Bats With Their Baby-Veined Faces--Part 1

Patti Smith is on my mind today. My beloved soul-sister Stephen called me yesterday. He's dying of cancer but his inevitable cellular expansion into the unknown has been put off for some months, hopefully some years. It turns out he's of the blood type that can undergo genetic resequencing. There's been a lot of work in this area, much of it experimental and much of it hopeful. He's on some kind of drug--we didn't talk about it in depth because we had too much to say to one another, mostly about what he's going to do with himself, now that he's got all this time. These therapies can be very successful, just not permanently. Yet.

"I feel pretty good these days," he explained to me, even as he was calling because he's going through withdrawals from the fentanyl patch he's been on for a couple years. "I don't know if I should travel the world, see Bali with my husband, fire-walk, or stay here and get out of bed and get breakfast for the kids and take them to school and, you know, just live my life."

Steve and I both survived the 80's AIDS crisis. We were both in New York City when Reagan cut funding for social services while tacitly denying this distinctly American genocide, Steve a robustly sexual gay man and me a intravenous-drug addict. I say "intravenous-drug" because there was a time when I was as addicted to the needle as I was the drug. (Consequently I have injected any number of interesting substances, both purposefully and by accident: cocaine and pastel dust, isopropyl alcohol, and dirty water come to mind.) I watched as my city streets filled with humans, people disgorged into the streets who had been (some for years) in mental wards, treatment centers, and hospitals. Elevators were crowded in a new way even for Manhattan, filled with the collage-phrasings of schizophrenics and the ramblings of dementia, people leaning on sticks and crutches as limbless and lost as people I had seen in Haiti. Little wonder heroin was my drug of choice; it was a soft and comforting euphoria spansule that enveloped and protected me as I roamed through Hell.

It changed everyone who was there. It reminds me of John Shirley's novel "A Splendid Chaos," where people go to this disco and it turns out its some kind of technology that takes them to this "Survivor" like planet where they're forced to figure out how to live on this weird planet with multiple other alien species and diseases. There's this electrical field that travels like a merciless storm cloud, and if you're caught in it, it "twists" you electrically. Some part of you emerges that was always there, but the phenomenon dislodges and even enhances it. So if you went through the 80's in a big city that was devastated by AIDS you've been through that electric event, and some part of you is distorted and enhanced. If you're lucky, it was your compassion.

It seemed to have been so with Steve. He has an incredible generosity and almost unlimited compassion, even and maybe especially as he took care of his partner through his partner's death from AIDS. But I'm waaaay off topic now so I'll get to the point. Steve recently finished reading "Just Us Kids," Patti Smith's homage to her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, which is also kind of a billet doux to New York in the 70's. Steve and I both had a similar experience reading the book, which evoked an unsentimental awe for the decade before the madness. BM. Before Madness.

Extending that device, I could also parse a significant movement in my own life, that being Before and After Patti Smith. Seeing the still stunning Mapplethorpe photo of Patti for her first album at age 15 changed my life. For a burgeoning lesbian and future transperson, the impact of an androgynous, iconic contemporary woman artist was meteoric; I was caved-in and smashed to bits in the kind of wonderful way in which you are then magnetically rearranged into something greater, this particular impact having merged with your molecules. That she existed NOW, in my space/time--unlike Marlene Dietrich or Romaine Brooks, whose photos and biographies I had devoured with a longing I can only now begin to identify--and, that she had agency, was an artist, was enormously important in 1975. I mean, I didn't even particularly like Romaine Brooks, but in a desert of a certain kind of androgyny, one had to make do.

Gertrude Steinian butchness didn't quite capture it, and while I adored the male forays into femininity, like Bowie and even young Robert Plant, I needed to see a woman doing it. At fifteen I was already exhausted by masculinity and its tantalizing yet repulsive allure. I could not have any of it. Those moments in which I allowed it to transmute my body, to "twist" me, were often abruptly halted by someone taking the piss out of me, or by my own hyper-vigilance. Patti offered a way to allow the cells of masculinity to pass through my membrane and infuse me with near luminescence. It was liberating beyond belief to release some of the tension in the reins I had bridled myself with.

Her impact merely began there. Because of Patti and her genius eruptions, her own literary/artistic obsessions, I read Rimbaud, Ginsberg, the Bible; I listened to Coltrane and Ronnie Spector; my eyes slid greedily over Brancusi's "Bird in Space." I probably read about and saw more demanding work during my Patti-era than I did any time in art school. I hope the kids have somebody today, somebody whose presence forces them to confront as much of themselves as they are ready to, not in a "Beautiful" way, or in that way in which people like Pink and Katy Perry have made an industry of, "comforting" us by telling us we're "okay." "You're beautiful the way you are" always rests on the substrate of "you are actually not beautiful." And why do we need so much reassuring? Patti was only reassuring in that I knew there was someone else out there, like me, dying to create, chafing at conventional genders, yearning to roll in a field with Wilhelm Reich, Jane Bowles, and Mick Jagger.

When Stephen asks the wonderful question, "what will I do with my time?" I inevitably ask it to myself. My adolescent obsession with Patti Smith showed me all I need ever know, that I flourish in commune with others, that relationships are everything, and that everything is creating all the time. Stephen offers intention
as the light that moves a life from the prosaic to sublime. My intention then, is to foster and care for my relationships, with my lover, with friends, with animals, with systems, and with objects. And then, turn it into art.

On the Road With Rimbaud

When I was fifteen I ran away to find Patti Smith. It was another drunken morning – my two best boys had convinced me to slough off my job at the florist, work my canny parents got me in hopes of preempting any teen mischief my first summer not in camp. I don’t think I even called in. My boss was a revoltingly bald hairy guy who sang in a band at the Red Barn and played accordion and stuck his nasty, pointed tongue in my mouth at every opportunity. I was delighted to be trashed by 10am. It meant I was free.

We packed up a gallon of bourbon and a ham, got into Bill’s corvette and drove out of the tepid yellow Virginia sun, to stinky, muggy New York City. We slept in the front yard of Saint Mark’s Church. It was 1976. I threw up in CBGB’s that very first night. All that ham and bourbon you know.

We never did meet Patti Smith, although we did meet her drummer, JD Dougherty. I had forced my friend to let me wear his homemade “Iggy and the Stooges” t shirt, and I remember being really glad I had, pointing at it even, for JD’s approbation. We saw Lydia Lunch and James Chance playing their very first gig, and all of Saint Mark’s except Patti came to see them: members of her band, and Blondie, and the Talking Heads, the Cramps, and more. We were in Joey Ramone’s loft at one point. I was drunk, or hungover enough to be in another kind of altered state; I knew what kind of drama was waiting for me when I got home. The return was indeed bad, but in an emotional way. I cemented my complete alienation from my family then; they could not understand their miserable daughter and her need to run, run and stay fucked up. But that’s neither here nor there.

I still love Patti Smith. I recall, some years back, thinking, “someday this music won’t reach me anymore; it will seem juvenile and irrelevant.” But that never happened.

I spent a couple nights at the Zen Center at a meditation seminar this week. The sensei talked about grasping, clinging, how the little mind wants to hold on to things that it believes make it feel good, but how the truth is that nothing stays the same, there’s nothing to cling to. There is not even some essential nugget of oneself that persists. Everything is changing, all the time. Is there not an essential nugget of Sam-ness that endures? Who still loves Patti?

I’m a Clinger: I get that.* Clinging to my identity as a woman has created great suffering for me this past year, in the form of unseemly panic. But frankly, there’s nothing I could have done differently. Anyway, this is how pearls get made, I tell you, by holding on to, succoring, then coating our irritants, our discomforts, our obsessions, with our handmade mucous love. I may have clung to the crap in my oyster mouth, but the pearl I will give freely.

I tell you this: there is an organic process, and you cannot hasten it. There is grief to be felt, and change to fear. Surrender. But god damn it do not be attached to it. It’s a lost love. That ship sailed, Boyo, and yet I’m knee deep in surf, looking for the dock. I have respect for the ocean, though, don’t you? Ever been boogie-boarding, or wave-jumping, and you’re thinking “I’ve got a rhythm with this now; it’s happening for me” when WHAM, you’re somersaulting through salt water and sand paper, your nipples torn by the ocean floor, your lungs and face burning? My woman ship has sailed and I have nothing but honor, respect, awe and not a little fear of the ocean it’s on.

There’s something mythic about transitioning. Something classical. All of the sudden I’m Jason, only my Golden Fleece is a merkin, and I have to battle my way through seven kinds of transguy performance-rappers to get to some oracle with a chest wig. Doesn’t it seem that there’s a higher percentage of transguy performers than other demos? Are we all shameless self-promoters, or is it just me? Well, strictly speaking, I’m not without shame, so there you go.

Shame was the final challenge to Siddhartha’s ego, evidently. It was suggested, coyly, to him, that perhaps he was not worthy of enlightenment. What made him think he deserved Awakening!? Buddha didn’t bite; that’s why he’s all Buddha, all the time, but me? I’ll doggedly chew some shame.

What makes me think I’m worthy, deserving of happiness? Fuck awakening; let’s just talk about simple satiety. I have profound experiences of fullness, of connectedness. It’s up to me to use my transgendery magic for good and not evil, by which I mean, I can use it to isolate and embitter myself, or I can get on the dance floor with the other guys, and shake what God gave me, which is, frankly flawed, but not without certain charms. I’m not a Buddhist; I have too many madcap and zany mystical and direct experiences to deny a greater consciousness – but I love the Bodhisattva vow, which was explained to me as dedication to the ultimate welfare (awakening) of others (before oneself).

So I make this vow to you: I will dedicate myself to be ever-changing and expanding, with intentional joy and love, in the belief that this action will infect both you and me like a beautiful virus. I don’t think this will make you reconsider your birth gender, and it may not change our taste in music. Hopefully, it will make you rethink your shoe choices, which I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. Anyway, I’m not worthy, or I am, or it doesn’t matter anyway. I am becoming a man, who was once a woman, who was never a little girl, who might become something else entirely. Dinner is served.

*which sounds like something dingelberry-ish and dire in your short hairs...metaphorically, I suppose it is.