographers agree that nothing is more masala than “Sholay,” except perhaps this higgledy-piggledy review that I’m in the midst of typing about it.

So, what’s this movie all about? Well, that’s a darn good question. And not one that I feel entirely equipped to answer at this point. As I watched Sholay, what kept running through my head were Twain’s infamous words in the preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

Now, at the risk that someone might be lurking behind my bed, where I write this, ready to point the tip of a revolver to the crown of my head—something I’m surely not ruling out now that I’ve entered the masala world of Sholay—for trying to summarize the events of this picaresque extravaganza, I can simply jot down some scattershot impressions of the movie, some of which I’ve gleaned from reading about it and some of which occurred to me upon my having experienced the film firsthand.

The two main stars of the show are the mononymous Dharmendra and the legendary Amitabh Bachchan, who got his start in Sholay. I, frankly, had never heard of either of these guys, but they both have hordes more fans and followers than all of our all-time biggest Hollywood names, combined. They’re joined by an ensemble cast of other Bollywood A-listers: Sanjeev Kumar, Huma Malini, Jaya Bhaduri, and Amjad Khan. The producer (the director’s father, G.P. Sippy) boasts, and the critics tend to agree, that this is the greatest, most historic cast of actors ever assembled. Again, all these names are new to me, but I expect that Bollywood fans would shudder to hear this and ask me what rock I’ve been living under all my life. Forty-five years later, Sholay is still perhaps the most famous movie in the history of Indian cinema.

There’s no discernible plot to this movie, as far as I can tell, other than that Sanjeev Kumar hires a harum-scarum duo, Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan, to defend a village against Kumar’s enemy, played by Amjad Khan, who has killed most of Kumar’s family. What happens from there? Well, a train robbery (or actually, no, that happened before they were hired; it’s hard to keep track with so much happening). A buddy movie. A whole lot of camptastic musical numbers (but no more over-the-top than your average Elvis movie). Incredibly acrobatic, shoot-‘em-up western scenes (Sholay is heralded by film scholars as the crown jewel of the “curry western” genre, India’s answer to Italian “spaghetti westerns”), a Chaplin-esque prison comedy with plenty of Jerry Lewis-style slapstick, and Bruce Lee-level MMA bouts. A love story: Hema Malini dances barefoot on glass to save Dharmendra’s life while he’s strung-up like the Count of Monte Cristo. Some of the raiments are out of this world. The landscapes are stunning. The chase scenes are topped only by the ones in The Blues Brothers. The film paints India as a place of immense intrigue. A mélange of other elements are mixed in to the point that the whole notion of plot seems beside the point. Much-of-muchness maximalism is the name of the game in Sholay.

Oh dear! Now I’ve said this, you probably think I didn’t like Sholay. No no no, I did! It was top-flight! It’s just that it blew my mind is all. After 22 years of Vipassana meditation experience, I thought I knew all the storytelling tricks that the mind has in its bag, I wasn’t prepared for this. It was a trip. I’m glad we took it. Now I’m going to duct-tape my passport to my chest and scratch my nails as I reflect on what it is that I just saw. If you don’t hear back from me in, say, a week, call the Embassy.

Sholay, 1975, dir. Ramesh Sippy, 204 mins, in Hindi w/ subtitles, Amazon.