"PSYCHIC BIDDER"
almost-smart thoughts for almost-smart readers
Describe the Gay Portal that opened up in your mind when, as a kid watching the movie Beetlejuice, you heard Otho say “Deliver me from L.L. Bean,” scornfully, disdainfully, bitchily, after opening the haunted house’s closet and not seeing the invisible ghosts. Describe the parallels between Beetlejuice and Poltergeist, between Otho and Zelda Rubinstein, the dwarf psychic lady who came in to run the show of Carol Anne’s rescue: “Carol Anne, go into the light!” Both outlandish mediums, both Southerners, oddly, one serious, the other played for laughs. Setting up social media accounts, dating apps, work emails at your house, you had to come up with wifi superstitions to combat the ghosts that prevented multi-factor authentication from getting through. Everything’s combat. And the authentication code only arrives when it’s too late and you are no longer near the device. This is the shield of the poltergeist.
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You are not, like Rainer Maria Rilke, a “feverish masturbator,” and you want the written record of these diaries to attest to that fact. You read in the Times Literary Supplement about the “pathological onanism” of Rilke. Not yours, yours is more a pathological fear of orgasm, you would think.
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You have no wife, no life, etc., body falling apart, can’t separate the gibberish from the justified, true belief, your sorting mechanism is “all shitted up to be damned.” Her grandfather can provide sayings for her poetry, but yours can’t? The Turbot family, going back generations, are xenophobic perverts, didn’t you know that? Also, there’s a rapist hiding somewhere in your family tree—theirs too, everybody’s, if statistics are to be counted on.
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Heterosexual love is pain. Homosexual love might be too, you don’t know. Maybe you’ve been radicalized against women. Readers should be warned to discard your words thusly. Women are many things, have many shapes but the one seeming most clear to your scratched lens just now is that women are a ferocious subset of humanity. (SAY MORE ABOUT THIS< FIT IT IN SOMEWHERE). You began as unafraid of female body, naively so, pushed into her by culture—then losing innocence, gaining some insight, you became repulsed. Not that women are objektively repulsive. Or even truly subjectively repulsive. Not at all. It is everything about woman minus her body that is the reverse of magnetic, to you in certain of your moods. This authorial persona is radicalized against women. It isn’t really you. Tell the cops it isn’t you. Neither are you gay, that’s another persona put on so that you may write. Personae exist behind bars, put there by “woke thought police.” You can use the words too. You don’t want them to just assume you’re with them. …looking at a woman from behind, stealing glances as they walk away, not risky in a sense, cowardly because it’s behind her, out of her view, out of being seen back. You’re proud of how you avert your eyes when she can see you. You’re non-threatening to her face, but ashamed of how you steal glances when she can’t see you. You watch. This is your repression, in a word. A force field that contributes, along with other elements, into making you gay, into bringing that to the forefront. You want to own up to it, like that will earn you some special brownie points, and you will earn a windfall of these coins, these non-threatening coins, if you admit that you’ve ever thought about loving men instead of women. You love neither men nor women, in truth. It’s a foreign word, a foreign verb: what you do with other people, especially foreign because you never let them know the silent, unexpressed emotion of affection. Courtly or crazy, from afar, Beatrice-style, horribly impaired and incomplete because never conveyed. But you love it that way. It’s working for you, in a curiously non-working kind of way. Funny how that’s the operation, often. The function of a non-functioning set up. A secret explanation for why you misspell the word sike-ology. Because it’s all wrong. The “sike/psych” part, the Greek root for breath, life, soul—misbegotten completely, mistaken for something else. Therefore the typo, to mark the lexical fracture.
“Psychic bidder”—in the card game Bridge, misrepresenting a player’s hand to deceive opponents. “Psych” as a verb in athletic-competition contexts starting in the 1980s (at least how it manifested to you as a child). Something you heard from your sister Dawn. “getting psyched.”
You and Brian talk about hating women, sometimes. Brian, Tony Larry’s boyfriend, displays a stereotypical misogyny when he says things like “ooooh, take that stinky pussy away!” He might be playing a role too: misogynistic gay guy hating women. You want to write down all the things that come out of Brian’s hypocritical, complicated mouth. Brian designed the post-apocalyptic wedding dresses of that fashion show at Tony Larry’s farm. That must have been how they met. “Things You Learned About Brian From Working With Him.” You drove produce to Tony Larry’s farm stand when TL was sick or away on other business (the rumor was that he was depressed and in a facility), and you manned the battle stations with Brian so you got to know him to a certain extent.
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Even after Tony Larry, even after the possibility of some understanding or love there became untenable and the situation was resolved, there were after-echoes, reverberations, and you were left to contend with yourself—it’s all just you. That’s all. Driven by a broken heart back into some solipsism hurts twice as much. You didn’t want this secret annex of yourself to be activated, the factory taken out of “mothballed” status after a lifetime’s interval of never being used. In a past life, was it ever used? In a past life, were you gay? So there is some memory, under the radar, of gay ancestors, trace elements. Gay cavemen. Wait, it’s a factory floor mothballed, and a gay neanderthal? Which is it, which metaphorical construct are you going with? You will write a poem one day called COMING OUT TO PEOPLE ON ZOOM.
Speaking of poems, two poems were accepted by Sinkhole Quarterly and should be out in Issue 4: Rebellion in early August. You’re trying to write more poems as they may provide a feeling of smaller closure than finishing a whole novel. You also are trying to format a book collecting some plays you wrote possibly to self-publish if you can figure that out.
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You just can’t concentrate. You can’t focus more than this. You sent the novel off to be looked at, submitted it in its broken stage. You can’t write. You are setting up to read several things, which are the products of some people who are subscribers to the newsletter: a copy of an Australian zine RANGO TANGO; a small collection of short stories and interviews from Ivy Grimes, GRIME TIME; the new novel by M.E. Proctor and Russell Thayer entitled BOP CITY SWING (eternally chagrined and let down by yourself for not reading this in time to blurb it for Cowboy Jamboree, you are going to finish reading it in paperback version); and Gabriel Hart’s youth-crime novel ON HIGH AT RED TIDE. You feel that in the coming weeks as your job slackens off you will have more time and more constructive attention span to read all this and report back to them, the subscribers, on what you find.
Things you’re listening to lately: Abul Mogard, Sonny Rollins, noise/industrial from the Nostilevo label including Siobhan and affiliated act Corporate Park which you love, and your favorite musical act right now, Cucina Povera. Friend of the newsletter who goes by the pseudonym Kosten Koper disappeared for a bit but you sense they’re back. They are the mastermind and selector behind the avant garde radio program L’Etranger on Radio Panik.
TV shows you’re watching: no TV really but you have been enjoying episodes on YouTube of The Kelly Mantle Show, especially interviews with Tammie Brown. Crazy shit, mind-scrambling for former kids in enrichment or “gifted and talented”: the periodic bells in the program bring back disturbing emotions.
Oh, and the header image of the two buildings in love came from a piece of xerox art done by your high school friend Scott Olson who is a real true-blue artist.