Prequel: Travelogue 1979-2003
Gunner's Inn, OK. Colonialism, travel. Coming out. Healing in the Cradle of Civilization Part II coming soon. Gonna be a long week- Get your readers on.
Look if you are my mom or a coworker and you want to read about my sex life, by all means, please continue. Also TW for abuse though its not graphic.
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I am on a train from Boston to New Haven and I have been awake for 24 hours and feel delirious. For some reason I think it is a good time to keep writing? It is not. This train hurtling towards home is the last of the liminal spaces I will occupy this week. I left for Istanbul panicking that I wouldn’t be able to shake my depression and then I leave Istanbul afraid that it will be waiting for me when I return, my endless black fog, my constant companion. Descending into London I watch from the sky as the cars drive the wrong way on the roads. I am disoriented, half switched on and off from east to west. The plane shakily approaches the landing strip in Boston and the tears begin.
I don’t want to stop writing about K. It feels like I have said a lot of what I can say about it right now but writing about it keeps her tethered to me and I am afraid to let that go yet. I am keeping her close by peeling this heartbreak apart. For a week everything Suzanna and her mom and I ate had pomegranate seeds in it—the fried fish sandwiches, even—and that’s what I want out of this right now, an endless procession of sweet and bitter and a blood pink stain on my hands.
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Prequel: 1980s/1990s
I moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, 2 weeks after my 18th birthday— the first week of July, 1997. I got on a Greyhound to join my high school boyfriend, Dan, who moved there immediately after graduation to help his sister-in-law with her three-year-old while his brother was deployed overseas. In my infinite wisdom I deferred a full 4-year scholarship from the publishing house Alfred K. Knopf to attend Bennington College in VT.1 Instead I bought a bus ticket for $87 that, over the course of three days, took me from Lewiston, Maine to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I could only bring a couple bags, so I filled two army duffel bags with my books and left everything else in my dad’s basement.
I was a poet. I was going to singlehandedly revive the Beat movement, but with a feminist bent and for ladies only. This was going to be my On the Road material. Some of my favorite lines in one of my favorite Beat poems were Gregory Corso’s “should I get married, should I be good, astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and Faustus hood? Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries…” etc. etc. I also thought that I couldn’t live without Dan, who I had started dating about four months earlier but had lost my V-card to at the ripe age of 12. So much for feminism and my anti-establishment ethos.
While at Ft. Sill I worked at the base’s Rec Hall, Gunner’s Inn, where we catered bootcamp graduations and PT tests and served beer and pizza to kids who couldn’t do much except shoot pool and play Sweet Home Alabama and Free Bird on the jukebox over and over again. One especially traumatic night I had to sling bottomless Jack Daniels’ Country Coolers to new recruits at a Leann Womack concert. It was not my scene but I made the best of it, not having had a scene to compare it to in the first place. It was content for my poetry, I told myself. The landscape was new to me and so romantic in a way anything new seems so much more interesting than it is. I felt like I was on Mars. I dreamnt nightly of tornados. I was windswept.
Dan and I bought a 1984 Plymouth Gran Fury for $300 from his brother. It had been a cop car (ACAB) and though someone had spray painted it matte white, you could still see the blue stripes down the sides peeking through the primer. You couldn’t get out of the backseat from inside the car. Dan and I decided to paint thin racing stripes from the trunk, across the roof, and down the hood. We hung a disco ball from the mirror. It was a total piece of shit. It was made of pure steel.
This was before GPS and cell phones obviously and Dan worked second shift for an oil company as an unskilled laborer. I don’t quite remember what his job title was but it was dangerous and involved throwing a chain around the shaft of metal pummeling the earth. He got paid something like $10 an hour and we thought this was an insane amount of money and honestly, it was, coming as we were from our minimum wage jobs of $4.25 an hour and I’m sure I wasn’t even making that at Gunner’s Inn. It was hard to find the rigs he worked on in the dark so I would leave Lawton hours early to pick him up, driving around the black flat landscape looking for blinking rig lights on the horizon, sometimes just picking one and aiming the bulletproof Gran Fury in that direction and hoping for the best. I spent that entire summer listening to Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits, Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, and Tori Amo’s Little Earthquakes on cassettes in that car. My memories from those nights are mostly of my headlights sweeping the sides of gravel roads and armadillos scurrying into the grasses. Dan would strip out of his mud-caked clothes every night before he’d get in the car. There was a lot of Sonic in our lives: Burger, onion rings, strawberry milkshake.
Roll out, roll out
With your American dream and its recruits, I've been ready
Roll out, roll out
With your circus freaks and hula hoops, I've been ready
We made one friend while we were there, a guy we only knew as Reid who was there on a “military time or jail time, buddy” sentence in which he took the former. Mostly Dan and I spent our free nights chain smoking and drinking endless cups of .75 coffee at a nearby IHOP, playing cribbage or Rummikub. One night Dan picked me up from Gunner’s Inn with Reid in tow. Reid knew a bar that would serve us, a trifecta of 18-year-olds, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, which was saying a lot since we were already in the middle of nowhere. I think I drove since they’d already started drinking or smoking or both, likely. We pulled up to a tiny shack, which Reid claimed had until recently been a gay bar and I remember wondering how he knew that and how a gay bar survived (or not, I guess) in the middle of Oklahoma. I was nervous about walking in as a minor but an old lady with red hair piled on top of her head met us at the door with two pitchers of beer. At some point the televisions above the pool tables started broadcasting news footage that Princess Diana had been in a crash and was dead, which means it was August 31st, 1997.
Three months after that I was back in Lewiston, living in a brick apartment building that was rotting into the Androscoggin River. From our back deck we could see the entire mill skyline of Lewiston. It cost $70 a week, which Dan and I split with our friend Ian. The landlord sent a woman around weekly on Friday nights to collect rent in cash, before all of us drank it away over the weekend. There was a very… weird man who lived in the basement. Whenever my mom, just up the hill from us, heard firetrucks, she would call to make sure the building wasn’t in flames.
When I returned home from Oklahoma I worked as a personal care attendant for people with major physical and cognitive disabilities. Though I was completely untrained, in exchange for manually stimulating the anuses of these residents in the shower to get them to poop, I got $8 an hour and very bad health insurance. I also worked at Service Merchandise, which was both the easiest and most loathsome job I ever had and is responsible to this day for my hatred of extended warranties. I got pregnant with Ezra less than a year and a half after we returned and that was the end of me pretending I was still going to get myself to Bennington. I had already enrolled in the local commuter branch of the University of Southern Maine anyway. I started working as a bookkeeper for my family’s small business at a pay cut, but with more flexibility. As a pregnant 19 year old, I qualified for Maine Care. I had been almost nowhere but I somehow wound up exactly where I’d begun.
Before I took a bus across the country to live with my boyfriend on a military base for six months, I had left New England exactly 4 times. I use New England liberally actually—I had never been to Rhode Island or Connecticut and had only visited Vermont once, when I interviewed at Bennington, embarrassed by the “if you object to logging, try using plastic toilet paper” bumper sticker on my dad’s truck, which I didn’t have enough sense to understand was what made me so attractive to the admissions committee in the first place. I talked to the admissions woman about A Passage to India and handed over copies of my poems and told her I wanted to double major in Dance and Women’s Studies. My college essay was about the relationship between passion and compassion. Where exactly did this one come from? I’m sure they thought.
Three of the four times I left New England I went to Bermuda: Once when I was a baby, and then again at 7 and 13. I don’t know why this was the place my grandparents brought us and now they’re dead and I can’t ask.
My great uncle Henry’s lover went with us when I was 7, though no one said that he was his lover or even whispered about it and so I’m not sure that he was but regardless his name was Arthur and Arthur was definitely gay. Henry and Arthur were of the bachelor class if you know what I mean. Henry collected photography books, giant tomes on Stieglitz that no straight Polish lumberjack from rural Maine had any right owning and which I would later inherit as the other family gay intellectual. Arthur braided my hair and was full of belly laughs and wiped out on a moped while we were there because he wasn’t used to driving on the other side of the road. He laughed and laughed and pulled up his shorts to show me his road burn.
Other memorable characters from this trip included a waiter at the Sonesta we stayed at who took a shine to me and gave me extra service paper doilies every morning at breakfast—which, honestly, you could probably still court me by giving me paper doilies, so kudos to that guy for immediately getting me and a heads up to future lovers. Later, my grandmother cut out an article from the newspaper that included a photo of the Bermuda Sonesta hotel staff because they were striking and it made international news. She circled the waiter in pen and wrote “Michelle’s boyfriend” on the clipping because excessive interest in young girls by grown men is a totally normal thing. I kept the clipping for many years and for all I know it is still in a photo album somewhere.
We went back to Bermuda when I was 13, and I remember less of that trip than I do of the earlier one, though in the pictures of me from that visit I’m wearing a tee shirt that says, “Peace in the Middle East,” a choice I’m sure the (post)colonized service class of Bermuda thought was a real hot take coming from a white tourist teenager on holiday with her grandparents. During the earlier trip, I saw a Shell gas station for the first time and was shocked there was a station named what my family called me. Very Perry Miller/Origins of American Studies, even, for a 7 year old. Perhaps that was the foundational moment that shaped my interests to come— it is entirely possible, as it was the first time I saw palm trees as well and I remember being extremely taken with this new world.
I don’t remember going as a baby, obviously. I think it was a belated honeymoon for my parents and I was there because my mother was very fertile and got pregnant with me fast.
Besides these random trips to Bermuda, my only other trip outside of NE was when I went to Orlando with my dance team when I was 15. We placed in Regionals in Group Tap at Dance Olympus, in Brockton, MA and qualified for Nationals. We fund raised our little asses off for months to get us all to Disney, including a massive yard sale in a patch of grass in the median of Route 4 in Turner, near DeCosta’s egg farm. Migrant workers bought most of our stuff. I was 15 years old and I didn’t even know that they lived there, they were completely invisible in my world and then suddenly they were buying all the things people had donated to us and carting it off in rusty pickup trucks. I think about that a lot. On our rides to Regionals each year we would stock up on road trip food as though we might starve between Sabattus and Brockton, an astounding distance, to us, of 167 miles. It was the one time a year I got to eat Toaster Strudels, because someone else’s mom always bought them for us. I have no idea how we heated them up but in my memory I ate them hot and sticky even in the van. The migrant workers were a lot further from home than we were from Brockton. I don’t know if any of them ever got to eat Toaster Strudels but I hope they did. We won second place in Group Tap with our choreo to Bette Midler’s For the Boys.
I’d been to Boston a couple times, which was 144 miles away and mine as well have been on another planet. For some reason my stepmother and I went to Boston on a bus I think her church booked though there was nothing Catholic about the trip. I bought a pair of clogs and a hemp necklace at Quincy Market. I had a coffee drink from a new place called Starbucks. I felt international.
My very large Polish grandfather drove to the New Hampshire border every few weeks to load the car up with tax-free booze for the family, transporting it back over state lines like a mob boss. Sometimes I’d go with him, maybe when my parents needed a babysitter for some reason, I don’t know.
My best friend Matt, who wound up being my jail boyfriend after driving the getaway truck for a bank robbery (a story for another day but 30 years later I still have all the artwork he sent me in his letters from prison and I should really share those someday, he was so talented, jeez, where are you now, Matt?), would buckle me and my best friend Gina into his Bronco and we’d go to Joe’s Smoke Shop in Portland just to stand outside in our combat boots smoking clove cigarettes, or to the original Bull Moose Music in Brunswick, to buy records.2 These were the extent of my travels.
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The first time I went to NYC—which was the fifth time I left New England and the first time I left New England on my own—was when I took that Greyhound to Oklahoma. I had a long layover at Penn Station. I was 2 weeks into my 18th year and I sat on the filthy sidewalk outside chain smoking and talking to everyone because I was more afraid to be rude than I was for my own safety. My mom gave me pepper spray for the trip and in Pittsburgh during a layover I held it tightly in my hand while following a stranger down a deserted street to smoke a joint with him. In St. Louis I got stuck between some cops (ACAB) and a man they were trying to arrest just as we were boarding. Somewhere else in the Midwest we picked up a community of Mennonites, and I spent a long night looking at their hats in the yellow glow of the passing highway lights, transfixed.
Prequel: Early 2000s
The second time I went to NYC was 5 years later, when I was 23 and I had my first girlfriend and she was 17 years older than me and had been my professor.
I considered only using her initial here, A, but she has been dead for almost 15 years, and I’m pretty sure almost no one who was close to her is still alive except for her wife? Also, despite the things she did to me, she was a victim of academia’s most brutal vicissitudes and I think it is worth sharing her work. Her name was Andrea Newlyn, and she was brilliant. I do also think she was probably a narcissist.
When I met Andrea, Ezra was a baby and I was taking my college classes spread out over three semesters—fall, spring, summer—so I could work full time and go to school and take care of my baby. Flyers went up on the walls of LAC for a Summer Course, 19th-Century Sentimental Women’s Fiction, and it was not even a question that I was going to take it. Andrea was a visiting professor from Ohio State University—ahem, excuse me, THE Ohio State University—but I didn’t know anything else about her and there was no reason to. She walked in with her trousers and button up dress shirt and oxfords and opened up the early American seduction novel Charlotte Temple and that was that. Next thing I knew I was arriving at school early to sit in the parking lot in my car, blasting The Cure’s From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea and reading, waiting for Andrea to show up and see me. The longing, man, it was intense.
Andrea took me to NYC because the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference was there in 2002 and she was on the job market. She had come to Maine because she had a fantasy of living there and thought she’d be able to squeeze a long-term position out of the visiting professorship that she’d scored at USM. This was wishful thinking bordering on psychosis—she had her wife, C, a pharmacist, buy the actual nicest house in Auburn, an Art Nouveau masterpiece that had no business being in that town—and somehow seemed to think that this job strategy was going to pan out, despite knowing that academia most certainly does not work this way.
MLA is one of the larger academic conferences, and I could not believe I was there with this 40-year-old who knew everything and everyone. I had just left Dan quite literally in the middle of the night for her. Who cared that I had never heard of MLA before she said we were going? She pointed out Hortense Spillers to me in hushed idolatry as we passed her in the publisher’s exhibition hall. She pointed out a short dyke and said, “that’s my ex, Judith, she dedicated her book on lesbian sexuality and narrative Come As You Are to me” (not that Judith; I am trying to fact check this right now but can’t find a preview online that includes the dedication page). Later I passed Judith while walking around by myself and she gave me the most pointed lookover of my life. I’m sure she knew exactly what was up LOL but I thought she was checking me out. I felt completely inadequate but also elated. I had fucked up by not going to Bennington and having a baby and now I was at MLA with my hot professor girlfriend who was older and so experienced and who loved me. I sat in the hallways while Andrea did the awkward rounds of interviewing in hotel bedrooms giant academic conferences are famous for. I bought a leather-bound journal and wrote about how amazing she was. When I was just a toddler and she lived in Boston her girlfriend Esther had cheated on her with Tracy Chapman (Andrea was also a compulsive liar so I also have no way of fact checking this. Esther, are you out there?) I was in.
Andrea had a flair for the dramatic. She was classically (pathologically) charismatic. She dressed like Annie Hall and I probably got a lot of my lesbian style preferences from the imprinting she did on my baby queer psyche. She had mounds of long curly black hair, just, like, the most amazing hair you were ever going to see. She was an LHB before LHB was a thing. She smoked cigarettes with me during our breaks at school out in the smoking gazebo (an actual thing—the designated smoking spot at Lewiston-Auburn College had a big ashtray in the middle. When it got cold they’d screw up some plexiglass around the perimeter so we could hotbox ourselves while avoiding the worst of the bitter winds). Once she got out of her car at a red light in South Portland and swaggered to my car and kissed me while cars honked around us. She was, for a time, dating and living with another of my professors and invited me over and pushed me against the wall and made out with me. She took me to Somewhere Else and to Sisters and for ice cold walks on Willard Beach, where we held hands and watched Portland Head blast out its searchlights across the sea. She drove a Harley and took long rides with me on the back, wrapping my baby arms around her leather-jacketed waist.
Andrea’s dissertation looked at the convergences of trans and racial passing literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries. She wrote about the queerness of Winona and Naomi Judd. She wrote about everything. She was an alcoholic and woe be the person (me) who could not figure out how to make sure she had a 6-pack of Stella Artois every night. After her relationship with another of my professors ended, she moved back in with C and talked her into installing a hot tub on the deck of the mansion and then kicked C out and moved me and Ezra in. There was a baby grand in the living room.
My uncle Henry died in August of 2002 and I’d inherited boxes and boxes of his Cutty Sark from one of my grandfather’s New Hampshire liquor store trips. We would get shitfaced in front of the fireplace and the baby grand listening to REM and Culture Club and Bronksi Beat. She taught me how to use a strap. I would pass out with my face in her pussy, drunk and in way over my head, completely unable to cope with what was happening. She was an addict with fibromyalgia and this was the early 2000s and woe be the person (me) who could not figure out how we were going to pay for her prescriptions of oxycontin and Xanax and Klonopin. I did not know anything about any of these drugs, I only knew them as the medicines she had to take to not be in pain, always running out, never having enough.
My dad died on April 9th, 2003. I had only indirectly come out to my family in the weeks prior to that. He died in his sleep and suffocated to death while having an epileptic seizure. Maybe two weeks before that I had called him from Andrea’s kitchen, furious with him for meeting up with Dan to go out for pizza with him and Ezra at a time when I needed support. I remember he answered the phone, “Hi, Shell!” and I launched into screaming at him that he would never hear from me again before hanging up on him. I felt betrayed by my family and my dad, especially. It took me a long time to get over this being the last time he heard my voice, and the last time I heard his. He was 44 years old. I am almost 46, now. He was clearly so happy to hear from me.
I had disappeared. I could not deal with coming out and everything that it entailed, not even a tiny bit. It is from this period of my life that I learned a few things about avoidance as a coping mechanism and what it does to people and what it does to your self. You have to tell your stories with a lot of slants to keep your ego intact. With K, I understand it again so so well all over again but from the other side and she is nearly 50, not 23.
In the months that followed, May through July, Andrea was making desperate plans to move back to Columbus. I was cut off and had cut myself off from all friends and family. I had a restraining order against Dan, who had said extremely scary things in the months prior and who had taken a bat to my car the day he found my middle-of-the-night note I left him when I ran away with Ezra to hide away in Andrea’s impenetrable fortress. It made no difference to me that the previous fall I’d had to bail Andrea out of jail after something happened when I’d left the room she and C were in and C’d called the cops (ACAB). It made no difference that when my dad died, Andrea was emotionally abusive, convincing me that my family did not love me, that my father had never loved me, that they did not know me and so could not love me.
Andrea could not find a publisher for book. She did not get tenure at OSU. We broke up before this, when she was still trying to piece it together, but that stress was a constant presence in our relationship. I got a job working at the lesbian bar Slammers as a server and then a bartender and I made the first real queer community I ever had there. I would come home after work and lay out all my pennies in front of her. It was never enough. I didn’t pay child support—it all went to Andrea. She was angry and stressed and she wanted me, a 24-year-old, to figure out how to support us both. She spoke incessantly about not being able to do other work because hers was a vocation, not a job. She bullied me constantly, she did the thing abusers do when they put you on a pedestal but tell you you don’t know anything, that no one loves you, that you’re better off not being in touch with your family, your child. She isolated me, she controlled my finances. At the end, she started pushing me, once trying to drunkenly kick me out for a reason I don’t remember but am sure was invented. Another time, a coworker at Slammers, Erin, asked me about the bruises around my wrists and I lied about it—a move so classic it feels like I’m making it up writing this. To her credit she didn’t believe me. I remember her saying, “Really? Because it looks like someone grabbed your wrists like this,” as she circled her fingers and thumbs around each arm. Andrea had constant affairs and/or dalliances with her exes and with people adjacent to me—C from the eating disorder clinic I also worked at, a straight woman she tried to seduce, a couple of older women from the bar.
My father was dead, my family was gone, Ezra was lost to me, but I finally left one night, sleeping on a bench in Schiller Park before my friend Angela from work let me sleep on her futon for a couple weeks. Two weeks later I moved into a cockroach infested slum of a house in a neighborhood I had no business renting in with Casey, who saved my life, and started to rebuild.
Eventually this story will get us to the street cats of Istanbul. I am getting there, it is all connected, it really is.
Andrea had four dogs and seven cats. The dogs: A Newfoundland named Kelsey Morgan (no relation) and three Great Pyrenees named Gracie, Kylie, and Keegan? Kiernan? It’s hard to believe I don’t remember anymore. I cannot remember any of the cats’ names except Tinny, who was 22 and who I was responsible for hooking up to fluids through an IV every evening for some months. A lot of the duties were mine. Because I made less money than her, housework and all other tasks were mine, which included caring for the eleven animals. Like her prescriptions, there was no end to the medications and care the animals needed. Glucosamine. Heart worm. Brushing. Special diet food. Eleven animals, plus my two cats. Thirteen animals.
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Andrea died in May 2010 when “the car she was driving swerved to avoid animal in the road.” She was ejected from the roof of her Nissan Xterra and, I think, rescuers basically had to remove her car from on top of her. I appreciate the gentleness of this explanation for her death, but I suspect she dozed off on pills at the wheel. I’ll never know. She had moved back to Maine to live with C. Andrea’s mother died a few years ago. She had a brother she was estranged from last I knew, an ex—Kerry?— who I think is a copyright lawyer in DC maybe? Other than that, I don’t think there are many people who would even really remember her now except for her academic friends and the people who she hurt along the way.
I found out Andrea died by running into a townie lesbian I had met through her who was working at a gas station near my mom’s house. I was visiting my mom, I went in to buy smokes. She said, Omg, I haven’t seen you in years! Guess what! And I said, Andrea died. She said, Oh you already know. I said No, it’s just the only way that was going to end. I was not sad. I did not cry. I thought: Now she can’t ruin anyone else’s life. I thought: Some people are actually better off dead. It was that bad. You can read this and judge me. You did not go through what I went through with her.
The last time I saw Andrea was after I had moved back to Maine and was living with Ezra in an apartment in New Auburn. It must have been 2007? The person I was dating was over and we were all watching television when the knock on the door came. That door was an indoor entrance, up three flights of stairs. I opened it and Andrea was standing there, on crutches, a big boot on her foot. I was shocked. I told her she needed to leave. I closed the door. She hobbled back down the stairs and sat in her Xterra out front for a long time before driving away.
Last year I read R/B Mertz’s Burning Butch (if you have not read this I cannot over-emphasize how critical it is that you stop what you are doing including reading my blog post column and immediately order it/read it) and reached out to them because they also were supposed to attend Bennington during those years. If you or someone you know were supposed to attend Bennington and didn’t any time in the years between 1994 and 2004, HMU, R/B and I want to have a kids-who-never-got-to-Bennington reunion someday.
The founder and owner of Bull Moose, Chris Brown, is the originator of Record Store Day. The Brunswick location was the first I believe and it was the holy grail for teenagers out in the sticks.