He loves his solid foods these days, plunging in with great vigor and pride. Every meal is like eating with Falstaff. His poops are like little meatballs now. Sometimes when I’m changing him, the little meatballs roll off the diaper and onto the floor, and I have to chase them down. It’s sort of exhilarating—sort of sporting, or something. It makes me feel a little like Babe Zaharias.
Perhaps I am not getting out enough.
FEBRUARY 20
We are having a hard morning. I didn’t sleep much last night; I woke up at 3:00 feeling discombobulated and afraid. I wish I had an armed husband or at least a dog. Everything would feel safer. I’m tired and wired and fat and feeling about as feminine and spiritual as the late great Divine. I am also totally bored. The kitty has been crying the blues all morning, and it is wearing badly on my nerves. I think I’ll have her put to sleep this afternoon. Maybe that would cheer me up. At least it would be something to do.
Later
Sam has a marvelous new look of impatience. You see it cross his face when he first notices that he’d like to nurse. His brows furrow in a slightly sarcastic way, like he’s about to ask, “Who the hell do you have to know to get a drink around here?”
He’s so beautiful, so funny, so incredibly dear, and he smells like God. When Mom or Dudu have to hand him back over to me when they are about to leave, they lean into his airspace and sniff one last time, trying to memorize him, maybe storing a little hit for later.
We all lean into him, soaking him up. It’s like he’s giving off a huge amount of energy because he hasn’t had to start putting up a lot of barriers around it to protect himself. He hasn’t had to start channeling it into managing the world and everybody’s emotions around him, so he’s a pure burning furnace of the stuff. This is my theory, anyway, that he radiates it; it’s probably affecting us all like a spray of negative ions, like being in a long hot shower or at the seashore.
For instance, I notice that the kitty, who, like all cats, is a heat freak, stands right next to him all the time. She basks in him. He’s her own private tanning salon. When he falls asleep, she waits patiently for a moment and then begins to butt him with her head, as if it’s 2:00 in the morning and the bar has just shut down and she wasn’t ready to go.
He’s sleeping now, loudly, like a drunken baby angel in a cartoon.
It’s great to feel better, to be back in the saddle again. And it’s so hard to let chaos swirl around without needing to manage or understand it. It’s so hard to get quiet enough, free enough of the bondage of self, to hear the voice in the whirlwind that Job heard. There’s always so much shouting going on in here. It’s a cacophony of sounds from my childhood—parents and relatives and teachers and preachers and voices distilled into what has become my conscience. But I don’t think the still small voice is my conscience. Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the true unique essential me—and maybe those are the same thing. It’s so hard to hear it though, and sometimes when I think I hear something in my own true voice, I’m so nuts that I’m not sure if it’s me or someone pretending to be me. It seems like when it’s really you, the voice doesn’t even have to talk.
My friend Larry, the scholarly one who has HIV, says it’s important to remember that God is present in many, many ways in the world if you’re just looking. You don’t have to go to the cathedral or the temple or the sacred grove to find calmness and faith. Sometimes we just can’t quiet the mind—it’s like some crazy riled-up two-year-old who can’t get to sleep—but we can find our own steadiness in the middle of that and see it as some form of God. We can notice all the chaos and voices and know that they are one aspect of the mind but that they are not our nature. Our true nature is more like Sam’s, lovely and alert and peaceful and entranced.
Sam is a happy person. He has this little Yoda smile. He is a poem. It seems like he’s turning out okay. It’s all these people who love him so much and take care of us both. Maybe it also helps that there is no angry dad stomping around. But that always hurts so much to think about, because it would also be great to have a kind and funny dad here with us, hanging out, maybe even helping a little. I take a long deep breath.
Sam’s such a gift. Dudu and Rex love him passionately, would kidnap him and raise him on their own if they thought they could get away with it. And my mom and her twin sister, who used to bicker a lot more, take him every Thursday for most of the afternoon so I can either see my therapist or go to a matinee with Pammy. They sit around beaming at one another, like Christian Scientists or something. It’s like Sam opened this window for us, and all this grace flooded in.
Little by little I think I’m letting go of believing that I’m in charge, that I’m God’s assistant football coach. It’s so incredibly hard to let go of one’s passion for control. It seems like if you stop managing and controlling, everything will spin off into total pandemonium and it will be all your fault.
FEBRUARY 22
Sam looks exactly like the baby pictures of my dad in Tokyo. Watching him sleep, I sometimes bite my lip.
My gay friend Jane, who, like me, used to drink a little bit more than was perhaps good for her, said on the winter solstice this year that for her, being a pagan, the solstice is not just about the darkest night of the year but also about the darkest night of the soul. She and her goddess-worshiping friends celebrate this because the seeds of new growth lie in this darkness and develop in the winter to bloom in the spring. I said, What do you pagan homos do at your midnight celebrations—put a bunch of dogs in wicker baskets and push them off cliffs, with Holly Near playing on a nearby boom box? And she looked over at my big Italian crucifix on the kitchen wall, at the thorns, at the bloody wound, the nails through his palms, and then she turned to me with a look of such amused condescension that all I could do was laugh. As soon as she left, though, I went and stared at the crucifix for a long time and breathed it in. I believe in it, and it’s so nuts. How did some fabulously cerebral and black-humored cynic like myself come to fall for all that Christian lunacy, to see the cross not as an end but a beginning, to believe as much as I believe in gravity or in the size of space that Jesus paid a debt he didn’t owe because we had a debt we couldn’t pay? It, my faith, is a great mystery. It has all the people close to me shaking their heads. It has me shaking my head. But I have a photograph on my wall of this ancient crucifix at a church over in Corte Madera, a tall splintering wooden Christ with his arms blown off in some war, under which someone long ago wrote, “Jesus has no arms but ours to do his work and to show his love,” and every time I read that, I always end up thinking that these are the only operating instructions I will ever need.
• • •
The cross, though: was it Lenny Bruce who said that if Jesus had been killed in modern times, we Christians would all go around wearing little electric chairs on chains around our necks?
FEBRUARY 23
Sam can sit up by himself now without having to be propped up with pillows. I used to surround him entirely with pillows so he could sit around without my having to hold him. Donna used to call it Fort Samuel, and she used to tell him that Fort Samuel was a state of mind. But now he can sit up by himself. Everything is going by so quickly. You know how when you’re at the library, and you get one of those reels of tape that hold two weeks’ worth of newspapers, and you put the reel on and then wind it forward really fast to the date you’re looking for, but you see every day pass by for about half a minute? That’s what it feels like to me now.
Sam, who was so recently larval and incompetent, is almost crawling. He moved backwards half a foot tonight. I feel that these are his first steps out of the present. He used to trip out only on whatever was within his narrow vision and grasp, but now he sees something a few feet away and he gets this glinty Donald Trump look in his eyes, like in the old cartoons where someone gets a greedy brainstorm, blinks, and we hear the sound of a cash register and see the dollar signs in his eyes.
He’s crawling inexorably away from the now. He’s c
rawling toward anticipated pleasures. Soon there will be scheming and manipulation, a dedication to certain outcomes, to attaining certain things and storing them for later. I’m trying so hard to learn to live in the now, to bring my mind back to the present, while Sam is learning to anticipate and plan, to want things that are far away.
It’s funny to watch a baby crawl backwards because it’s something you grow out of—after a while you’re only supposed to go forward. I think this is a part of the voice that says constantly, Fix, fix, fix; do, do, do—the part of us that believes there is always something to fix or to do. It is so fucking bizarre and excruciating just to be. Just to be still. I mean, except when I’m in church or nursing Sam, nothing can make me more frantic than sitting and trying to just be. Have you ever tried meditating? For me it’s about as pleasant as coming down off cocaine. My mind becomes like this badly abused lab rat, turning in on itself after one too many bouts with Methedrine and electroshock and immersions into ice water, and I can’t get into some fantasizing and mind-fucking fast enough.
Anyway, I watch Sam be a baby and crawl backwards, and it’s such an alien concept because it seems so natural to think that all the action is forward. Actually, backwards is just as rich as forward if you can appreciate the circle instead of the direction.
FEBRUARY 24
Pammy has gone to Morocco for a month. I am completely distraught. I find I’ve been sort of scared since she left, like she was somehow keeping us safe. I’m watching Sam sleep a lot, to make sure he’s okay. It’s hard to believe how shallowly babies breathe when they’re sleeping. They’re like plants.
FEBRUARY 27
I was a mess all morning. Maybe my hormones are raging, maybe that’s what the craziness was all about. Something is really off. Part of me wants my body back, wants to stop being a moo-cow, and part of me thinks about nursing him through kindergarten. I know a woman who nursed her daughter until the girl was almost four, and of course we all went around thinking that it was a bit much, too Last Emperor for our blood. But now when Sam and I are nursing, it crosses my mind that I will never ever be willing to give this up. It’ll be okay, I think to myself, we can get it to work, I’ll follow him to college but I’ll stay totally out of the way.…
This the easiest, purest communication I’ve ever known.
MARCH 2
He’s six months old now, the most gorgeous, alert baby you ever saw in your life. Everyone says so. Maybe they just say so because I’m so goddamn tired and mentally ill so often. I had two days of bad depression this week. Peg came to cook for us and baby-sat so I could go hang out with a bunch of other recovering alkies. They were funny; it helped to be with them. But still I would love, love to check out sometimes, especially when I feel like I did yesterday and the day before. The weather sucked, gray and heavy and damp and dark. I felt like I was really hurt somehow, in a deep way. I can’t explain it. And there was nothing to do but feel it and maybe talk about it a little with friends. Pictures of glasses of wine kept crossing my mind, and I thought about how great a few hundred lines of cocaine would feel. I kept remembering that old joke about how when a normal person’s car breaks down, she calls a tow truck; when an addict’s car breaks down, she calls her dealer.
It finally occurred to me the next morning to call my therapist, and we talked for five minutes. That helped a little, maybe even more than a little. I was really aware when I called her that I wanted a fix, that I couldn’t stand the feelings of exhaustion and loneliness and fear and anger. When I mentioned this to her, she reminded me of a story that I had once told her. It was something that M. F. K. Fisher wrote about in one of her books, of having a friend over for tea one day. The friend noticed out the kitchen window that Mary Frances’s cat was lying in a big mud puddle. Mary Frances said that it was hurt and trying to take care of itself, but the friend asked, Then shouldn’t we take it to the vet? Mary Frances said no, absolutely not, that if she did, the cat would die, that the cat knew exactly and intuitively what to do, knew that only time and lying in the mud would heal her. A few days later the cat was okay again.
That’s how I felt after my dad died. I had to shut down almost entirely and just lie in the mud for months. I felt that the world was no longer safe if my young handsome lively father could be so suddenly dead. It felt like it was a shooting gallery out there. And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore. And then over time I became more or less okay: I did feel joy again, and I feel it now sometimes bigger than I ever thought possible. It’s so big inside me now with Sam that it’s like a secret that might make me burst, like when you’re in love.
MARCH 3
Sam now sleeps in our little tiny bedroom at the far end of the apartment in a beautiful crib that someone has lent us. God, he’s so grown up. It goes so crazily fast that it’s no wonder we’re all just a little bit edgy. One day you’re six months old and learning to crawl backwards, and then about ten hours later you look like Alan Cranston. Have you seen him lately? He was a great senator, a great man, and I’m sorry bad things are happening to him, but still I’ve got to say that he looks absolutely cadaverous. He can’t weigh more than about 105. I’ve got pantyhose that weigh more than he does.
Sam’s a good sleeper for the most part. I put him facedown in his crib, and he does a few baby push-ups. It’s this very manly little ritual he has. He turns to look joyfully at me, like it’s great that we’ve simply moved the party from the living room to the bedroom, but then he understands that I am going to turn off the light and leave him, and this look of terror and total betrayal crosses his face. Total betrayal; basset hound death. His lips tremble, and he weeps for a moment in this pitiful little-guy way. Then he goes to sleep, just like that.
I start to think about the millions of things I could do around the house or at my desk, and I decide on just one thing that could really make a difference in the quality of our life, and then I usually end up thinking, Gee, that sounds like a lot of work for a woman who hasn’t brushed her teeth in three days.
MARCH 4
Sam’s got this fabulous little fake cough now. The advice nurse at Kaiser said lots of babies get little coughs from all the teething drool, but I would swear he’s just doing it because he can, like that Eddie Murphy routine where he says, “You know why male dogs lie around all day licking their balls? Because they can. If I could do that, I’d never leave the house.…” Sam will look at me suddenly with great concern and go, Cough cough cough, quiet and tragic, and then look at me expectantly, and I’ll say, “Oh, Sam, honey, that’s an awful cough,” and he looks terribly pleased. Then his eyes grow wide again, and he goes, Cough cough cough.
His eyes are very dark and huge. Most of his body is taken up with these eyes.
My friends and I did a food review again after all these months. I loved being out with my gang again—Peg, Leroy, Bill, and Emmy—and for the first couple of hours I loved being away from Sam. I felt once again like Zorba the Greek, with my arms stretched out to the sky, dancing to balalaika music. Everyone was very funny. Then all of a sudden I felt this psychotic need to be with Sam again—the jungle drums started beating, and I could hardly take in what anyone was saying. I couldn’t get home fast enough—my breasts were absolutely bursting with milk—and I rushed to the crib and woke Sam up, and he gave me this bewildered, derisive look, like “Don’t you have any friends?”
Maybe he’s not really capable of loving me per se. I think maybe I can only love or understand God in that same baby way. I don’t know. Donna says that when our babies see us, they say, Oh, good, the chuck wagon’s here again.
MARCH 5
I was reading something the other day and came up
on the word bastard, as in illegitimate, and it actually crossed my mind for the first time that Sam is illegitimate. Maybe I’ve lost too much ground over the last year and a half, but I swear it hadn’t occurred to me before. I mulled it over for a few moments, saw that in a legal sense the word maybe did apply, but then I thought, Nah.
We have a new comedy routine we do to amuse our friends. It’s called Crane Operator. I am the crane operator, and he is the crane—I carry him suspended about a foot off the floor, motoring over toward, say, an orange, making engine sounds the whole time, and then when we’re directly over the orange, I lower him until he can slide his hands under it and somehow get a grip on it. Then I raise him, holding the orange, and our friends clap.
They are a simple people.
MARCH 6
He splashes in the sink now while taking his bath, slaps the water and squeals, like some yahoo from Deliverance.
When he thinks I’ve left, he cries. When he thinks Megan’s left, he cries. When he sees that we are still here, relief pours over his face and his entire body, like one of those old nudie pens where you turn it upside down to get the swimsuit to pour back over the woman.