Chapter 7

HEAD DOWN

I have a chance to go to New York on a writing assignment and, for some reason, it feels like a terrible mistake. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I would return to New York now and then but I haven’t been back in a few years. Much of the sleazy, dirty New York I loved is gone but the city still has a powerful hold on me because I find ghosts standing on every street corner there.

I’m only going for a few days but I’m using the trip as an excuse to stop working at the House. Everything that Judy has directed me to do so that I can deal with the emotional consequences of working there, I’ve ignored. I haven’t gone to more meetings or kept a journal or even taken the time to really examine why I feel so fucked up. I sit in Group every morning pushing and pushing the residents to be honest when I feel like my sobriety is brittle and dry at the moment.Watching them struggle makes it impossible to ignore my own precarious position. I just want to run.

It’s decided and I’m going to New York. On the outside, I can explain it as a job, or at least an opportunity.Yet I know that something deeper is at work and I feel like I’m on the cusp of some great and terrible change. There is a burning in my stomach that intensifies through each day until, lying in bed at night, I begin coughing and choking on sharp bile. My mother tells me that it is acid reflux but that sounds entirely too mundane and I think that surely I’m too young to be sharing diseases with my mother.

Still, something is keeping me sober despite my best efforts to head down another path. That something is, of course, my “higher power.”Those two words that have made millions of newcomers to A.A. cringe because of their religious connotation and their sheer geekiness. It’s one thing to wallow in our druggy war stories but quite another to start praying.

I never had a problem with the idea of a higher power or even God. As a child, my parents couldn’t have been less interested in attending church so I went on my own. I worked the religious circuit in Cherokee, Iowa, moving from the First Church of Christ, to Grace Baptist, to Immaculate Conception. There was no particular event to draw me to any of them but I do remember sitting in each church and waiting for something to happen. It never did until I got sober.

My higher power has changed throughout my sobriety. When I first got sober, I prayed to Dino and was able to feel him around me. After a few years, I felt that he had moved on to wherever he was going. Much like Zelma, I was sleeping one night and dreamed of my dead husband. In the dream Dino walked up to a door and opened it. When he opened that door, I heard myself gasp, and felt something like water pouring over me. I woke up weeping and never felt Dino’s presence again.

I moved to Venice Beach and started praying to the ocean, taking long walks just feeling the depth and immensity of the water beside me. Almost every night I would walk out on the Venice Pier at sunset. It stretched before me like a long-handled frying pan, as strong and graceful as anything made from concrete could be. Almost every night it drew me down its length, a highway out into the ocean. The sun would already have sunk below the mountains as I walked out onto the pier. The world was silhouetted black against the water. Surfers rode alongside the pier catching modest swells, weaving their boards in between the pilings before rising up in triumph one last time, and then sinking languidly back down into the water. Seagulls flew in perfect formation, gliding parentheses, so compelling in their unity. Most nights I got there in time to see the path of gold that the sun formed on the water. Where the waves broke, the path would be fractured into a thousand arteries but, as it continued out over the water, the reflection would gradually consolidate into a gleaming, golden line.When the sun sank below the horizon, the water reflected the red, gold, blue, and white clouds in the sky. Each night this revelation of nature was repeated, drawing me to live there and witness it over and over again. In those moments, I felt God.

 

There is an enormous circular platform at the end of the Venice Pier that smells of fish and beer and, sometimes, piss. Each night, I would walk to the center of it where a small bronze plaque had been imbedded in the platform. As I ran my toes over the worn letters of the inscription, I would look out. Look to the mountains on my right, slowly dipping down from the Palisades to Malibu and Point Magu. Look to the left, where the airport shot out jet after jet like artillery fire. And look, finally, out over the ocean to the horizon where I knew that the water was miles deep and moved with mysterious creatures. I would stand there, breathing the moist air deep inside me, and pray that my life would change. I prayed that my old life would be ripped away from me. As I stood there, I would trace my toe slowly over the letters on the plaque, reading them as if they were Braille: “Center of the Universe.”

 

But again, after a few years, I moved on. Los Angeles contains a vast spiritual life that is hidden from outsiders and, since moving here, I’ve been a seeker. I’ve sat in Indian sweat lodges that were held in backyards of suburban track homes. I’ve attended yoga classes led by a woman who grew up in New Jersey but now wears a white turban and goes by an Indian name. I’ve been taken to Bel Air mansions where Hollywood wives sat in a circle around a Kabbalah master asking questions about real estate.And, though I sometimes ridiculed these experiences, I gained something from each of them.

One of my great spiritual adventures was a weekend workshop called the Body Electric that took place in a community center at the base of the Angeles National Forest. The Body Electric morphed out of the radical faerie movement in which gay men dropped out of society during the ’60s and sought out a natural spiritual life in rural communes. Now gay faeries are figures of fun, their earthy drag obscuring a strong anti-assimilationist creed built on Marxism and feminism. In the deep woods, they developed rituals that would connect them to the power of nature and their forefathers. Part Native American, part horny group-grope, these rituals are easily dismissed when one sees pictures of men named Persimmon or Cupcake in long dresses and wild hair dancing through the fields or participating in obscure rituals such as saline hypnotherapy.

When I entered the room where the Body Electric was held, I was three or four years sober and deeply tired of nights spent in bathhouses. Twenty men sat in a circle in the room and were addressed by a tall, thin leader with long brown hair. I don’t recall whether he really explained the purpose of the weekend or if I understood fully why I was there but, in retrospect, I know that the weekend was designed to help me see worth in other gay men, whether I was attracted to them or not. The first day of the Body Electric was horrifying, including a long ritual during which we got naked and learned how to masturbate one another. We were told not to cum over the course of the weekend and, though the day’s masturbation lessons had repulsed me, they had also left me rather horny. That night, I went home feeling disgusted and vowing not to return the next morning. However, my fundamental cheapness reminded me that I had spent several hundred dollars to register for the workshop and I wanted my money’s worth.

It is very difficult to describe what happened on the second day of the Body Electric but I remain convinced that the experience ranks alongside my sobriety and being arrested in the streets of New York during ACT UP demonstrations as one of the great healing rituals of my life. All of the shame and awkwardness of the first day dropped away during a long ritual in which two men would massage and pleasure a third person, not to the point of orgasm but rather to a sort of clenched intensity, carefully timed to the music thundering through the space. The two men massaging me looked like Santa Claus and an aged rabbi, but there was something so sweet and gentle about them that I felt entirely content being with them. Their hands traveled over my body, using the techniques we had learned before along with a few that they had clearly acquired elsewhere.At the apex of sexual pleasure, I was told to tense my body and hold my contracted muscles as tightly as possible. After a few moments, the leader called out, “Release.” My body fell back down onto the massage table, the hands of my brothers lifted away from my body and, for a few moments at least, I was free and happy. Stars zoomed past my eyes and I felt myself float up and out of my body. I remember weeping at the thought of leaving those men whom I had found repulsive only the day before.

I’ve had other such experiences in even stranger environments. One weekend I found myself sitting in a convention center with thousands of other seekers spread out in front of an ethereal Indian guru. For two days, we chanted and meditated. My brain had been filled with chemicals for so many years that it was not all that difficult for me to hallucinate. So I was not shocked to have an intense vision that brought me to my next higher power—the Indian god Ganesh.

Sitting in the hall chanting with the guru and the other devotees, I felt something akin to the rushing sensation I’d felt the last time I dreamed about Dino. Suddenly I was not in the convention center but in the ocean. The sea was filled with light. I was far down, at the point where one can no longer see the golden ceiling of the surface. I was far down, cradled in the warm embrace of the liquid world. The sea’s inky depths were hung with curtains of light. They extended up to where I knew the surface undulated with wave after coursing wave. The light emanated from everywhere, nowhere. It washed over me, moving to a slow rhythm. The light had mass and the water moved with it, currents shifting and dancing in the light’s song. The world rocked back and forth.

“Come, come,” the light sang to me, beckoning to me with long, blue-white arms. I breathed liquid. I gave way to the slowly shifting pressure and opened my lungs, letting myself become one with the water, connected.As the water moved, so did I. I had no fear of the black chasm below me. “I know you,” a woman’s voice sang from far away, “open your eyes.” I began to sink down into the cushion of blackness and, as my mind quieted, I saw lights twinkling in the depths. There were stars in the ocean, as remote and distant as in the sky. I decided to leave the safe depth, too close to the dry world that I had known. I wanted nothing but the deep blue sweep of light leading to blackness filled with distant stars. “Come,” she said with complete understanding, “it’s time.”

I flew toward the stars, twinkling in the darkness below, and felt a gathering of energy in and around me.The woman’s voice became a plaintive cry without cessation. It was lodged in the base of my spine, throbbing, “Open your eyes, your eyes, your eyes.”

I came to a field of sea grass, moving like wheat in the wind. Blue-white fronds billowed in unison, silver rippling over their surface. Moving forward, the grass stroked my legs and groin. I felt the grass moving, alive. I breathed and listened to the song of the woman’s voice, called out to it with moans and clicks in my throat. Miles of water rose above me and its weight was a comfort.

I sat cross-legged, my hands on my thighs with the thumb and forefinger touching. Sitting in the same position across from me was a brightly colored elephant. His trunk was curled and pointing upwards, bubbles percolating from it. His black eyes with long lashes watched me intently, never blinking. The elephant’s face was chalky white but his body was a garish pink, gaudy as a street fair. His entire being glittered. In two of his hands, with their painted fingernails, he held flowers. The other two hands extended to me, one held up as if to command me to halt, the other holding a softly shimmering blue pearl. I floated to him, drawn by the beauty of the pearl, and settled my head on his huge foot, staring at the azure light that emanated from the orb.

The elephant’s words drowned out the woman’s voice as he said, “I have but one thing to tell you.” I rubbed his soft rosy foot and waited, breathing slowly. “Part of you must die before the greater part can live.”

I looked down at my flesh and it was black, as if burned. As I watched, my body began to stir, covered by thousands of black, flickering butterfly eyes. The blue ocean light washed over the eyes in silence. Then there was no voice, no sound, only momentum without movement. The eyes slowly blinked open and shut, thousands of black butterflies. Each open eye contained a patch of light so severe that I could barely look at it. Yet I gave myself freely, with relief, to the obliterating light. In great waves, the eyes all over my body opened, revealing themselves, water streaming from them. I was this burning thing and, it seemed to me that where there had been only darkness, now there was only light.

Funny how such strange and intense visions later seem delusional, self-induced. I also soon felt that the Indian guru was a false prophet, perhaps even a cult leader. However, I still pray to a gaudy statue of the Indian god Ganesh that sits on my desk, illuminated at all times by three white candles.When I get up in the middle of the night and wander to the kitchen, there is always a moment of comfort when I see the dark eyes of the statue lit by the flickering light of the candles. Ganesh is part elephant and part human in form. He is the patron saint of writers and is said to have wanted to write so badly that he broke off one of his tusks to use as a pen.

 

But I haven’t been writing. I’ve just been living and listening. I’ve let myself become lost in the stories of the House’s residents. Mostly in Group, I hear lies, and the lies of the residents intertwine with my own lies, building a strong thick screen between me and the rest of the world. Because I now share in their lies, I am deeply drawn into the stories of their endlessly varied degradations. The weeks have slipped past and today is my self-imposed last day here. It’s an indicator of how the rest of my life feels that the House represents stability to me at this point. This morning, Judy asked me again to stay and, with the supreme confidence of someone doing the right thing, told me that she was keeping the door open for me. But I’m ending this today and I have no idea why. Well, once again that’s a lie. I feel on some level that working in recovery is what I’m supposed to do with my life instead of writing, and that thought has terrified my ego so deeply that I need to run. In the culture of Hollywood that I both dismiss and crave, there is no way to see becoming a therapist or a social worker as a triumph.

Today, the Group is reading the Third Step from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Together, they intone, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.”Then, each resident reads a paragraph. As they read, their stories flash in my mind.

Ding-Dong teeters into the room and sits next to me, unable to read, slowly rocking back and forth. My hand rests on his shoulder. He likes this contact and flashes me his big, blind smile. He can navigate the House from memory now but the other residents instinctively steer him past sharp corners and obstructions such as furniture and feet.

Next to Ding-Dong is Damian, a shriveled little black queen in his fifties, who sleeps only with “straight” men. Damian showered these men with gifts, money, and, naturally, drugs. Inevitably, Damian’s dates evolved into lurid screaming matches that all too closely resembled the mundane heterosexual couplings that the tricks had sought to escape in the first place. Now Damian sits in a decaying house in Hollywood, pining for the butch realness of these men who took everything. But Damian had managed to scare off few of his tricks.When he disappeared into treatment, the “straight” men realized they missed the drugs and the gay sex. Even now, months later, their numbers continue to flash frequently on Damian’s beeper and cell phone, taken from him when he entered the House but on view in Judy’s office. One of the hungry heterosexuals finally tracked down Damian after asking around on the street and he calls the payphone in the lobby of the House every few days. Damian has been instructed not to take the calls but he continues to circle around the payphone at noon when he knows that his man will be on lunch break and cruising the streets around Santa Monica and Highland, looking for a little attention.

Marlon, on the other hand, was one of those men Damian would have happily serviced out there on the streets. He swaggers around the House in low-hanging jeans and a wife-beater, his gang tattoos running up arms that were once beefy but are now just sinew, eaten away by his relentless appetite for crystal. I find him wildly sexy, adding another secret to the heavy bag that I drag around. Judy bought him a conservative buttoned-down shirt and khaki pants last week, which he hates. After hours of cajoling, he revealed why he is so invested in the masculine thug look. It seems that Marlon also had a “straight” boyfriend who used to send him out to the streets to earn. He was unhappy with Marlon’s nightly take so decided to test Marlon’s appeal as a trannie. The boyfriend sent Marlon out in full drag splendor and, after no more than an hour, Marlon was sitting on the curb of Santa Monica Boulevard in front of Shakey’s Pizza, with his hands cuffed behind his back. The cops had pulled off his wig and Marlon’s face was streaked with mascara, running with his tears. After a full night in jail, still in the cheap sheath dress he had donned for work, Marlon vowed never to turn fem again and reverted to his Cholo look. Today, he still hangs onto a vestige of the look with the khakis worn long and the dress shirt worn open to reveal a wife-beater underneath.

There are two women of the biological variety in the room today. Missy resembles a turtle with her head pulled back into her shoulders and her face collapsed into a pockmarked mask from years of shooting smack and meth. Missy specialized in washing checks to support her habit. She is the dark figure who roots through your trash at four in the morning, expertly sorting through the coffee grounds and orange peels to extract a cancelled check you thought was hidden so deep in the garbage bag it would never be found. She is the casual stroller in your neighborhood who deftly grabs the electric bill you’ve paid and left hanging out of the mailbox for the postman. With her own special blend of acetone, bleach, and typewriter correction fluid, she removes the payee and amount before drying the check with a hair dryer. As carefully as a diamond carver, Missy would iron any warping out of the check and then rewrite it to herself for thousands of dollars. When she was at the top of her game, Missy would load up a stolen car with a laptop, portable printer, and a laminating press to produce IDs that allowed quick conversion of the checks into untraceable cash. This is her fifth time in the House and, as always, she’s shown up with her dog and only long-term relationship, Peanut. Peanut is irretrievably filthy. After ten years of living on the streets with Missy, he has become so stained that he simply will not come clean. At this point, he considers the House to be his home and wanders through Group, one ear permanently drooping over his little Schnauzer face and a snaggletooth sticking straight out. The residents reach reflexively for Peanut, dragging the stinky dog up into their laps and burying their faces in his matted fur like the catatonic residents of nursing homes who respond only to the touch of an animal.

Missy usually arrives for rehab straight from another stint in prison but she was not caught washing checks this time. Instead, she freaked out after a three-day run on some tweak and grabbed Peanut, trying to hold him so close to her that he began to suffocate. The dog bit her as delicately as it could but it still set her off and she kicked the poor flea-bitten thing until it was nearly dead. Now, Missy can barely look at Peanut as he drags himself around after her, a constant reminder of the fact that she harmed a soul that was inarguably innocent.

Jason sits next to Missy, cooing softly over Peanut’s impassive body, stroking the dog with complete adoration. Jason isn’t yet thirty but he’s torched his life repeatedly for just a little more tweak. Today, he’s happy though, because he’s come out to both his parents and his brother. I know that he feels that this admittedly heroic action and the positive response will cure his addiction. For him there is still a long road to understanding that his sexuality was only the first secret to be revealed. Still, it was enormous progress and no one can deny him his day of happiness. Only ten days ago he was sitting in prison after having violated his parole one more time. On his last run, Jason had strolled out of the joint in the white jumpsuit worn by prisoners and headed directly across Los Angeles to his dealer’s house. For days, he had slammed tweak and cried, knowing that his parole officer was going to bust him. When he finally called his P.O. and told her that he wanted to stop using drugs, the response had been a direct transfer to the House.

The book is passed to Marie but she just stares at it and shakes her head. Marie is the little girl I saw sitting in the dining room on my first day working here. I’ve come to know a lot about Marie. Over the weeks her black roots have grown out and only shaggy blond ends, trimmed roughly by another resident, remain.When I first saw Marie close-up, I was shocked by the red streaks running across her face. Judy had explained to me that sometimes tweakers use so heavily that the capillaries burst in their faces and the pores bleed. Marie had literally been sweating blood when she arrived at the House.

Marie is leaving tomorrow to go back to her family, or so she says. I think it is more likely that she will return to Venice Beach where, in a fit of paranoia, she stabbed another tweaker before she ended up here. She made the decision to leave yesterday after she shared with the Group that, desperate for attention as a child, she accused her father of molesting her. I asked her whether he had, in fact, molested her and she sat stone silent. Finally, she started laughing and said no, he hadn’t molested her. Then she continued to say that she’d asked her father if she could kiss his penis and he had agreed. I’d asked her again if her father had molested her and she told me no. For nearly an hour, we’d gone back and forth with her laughing, changing her story. And now she sits slumped over the book, having notified the staff this morning that she will be leaving. She doesn’t look up but throws the book in Erol’s lap.

Erol is perhaps the most fucked-up, arrogant person in the House and, without doubt, the sexiest. He was born in Turkey and his family emigrated to Los Angeles via a ten-year stint in London. His voice is a ladder of accents that hints at his shifting identities. Erol is short, compact, sleek, and covered in black fur with huge arched eyebrows framing pained eyes. He is deeply invested in being a straight man who, out of desperation, abandoned fucking women and now only goes for trannies. My sexuality feels mundane and utterly explainable alongside his complexity. I’ve spent more than a little time fantasizing about him and his constructed but potent masculinity. Erol’s body has regenerated itself in front of my eyes in a month, piling on muscle without exercise.

Erol’s presence points out Pauline’s absence. When Erol arrived at the House, Pauline promptly decided that he was her new husband. Unfortunately for Pauline, though, Erol’s kink for trannies was not strong enough to get past her appearance. She followed Erol around for a week or two, towering over him, until she announced that she was leaving the House.

With an English public school lilt mixing with the burr of his Turkish vowels, Erol reads,

“It is when we try to make our own will conform with God’s that we begin to use it rightly. To all of us, this was a most wonderful revelation. Our whole trouble had been the misuse of willpower. We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into agreement with God’s intention for us.”

After we say the Serenity Prayer together, I ask the Group to sit back down. Judy is standing in the doorway. My voice is already breaking and my eyes feel full.

“This is going to be my last day, you guys.”

I’m surprised by their reaction. On most days, the residents look sideways at me, evaluating whether or not I represent a threat. The majority of their hatred is focused on Judy, who is much tougher than I am, but they’ve hardly been warm and cuddly with me. With the news of my departure, Jason actually gasps a little and Erol begins to cry. It’s so typical of my life that I don’t know when I’ve connected with people.

“This was always a temporary thing for me, to fill in until there’s a new fulltime counselor. And I ... I wanna thank all of you.”

Each and every one of the residents stands in line to say good-bye to me as I cry like a baby.

I’m in Judy’s office, still weeping. She just sits and watches. It’s the difference between this place and the outside world. Out there, the world reacts to emotion with embarrassment and a friend will rush to say, “Don’t cry.” Here, all emotion is equal as long as it is honest.

The tears subside and I look at Judy who is slowly nodding her head. After I blow my nose, I offer up what I’m really crying about. “This ended up meaning a lot more to me than I thought it would. In fact, I kind of think I could do it instead of writing. But I’m too scared.”

“Too scared of what?”

“My ego. What I think I should be.”

Judy isn’t a big hugger actually but she gives me one now. “The door’s open, honey. Why don’t you just accept you don’t know what you want? You have no idea how it’ll all work out and that’s fine.”

 

Most of the residents are eating lunch when I leave. I move quickly past the dining room before they can say anything. As I open the front door, though, Ding-Dong is standing outside, smoking a cigarette. He looks toward me and says, “Who’s that?”

“It’s Patrick. I’m leaving.”

“Oh, OK.”

Ding-Dong doesn’t look sad or happy, just intent on his cigarette. In the larger scheme of things, my departure is a small event. He turns his face to the sky and blows cigarette smoke upward. “Hey Patrick, is it gonna rain some more?”

I look at the sky. It’s filled with huge, puffy clouds, bruised along their edges. “I think so.Yeah.”

“Well,” Ding-Dong says, tossing his head, “that makes my hair curly.”

Looking at Ding-Dong now, smoking and thinking about his hair, he becomes a real person. “Ding-Dong, can I ask you a question?”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “I hope it’s personal.”

“It is. What’s your real name?”

Ding-Dong stares at me with his opaque eyes and extends his hand. “Robert Alistair Tompkins.” He winks. “But you can call me Bobby.”

I shake his hand. “Very nice to meet you, Bobby.”

 

In my first months of sobriety, my sponsor told me to “be good to myself” and I interpreted that as getting as many spa treatments as possible. Facials and manicures seemed the perfect panacea to years of snorting poison and blowing out my liver. Having left the House with my eyes red and puffy, I head to a spot where I’ve spent many a weepy afternoon.

The Beverly Hot Springs is secreted away behind an ugly stucco façade on Beverly Boulevard in Koreatown. The luxury of the building reveals itself only from the parking lot, where my car is whisked away by a valet. I enter through a set of glass doors into a tall marble atrium with a waterfall rushing down. The sound and smell of water is everywhere in the complex, which is built on a natural alkaline hot springs. The odor of sulfur, eucalyptus, and mint drift heavily through the reception area, distracting me from the hefty charge the Korean woman zips onto my credit card. In early sobriety, most of my income went to paying off my spa bills but I rarely treat myself to a massage here anymore because prices have skyrocketed with the influx of Hollywood agents and actors who have become devoted to the place.

Upstairs, I hand my receipt to a little Mexican man in exchange for some towels and a razor. He then waves me into what looks to be a gym locker-room but with a few slabs of marble added for luxury. I deposit my clothes in a locker and secure the key, mounted on a stretch band around my ankle before walking naked into the spa itself.

It is drizzling again and only a weak light drifts through a skylight, further shadowed by the slowly rotating blades of a fan. The spa is mostly deserted on a weekday afternoon but a few Korean men sit on short concrete stools that look like flat-topped mushrooms in the grooming area. One man intently examines his body, squeezing blemishes and methodically plucking out hairs. A few obviously gay men lounge naked in plastic chairs near the main pool. Two of them are marked by the distended stomachs, thin extremities, and pouchy faces that come from extended use of HIV drugs. Another is a glistening young black man whose body is thick and thin in all the right places. The Korean men utterly ignore me and the three gay men give me a quick assessment before returning to their poses.

The pool itself is an enormous tiled expanse of steaming water that smells gently of sulfur. I lower myself into the wet heat inch by inch, savoring the heavy silkiness of the water, moving slowly because the first immersion is always the most delicious. Finally, I let myself fall backward, under the water, and just float there for a few moments. Half walking, half swimming, I make my way to the fountain at the center of the pool that is the source of the mineral water. I reach up and sweep great armfuls of the thick water onto my head. Finally, I settle onto the ledge at the far side of the fountain where I can relax in privacy.

During those first months of sobriety, when it was raining as it has been lately, I would come to the same spot late in the morning, sit in the water, and cry at how completely I had fucked up my life. Dino was gone. New York was gone. I’d lost or run away from everything I loved and found myself in a strange city where I knew no one. When I felt completely lost, the water helped by washing off the filth of my past. At the very least, immersing myself in the steaming world of the spa would eventually make me so deliriously relaxed that I wanted nothing but to go home and sleep.

Ultimately, the magic of the springs comes not only from the hot water but also from plunging at intervals into an icy menthol pool. The first dip into the ice water, after having given way to the womblike hot pool, is unbearable.The water is so cold that it burns and, as opposed to the hot pool, I plunge into the coldness as quickly as possible, submerging myself entirely until my body starts to become numb and tingle. After a few more moments, a wonderful trancelike state overtakes my mind and I can remain in the freezing water for quite some time. Finally, I stumble out of the coldness and step back into the warmth again, each wave of heat feeling like a thousand pinpricks. After repeating this process four or five times, I can barely think, let alone indulge in my constant state of worry.

Immersed in the water, I know that most of my pain comes from the fact that I want to control everything. If I drop down into the water here, let myself drift and float loose, there are no rapids that I will tumble over. There are no depths in which I will drown. But still I hold onto the edge. Judy told me that I don’t know what I want or where I’m headed and that it’s fine. I want to believe that.

 

I fell asleep early this evening after returning from the Hot Springs. I slept without dreaming but have woken up now in the middle of the night. I was shuffling through channels on the television when I came across Wings of Desire. I’ve seen the movie twice but had forgotten about it. The film is mostly in utterly flat German with the exception of scenes with Peter Falk, who strangely appears in the film looking very much like Detective Colombo, the character that brought him fame. First, Dino and I saw it in a theater in New York. The second time I saw it was in Rome, where Dino and I had taken an apartment for the summer. The Italians dispensed with subtitles altogether, dubbing the dialogue into Italian. So ultimately I’ve never really paid attention to the dialogue of the movie and tonight I only read about half of the subtitles because they are annoyingly cut off on my television screen.

There is something very beautiful about the movie. Set in Berlin and shot in the tones of a fine silver gelatin print, the film is about angels. Everything shimmers dully. The angels look exactly like the living people they quietly observe. Carrying notebooks, the angels carefully record the strange, small, telling moments that somehow define humanity.They are doing more than observing though. The angels are witnesses who sometimes stand behind loved ones, a hand resting on a sobbing shoulder. The living person never knows why, but there is a little wave of comfort that passes over them as the angel smiles sadly.

In the film, only children can see the angels. The children are not afraid of the strange figures standing and watching daily life. Rather, the angel and child smile knowingly at one another. I realize that I’ve never bothered to think about what the movie means. I just watch it. Tonight, I wish that there were a way to be like a kid again so that I could see the angels who must be sitting around my bed, watching me. Maybe one has his hand on me now because I’m falling back asleep.