SOMETIMES YOU MEET SOMEONE…
To explain the ways of a man to God
By Bruce Isaacson
Danielle—Can’t remember where or when. - BI
My gay and trans friends don’t always understand
How I look so strait & male
But hold sympathy for what it means to be
Sex-marooned, outcast, alone…
My Dad was conventional as it gets—
Apostate Jew business house rising
I am the eldest son
Born to drive the family to
The promised land
Sent to all-conservative schools
He started with Baseball and Boy Scouts
But he wasn’t some remote asshole Dad
Shoving me out with violence and homo slurs
He drove me to scouts & stayed for meetings
He coached the baseball team
Put me 3rd in the lineup
Here’s the thing—
I was terrible at it
A few hits at the beginning then
Struck out and struck out and struck
Struck… I loved that baseball team
Knew I was doing them wrong
Ten years old my Dad’s the coach
I try to quit
Scouts turns into randy boys
No girls sleepovers I want to
be different
different than I am
Try again high school baseball
I’m still terrible at it—
It’s 1970s Berkeley
What I’m good at is
Reading and writing and
getting stoned—stoned on pot
every day every day and
mescaline peyote LSD
at least fifty acid trips by fifteen
It’s the ‘70s so the whole school’s divided
between stoners and jocks
I choose—stoners
Cultivate social position with
the fuck ups
I love playing pinball at the hot dog shack
I love doing headrushes till we pass out
on the field at lunch
I love the insights that come with Owsley
a theory of Life structured to avoid seeing death
I love smoking in the boys’ can
Wow I love those guys
even when they handcuff me to the urinal—
But after watching Lady Sings the Blues on acid
After Mike Frosty’s rushed to emergency
I drive home to sweat out the strychnine alone
After all night bad trip seeing
Mom & Dad as pixies dancing on the ceiling
After I get busted for acid
At the morning confrontation with Dad
I tell him
I just want to be his son
In all the fucked-up things I do
in youth he never once
put hands on me in anger that day
he hugged me.
•
Advance ahead twenty years
I’ve graduated from an Ivy League school
I’ve been married four months then divorced
I’ve been a big deal business go-getter
I’ve been in charge of $50 million dollars of
computer timesharing revenue
just as PCs start getting big
Now that $50 million ego is as good as
being chained to the urinal in the boys’ can
I leave computers to go work with Dad
I am serious and dour and
I haven’t had a lover in eight years
I want to be seen as a success
But what I am is: dumpy, selfish,
protected accountant who’s learned
to do what he’s told
One day my grandfather dies
I remember loving Steinbeck & Hemingway and
write a poem called Ten Rounds With the Champ
The Champ is God and I am KO’d in the fifth
The poem takes me to a reading in North Beach
where I meet Julia who galumphs over to say
she liked my poem
Now Julia takes shit from the poets
despite Iowa MFA she looks like
a street person it’s said she’s never had a lover
The Babar reading’s by the Castro
Gay revolution bursting all around
Everyone’s having so much—fun—
Trans performers belting show tunes from a balcony
Writing, film, plays full of camp and spirit
And then suddenly—AIDS
And then suddenly—Death
And then suddenly
It’s dangerous again to be who you are
Now Julia lives her life totally chaste
Due to polio and art she is chaste—
not of heart but of body
This makes her unique
Of all those poems about what it means to be different
Julia’s a minority of one
She’s famous as a poet & teaching me
A body-morph I start working out losing weight
having lovers
I’m still a selfish pig but
Sometimes you meet someone and
Everything changes
Julia introduces me to Danielle
She’d just flipped out of Barnard
Danielle is strong-willed sex omnivore lesbian
who loves men in drag
Danielle’s at heart a dominator
Danielle and I become close
Danielle moves into my spare room
With glee Danielle will tell any man
what to do
she does—
And I do it
I start wearing eyeliner to the reading
Grow hair to my shoulders
My misspent youth doing drugs in Berkeley
comes back as gift—
I know how to look weird and dangerous and
Danielle likes this & this makes me
popular among the poets
the apostate businessman
the pillar of Ass-hole-ules
the comrade in the Mercedes
publisher to the freak scene
having more fun than’s allowed
Danielle tells me what to do
She puts black plastic porno on the telly
And we each jerk off
In the same room but
Not together we’re not together
she has a boyfriend named Dish
a Vietnam vet who wears wigs
I’m a little too—beefy—to
become too fay
So she does me up like a glam rock Druggie—
Like Riff Raff of Rocky Horror
eye liner, mascara, long hair dyed black
a black net hat that’s
distinctly middle eastern
worn like a scarf
with cheap imitation roman coins
that hang down as earrings—
With black lipstick & all-sallow make up the
headpiece imitates Jambi
from Pee Wee’s Playhouse
Add a suit coat made of leather
torn at the seams dirty black jeans
and boots—black leather boots
with silver stars all over them—
This becomes known as Bruce Drag
Suddenly we’re stars of the poetry scene
Danielle child of a famed U Chicago economist
her professional world’s evolving from
poodle groomer to stripper to public dominatrix to
legendary working girl who beat up Artie Mitchell
the performance artist hired as a stripper who
strapped one on and butt fucked an American Indian artist boy
at a party for SF’s political elite—
Mayor, Supervisors, Willie Brown couldn’t
get out of there fast enough
She went from vampire novel to posting a video of her
actual drinking of blood
surgically implanted fangs till
finally she couldn’t live in her legend
But that’s later—now we’re toast of the SF art scene
add travels to New York & L.A.
Danielle Hell with Jambi Bruce behind
every week’s evolution
makes us a little more… unique
a little more inflamma-anti-middle-class
We’re too weird for City Lights tourists
who stop and stare
Too weird for the communists of North Beach
Too weird for the booth man taking toll across
the Bay Bridge for the reading
we’re not too weird for
Frank the Dealing Doorman with
Hells Angels connections he will teach me
what to do with baking soda, flame, and cocaine—
we’re a little much for the neighborhood Thai restaurant
as if proving to immigrants that entitled
America’s too fucked up to breathe
out to dinner in full Jambi Drag before the reading
we run into my father’s personal secretary Rosella
who sits silently across the room staring at
my eyeliner black lipstick at Danielle’s
leopard spot stripper coat and
spandex so tight she wants them to
see her labia
Rosella’d always thought me an entitled punk kid
I didn’t like her much either
I knew she’d tell him—was sure she’d
tell him
And do you know what he did?
He did nothing
Nothing
He pretend it didn’t happen
His idea of gay would be to make laugh of
men holding hands—
he was so narrow it hurt
Hurt him hurt me
No doubt he felt humiliated
but when you don’t know what to do
sometimes best do nothing
He kept his relationship with his son
for years he helps me become whoever I want to be
To love is to disappoint
and be disappointed
It’s very real
Not everyone has heart for it
I’m sure I disappointed
Danielle but loved her too
I’m still loyal to who we were
Later she trades me in, moves out, moves on,
Despite our holy vow to do heroin only together
I never did
She became a multidecade
addict
with a big mean dog
which she used to intimidate me twice
I heard later she had real tragedy in her life
But life’s onto the next asshole anyway
Job, marriage, career just one more
drag we pull on and off for the day
We’re each just one particularity in
an eternal string of need and error and
vain attempts to fit
in a culture that’s got us each
chained to a urinal
Even when they let you go
Affection and friendship just mean
pain becomes less sharp
Closer to the heart
We each get to be who we are—
That’s a privilege
and a curse
If I could speak to him today—
that writer boy testing his limits
that Bruce in his Jambi drag
or that incel of no sex for eight years
who thought he’d finally arrived when one day
the sweetest love came to him
in a San Francisco bath house
easily without fanfare
I’d tell him—
Protect what’s softest-bestest inside you
I’d say—
I believe in you
in all of you
I’d say—
Let the making of art guide you
We hold & mold life in our hands
To grow into the Self
is our privilege
and our prison
Danielle & I haven’t spoke for 30 years
but sometimes you meet someone and then
everything’s different
To become an unbroken human is a clown car
of pathos & bathos
of sympathy & humor
I got to hold Dad’s hand as he lay
curled in a ball in damp sheets dying
In a Medicare nursing home too I
held Julia’s hand before she…
There is no escape
but to find & grow into what we are.
Bruce Isaacson is a poet and publisher of Zeitgeist Press. Books can be found at Zeitgeist-Press.com. He is also a founder of Poetry Promise, a 501(c)3 charity to increase the knowledge and practice of the literary arts. PoetryPromise.org.
