Trebor's Tour Journal

Sat. Sept. 20: LA

Book Launch party went great, with a lavender cake supplied by Stuart Timmons, and lots of folks chattering in the garden at the One Institute at USC. The One Institute is a gay and lesbian archive where I volunteer: I dig through boxes left from people's estates, discovering weird books, sometimes stashes of cash, assorted trinkets.  It's like digging through an attic. One is housed in what was once a fraternity, which is cool in a poetic justice kind of way. Sort of like beating swords into ploughshares, or rather letting the swords be the ploughshares they were meant to be. All in all, a great send off from my LA friends.

Sun. Sept. 21st: West Hollywood

Today I took part in the West Hollywood Book Fair and read at a salon event with other poets and writers at the Abbey, after signing books at Skylight Books table and A Different Light bookstore. There were fake fall-color leaves scattered all over the place, which was odd as it was 95 degrees and folks were gathering for shade under fully-leaved green trees that are almost all evergreen here because there is no real winter. There were tons of kids, who probably made the leaves, which is great as I am a proponent of kidpower! It's amazing how much of a family event this fair tends to be, indicating that either lots of queers have kids or that lots of straight couples come to the fair with their kids. I know of no other queer literary event where there are so many kids and kid-oriented activities. My favorite moment of the fair:  Teacher to kid: what's the plural of leaf? The kid answered: tree! :)

Monday, Sept. 22nd:  Palm Springs

Began the long journey, stopping to stay in Palm Springs. I love the billions of windmills that you pass through on the way in, like some weird gateway and I'm a little Don Quixote tilting at the national book tour windmill. Had an interesting evening in the weird, but good energy (in my opinion) of this desert place. The whole area is like two dimensions, a sort of solidstate board, and everything is one-story with long views through giant glass windows that look out across sagebrush or golf courses. And then there are the mountains which are profoundly 3-dimensional, giving them a sublime presence. As soon as you avert your eyes from their ancient all-is-vanity peace and timelessness, it's all very mod and Sinatra and makes you want to drink scotch and soda and eat peanuts like I used to do at my uncle Jerry's who was a Dean Martin kinda guy and generally drank too much, but still made great pancakes wearing a chef's hat for us kids next morning.

Tuesday, Sept. 23rd: Phoenix

Drove to Phoenix through the rocky Mojave, admiring the occasional cholla cactus, with their long spindly arms. Stopped in Quartzite where we visited the Readers' Oasis bookshack, which is run by an old hippie wearing a silk g-string. Favorite book found was "Famous Swedes" which amounted to all of 72 pages. Quartzite has a big Q in chalk on a dry rock peak south of town--hard not to see it as a big 'queer' symbol for this boy :)

Felice is obsessed with mirages and no longer believes anything we visit is actually real. And on some level, it probably isn't, and doesn't matter anyway. The desert will make a Buddhist of ya.

Felice has decided to apply for the position of Bard of Gila Bend, a very AZ-named kind of nowhere town which overnight is turning into a horrific suburb. But I like Phoenix:  I like the orange dirt, the blasted, baked hills and yards with beat-up old sahuaros and their missing limbs. If you like gravel, you'll like Phoenix. I love gravel. Good people here too, and the wandering desert rats always intrigue me: middle-aged, weathered guys on rickety bikes. Legions of them.

Finally--ostensibly the point of all this--at a behemoth Borders, I heard my name announced over the loudspeaker as I scurried upstairs to my standing-room only reading of 6 people. :) Sandra, the events planner was fab, peppering me with all the right questions. I really enjoyed it, and I think I read well. Allen Kalchik of Heatstroke wrote a really nice feature he put on the front page of the paper with a pic of me and of the book cover, so that helped.

We went to an interesting restaurant, with an enormous sign out front, which read, "My Florist." The owner liked the sign so much, he named the restaurant after it. This has an interesting potential for future restaurants:  Sullivan Mortuary, Antiques, JiffyLube.

Allen Kalchik and I retired to Charlie's, a western-themed queer bar, and the Platform (I know that's the wrong name, but it's close), the local leather place, which was interesting. I like smaller city queer scenes--much friendlier in general.

Went home to Robrt and Todd's and slept with a sweet cat named Alma-Jean and Billy, my 99cent store doll of indeterminate gender, who has become a work in progress, courtesy of my sharpie pen.

Wednesday, Sept. 24th : Phoenix

Went with the elfin Allen Kalchik and Felice up to Prescott (pronounced like biscuit as opposed to fleshpot.)

It's very much like a CA gold country town, lousy with tourists, overpriced antique shops and general fluff. There was a weird redneck vibe, and the sentimental references to Indian stuff bothered me and hinted at a subtle animosity in general left over from AZ's despicable past in reference to Native Am. relations.

On the way down the hill, saw a swastika painted on a rock, and next to it---'god  is love'. Lots of 'Support Our Troops' signs over roadside taverns, and we got hung up behind a Ford Taurus with a Christian fish, an Am. flag and a Mickey Mouse head on the antenna. The full catastrophe. And the car was white to boot.

Gosh is love.

Support Our Troupes.

We went on yab-gabbering down the hill, across mesas (I've always loved the sagebrush forever). It rained on and off and I fell into a funk of long ago kid blues driving around Washington State with my dad when I was 9. Hadn't felt that in a long time. Kinda sucked, but I liked getting in touch with it. Towns named Surprise, El Mirage engendered jokes:  Swedish deep tissue mirage; exclamatory suburbs named Ennui! Aloof! Exclusive!

Came back through the stink of Glendale railroads and power plants, and back to Robrt Pela's for a fab party of Phoenix folks. No one loves Phoenix which makes me like it all the more :) It's all about the earth of it anyway for me: the dirt and palo verde, the red stones and beat-to-fuck saguaros of the barrios.

Thursday, Sept. 25th: Tempe

Today I've learned that Tempe is not to be pronounced as the soy bean product, but rather as if someone out of work desired a temporary position. Thus, they might feel 'tempe' as in tempie. The murder of Spanish knows no end. It all began with Vallejo in my youth. I don't remember who, but one of my many aunts once referred to it as "Valley Joe". I must admit my own culpability as my father once asked me to find San Jose on a map. As I looked for San Hozay, all I could find in its place was some place called San Joe's. The worst was an early boyfriend's mother who raved about her visit to "Pube-lo", CO.

Reading in Tempe was similar to Phoenix--small but good. There was an earnest young kid who wanted to be the next Kerouac, but in general ASU doesn't seem to be a terribly intellectual school. Robrt's boyfriend Todd suggested we go to a restaurant called Fate. Since you really can't say no to fate, we went. Interesting place. It's a hip little restaurant run by this little cool kat chinese dude out of an old house downtown. He's like 30, very lowkey and not at all savvy, and yet he gets endless attention as changing the culinary landscape of Phoenix with his Asian fusion fare. I like to see successful people who aren't hideously ambitious, and he was one for sure. He was mostly concerned with the new cigarette laws. He likes cigarettes. Nowhere towns are the only place for true hipsters. It's all relative. You can't be hip in a hip city; you can only be ridiculous or aloof.

Friday, Sept. 26th: Tucson

We headed off to Tucson today, after Todd gave Billy a makeover with the sharpie. He's now got a sort of uni-brow as well as black nail polish and eyeliner.

Southern AZ is much prettier, greener, funkier, more poetic in general than Phoenix. Picacho Peak, a big butte, gave me a sublime slap I'd missed since Palm Springs.

We made it to Rich's place, which is an adobe structure way out in the desert north of town. The desert here really is a forest, very lush. Felice and I are now off to Antigone for a reading.

More later......

Antigone Reading was a huge success, with over 30 people. It will grow like a fish story to several thousand in time, I'm sure, but let's at least start out accurately.

Felice and I both read, people asked lots of questions, food and beverages were served. Nice community of people here in Tucson.  They all know each other and seem very likeable. Afterward, we went out to the Congress Hotel, which is a bar and music place. It's a cool old hotel, famous for Dillinger shootout or something like that. It's down near the train tracks, which are active with lots of trains, and I like trains.

Saturday, Sept. 27th: Tucson

Had lunch in a timewarp Grateful Dead veggie place called Oasis, complete with Jerry as guitar-toting angel mural, along with other large murals of rose-clad skulls, and one with multi-colored Jerry bears in a paradisiacal flower-ful setting which was the best evocation of acid I've seen in years. From there, it was off to the library where I taught a writing workshop. Sixteen people showed up and we did memoir writing, focusing mostly on our first memory. People got into it. The highlights: a young black woman recalling sitting on Santa's lap, completely baffled how anyone could believe in a fat old white man going around giving everyone gifts; and one guy's vision from the crib  of golden sunlight and his mother's blond perm as a sorry approximation of it.

Rich had a big party for us tonight. It was basically dudes in the desert drinking too much beer, but since they were queer they chatted a lot more about who they were and what they felt. Rich is a great host. He's very into dogs, and very lowkey. Has a 300-year old Saguaro in his front yard. He's very cheerful and earthy, reminds me of my brother, Brian.

Sunday, Sept. 28th: Tucson

Tucson  is not a very Asian town, which is odd for me after living in LA all these years and working almost completely with Asian kids in my tutoring business. So we went out for dim sum and met a nice kid who waited our table and told us about his life here after leaving Hong Kong.

We did a reading at the library with just 7 folks, so we have clearly now saturated Tucson. Rich and I went over to KXCI Community Radio after the reading and talked up the book and played my Pansy Division song, "Denny". I like radio, you get to just BS and watch radio people, who are sort of amazingly confident and efficient and expeditious.

We wandered Tucson's wide soulless boulevards on our way to David Gillmore's coming out party for his grand piano. There I met Maurice, a fab character and ceramicist who has been in Tucson since the 50s, as well as an interesting drag queen named Sandy (aka Helvetica Bold).

Monday, Sept. 29th: Tucson

John Brennan took me out to the Tucson Desert Museum in  Saguaro National Park. Tucson is weird. It is the greenest desert you'll ever see, very bizarre--a literal forest of cacti. The museum was full of caged snakes and toads and animals in natural habitats:  coati, javelinas, ocelotes, bobcats, bears and mountain lions. I was humored by the constant printing of the word "fishes" throughout the display, as there is no such word. Tutoring has made me a grammarian!

 John and I wrote Linda Ronstadt limericks in the guest book, as she's a native celeb of these parts. The museum had a fake cavern, with cement stalactites and stalagmites. Caverns are some kind of mouth fascination I think. Open your mouth and look in the mirror and you will see a red version of a cavern. If  you've got a serious infection, it may more closely approximate the limestone version.

John dropped me off at Borders where I signed and met a very cool kid who worked there. He and his manager explained things about Borders that would chill your spine (selling shelfspace to the highest bidder like a grocery store). They had a funny cartoon they were passing around: Guy in a drive-thru booth, with McBorders sign overhead, saying, "Tom Clancy with that?"

Tuesday, Sept. 30th: Tucson

I spent the day on buses attempting to reach my rent-a-car connection. I like buses, it's the best way to learn a city. Tucson is massive and spread out in an LA sorta way, but minus any kind of glitz.

I did an interview with Raj Ayyer of Gaytoday.com, which went well, thanks to his great questions.  You can see it at:

http://gaytoday.com/interview/100103in.asp

The evening ended with a visit to Maurice's ceramics studio where Rich and I viewed his unique Japanese-inspired funerary urns, as well as his massive collection of art from all over the world, including a wall of masks  he talks to each day. Turns out he started the ceramics program at UofA. He had great stories about his early years traveling Asia, and at 76 has that child-like quality that only artists and monks seem to retain with the years. He gave me one of his little ceramic Ganeshes for my trip. Dig that cat!

Wednesday, Oct. 1st: Tucson-El Paso

I cut out of Tucson, stopping for coffee on 4th Ave. among the excessively-tattooed boho crowd, and headed east to El Paso, with plans to stop along the way at the Chiricahua National Monument, where I got that high wind nowhere feel among the silent rock towers and pine trees.

Then I drove lonely into New Mexico listening to Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. And sure enough when I crossed the border, there was a weird purple line across the sky. Last time I visited New Mexico, it buzzed for eight days. The sun went down and the fields went yellow under a purple sky, while the ugly black anachronistic Keystone Cop New Mexico state trooper cars lurked like beetles.

Pretty soon there were signs saying: "Dust storms may exist next 15 miles." I should think they would 'occur,' but in New Mexico such things exist.

Reaching Texas, the hubris was immediately apparent in giant 3-dimensional lone stars on both sides of the freeway. Not long after, a belching factory coughed so much soot into the sky I was sure the building must be on fire. Alas, it's just The Clean Air Act Texas-style. At night, the city looked like the gates of hell with all those belching smokestacks, and its big, bright streetlights illuminating the barely-flowing Rio Grande (Styx?), not to mention half of residential Juarez on the other side.

I started to like the place immediately. Something about the slap of reality painted a sublime picture after the prettied-up facade of most American cities. The border is disturbing. There is no dignity in fencing people out, but there is dignity in trying to get through. Since the border is a human creation, and dignity is the ultimate expression of the human condition, such a border is a bad idea and more or less cruel and unusual, and clearly inhumane.

Being on this side, I found one of those soulless freeway motels (tons of empty rooms with views of Mexican shacks on the opposite hills) and then headed downtown to hand out postcards at the gay bars. I met a sweet Alaskan Eskimo girl who sorta took me in and proceeded to promote my reading among her friends and the bar's patrons. The kindness of strangers. And she was having problems with her 'papers'. Though she was a US citizen, born in Alaska, she'd been raised in Mexico and so was 'suspect' and required to prove her citizenship. Sheesh.

Thursday, Oct. 2nd: El Paso

I made a visit to Univ of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), hunting for the gay and lesbian student office to post some flyers, but there was no such animal. I wandered around as it has some very cool architecture. I couldn't figure out what it was. It looked sort of like Tibetan monastery architecture, with those huge tapering towers crowned by squared tiled roofs. But that seemed absurd in Texas. I figured maybe it was some kind of old Texas fortress thing or Alamo fantasy.

I found out later at the reading from the BN store manager. She explained it was Bhutanese architecture and gave me a book to look at. Geez, I wasn't far off. Some lady, back in 1914, who had seen pictures of Bhutan in a Natl. Geo., was hired to design UTEP's buildings and chose this style as she felt the blasted parched rocky mountainous landscape of El Paso looked like the dry side of the Himalayas.

The reading (I should say signing as this BN does not do readings I found out on arrival) turned out to be yours truly sitting at a table at the very entrance to the store. I felt like Hillary Clinton, minus the name recognition, Senate seat, famous husband and ovaries.

I met some nice locals all the same, and one funny Irish lady who related a few new Irish terms I hadn't heard from my plethora of Irish aunts while growing up: Irish curtains are bags around the eyes, and two-toilet Irish describes Irish folks who are putting on airs. She also told me that WOP stands for WithOut Papers. I never knew that. Why do latin people always have to have papers?

This lady turned out to be part of a writing group so selling her a book may plant a nice seed in El Paso, along with those planted among the gay folk who invited me out to bars. One guy said in all sincerity, "You're home here," which touched me. One of the greatest things about being queer is that you really do have a family wherever you go (especially in smaller cities).

Friday, Oct. 3rd: El Paso-Albuquerque

I'll miss El Paso and its ghosts--abandoned warehouses and 1930s-style downtown of anachronistic dept. stores and a city park that reminded me of Galway, Ireland, where I once met a drunk who claimed he knew Ronald Reagan from way back when Ronnie was a wee Irish lad gamboling about the streets of Galway. A ghost sure thing. Bhutan and the west coast of Ireland, all in a blighted Texas town.

The journey north into New Mexico was heightened by rain and lightning and brooding purple mountains enshrouded in clouds, leading eventually into Albuquerque where I found the inimitable Tin Do at the Southwest Gate of the ALB Sunport, as they call the airport. We headed into town and up to Santa Fe to stay with his friends Luke and Sarah and their sweet little daughter Leila, who is 2 and points at the moon and shouts, "Luna!" She also is obsessed with a doll, chanting "baby, baby, baby," as well as a little wooden Thai buddha which gets the long drawn-out "Buuuuuuddha" treatment.

Saturday, Oct. 4th: Albuquerque

Brothers and Sisters Bookstore is a great store, run by goddess Ruth Jimenez who made a great effort promoting the reading via their website, the papers, posters, etc. There's also a vegan cafe attached to the place with great food. We had a small group, but lively, with lots of questions, and sold some books. Everyone who works there was way cool. A great store all in all. It's near Central Ave, which runs by the university, and reminds me a lot of Broadway/Capitol Hill in Seattle, with the requisite coffee shops, thrift shops, etc. Every American city is frighteningly similar these days. We saw some t-shirts with Apache warriors pictured on them under the caption: "Homeland Security:  Fighting Terrorism since 1492."

Sunday, Oct. 5th: Santa Fe

A strange city to say the least. A town really. Wandered the streets and looked at all the Indian, fauvist and impressionist knock-off art. It's hard to take this city seriously. It all seems rather tired and insignificant and so exploitive it's almost repulsive. One store was called "Poem". Of course, it sold anything but poetry:  candles, cards, soap. Walking around the plaza, past the Indian market, how can you not feel shame to watch the white folks pick among the turquoise, nothing better to do with their leisure than to spend their vacations buying and consuming? I just looked at the Indians, who stoically wouldn't let you know what they were thinking.

Read at Borders and met the assorted artists, hikers and ex-hippies that populate the place. Nice folks generally, mellow and kind. The staff was gungho for the book, making me feel they'll push it when I'm gone, which is the real point of readings I'm finding.

We went to a horrible gay bar that was attempting to out-LA LA. Walls of rain and 5-foot backlit petri dishes of glupey nothing moving about. Downstairs were giant mock sea anenomes puckered on the walls, all bathed in a sea of terribly unoriginal techno music. In all its tawdriness, at least it was real. I think.

Monday, Oct. 6th: Santa Fe - Denver

Bid farewell to the hippie couple and their baby,  who has dubbed me 'email guy' as I kept checking my emails, tour-slave that I am. Tin was really great to be with and I was missing him a lot as soon as I hit the road. We're like a hand and glove as they say.

Drove up through Taos, which is overrun by tourists as well. Uggh. The mountains, spotted with bright yellow slopes of aspen, were beautiful as were the enormous high meadows which stretched for dozens of miles. I saw a big Tibetan stupa festooned with multi-colored prayer flags far off in one meadow, under the purple/green mts splotched with aspen gold and yellow. Pretty soon, the aspens were everywhere, coming right down to the highway like curious animals to watch the cars go past. North of Taos, the tourists vanish and it's just some agriculture, scattered adobes and blighted little towns. Into Colorado, and the towns get bigger and more blighted, full of Indians and abandoned weed-choked gas stations. This is the real America I love.  Or maybe it's not real either, but it's got soul.

I met an old college friend in Denver, which seems fairly blasé as cities go. We had to drive all over to find some place to eat, finally settling for a Thai place, where we talked of old friends and I learned about the suicide of one of my fraternity brothers. He too was gay, but was unable to deal. This made me very sad, and I reflected on what an odd chapter that was in my life and how its brand of conformity and establishment-style myopic conservatism, privilege and entitlement actually kills people (kills its own even). I know why I turned my back on those people, though I've felt bad about it more than once. Well, I did it to survive.

Tuesday, Oct. 7th: Denver-Minnesota

I knew this was to be a long drive, so I set off and 'balled that jack' (as Kerouac would say) all the way to Worthington, Minnesota, just a few hours shy of Minneapolis. I liked the cottonwoods of Nebraska after the sulfur stink of industrial east Denver. Somewhere around Grand Island, the whole place just turned green and humid. It was weird-- it was real sudden. The west was over. Now there was water and green, green grass everywhere. I tired of the interstate and headed out onto backroads, enjoying the nowhere towns with their empty-boarded up farmhouses, old town halls and vanished economies. What a weird trajectory, the last 100 years in these places. It's like Willa Cather's Antonias and all them came, cleared the land, and then vanished, leaving behind all these endless fields of crops, sparing only the big cottonwoods which crowd the wide, flat rivers. Old rusted bridges, especially one crossing the Platte, made me ecstatic about rivers and trees, the assertion of the land in spite of all man's little vanities of agriculture and civilization. Passed through the Omaha Reservation, crowded with kids all dressed ghetto fabulous, playing basketball or loitering at the service station. As for those 100 years, what a shock these people have been subjected to.  Whatever this place was is almost completely gone, the road scattered with dead spirit animals--I've seen coyotes, skunks, raccoons, badgers, porcupines. The American road is a holocaust of meat. "Cottonwood, wish me luck," I mutter, which is a line I stole from a Bukowski poem that ends with 'Mockingbird, wish me luck.' I always liked the sound of that, but prefer trees, so it's 'Cottonwood, wish me luck,' for me.  And they always do.

Now I'm in some sorry little motel in one of those freeway towns that make even a loner like me lonely. Good night dear reader.

Wednesday, Oct. 8th:  Minneapolis

"Donny's  Birthday." That's a line from my grandfather's diary, referring to his son, my Dad. It was the only mention of him in his diary which he kept on his long trip back from India in 1945, where he'd sustained what resulted in fatal wounds ultimately. My father and I read the diary together one afternoon, and it was one of the nicest times I've spent with my Dad. And today really is my Dad's birthday.

Arrived in fabulous Minh, which is what I call it cuz I'm lazy and that's Tin's middle name and Minneapolis is just too many syllables. Post-modernism is destroying language and turning everything into acronyms anyway (or Viet middle names as the case may be). Even Pomo has been abbreviated. But Pomo is really a CA Indian tribe. I digress, --so pomo of me.

St. Mark (Mark Loftstrom), who is seriously a saint when it comes to booking events in Minh, has lined up a full schedule, and it begins the moment I arrive to a little cocktail party at his house, featuring writers, MPR and local radio people, friends, cool trans people and activists. He's cooked up flyers, bookmarks, and all manner of events:  A radio interview, a visit to a gbltq after-school program, a Borders reading, a speech for Natl. Coming Out Day luncheon at the convention center, a book party at Jetset nightclub, and a panel discussion for the Rake Festival (Rake is a local magazine).

We head off after the cocktail party to Jetset to scope out the space for our party. It's an interesting bar: Rectangular and minimalist, it looks like an art gallery, and it's housed in an old brick building--reminds me of the old part of Portland, OR. It's hip in an NYC way, with big globed fixtures bathing the rectangular space in muted yellow light, and there are 60s international style benches and round tables scattered about. It's very subtle retro for the sophisticated crowd. What I especially like is that it's a queer space without the horrible techno beat. There is no dance floor and it's all about ambience. It's a very powerful space in a way which complicates our plans. There's no way to have a party in this place without subsuming it to the established tone and mood it's assumed, care of the very sweet owners, Peter and Susan. A straight-up reading would never work, and so the Jetset enigma begins.

Thursday, Oct. 9th: Minneapolis

We took the scenic route along the Mississippi (more syllables), with its superlative fall color, arriving to KFAI radio studio where I was interviewed for Write-on Radio by Lynette and Jules. Jules is a poet so she invited me to read poetry, while Lynette played my Pansy Division song ('Denny' is turning out to be a great complement to my radio pieces) and asked insightful questions about writing fiction from a poetic foundation, and what the hell coming out is all about in the current culture. Since it's National  Coming Out Week, Minh events will all be about coming out. This is easy in terms of my book, so it's gonna be a nice ride and a good spin for it on this leg of the tour. The last question today and always will be:  "So tell us about the Jetset party?" Neither Mark nor I have any clue what it will  be, so we dodge around, invoking Yoko Ono, Christo, etc. We make things up.

Ventured up to Uptown, the hip area, which is friendly and delightfully free of attitude. Then we headed over to District 202, which is a queer community center for high school kids. Thanks to a grant from Target, they bought 20 books right off and gave each kid one who attended our little coming out discussion, which went swimmingly. I love kids and teaching and these kids reminded me why. Lots of them are the only kids in their schools who are out and their courage is really impressive and a little heart-breaking. The saddest part for me was hearing how so many teachers tolerate other students teasing queer kids. I asked them which queer books had an effect on them, and the one that was mentioned more than any other was Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. Gotta read that.

That night, I read at Borders to a group of about 10. Tell us about Jetset! Uh.......

Friday, Oct. 10th: Minneapolis

Today is the big day, gotta speak at National Coming Out Day Luncheon, 500 people, and not my usual crowd. I'm a bit wrecked, but less than I should be it seems as I feel quite calm. Hell, I told the truth in my book and so it's easy to talk about. That's what's cool about the truth. Just stay in your heart and deliver it and it takes care of itself. It really is that simple. There were four speakers (projected on video screens to boot-Yikes!): Sandi Dubowski who made the film 'Trembling Before G-d'; Lina Knox,  a local college student; and Randi Reinart, a mother of a gay son. Sandi was funny and warm; Lina was hilariously self-deprecating and quirky, saying things like "I took up the trumpet--I guess to attract girls." Randi spoke about her son and made us all tear up, as Moms testifying about love for their children always will. She now gets arrested fairly often with her son, which brought cheers and laughter because she's not the kind of lady who would have ever been arrested if her son wasn't a gay activist. I spoke last and talked about how coming  out is an act of love, healing and connection, that it strengthens families as Randi so poignantly expressed and as my book illustrates. I read a little bit and ended with Harry Hay's oft-quoted line that 'tis a gift to be gay,' which I completely agree with.

We handed out dozens of bookmark invites to Jetset, even though we have no idea what we're inviting them to. We wound down by walking around Lake of the Isles, which is surrounded by big old houses and trees, attempting to figure out Jetset. Shall we print out quotes from the book? Plaster the walls with my book postcards and stickers, which both feature the book cover? It's a club-- we can always do nothing, and no one will notice: a truly minimalist book party. Meanwhile, we walked among the geese and the fecundity of Minnesota, so alien to a desert habitué such as my recent self. Observation: Minh is the only city I've ever been to that has soap dispensers in its porta-potties.

Had a nice evening on Vaughn's roof, watching the pink/purple sunset (I lucked into unseasonably warm weather up here), talking about identity and the various personalities of cities--Missoula, SF, LA, Minh (all the while annoying Vaughn and Jeremy with requests for Jetset ideas). Headed over to Walker Art Center,  which has a monthly party that I lucked into. I hadn't had a chance to visit an art museum on my trip until now, and having heard about the Walker, I was excited and almost cried at how beautiful some of the contemporary art was. If you pay attention, I think you can feel the place from which the art piece was created and it's devastatingly intense when you do.

Saturday, Oct. 11th: Minneapolis

Today it rained. We must figure out Jetset, and so we end up in a flurry of activity, buying tape, felt pens, a fish bowl, poster board, groceries, Halloween candy, and fortune cookies with coming out phrases printed on the fortunes. It is after all billed as True Colors, a celebration of Natl. Coming Out Day. What would Yoko do? Just give queers a chance? Billy has been drafted to perform as well and seems cooperative.

We float into Jetset, late of course, hampered by traffic and confusion right up to the last minute. We no longer cared if anyone came--we had a very interesting canvas to work with and almost total freedom to do whatever we wanted. We taped a line of postcards all along one long, white brick wall, put out trays of fortune cookies, chips and candies and drink menus named for characters in the book (Vitriolic Vince, Naive Neill, Angelic Anita and Perfect Peter). We set up the books and waited. Folks showed up and we chatted away and drank too much and pretty soon books were sold and raffled, while polaroids punctuated the oh-so-understated ambience (the photos joined the postcards up on the wall). The club filled to capacity, when somewhere around my 6th beer, I had a vision of my San Francisco friend, Willie, and it turned out to really be him! What a surprise! We jumped around a bit and it was soon time to wrap it and get out of there. I grabbed Billy (I'm not sure this is the punkest or raviest of towns--they don't really get Billy). I feel like a CA whack-job here now and again, but no one judges me for it. I feel kinda lucky, I do think there is a freedom out west that slowly seeps away as you move east. CA is alright, though kinda sad how it's being swallowed whole. We rolled into the cool inky eve and ended up drinking Thai martinis (very spicy) at a Thai afterhours club/restaurant and were soon swallowed by the night.

Sunday, Oct. 12th: Minneapolis

Willie headed to Madison, where I'll catch up with him Tuesday when I read at Room of One's Own Bookstore. Mark and I went down to the Loft Art Center to meet poet Greg Hewitt and do the panel discussion on Gay Writing in the new media atmosphere of Queer as Folk, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will and Grace. I'm so anti-pop culture I haven't even seen any of these programs but winged it successfully off previews and the constant blather about them. It was interesting--Greg's a brilliant guy and we ended up talking mostly about literature and gay consciousness, and it was a lively afternoon.

I'm now officially done in Minh! For relief, we go over to Ruminator in St. Paul, which is THE independent I was unable to get a reading at as a first-time unknown novelist. What is perhaps the coolest news I've received came when Mark asked if they had my book. "No," was the answer, "but we had 6--they sold out, and we've ordered more." :)

Monday, Oct. 13th: Minneapolis

Today is a day off, and motivated by the Ruminator Blessing, I venture to Amazon  Books, where they happily buy a stack of books. Then I head over to Birchbark Books because it's the store Louise Erdrich owns and Isaac loves her books, so I must visit and get him something. Of course, I hope she is there, but of course she isn't. The lady at the counter mentions Louise has signed copies of her latest books there and I notice one is of her poetry, which I've been unable to find. Perfect for Isaac. The lady then leans over and says, if you'd like Louise to add a little personal note to it, she just walked in. There she was with her husband and baby girl. She signed it 'Dear Isaac' which really made me happy because Isaac has been such a good friend and I know this will surprise and elate him. :)

I also visited Greywolf Press where the executive editor invited me into her office for a chat. She was so warm and sweet, and then gave me a pile of books, one of which, I happily noticed, had a friend of mine's essay in it. I took a drive through old St. Paul, which has that old world Catholic working class feel to it, and which made me think about how schizoid Am. catholics are, attempting to make peace with the Protestant work ethic. They don't always pull it off, god bless 'em, --I can always tell a catholic town, and it's weirdly homey to me.

This is a beautiful place up here, with all its trees, lack of traffic and crowds, the big river we walked along, the lakes, and always the wonder of what was it like before the whiteman came. The sky bridges remind you of the harsh winter and the big sky itself seems to hold you so that you aren't in the same place as the rest of America. It's weirdly separate here, friendly, peaceful, very little attitude, lots of political stickers on cars. It doesn't seem as dumb as the rest of America. I like Minh, will definitely come back. We ended the day with Vaughn and Jeremy as Mark wanted to have a little going-away party. We talked about religion and somatics and depression. These guys are great intellects without being overly rational or brainy. Some of the best conversations I've had on this trip. Mark has been like a brother in the best sense of the word, and I've always had a great regard for true brothers. And all this because I met a guy named Shaun through another guy named Donn who was in Queer Dharma with me, which was a product of Buddhist practice, which came to me through the blessed window of SF where everything is possible for the lost youth of America---and just like the quote I start my book with, and which comes from the indigenous people of this very region: "Sometimes I go about pitying myself, when all the time I am carried on great wings across the sky." Always. They carried me here. I feel immensely grateful today.

Tuesday, Oct. 14th: Madison

The drive across Wisconsin is beautiful, among all the silos and golden trees. Almost no traffic, but lots of state troopers and signs for CHEESE; Another for a fishing museum. But the most memorable sign: Cruisin' Chubbies Gentlemen's Club.

Madison is in the middle of pretty much nowhere, and I pulled off onto the big ugly stripmall boulevard that leads into town, where I found Borders. I stopped and signed books there as there's a men's group that is going to be reading my book soon. I bought cds (an expensive habit after being a devoted burner back home, but these drives demand it and create auditory cravings). Nirvana Unplugged and Seal, along with Aretha and Joni swallowed what cash I had. I then went off to James house, after tailing a little car with stickers: 'I'm the product of a catholic upbringing', NIN, a Darwin fish humping a xtian fish.

James house turns out to be a nice little old farm house in the vegan district of town. These houses are so earnest with their cellars and dormer windows. It's like they're sitting up straight at the table. But it was cold, and James' dog Sophie was a shivering puppy of teething exuberance as I humped my bags up the steps, and the world got all Kerouac-y in that wintery way of sad old broken down Chryslers in the cold, covered in falling yellow leaves on pot-holed streets with no sidewalks and cyclone fences and all manner of sad how-will-we-pay-the-heating-bill jacketed lost souls scurrying for warmth and liquor and love.

James used to live in SF, but  is from Wisc. and wants to live on a farm now in his dotage (41 like me, a couple of dotes). Willie was there too, high energy Willie who dragged me all around town and the U, showing me everything, a regular dingledodie in the grand Kerouac tradition, complete with stops for pints of beer. I gained a new appreciation for the goodness of Willie. :)

The reading proved ghostly, with an audience of profoundly single digits. The kindly and interesting proprietress was apologetic and mystified as she claimed she'd sold two books that very day. The Mysteries of book readings know no parameters and are one of the great koans of the literary life. We laughed.  If the book is selling, what me worry about attendance. Other than I love to read to people. I'll read to walls and cats and imaginary friends. Even Billy if I must!

We ate fish, and next morning more vegan hippie food. It's cold, I'm here less than 20 hours, with no friends ahead for 3 days. Madison, sadison.

Wednesday, Oct. 15th: Milwaukee

Another fast visit, I plow into Milwaukee and head straight for the bookstore where I'll be reading--Outwords. The owner Carl is very cool, and after hearing me rave about Milwaukee's treeful and architectural beauty, gets on the phone and obtains a discount room for me at a mansion B&B. I head out into town to flyer and wander, hitting UW up the street and then a gentrifying neighborhood full of bars and used record stores, with coffee shops beginning to show up among the dilapidated section 8s. It's the same everywhere.

Walking back across the river, running late and sweating in the cold air, I ran across 3 little Asian boys in tae kwon do outfits, dodging through pedestrians, and all stress vanished.

I raced over to the Kilbourn House, dropped off my junk, and skidded into the reading without a moment to lose. This was one of those perfect, intimate readings--10 or 11 guys, all readers, 7  bought the book! I read with Mark Kendrick,  author of Desert Sons and Into This World We're Thrown. He's a  real nice guy and we were a good pair to read together as he writes about struggling to come out and first love as well. We traded books and arranged to see each other in Chicago at my reading there. A sweet guy from the reading took me on a tour of the bars and city and then I returned to the lovely New Orleans-style haunted house elegance of the Kilbourn where I slept in a very comfortable bed, worthy of a vampire.

Thursday, Oct. 16th: Chicago

I drove down to visit with my old high school friend Robin and her 9 chows in the burbs north of Chicago. She does dog rescue. We bopped around a bit before I had to head into town for my reading at the Gerber-Hart Library up near Loyola University. I don't know anyone in Chicago, so I go down to sign books at Unabridged where I meet some nice folks who work there. Then I go off to burn time in a coffeeshop before the reading, which is kinda sad as Chicago has fewer trees than I was getting used to in Minh and Milwaukee. It's a big beast of a city like LA and that's never fun to be stuck in alone--unless I'm depressed. Then I can have a big old existential time of it. But this trip is all about connection, and I'm thru with my mopin about, so I'm just treading water in Chicago. The reading is small, but like most small readings, the discussion turns lively and goes on for more than an hour. Jonathan Dixon helped me set it up and we had a nice chat in the coffeeshop. He is the managing editor of Newtown Writers, which has published a few of my stories, and thanks to him, I found this venue.

I'm due in Kalamazoo for a noon event next day, so I blow out of Chicago after only 5 hours, bidding Jonathan goodbye in a bar, and then getting bogged down in construction and traffic all the way out and through Indiana, before reaching Michigan where the whole urban mess simply vanishes and deer carcasses begin to appear on the shoulders of the road. Cold comfort.

Kalamazoo is Joe and Maria and little Sam and Matilda. I arrive about 1 am and Joe and I drink beer and rap (after child-viewing of course--Sam and Matilda all bundled up in their little beds in the Michigan cold). Maria, who's a designer, has outdone herself with this 50s-era house. It is 'Far From Heaven' to a tee, and what's funnier is Sam at play in it. But that's tomorrow.....

Friday, Oct. 17th: Kalamazoo

Sam is the neatest child you will ever meet and sweet as pumpkin pie. He's 7, knows where everything is and goes and gets things and then returns them by tiptoe to their exact spot. What can I say, the boy is devoted to his Mom. Matilda is 5 and playful, she likes to be swung around, teased and chased. Two of the sweetest kids I've ever met. Truly. We go off to the library for an event there, which is well-attended--about 20 people--with teachers, counselors, gay folk, and a sweet man named Tom who is a professor of medieval history and all-around interesting guy, who told me about the wolves that have come down across the ice from the upper peninsula (one was even found south of Chicago).

I was asked to lecture on gay lit, which I'm hardly an authority on, but I'm good at getting people to talk, so I gave them an outline and let them have at me and each other. Terry, who organized the event wants me to come back (as did the high school counselors), and I'd love to as this was a perfect event and a great community, not to mention that they came up  with the best designed flyers and posters to appear on my tour to date.

Joe, Marie and me, et al. went off for a nice hike in the woods, with Sam playing raptor and running like a madman down steep, leafy hillsides, until he gleefully spilled. He showed me his 'talons,' forming his hands into claws, and told me he was an eagle. And he means it, and on some level I believe him. He's very present, very aware for a little kid, very imaginative, talks to himself a lot, even has his own sound, which is kind of a low hum he accompanies himself with. Matilda is more social, likes to get a reaction, likes to try new things and drag you along. She too likes to fall down. I like kids who like to fall down. They're both happy little tykes, I really like them a lot.

Saturday, Oct. 18th: Kalamazoo

I'm not used to getting up so early,  but off we go again at 10 am. Joe is like Mark in Minh:  he knows my schedule, which he pretty much put together. Kindness of  strangers is one thing, generosity of friends kinda takes my breath away. Like Mark, Joe and Maria (I used to work with them in SF 10 yrs ago--Joe's a writer; Maria's a designer) have put a lot of time into promoting me, putting out flyers, contacting folks. Joe even pitched me to the  local paper, the Gazette--and thanks to him, they decided to do a front page article on National Coming Out Week, so when I arrived, I saw myself quoted and the cover of my book prominently displayed  in the newspaper.

To Kalamazoo College we go (one of about 5 colleges in this small city), with bagels and juice to teach a writing workshop to Kaleidoscope, a queer student group, and other students of writing. There are only 1300 students here, but appears even here kids can come out and feel OK about it. I had these ten lively characters write about coming out, and as they were a bright, motivated group, they came up with great, creative stories, which we read to each other. They gave me a teddy bear which I gave to Sam as he was eyeing it pretty intensely as he explained to me how anatomically incorrect the eagle talons were on a small sculpture in the library.

We then rushed across town to Athena Bookshop, where I did a signing. It was kinda funny. They had this big chair by a fireplace and people would come in and chat, buy a book, and leave. Then more would drift in. Another Hillary Clinton event, minus the lines out the door. But I got on their bestseller list, so that was nice :)

Sunday, Oct. 19th: Kalamazoo

We went out to Lake Michigan and played in the dunes, chasing Sam and Matilda until they did face plants, spitting up sand and rolling like sow bugs. We attempted to fly a kite, but between me and Joe, we were unable to do more than get it up into the air long enough for it dive headfirst into the sand. We struggled with the instructions, marveling at the model on the cover who was wearing a braided mullet. I've never seen such a thing, not even on mullet.com.

The freeway out here has quotes from God. It's sort of a 'Got Milk' kinda ad campaign for biblebangers: "I can think of ten things carved in stone" -- God. How they denigrate their own deity. A new level of spiritual bankruptcy. Meanwhile, families drive about, back and forth, filling minimart lots with whines and cackles. Am. families are strange. They're like little gaggles of hunter/gatherers, searching for entertainment. They wander about in little vans grubbing for it.

We drove home through the countryside, small Michigan towns, including notorious Benton Harbor and St. Joe, small towns where there have been race riots. Joe worked on the paper here at one time and mentioned the weirdness of how segregated it was and told me how 'we used to hang out here, and over there, etc.' 'Who's we?' I asked. One of the best answers to that question then dropped from Joe's droll lips: "You know, wherever you go, there's a 'we'". I'll say, and I'm starting to lose track. For  now, its our little family--Sam singing to his plastic animals in the far back of the minivan; Matilda moaning for the bathroom; Maria--good mom that she is--telling her she can make it, while badgering Joe to speed up. Joe and I roll our eyes up front and onward we go, marveling at the plethora of Halloween decorations,  including the oddest I've ever seen: Six or seven life-size sheet ghosts dancing in a circle on someone's front lawn. Dance death dance.

Monday, Oct. 20th: Kent State

I got up and attempted to get an early start, which I seem incapable of accomplishing. Joe calls me an old lady, but all the old ladies I know are prompt. I've always been slow. And it's cold. Cold, slow and facing another long drive into the endless Midwest. I'm noticing that the trees are never very big out here--I don't know whether this is because these Midwestern trees are second growth or because these species don't grow large. I'm missing the big fat trunks of CA oaks and pines and redwoods, and the dry dirt and the sagebrush, etc. Things are getting dark and wet out here, and the brick is kinda sad. Never thought I'd miss stucco. Well, I don't really. I miss the dry.

Kent State is a monster of a campus, but the super sweet Steven Harbaugh (Sec. of Pride Kent who set up the event after finding my website online--resourceful dude, this Steven) meets me out front and takes me for a bite and gets me all set up. And he delivered. He did flyers, listed it everywhere, and when we got started there were 30 people in the room. I read from the book and then we had a lively discussion about gay marriage, Howard Dean, homophobia and coming out in high school. There were lots of straight kids there, many who call themselves allies, and others visiting from the Human Sexuality course. Bridget and --damn, he's gonna hate me for losing his name! (maybe he'll email and tell me so I can fix this!)--took me on a walk to the memorial for the 4 students slain by the National Guard in 1970. In typical American fashion, they've built a parking lot over the sacred ground--think Joni Mitchell and pave paradise--where the students were shot and killed. At the exact spots were these weird lights, sorta like what you'd see along a walkway. If someone didn't tell you, you'd have no clue what was going on, and you might even get mad because they're taking up  parking spaces. Uggh. Spiritual bankruptcy strikes again. Up the hill, there is a more formal sculpture and a bell that is rung on May 4th to memorialize what happened. As these students informed me, Kent State is still a very political campus, with a lot of anti-war activity, a domestic partnership movement for faculty members and even Young Republicans and Christian groups which these queer students are involved in so as not to get left out. I was rather amazed by their presence of mind, since in my day most glbt people were either completely unwelcome in Repub. or Christian circles (if they even existed at all) or were too angry at the negative rhetoric these two institutions have consistently employed to go anywhere near them unless protesting. It's nice to see that these glbtq students are more pragmatic and determined as well as more visible and even tolerated in these traditionally homophobic groups. The world is changing, and these guys are a big part of that. I was really impressed with the members of Pride Kent, and happy to see you can be queer on campus,  which wasn't the case 20 years ago. I sound like an old man, but I sure felt like the kids are alright after leaving Kent.

Tuesday, Oct. 21st: Shippensburg, PA

Into PA I go, and so begins the winding roads through beautiful fall color and rolling mts, but also the advent of heavy truck traffic and endless road construction. I'm on my way to Karl Woelz's house, deep in the heart of nowhere, Amish country. He's living there with his partner teaching English at Shippensburg College. I get lost of course after leaving the turnpike because Karl doesn't know where he is, but I enjoy being lost as I'm used to it and get to see Amish folks Amishing around in hats and buggies. PA has been strange. I love these big lolling rivers and bridges, but there are always big belching factories nearby. The whole state is rife with these factory towns which really don't exist out west, so it's odd, like some other country.

I'm starving as usual because I can't eat freeway food and have been subsisting on pretzels and Fritos when I must partake of freeway fare since those are the only remotely non-lethal foods available. It's profoundly sad to watch the American diet in action on the road. Our Way of Life. McDonalds. Ay. Willful ignorance is not worth fighting for. I've lost more than 10 lbs already on this trip, and I have to laugh. Why has no one written the book on the Get-a-clue diet? If people just knew what they were eating, they'd starve themselves to svelteness as I'm doing. There's very little real food in America. What we're starved for is the truth and we keep misinterpreting it as french fries.

I find Shippensburg eventually and Karl, ensconced in Victorian splendor (which you can get cheap here as this town doesn't even have a coffee shop! But it's full of cool old houses and tight little streets). Karl and I take a walk over to campus where we meet an enormous baby named Howard and talk about M2M and other things (Karl edited M2M and that's pretty much how we became big email fans of each other's minds). Karl's partner Will arrives home and we all make dinner together intellectualizing about all manner of things. Good guys, and another ridiculously short visit--19 hours total--when I'd love to stay a week.

Wednesday, Oct. 22nd: New Haven

But we must 'To New Haven' to dump the car so I won't have to deal with it in NYC. Karl, lost as always, predicts a 7 hour trip, but it mercifully ends up only about 5, which is really my max at this point. I'm sick of all my cds and I've taken to speeding. Must regroup and take a deep breath and slow down.

Billy is a wreck. Not only does he refuse motels, such as the Comfort Inn at Kent State--continental breakfast don't you know (read: donuts--North Am. continent apparently)--but I accidentally left him in the trunk thru Penn and he's furious. On top of that Sam called him Molly--Trebor's dolly, Molly! He got a big kick out of that. Sam did, not Billy.

Billy is currently on the floor of the car down in the alley in the 40 degree cold. I'm a bad parent.

I'm staying here at Loretta's and we had a nice time running around Yale and the streets of New Haven (a very nice town, and with that coastal energy that I've so missed--though it also means tailgating and aggressive driving. Yuck.) flyering for my reading Saturday. Loretta is another old SF friend, a great graphic designer and painter who has a wonderful loft with free heating (in New England no less, go figure). She also got me a gig at the Center for Buddhist Life at Yale, so I'll read to them Saturday night :) We ended eating falafels among the Yale students, who definitely have a high IQ vibe to them. I like the campus, the way it's all mixed up with the city. Thick as thieves, commerce and education in America.

Tomorrow, NYC.....

Thursday, Oct. 23rd: New York City

Took the train into NYC, a little intimidated by the hugeness and bustle. I don't care how big LA is, it's not NYC. I was pleasantly surprised by how warm and friendly everyone was, how easy it is to get around--train, subway, bus. I just wandered around from Grand Central all the way down into the village, taking it all in. Had to buy a hat, I was so cold--and being that I botched my recent haircut, I'm down to a severe skinhead/buddhist monk cut.

I had a bagel and watched an intellectually-tortured looking French boy write postcards home. People hocking things on the street, taxis yelling at cops, all manner of people mixed together and teeming through the streets --and everywhere smiles. This almost shocked me. People seem sincerely happy here. They aren't smiling at me per se, or anyone specifically, just generally. Everyone loves NY is clearly part of it. It's kinda sweet. It's not like LA and SF where if someone loves their city, it's somehow about them. NYC is too big for that. You know right off, you ain't nothing here. LA has that too, but NYC has it in spades, and it's a liberating thing to me: Anonymity is sweet. SF drove me nuts because it seemed like it wouldn't permit anonymity. I always felt hounded into being somebody there. Perhaps it was my youth or its limited size. Whatever the case, being no one is definitely where it's at if you're into freedom. Identity draws lines and limits.

NY is about NY itself, the thing. It's like everyone knows this city is an incredible achievement of the human spirit and so their love of it is kind of like being proud on some humanist level. There is a selflessness to it that is not apparent in other cities. Maybe it's all about 9-11, I don't know as I haven't been here in such a long time. I'll warn you right now, I can tell I'm under it's spell, so my impressions are tending toward the overly positive I'm sure. But there is an almost palpable feeling that everyone is in it together and that's a powerful feeling in a city, where I usually feel begrudgingly welcomed. It's not like I'm special here though. It's an impersonal welcome, like how a tree welcomes you. I prefer the manners of trees.

When I saw the Met Life building I thought of my father and began a poem. All highrises are tied to my father as he traveled a lot when I was a kid, and being in insurance, always worked in highrises. We were suburban kids, and so highrises became symbols of him--just as enigmatic, just as worldly and unfathomably engineered. We always asked him what floor he was on when he visited other cities: 10, 28, 36, etc. In NY, the numbers were always higher: 74! yippee. NY was the ultimate sculpture of father. Such an idea is like a ruin now, but it offers a sweet sadness as I wait on corners, blowing steam from my mouth, listening to Senegalese guys joking in French.

I meet up with my friend Bill, an actor/performer from SF days. Even after his long day at a desk, he walked me like a dog all over town, taking me out for a great Burrito (something he says is hard to find in NYC) cuz we used to eat burritos together all the time. It is true that the best burritos in the world are in SF--brown rice, tofu--ingredients LA can't seem to muster, unable as it is to overcome the traditional Mexican fare of lard, cheese and white rice. Well we found great burritos to rival SF's in Chelsea.

Bill delivers me to my radio date in the McGraw-Hill bldg. near Radio City for my little NYC city media experience: Through security and up to the 36th floor to the super high-tech Siriusoutq radio studios for the Derek and Romaine show, wherein we spoke at length about Billy; where I got a name like Trebor; a bit about the book; and once again, played the Pansy Division song, Denny. The Derek and Romaine Show follows a humorous talk show format, so it was very different from my other radio pieces and interesting that way. Billy got more attention than I did!

Down and out and onto the subway over to Columbia, where two blocks away live Melissa and Howard, a fab couple, progenitors of my greatest backpacking partner of all time, the inimitable Chris Geiger, who has surprised me over the years on 20-mile backpacking trips by packing each of the following illogical items at one time or another: oysters, a bottle of jug wine, a pineapple, a whole pumpkin pie--and once a formal outfit with tie for his girlfriend's birthday. We even hiked one whole day completely naked because our clothes had gotten soaked island-hopping through a lake. How we wandered SF as well in those early days of my attempts to write, drunk on Carlo Rossi burgundy, having feasted on spaghetti as it was all we could afford, and stopping by corner markets for 25cent cigarettes in the North Beach days before I came out and sadness haunted me like the fog. We drank endless angst-ful cups of coffee, read books at the Mechanics Library and took journeys to LA to visit his whackjob friend Ron, who carried his money in a coffee can, mailed things like shoes and plates (teaching us the PO will literally deliver anything with proper postage--at least back then) and made avocado pizzas--and when he had a baby, confused the child with his coffee habit to such an extent that the child screamed for coffee whenever it wanted anything: "Coffee, papa, coffee...whaaaaaa.." Chris has been a great friend, and when I came out, he took me to the Castro and said he'd be my boyfriend as arm-and-arm we walked through the neighborhood. May all the buddhas bless Chris.

Daydreaming on the subway, which is clean and efficient, and nothing like its reputation--much better than SF Muni on all counts. Out I tumbled, lost on streetcorners, asking which way is the Hudson?

Ensconced on Riverside Dr. I enjoyed the good company of Melissa and Howard, lively oddballs in their own right. Melissa reminded me of the date, and I realized it was my Mom's birthday, so she insisted I call, screaming happy birthday in the background--though they've never met. And so, I wished sweet Mom well, looking over the big river and its barges from 10-stories up, surrounded by all the buildings of New York which are my father. In time I said goodbye, and slept the sleep of the welcomed.

Friday, Oct. 24th: New York City

Art arrives for breakfast. How can you not delight in a man named Art who also collects it? :)

He insists I must 'To The Guggenheim' at once! to see the Rosenquist show. Off I go among the overcoated throng (no such thing in LA). Like a different tribe, they're all wrapped up and beautiful in that cold city way I miss. The Guggenheim is full of all sorts of people who know they are in NY and this is a for-real place. It's funny to watch the tourists', even the locals', super-awareness of where they are. Berkeley was like that, Yale is like that. You're on the top of the heaping ant hill of America and it wakes you up, makes you feel lucky, a little grateful. It floats around the streets here, that knowledge. This ain't Milwaukee, it ain't SF, LA, whereever.  It's NY.

I don't like pop art that much. I don't like the dissonance of it. Or as Loretta says: "Pop are is ABOUT". I've lost interest in 'about'. People ask me what my book is  'about'.  Who cares? It's like asking what a flower is 'about'.  It's the wrong question. The only good question has no reference point. It's just wonder. This all came clear 2 hours later in front of the Vishnu statue in the Met, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I liked Rosenquist's use of color and I like the idea of the President as cake. I also like the idea of the big spinning washing machine cycle of history in his Millennium series.  But pop art is sort of like religion--it asks you to believe certain things:  about history, change, image, collectivity, propaganda. I ain't a believer in anything and I hate being assumed into that, so I'm chomping at the bit which I always am at such a show.

Off to the Met, where I bring myself back to earth among Caravaggios and other late Renaissance painters, who I've come to really like over the years. I love the faces. If it's about anything, Mr. Rosenquist, it's about faces and what comes through them! All his faces were ads. Oh, who the hell am I to take him to task?

The Met is immense. I had to pick and choose. I went to the Modern Art section cuz I love abstracts, fauvists--even Impressionists (though they're like overplayed songs at this point) because they do not ask you to believe anything. I like the open-ended thing. Georgia O'Keefe gives me pangs for the desert I miss, Chagall reminds me we are all children. I love Chagall, always have.

On down to the Asian art rooms, where I catch myself looking for Cham Dynasty pieces from early Vietnam, and before I find them, realize that among these dimly lit warrens and caves, I'm looking for Tin. I miss  him and laugh at the silly ways I try to find him. I used to look for Gerardo among  pyramids in Mexico. How cornball. I wonder if anyone ever looks for me in Irish poetry? You'll  find me there  I think. I went to Ben Bulben to Yeat's grave--yikes, it freaked me out, and then in the church that looked creepily familiar, they spoke Gaelic. Sure enough and soon after I learned my line of Healeys came from Sligo.

I ran smack dab into the Vishnu, with one leg out--now I know  where Tibetan Tara came from. I love how androgynous the Buddhas  and Vedic gods are. Anyway, Vishnu erased both Caravaggio's faces and Rosenquist's ideas 'about' and sort of resolved everything into a point that is about nothing and everything all at the same time.

So I went downstairs and had an 11-dollar salad. If not for Vishnu, I would have been appalled.

I had to leave eventually, after a quick run through the sculpture gallery. I used to think writing was like painting--maybe poetry is. But fiction is sculpting. I got some great inspiration there, wish I could remember all the names. Who did that Cupid and  Psyche?--it's amazingly perfect and heartbreaking and strong, and everything. What a story should seek to be.

Off I go through the Upper East Side, its brownstone elegance, the subway, and up at Bleecker St. to wander west to meet David at Doma, a little cafe near Creative Visions where we'll read together an hour hence. Charming David is a fine companion. He'd be the ideal travel partner. He takes what comes, remains always unruffled and grinning.

The reading is big and standing room only. Tons of David's friends came--lots of writers. Art appeared and Bill with his partner Mark (who I also know from SF); Sri from SF who I chanced upon in the subway (living in NYC unbeknownst to me); Anne who I met at BEA in LA; Rob from New Orleans Saints and Sinners lit conference in May; David Rosen, who I know is intensely busy, and who I also know is a magical soul from our wonderful meeting in LA. NYC is the one place where everyone I knew who said they might come, did. This really touches me, makes me love NY and New Yorkers even more. The reading went great, we sold out all the books. We went off to dinner with a whole crew, and I giggled with David as we further investigated our weirdly parallel lives, enjoyed the charming art dealer guys and gals, David's partner Darrell who recommended Richard Ford books, and then I made two new friends, Andreas and Matthias, who took me to a wonderful party where we met wonderful people, discussed painting, love, qi gong, and all manner of things. I wanted to move to NY immediately!

Matthias delivered me back to the subway, which is like a mother that carries you about. And it's her birthday :)

Saturday, Oct. 25th: New Haven

David and I walked up to Harlem for Darrell's car and set out on the lovely parkways out of the city (pretty freeways, what a concept. LA has 1 which is getting uglier by the day). We only missed one or two turnoffs and amazingly got to New Haven on time. David, like me, and Karl Woelz, seems vaguely unconcerned with where he is or what direction he's supposed to be traveling--I like this quality.

New Haven is now like home as it's one of the few places I've returned to on this trip. David and I are reading along with Juliet Sarkessian here, and the reading is an odd mix of eccentric locals, friends, unknowns and magazine readers (as the reading takes place in the magazine section). Hard to tell whether the latter chanced upon us and sat down or actually planned to come. Either way, it's a nice event and Juliet and her partner are fab and full of great ideas. I like David and Juliet and we had a lively question and answer, esp. with Ellen, an eccentric older lady who asked lots of questions and was refreshingly frank and irreverent.

David and Juliet took off, while Loretta and I retreated for Thai food and to plan the reading for tonight with Indigo Blue: A Center for Buddhist Life at Yale. Bruce, who is the abbot at the local Zen Ctr. leads the group and called to ask us if we'd take his kid out to dinner as he'd be in NY until late. So we headed over to get Nate, who turned out to be a brilliant fellow, even rivaling little Sam in his presence of mind. Nate is very cool and very smart and starts sentences with adverbs, which I found very endearing in a 13-yr-old... 'Personally, Trebor, I prefer Krispie Kremes.' I had to keep reminding myself he wasn't 30. He rolled with the bad Chinese food, even though he wanted pizza, and then sat down to read the New Yorker. I fell asleep, Nate vanished, and then next thing you know, Loretta is rousing me and telling me we're gonna be late. So I stumble myself together and am forced to buy a latte at Dunkin Donuts on our way to the Yale chapel, which Bruce is decking out in candles and fruit bowls, surrounding a circle of zafus just below the altar. 108 tiny candles are set out in the middle of the circle, and I read the sections of my book which deal with Buddhist themes, and I realize how--though I'm rarely explicit about it--Buddhist philosophy is implicit in almost everything I write on some level. Which is to say acceptance of what is, honesty, openness, lack of judgment. This is what I try to do anyway. Often I fail of course or get lost in desires or concepts like everyone else. It is a practice after all. This is a very sweet event, very centering. I feel really happy just sitting there feeling a part of that little circle of  silent faces and candles. It's the Vishnu thing from the Met.

Sunday, Oct. 26th: New Haven/Rhinebeck

Rhett (that's my nickname for Loretta) and I have breakfast at a greasy spoon, and I'm on the road again for points Northwest, off to see my friend Bruce Rubin, a screenwriter from LA, who has a house up on the Hudson.

Bear Hollow is great, a big rambling house full of secret passageways and hidden stairways, cobbled together over the years--there's a 17th c. part, an 18th c., a 19th c., a 20th. Bruce is a wonderful man--I lucked across him through a mutual friend when I moved to LA and we became fast friends on a very deep level. He wrote Jacob's Ladder, among other things, and that gives you an idea of what level he lives on. Right off we were talking about mudras and that's what the Vishnu was all about. You can establish that same center with a mudra. It's weird, I know nothing about mudras, just that they have a sort of magical ability to concentrate energy and create space. Every buddha statue in that Asian room was a mudra. Good art approximates it. I want to write mudras!

Bruce has a screening room, so we watched a bad Clint Eastwood movie, called Blood Work, and I went off to crash in his son Ari's room, replete with xmas lights which lullabied me to sleep for the best rest I've had since the Vampire House in Milwaukee.

Monday, Oct. 27th: Rhinebeck

Bruce is working on a screenplay, and I need to work on this, so we both holed up and wrote all day, meeting briefly for meals. It's cool, like a writers' retreat. It rained all day, so I couldn't explore the 140 acres of forest around me, nor the pond and the two streams that run through the forest. Tomorrow I hope.

Bruce's wife Blanche is a very mudric person herself (Am I beating this image to death or what?). She is incredibly mindful though, and has a very calm presence about her. I love how she annunciates words. They're like mudras! Though I am a vegetarian, she cooked the best meatloaf I've ever eaten last night, and I had seconds. Tonight, she followed it with beef stew, which I also took seconds of. Don't tell anyone! I promise to go back to tofu after today!

Tonight, we watch One Hour Photo, a rather good film. Character-driven, it has this very strange tone to it, established mostly through these incredibly antiseptic sets. I generally hate psycho movies, and I'm not a big fan of Robin Wms when he's playing a man, but this film was pretty decent. I'd still rather watch real people interact however. What is the fascination with psychos? Are we back to pop art? Whatever happened to regular madness like my own?

Tuesday, Oct. 28th: Rhinebeck

Another good night's sleep (I hope I can get credits to carry me south as I know I'm back to 5 hours soon) and today is beautifully sunny, so we both write again, but also take a long walk through the land, along the swollen streams from the rain; past the gray trunks, leafless now; a little gazebo built by Amish people stands alone along the banks of one stream, and then in a clearing there is a stone circle--a labyrinth actually that one of Bruce's two sons is working on; a circle of chairs can be seen on a little hillock--'there's a firepit there,' Bruce explains. The trees are gray and bare, the ground is orange with leaves, the sky is blue and white and purple in the sunset --and then the darkness comes and makes it all one color in the mudra of night.

Wednesday, Oct. 29th: Baltimore

Rain falls as I pack up to head south, loaded down with food from Bruce's since he and Blanche are flying back to LA tomorrow. The fall color on the Taconic Pkwy is beautiful as the trees are still full out there just south of Bruce's place. All day it rains, so I listen to Van Morrison: "And it stones me to my soul....Oh, the water, oh the water...let it rain down all over me."

Along with Dylan's Love and Theft, this burned Van Morrison has been my most oft-listened-to cd. I like him in the rain or the forest; Dylan is good for coming into town, hobo conqueror that he is. If a city ain't about love and theft, what is? When  I'm a little down and self-absorbed, I listen to Nirvana Unplugged:  "I'm not like them, I can pretend... I think I'm dumb, ...maybe I'm happy." A very Buddhist song actually. He knew he was full of shit, and I know the same about myself. But I digress.

The Garden State Parkway was like an insatiable snake, winding through New Jersey, demanding 35cents at one tollbooth after another. It finally gulped and swallowed actual paper money on the bridge across the Delaware, amid belching DuPont smokestacks and misty rain, which led to VM's "Gypsy": "...together we will fold .. into the mystic." --Or the South as the case may be.

Because I saw my first Confederate flag not long after, just north of Baltimore. And so the next leg of the trip has begun. Rolling into East Baltimore, I drive down streets of endless row houses, each with a 3-step stoop in front--often occupied by idle youth. It looks like an industrial town in England. Eventually I reach the cheesy 'reclaimed' waterfront, which like most so-called urban improvement is a variation on Fisherman's Wharf or Universal Citywalk:  all the chains, family fun centers, lots of hideous cartoon-like signs insisting: "Fun, fun, look how  fun!" Code for boring ripoff,  but like I realized in Michigan, families are hunter/gatherers for entertainment, so they come.

Otherwise, Baltimore is kind of cool. Lots of colonial monuments and towers, and a cobblestoned square around the George Washington statue downtown, near which I meet David McConnell, who has taken the train down and spent the afternoon at the museum. We drive over to Little Italy to meet Juliet and her friends at a restaurant, and then to the reading, which goes really well. Lots of good questions from this crowd, and that look on their faces like they 'get it'. Michael, who manages the store, was very gracious and created a nice space for us. But it was yet another quick stop--5 hrs--as David and I hop in the car and head south to DC, where I drop David off at a hotel and go out to meet my brother in the Maryland burbs, getting lost along the way because DC isn't into signs for some reason. Maybe it's part of homeland security --no one can find anything they're looking for if nothing is marked.
 

Thursday, Oct. 30th: Washington, DC

My sister-in-law's minvan was totaled yesterday (she's fine), so we go up to this car dealership in the boonies to get a new one. It's run by one older guy and a bevy of recent high school grads who look farm or military or both. There seems to be an ongoing debate about whether Maryland is a southern state or not. Judging by these guys, it is--names like Travis and Buford, who answer my request for a map of DC with: "We ain't got one--we go north." Which is Pennsylavania, reminding me  that someone else recently told me Penn. is also really a southern state--at least the lower part of it. What is the South and what is not becomes a topic of  conversation from here south.

Car buying takes forever, but it gives me a chance to hang out with Ann and Steve who seem very happy together and generally unstressed about suburban life, which makes me jump out of my skin. I'm ready for the city by the time we get back home and so I head into town.

But as David McConnell reminds me once I get there, DC is an odd bird of a city, having all the stress and self-importance of NY, coupled with the inefficiency of the south, which I learn firsthand on my own in the hour preceding meeting him, which I spend looking for parking. This is the first major logistical mistake I've made on the whole tour. I should have jettisoned the car as I did in NYC and taken the Metro, which is an excellent system here. There are more parking restriction signs here than in west LA, which before this was the worst Nimbyism I'd ever seen:  No parking if you don't live here, or aren't our friend, or don't have an IRA, or haven't signed up for selective services, or between 2 and 2:15 on the third wed. of the Gregorian calendar during leap year, yada, yada, yada. It's the small print approach--just confuse them until they go away, terrified with visions of towing. You'd need a lawyer to advise you where to park in this town. --Diplomat parking, that's a new one. I'm very diplomatic, thank you very much--won't they take that? Eventually, I find one with a 2 hr.-limit 'til 6, and it's 4:03. I barely squeeze into it, half a dozen cars stopping and asking if I'm coming or going in the few mins. it takes to maneuver the vehicle into place. Ay!

I spend the walk attempting to recover from that uniquely hateful feeling of traffic/parking frustration which makes me 'postal' as in the bumpersticker I saw in Penn:  "Guns don't kill people--postal workers do!" Frustration is what kills people and plants the seed of hate, reminding me how hate is really not a deep emotion at all--or even a sincere one--and therefore not worthy of  motivation for any action, even though it's very demanding, urging release in lustful fashion. It's really all about space--or a sense of space, and then the idiotic compulsion of trying to find someone to blame for the lack of it. Metaphoriclly, people can't find a parking place--in the middle east, the ghetto, N. Ireland, N.  Korea, etc. The enemy becomes whoever you mistakenly blame: meter maids, other parkers, etc. They might call it religion or history or vengeance or love of country, but it's really all about parking. Cosmic parking. Public transportation is therefore a spiritual exercise as it cuts away at the roots of hate.

Literature is too! The reading healed all as it was well-attended and fabulous. This is the last reading David and I will do together and it's been a great little series we've shared. I was pleasantly surprised to find a friend of mine now working at the store--Robert. We went out for a lively dinner with writers Mike Mancilla, Andrew Holleran, Lawrence Schimel, and Jim Marks of  the Lambda Foundation and Lit. Review.

Robert asked for a ride home--little did he know what he was in for. In my earlier postal state (another reason to chill in crisis) I'd simply gotten away from my car as fast as possible, with only a vague sense of where it was. In an unknown city, this is a bad idea. Basically I lost the car, and confused by the asterisk of streets which meet at many intersections in DC and which create the roundabout circles such as Dupont Circle, I was faced with a sort of labyrinthine dilemma. I considered just taking the metro home--it's a rental after all, and insured. Can't I just say I lost it and get a new one? I assured Robert it was somewhere around here,  --small consolation, since there were like 8 streets converging in the general area, and I'd parked a block in and a block over, so that made the 8 into more like 24 streets to search. After 30 mins. and about 12 streets, we located it.

Friday, Oct. 31st: Washington, DC

Today is Halloween, which I purposely planned to spend here so as to trick or treat with my nieces, Shannon and Michelle--9 and 11 respectively--to fulfill my uncle-y duties, of which I'm sadly lax. But I also need an oil change as I've now logged over 3000 miles and the car keeps blinking and honking and beeping, --and alright already! I cut out of Michelle's Halloween play--she played a ghost (with glasses)--warmed considerably by the cute kids in various states of entertained exultation--one second-grader in the front row, a chubby-cheeked Vietnamese boy, made me think of guess who? The strange ways the universe pokes and prods you.

As I have fallen into some kind of karmic sinkhole of vehicular stress in DC, the oil change proves to be no simple matter. JiffyLube doesn't have the filter, so I'm told I have to find a GM dealer as it's an Olds Alero (what is an alero anyway? Is that like a celica--one of those car names that was made up because they did a study proving people have a positive and relaxed response to the combo of letters?). Finding a dealership means I have to go to the Rockville Pike. My brother and sister-in-law say this with some weighty dread in their voices, coupled with humor, as if informing me I'll need a urethral swab.

It doesn't disappoint. The Rockville Pike is the kind of 7-lane, billboarded, fast-fooded, rear-end-collision-every-3 blocks, heartbreak-of-psoriasis kind of horror that people refer to as 'just like LA,' reminding me it's not LA so much as it's postwar America on the steroids of unmitigated economic growth. Lack of vision is an understatement. One can't help but feel America is doomed to be consumed by its own greed and manure in such a place. To just look down it breaks the heart. Like very cold water, I dive in and eventually find a Chevy dealer who informs me the only guy who can do it is at lunch. Only one person at a Chevy dealer can do an oil change? They send me further into the abyss, 2 more miles up the pike to an Olds dealer who gets right on it. Looking up the road, I wonder if  I were to continue following this commerical orgiastic grocery aisle whether I'd eventually reach the San Gabriel Valley of LA. If not today, probably within 10 yrs.

I have the good fortune to end up on a bench with a couple of young grease monkeys on break. I like grease monkeys. They're always frank and honest when not talking about your car. They're all philosophers on some level, as most have racked up some serious history by they time they leave high school. These two have lived many different places and owned several vehicles, so we chat about various cities and various cars. Eventually, they drift off in their baggie pants and goatees, re-pocketing their cigarettes: "Take it ez, dude."

Back home for Daddy's pumpkin carving, I'm a spectator, so decide to do an apple-o-lantern, carving a mini pumpkin face, which is a huge hit with the kids. He's the cutest little yellow pumpkin ever, we all agree, as we load him with a birthday candle for his debut on the front stoop.

Off to trick-or-treat the neighborhood, which is one of those developments where every 3rd house is the same house, but with some variation in color, texture or style. We run across various other parents, some in that unique state of suburban marital ruin where the guy spends most of his time in the garage, with his beer fridge and guy stuff--old records, fishing gear--and they both talk about the kids because it's the only reason they're still married.

Michelle is a spy and Shannon is Cleopatra, and as they become loaded down with sweets, I begin to wonder ala Charlie Brown: "Does anybody know what Halloween is really all about?!"

"I do Charlie Brown. Lights please. And I say unto you... it is Samhein when the veil between the living and the dead is rent..."

Not on the Rockville Pike! Oh America, and I drift into Ginsbergian Kerouac-isms rueing the sad broken-down lost dream of America--"and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?" It's not a costume!

The kids end the night on serious sugar highs, unable to get to bed as they gambol, tackle and attempt to sell me candy bars which I've made the mistake of offering nickels for.  It's a tyke's workshop of commercial education as we bargain and dicker and I teach them how to turn a beautiful land of forests, where everything is priceless and given, into the Rockville Pike.

Ann and Steve have been good to me. I feel closer to them somehow than I have before, seeing them in their world and glad to feel they seem very happy and good to their kids, even if it's an alien world to my own. Loving your child and giving all your free time to them is an admirable and rare thing. They don't schedule their kids. They remind me of Joe and Maria back in KZ. I'm grateful for both of these sets of parents because they are the kind that raise good kids since they're doing it with their hearts and because they really want to.
 

Saturday, Nov. 1st: Norfolk

The drive from DC is hideous through the mixing bowl, which is a cute euphemism for a  very un-cute traffic snarl of epic proportions leading out of Northern VA, which is fast-becoming the vertical version of the Rockville Pike. Released finally, I speed south, eventually hitting the tidewater area with it's pines and big trees turning color. All the way out through the sloughs to Norfolk I go, enjoying the peaceful scenery and plentiful water. "Oh the water..."

Ken Orr has offered to put me up for the night following my reading at Lambda Rising. I'm excited about this one as an editor of mine is involved in a book group here, and it was highly recommended as a book tour stop by tour veteran Kirk Read, who used to live here.

Ken turns out to be a wonderful man (how do I get so lucky?) and has a beautiful apt with lots of Am. Indian art which launches us into our first of many wonderful conversations. Turns out Ken grew up on the Flathead Reservation in Montana and is part Salish. Like many people he ended up in Norfolk via the Navy, which gives the town a large gay population. One needn't ask nor tell when it comes to the Navy--one simply assumes or flat out knows.

Hosted by the down-to-earth Erik and Anthony, the reading proves small, but Ken's reception afterward draws in all the book club guys, some of whom already bought the book. We have a nice cocktail party at Ken's place, discussing the many books the guys have read, and then we head out for dinner in Norfolk's Soho district, one of them jokes. Like everywhere, there is a hip strip with brewpubs, pasta, coffee, etc. Ken and I walked around, viewing the fallen trees and collapsed walls of Hurricane Isabel's recent visit, while he pointed out the frequent mermaid sculptures, a variation on the cows of Chicago, Angels of LA, Elk of Sacramento, ad infinitum. This has become an Americanism, a wholly unimaginative and conformist way to promote imagination and individuality. Each one is different (like the houses in my bro's housing tract), but I  won't go on--you've likely all seen this in your own city. In Norfolk, it took an interesting turn:  Mermaids don't wear blouses or bras and this became of grave concern to city fathers, ala John Ashcroft and the Justice statute he's draped in blue at the Dept. of Just. The powers that be thus decided that bare breasts on city streets just wouldn't do. So all the statutes were more or less de-breasted, meaning they now look like 10-yr-old girls. No one has protested yet that topless children are now parading the streets of Norfolk. American morality at work.

Sunday, Nov. 2nd: Chapel Hill

Ken launched me with a surprise superlative breakfast of pancakes, orange juice, coffee and fruit. Boy does that beat the road food I often settle for in the am, or the starvation I feel obligated to undergo in an attempt to dodge donuts and other dangerous lard-based life forms.

It's another lovely drive through the tidewater pines and meadows, but two hours in I'm pulled over by a county sheriff for doing 72 in a 55 zone. Sheesh, I was driving slow! In LA you drive 72 in parking lots, --you only slow down to 55 in your driveway or around schoolyards.

Well, it had to come eventually, and it gave me a wakeup call. I should have been paying better attention. I'd noticed that drivers were passing,  then pulling back into the slow lane and slowing down again, code for speedtrap. But dope Trebor was listening to Kurt Cobain singing, "I can't complain,  I'm on a plane." Only I'm not. But I can't complain either. Though it's tempting. The Sheriff fits all  the stereotypes--the big wide-brimmed trooper hat, the drawl--except that she's a 60-yr-old woman. When she explains I'm to appear at the Greenville County Courthouse in January, I look at her with the look of the 'been had', with my AZ plates and CA no-accent. I'll opt for the mail-in $139, thanks. Looking around, I figure this county's biggest industry is probably ticket writing. Thus I feel like a philanthropist when I roll through the next sleepy town where I see a woman in curlers and bathrobe doing her errands on Main St.

I continue on to N. Carolina at ridiculously low speeds, passing way too many churches (even a bible factory outlet), but in love with the big pines all up and down the roadside. At one point, I pass a solitary house with a pickup in the driveway and a mashed dog in the middle of the highway which is fast becoming unrecognizable. All I can think is: Do they know? How long's it been? Will one of the kids be the first to notice? It's an odd tableau. I ramble off a good wish for the doggie's next rebirith. I'm not counting, but the roadkill numbers are horrific out here.

I pull into Todd's in Raleigh, and have to make a run for it as he has this weird oak tree in his front yard which is literally raining acorns that hurt when they bounce off your head. I got beaned and made a dash to the door as the flak and shrapnel bounced around me.

Todd's basement flooded, which is the guest room, so I get the notion to press on toward Athens after the reading. Which means I'll likely be setting a new record here for shortest visit.

Branch's Books was a nice place, with a small, friendly crowd. Wonderful Daniel,  who's only just out of high school, pulled a Steven Harbaugh (of Kent Pride fame) and really did an awesome job of promoting, with his own posters, web listing, etc. He even offered to put me on the radio but the interviewer got sick, and since I was visiting for only 4 hours, we had to bag it. I bought his chapbook of stories (he's quite a good writer)--he's heading off to Bennington shortly to study writing.

I sign books and join Todd for some good veggie food at Whole Foods next door. My only regret in leaving so soon is not being able to hang out with Todd, who like so many people on this trip, has a special light to him. He's an old acquaintance of my friend Roger, who was a professor of Buddhism at  Duke nearby in Durham before retiring a few years back. Roger's specialty has always been shepherding troubled men to some semblance of sanity and it sounds like he helped Todd in this fashion, as he did me. Roger gave us space, which is a greater gift than it sounds like and really what most people and situations need.

Off I go through the pines, and Todd sweetly guides me to the proper highway. Like DC, the Research Triangle is a traffic mess, with closed onramps, etc. I could have circled the area for days lost, but luckily I  found my way out by the kindness of former strangers who are now friends.

Monday, Nov. 3rd: Athens, GA

I'm staying in Commerce, which is exactly what it sounds like: 10 hotels, 15 gas stations, all fastfood horrors represented. There's but one choice--Ruby Tuesday's, the diner of Kent State fame. I find a veggie burger on the menu, and when I ask for a side of cole slaw, the waiter uses one of those American noun-verbs: "You want me to platter it?" Platter something means put it on a bigger plate with all the extras. Sure, platter it. What a horrible term. Next time I visit grandma and she asks if I'd like a snack, I can say: "Yes, granny, and could you platter it?"

I know I'm in the south now cuz the forest is buzzing all the time. People go on and on about where the real south is. Virginia is not the real south they tell me. The tyranny of identity. It's like deciding what's cool or who's hip. But, what do I know, I'm form California, which makes me a Yankee. Everyone outside the south is a Yankee so there's no need to split hairs. If you're Indonesian or Uzbek, you're a Yankee.

It's a country drive to Athens. I think I like the south, I don't why. It's kinda dead but it's not bleak or grim like the midwest and northeast can be. Likely, it's just a climactic thing. I'm having trouble figuring out why I like or don't like something. Maybe it's all an energy thing: too much earth in Midwest, too many wet, gray old factories in the northeast. Maybe it's the pines, or the weird sleepy southern thing. There's something here, it's just asleep. Like a big lounging dog. How weird is it to be on this country highway, with no traffic, no nothing, but still huge billboards advertising things miles away?

I reach Athens and immediately I feel it and I like it immensely. It's full of trees, and little hills. It's all crammed together, old houses and old trees--finally fat-trunked trees. It's got that old southern town feel to it. Even when prosperous, there's a weird anachronistic faded grandeur thing to it, like you really should sit on a bench and chew straw and just watch.

Instead I drink espresso in the Blue Sky Lounge. And it's an epiphany of sorts as I realize this is the kind of place I dreamed I'd be whiling away hours between readings, with it's good art crowding the brick walls, interesting-looking people, wooden pews and good coffee. But this is the first time I've actually had an hour to while away! It took 43 days to achieve this little dream. I begin reading Greg Wharton's Johnny Was which I picked up in Norfolk. What a great title. I'm in the middle of a story about a boy and a tornado when I get the urge to write Tindo--I love writing letters to him and I know he likes the weird scripts I come up with, the stickers I find, and the silly gayboy cards I unearth. I know he'd like this place, wish I could show it to him. I read the last chapter of my book, which is my favorite part,  but which I can never read at a reading! It always centers me and sends me forth to read with all my heart.

Off to the U I go to meet Nick of the Lambda Alliance. UGA is a beautiful campus, full of trees, and it feels a lot like Berkeley to me, so I feel at home. Nick is a friendly fellow and like so many people on this trip, he's set things up for me so expertly. I pass the posters he's pinned up as I cross campus (as well as a plaque referring to the War for Southern Independence--hadn't heard that variation before), and when I arrive he's there to greet me as the crowd pours in. Like Kent State, this is a big crowd of kids, and the kids are alright once again, with lively comments and questions and an invitation to dinner and the drag show across town at the Boneshaker. We go for Chinese, which is hideously sweet. But vegan Trevor (with a v) gulps what jack-vegan and sugar-shy Trebor leaves behind of the Empress Tofu, and sweet Cat insists on buying my meal before we all head to the drag show where Scott and Jonathan join me in watching a fabulous crew of Atlanta and local dragqueens, the Raven being the most spectacular. What a face: tired blonde extraordinaire. Drag shows are great, and they are so liberating and joyful and so important. I don't know how to say it poetically, but to free a crowd on a gender level is profoundly healing. Boys will be girls and girls will be boys--but it's not a mixed up world, Kinks. Such a world is the only one that isn't and that's why it's so important. The ritual walk to the stage to offer a dollar that always goes to charity is more real and sincere than any offering I ever witnessed from a thousand Sundays in church. Drag queens make the profane sacred by making the sacred profane. They are sacred clowns and they renew the world and crack open the heart. They certainly are doing that to me, who has to say goodbye and head home, due down the road as always. But on the long empty drive home--the woods are alive with insect song--I listen to Joni Mitchell sing about being a radio tower: "I'm sending out this signal here.. I hope that it comes in loud clear." And it's a real high point for me. That's what I'm doing on this tour--sending out a signal-- that's what the insects are doing off in the forest, and the drag queens (and Heidi Hensley, a lesbian folk/rock singer who opened for them and who sang the greatest Marilyn Monroe Happy Birthday song.--all the more fab because it was so dissonant to her butch voice) and what these sweet kids are doing, some of whom have just come out, telling of their travails and their progress. And Joni keeps singing what she always sings about--making oneself open to the world, as open as you can. Sometimes you're in a field of flowers, all blooming together, like this sweet night in Athens, where we all tuned in. I can see the moon up in the misty sky like a portal, and all of us portals to flow in and out of, for bright colors to come through. I know why I wrote my book and for whom and for what part of us. Imperfect scribe that I am, I know I will keep trying to write this story, in all its varied forms, hopefully  more clearly. I will always write about this. I think of what Bruce Rubin said about how the air and the trees and the food and the moon and the chairs and shoes and cars, and whatever --all support us, and so they are love. The entire universe is in love with us--Joni again: "call me at the station--the lines are ooooopen."

Tuesday, Nov. 4th: Atlanta

It's a quick drive down into Atlanta, with billboards peeking out of the rain/misty sky, proclaiming 'Success Lives Here,' preparing me for the boomtown I've heard it is. I listen to Dylan, to gather my hobo 'contrary' strength. Atlanta has an odd skyline, with almost every building sporting a pointed top. I end up staying in high style with Eric, a friend of a friend who lives 25 floors up in the Mayfair luxury apts., which are a mere 4 blocks from the bookstore run by the inimitable Philip Rafshoun, whom I've heard about dozens of times as I've gone from bookstore to bookstore crossing the country. This sweet man runs a great store and has publicized my appearance well. So well that a guy walks in (the reading still hours away) and buys the book cuz he'd heard about it, and liked my picture--Thanks Taro! :). We had a nice chat--his name was Andy, and he told me the coolest coming out story I've heard. He'd gotten married a week after his mother died of cancer, and years later, when he came out, she was the first one he came out to. He sat in the snow at her grave, with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne, freezing cold and crying his eyes out.

Lots of people came to the reading, and Eric even asked me to read certain sections that he liked. And another guy asked me to read a poem, which I did. I had a nice chat with Tofer who works there, and joked with Mario who is one of the sweetest guys working in a bookstore anywhere. Philip sets the tone and attracts people as cool, cheerful and friendly as himself.

Off to dinner with Eric to his favorite spot, Wisteria, where we met the chefs and were served by the lovely Judy Cresso who fed me Excedrin and told hilarious stories. I had okra and catfish because I insist on southern fare when in Rome.

Tuesday, Nov. 5th: Atlanta

It poured today, and Eric and I ventured out to the High Museum, where we viewed Day of the Dead altars (Selena has been edged out by Celia Cruz this year in the pop category) and an exhibit of Richard Meier-designed eating ware and sculpture. It was all so Richard Meier, geometric and looking like his buildings. My favorite painting was from an unknown artist, and depicted the incestuous seduction of Tamar by Ammon. The exhibit of photographs of Black women's hats was the most fun. Each photo had a captioned line of a quote by the pictured woman. "Uh huh, I wouldn't wear that hat to a pigpen," and "when I wear this, chile, I have real class," etc. But, for a big city, this museum is pretty minor, or maybe I've just been spoiled by CA and NYC. Sadly, it was almost completely empty, which concerned me about Atlanta's cultural sophistication.

Once outside, a bus passed through an enormous puddle, sending a tsunami right into Eric and I, who were completely drenched to the skin and left dripping. The requisite profanity barked, we ended up laughing it off and made our way home.

In the evening, we went out to meet Eric's daughter's boyfriend, a German guy who sells German wines around the South. He was a walking PhD. program and I learned a lot while we sat chatting over endless glasses of exotic German reds in trendy Emeril's in Buckhead, which is the sort of new money meets old money social-climbers' hell that every boomtown seems to spawn. Emeril is one of those celebutante chefs from New Orleans who endlessly promotes himself via books and restaurants where all the in-the-know status seekers (ie dumpy, overworked out-of-shape middle-aged guys with goatees and their overly blonde product (dates) with their pushup bras and cleavage, short skirts and BMWs). I know that sounds mean, but just imagine a world where people didn't waste precious time and resources on such fluff. Or had better taste and exercise habits! I'm no better than these people, --just less annoying? Aren't I?

May all beings be happy and free from suffering.

Thursday, Nov. 6th: Gainesville, FL

Eric and I say our farewells at a Caribou coffee. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this Starbucks-imitative chain, let me share the smarmy story of its inspiration, prominently outlined on the walls in captions under wilderness photos of Alaska. Seems the couple who own it backpacked across Alaska and had an epiphany of how small they were and how short is one's lifetime. They decided to do something 'significant.' Make a billion dollars by copying Starbucks? I think they missed the point. Further along the wall of shame, there's a picture of a caribou with the caption: "The caribou is a symbol of the spirit of Alaska. We wanted to bring the spirit of Alaska to your neighborhood." What?? Lattes are the spirit of Alaska? Bagels? Scones? The boycott has begun. I'd give such a poorly argued essay on 'spirit' an F! Starbucks may be evil as well, but something that affronts the imagination and the spirit so 'crassly' deserves special singling out. There's a clincher: 'Would you like me to 'moose' it? That means an extra shot of espresso. Can we platter it instead? I don't mean to be overly negative, but as Salman Rushdie once implored: "A writer's job is to call a fraud a fraud." And this is a fraud.

Maybe Emeril's soured my mood, but it's clearly time to go. Off to Gainesville, which turns out to be an LA-style sprawl surrounding a downtown core of college bars and the attendant Tempe-style fluff, complete with 3-wheel tourist bicycle-rickshaws driven by 'dude' students. Borders turns out to be an echo of El Paso, with a table at the front door. Luckily, this time I brought my Hilary wig, skirt and suit. The high point? A college kid: "Where are the dictionaries?"

Actually, the high point of Gainesville is John, who Andrew Holleran hooked me up with when I saw him in DC. John is a lively little guy with a wonderfully fresh outlook on the madness of things. We spent the evening drinking red wine and deconstructing christianity and western civ. as I had the misfortune to have caught a Christian program on "unbalanced yokes" (yolks?) or somesuch on the drive down, which was all about the problems inherent in a marriage between a believer and a non-believer. "Not a marriage at all, but a fellowship with darkness; with someone who is spiritually dead." Where do caribous go when they die? Will they mount them in the coffeshop? I'm being barraged with fraudulency! Why are these Baptist's so mean? Calling your neighbor dead is not lovin' him or her--and it ain't helpful. Chill, fundies, chill!

Friday, Nov. 7th: Cocoa Beach, FL

I've been invited to Jack Nichol's place after meeting him via phone from Tucson when Raj Ayyar interviewed me for GayToday, of which Jack is the editor.  I head out early, painfully hung over, and the drive south from Gainesville is beautiful. John sends me through this nature preserve as I head south and it's a lush tropical forest like in Mexico, all shrouded in mist. Back on the freeway I approach Orlando, where the sun comes out and the whole landscape just becomes Hawaiian tropical, and the brightest green. The coolest thing are the clouds--big white, fluffy cumulous things about 50 feet above me floating around in the light blue sky. I don't know how they do it. Must be some kind of humidity thing--shouldn't they just drop?

The bays and inlets leading up to the beach are cobalt blue and I'm excited when I see the Atlantic and the beach town where I pull over to write this in a coffeeshop.

stay tuned....

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Jack lives in 1960s Florida splendor in his highrise apt. bldg. on the beach. The decor is almost as minimalist as Maria's place in Kalamazoo, but this is 60s vs. 50s after all. Jack is a fascinating man, somewhat mystical even. He left school in 6th grade and moved in with the Iranian Ambassador's family (he's from DC) where he learned Farsi, the Koran and the B'hai faith. Jack came out to all his teachers and one ended up tutoring him privately because in the 50s no one could deal with it. He's a lifelong activist, so he had millions of stories, and while driving me all around Cocoa and Cocoa Beach (which is a weirdly quiet town, but very peaceful and sort of Palm Spgs. like in not being what it seems), I realized he's one of those guys who made the 60s a heroic time to me. The 'other' 60s happened here though, and there's an I Dream of Jeannie Lane, and I half-suspect my subconcious reason for coming here is to find my long lost father, Major Healey.

Jack is today my ambassador to Cocoa Beach and he takes me for seared fish sandwiches, and later Thai curry.  We end up at Taboo, an apt-named gay bar for a small town, where we meet more of his mystically present friends. He's the kindest man, very aware and not attached to his own drama. He watches out for a bunch of troubled souls he considers his charges, and for a day, I am one and know I am safe and cared for. He is an editor and could get my book free, but insists on buying it, which is a thoughtful gesture and not one often found.

Sweet Jack, laughing and delighting, plying the white beach roads of Cocoa Beach in his old silver Crown Royal, calling the huge clouds "Florida's mts.," telling the tale of his years which are about WHAT IT IS TO BE IN THIS LIFE, more than about his specific life. I feel I've been blest to spend the day with a kind of holy man.

Saturday, Nov. 8th: Ft. Lauderdale, FL

In the morning, I head south, through intermittent tropical storms, those weird low clouds banging around just above the road. Approaching Palm Beach, the whole concrete, construction sprawl thing starts up again. I'm on my way to Jim McDonough's, a writer and writing activist who I met in New Orleans at the Saints and Sinners conference in May. Another extremely generous soul, Jim basically set me up in Ft. Lauderdale with 2 events and a ton of publicity. Jim and his co-hort Karen, who is exec. director, are the prime movers behind Lavender Writes, a gay and lesbian writing group that puts on reading events and generally promotes writers. I'm their first out of town reader and they are excited to host more of us, so go to Florida! These guys are great. They end up giving me their weekend, taking me to the Miami Book Festival and delivering me to my reading events, while entertaining me with stories galore.

The tropical storm thing went on and on, with huge downpours that would drench you (ala Atlanta bus tsunamis) before clearing into bright sunshine. Ft. Lauderdale is spread out like LA, and like LA, the gay scene has an LA vibe:  very boy and very sun and beach. I never made it to South Beach as my hosts looked alarmed when I mentioned my interest. I didn't go, so perhaps I will thus be saving you all another Caribou rant in the process.

At Borders, I benefited from the men's reading group who stayed on, after their discussion of Michael Lowenthal's 'Avoidance,' for my event. This was one of the best audiences in terms of good questions about poetry and character. How are poetic characters different from fictional characters? Does poetry help one write fiction better? YES! All these questions help me articulate my own process to myself and others, and so they are gifts.

Jim and I went out for an Italian dinner in the trendy section of Ft. Lauderdale, which is the same as every other place:  sidewalk dining with cheesy xmas lights tangled on trees and awnings; bad art in nearby galleries--no Thomas Kincaid, but lots of dolphins and stuff that matched furniture. But let's not forget that Ft. Lauderdale is 'the Venice of America',  due to its canals (swamp drainage). Apparently south Florida is one big swamp which has to be drained and channeled for development, thus the occasional alligator in the schoolyard, the sink holes, the flooding in the rain. I'm not sure that gives it a fair claim to being Venetian. It sounds kind of like Tin's facetious description of Sacramento as the Paris of CA just because it's on a big river, in the center of the state, it's the capital, and all the cultured Vietnamese expatriots live there (meaning him).

Today, I read at Pride Factory, which is a gay store extraordinaire. I guess you'd call it a gay 5-and-dime, but maybe call it a 10 and 50 since it's full of $25 pairs of designer underwear, $19 t-shirts, lots of picture books, and some literature. The cafe is large and sponsors events, thus my visit here. Many of the Lavender Writes writers come and the event is fun and raucous with lots of funny banter and questions about Vince, one of my troubled characters. Rocky, Eddie, Josh and the staff were wonderfully supportive.

We retire for Indian food, where Jose gives me a lovely drawing he did, and Joe and Susan and Jim and Karen and I discuss the writing life, while drinking mango lassys, which are neither dogs nor Scottish girls.

Monday, Nov. 10th: Tampa, FL

Today, I head west. I've finally turned around and I'm heading back toward home--if there is such a thing. In no time I run over a turtle, a horrible experience as I love turtles, consider them my totem animal. He/she was already dead, but still. And it's not like a raccoon--they have shells, which make for a jolt before your heart sinks, and you begin the long, sad count of turtles across the Everglades. They're slow, which explains their not making it across the highway, but it doesn't explain how they get hit because they're slow enough to avoid. Well, no one's paying attention I suppose--I wasn't.

The Everglades are pretty--endless flat, soggy stands of spindly pines and other trees; bunchy grasses; long thin dirt roads vanishing into the groves and mystery. It's quick, and in no time I'm on the west coast, where traffic and golf courses and old folks reappear. Florida is weird. It's cheerful, with the sun and those funny clouds churning 10 feet above you, deciding whether to rain or not. But it's sort of blase too, sort of like Orange County, only with humidity. Pretty, but bland.

I take the long way into Tampa, cuz I want to go over the bridge south of St. Petersburg, which looks like one I saw in Kiev a long time ago. I don't know how to describe it, or what you'd call its design. It looks like a suspension bridge, but with only one pillar in the middle to hold up the cables, which don't loop concavely away, but go straight down in a fanned-out triangle.

Tampa, another Am. city, this time with strange Russian church architecture at Univ. of Tampa (turns out it was once an early 20th c. summer hotel for cold Midwesterners), lots of water, an interesting round highrise, and another with dormer windows. Otherwise, big blvds. to break my heart and make me feel lonely, lost and anonymous, but not in the good way of NYC or  LA. It's the Rockville Pike heartbreak.

I'm reading at Borders and possibly meeting John's (from Gainesville) friends, if they appear. And sure enough, Mel and Jay appear, along with Josh, Mike, Kevin, Jeff and a few stragglers who come by the table to discuss the book. This is one of those 'signings' up front in the store. My Hillary wig is quite crooked by now, and my nylons are seriously 'run', so these guys are a godsend as I sit up there with O'Reilly, Dick Armey, Michael Moore, Al Franken and various sports heroes (Correction Mr. Coolidge: the business of America is fluff). Perhaps though this is why we don't kill each other in another bloody civil war--it's just a bunch of jesters throwing jokes at each other, which keeps it all entertaining and light even though the issues are dead serious.

We retire to the Lake House, a legendary domicile as everyone attendant hints. These guys are all very into cars--most of them met through FAG (Florida Auto Group). So I follow 24-yr-old Jeff in his old guy's car, an enormous boat of a Lincoln, out to the lakes, of which there are many in and around Tampa. The house is an interesting work-in-progress, perenially under construction. Jeff is staying here and doing electrical work while he finishes school, Josh just moved out, and various others come and go. It's a big boarding house, and there is the sense that Mel and Jay, like Jack Nichols and my old friend Roger, like to help guys get on their feet. I like this sense of eldership among men, and the world needs it as so many fathers fail their sons, whether gay or straight. Men who care for men.

We talked about movies and cars of course. Jay knew as much about wine as Thomas of Germany/Emerils, so I got anther MA--this time in age of grapes--while drinking beaujolais, another wine I prefer to the tired, fruit punch merlot that has taken over CA. We talked about Cape Canaveral and rocket launches. I remembered Jack telling me that he sits at his fish bar and watches the launches. Some felt patriotic watching the rockets go off, but I wouldn't say that's the feeling at all. It's a human achievement that makes one proud or gives the spectacle dignity. Rockets aren't American or belonging to any one nation. They are a cumulative achievement--the Apollo rocket scientists were all-ex-Germans anyway. Someone mentioned America's willingness to commit resources. But that was more about the Cold War and arms race. One must guard against sentimentality--which is always insipidly dishonest and full of denial. Sentimentality is a real evil and patriotism and religion use it continually to slaughter people with impunity and even self-satisfaction. Rockets are like NYC, amazing, a testament to our minds and spirits--they aren't about borders or tribes, but they are about the complex way we use creativity and how it's never quite what it seems.

Tonight it's warm and not humid, so I get a chance to sleep outside on the lake, which is stringed with distant lights from the houses that surround it, and which lulls me to sleep, folding me into the subtropical night, under the stars we'll never reach.

Tuesday, Nov. 11th: Pensacola, FL

The road north and then east through Tallahassee is one of the prettiest freeways I've been on, with lots of pine trees and swamps and very few billboards or towns. So I listen to my Walkabout soundtrack cd while I sail along in air-conditioned bliss, watching the beautiful scenery go by to the tune of what I consider to be one of the best soundtracks and films about wilderness, both in the natural sense and in terms of the human heart. It's idyllic and Edenic, though I know this is total idealism because all you have to do is roll down the window and feel that humidity which is just now forming clouds a few feet above your head to soon be disabused of such paradisiacal notions. Such rapture is much like transcendant religion, a real nice ride, but dishonest and unreal. So I turn off the AC and feel the sweat, try to find my way with the truth. All transcendant ideas need to be grounded, whether it be xtianity, Buddhism or Hale Bopp. Dirt is the key, and that's why I do Native American sweatlodges and write about the body, and sweat like a pig in Florida while I dream of CA's mts, which --amazingly-- are as close to a perfect place as I've ever found. I miss em.

Speaking of earth religions (or should I say tribal religions of place, which are usually lost in ideas and not grounded at all--just look at the middle east. Only the Middle Eastern poets seem to know it's all about broken rocks and olive groves out there. To understand the middle east, I've found Yehuda Amichai and Adonis far more informative than any nationalist--then again what do I know? Well, as Dorothy Allison says "Two or Three things I know for sure..." --And for me, one of them is that poets are the only people you can really trust when it comes to history and social conflict)--anyway, I digress! What I was going to say was:  I am about to discover Southern Truck stops and the Rebel creed. I am flabbergasted by the amount of Rebel paraphernalia at the Lucky 13 Truckstop near Pensacola. I love stickers, so I pick up a few:  "Teach a Yankee to drive: point him north," and "Unreconstructed," "Keep on honkin', I'll be right with ya, just gotta reload". All with a Confederate flag background of course. Happily, there was one that said,"Heritage not Hate" which is more what this is all about, I think, though it's a dubious argument considering history in these parts. Funny, there were very few Am. flags. And the accents were tres heavy. That'll be 'thur senda wuh' ($3.71). I got lots of friendly grins from the most toothless of truckers--I think it was my shaved head and army fatigues, filthy t-shirt and pile of Rebel stickers. Now, all I need is a Ryder truck. Finally, I'm not a Yankee, --but a sad way to get dixie-initiated. People and pride. People just gotta have it. Dignity isn't enough? Maybe when it's not given, pride is all people have left. I really do espouse the Marxist view of history  when it comes to the Civil War. The Union was just the messenger--and a little heavy about it,  Mr. Sherman--and the news keeps coming:  truckstops and interstates, stickers, trucks--you name it, it's the march of history. The dilemma is always how to make room for change and how to have compassion for those who can't conceive it, resist it, or don't believe it's inevitable. But how do you muster the strength to dignify people who haven't respected the dignity of others? One at a time, just like coming out. War is all about pride and lack of patience. Who needs it? Time and Dignity--good name for a book.

I grab a room out at the Sleep Inn on the freeway above Pensacola (I'm trying to get my 'Buy-10 nights-get-one-free.' I'm at about 5 as I've been lucky to be housed almost everywhere.)

I ride into town on the hideous multi-laned Mobile Hwy. (a good name for it) that blights every town's outskirts in America. It's looking slightly less grim by the time I reach the old 60s sleepy southern downtown and I chance upon a sign for the historic district, which turns out be immense. It's a sort of quieter, less unhinged version of the French Quarter in New Orleans, with street after street of French bldgs and Victorians and old brick warehouses. I'm due for a decent meal, so decide to hunt one down among the bistros that glitter on each corner. Housed in a Yellow Victorian, the restaurant I choose is called Dharma Blue, a lame hipster name if there ever was one. The only dharma that's likely being practiced here is out on the Mobile Highway, Pensacola's Rockville Pike, which is just plain lousy with Vietnamese markets, restaurants, etc. Viet Hoa, Bien Phuc, My Tan. I kid you not, and I don't have a tan. I almost pull in for Pho, just so I can tell Tindo as he gets a big kick out of my Viet adventures. But I don't really like pho--what I like is Tindo's dad's homemade tofu and the fresh vegetable spring rolls. But the real clincher in my passing on Asian food is the decor, which is just this side of a check-cashing franchise (Rockville Pike chic?). I just can't eat under fluorescents. Who needs Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, when what we really need is Queer Eye for the Asian Restaurant? Only the Thai places have atmosphere, and we all know why :)

OK, enough of my shameless stereotyping. What does Trebor know about Dixie, Rebel pride, Viet food, Thai sexual orientation or the high income over-educated dharma bums who live here and open restaurants? Precious nothing. First impressions are just that and say more about the observer than the place. Fine then.

Anyway, I order blackened grouper to get in touch with my New South self. There's no mustard or hot sauce scrawl written on the plate's outer edge, but it's profoundly minimalist, with a few potatoes and sprigs of herbs across the top of the fish, which sits isolated as Burning Man in the desert of white porcelain they've situated it in. I love art and composition and all that, but when it comes to food, I roll my eyes. I'm famous for what Daniel Kopyc, my SF Pixie pal, calls bean slop. Just throw it all in and saute it. He used to call and request it, and I serve it in a bucket with cornmeal and hot peppers. I'm gonna make me some as soon as I get home.

Afterward, strolling around this reclaimed historic district, I think of CA and marvel (and shudder) at what a boom place it is. If this place was in CA, it would be overrun, no stone unturned. No place is like CA. You can actually hear the venture capital chewing if you stop and listen. But these places are working on it. They call it America's first settlement (I suppose St. Augustine was just a fort?) and the city of 5 flags (US, Fr, Sp, Confed, FL). Fact is, even Dixie is becoming quaint. Imagine.  It will  happen, it's happening already, right here in dharma red, white and blue. It hasn't arrived at Lucky 13 just yet, but just you wait. Even rebel pride and tragedy is for sale if it can get an $18 price on a menu. In the end, they all died for someone's greed really, of which quaintness is the latest manifestation isn't it? (that and oil). Or is it just that bad poetry will always out?

Wednesday, Nov. 12th: Pensacola-Hattiesburg

Good Neighbor Coffeehouse, where I am blest with the one Van Morrisson song that I inadvertently left off my burned cd: 'Sweet Thing.' And sitting here, gifted by that song and good coffee, I feel another full circle completed. This is the last place I'll be a stranger as I have friends in all the places ahead of me down the road. And I have been blest by the kindness 'TO' strangers all along, and VM sings to me like I'm a book tour baby being lullabied:  "And I will walk through gardens all wet with rain, .. and I will never, never be so old again... oh, oh, sweet thing." And that sweet thing is this journey.

I drive out of sleepy Pensacola, the open lots of it, the abandoned schoolbuses and leaning shacks, the sleeping dog south. On to Alabama and Mississippi, more pines, and big reeds along the road near Mobile, 12 feet tall--the earth red as paprika.

Hattiesburg begins like the rest: plastic, donuts, gasoline, 6 lanes of traffic. What a way to welcome people. This stuff oughtta all be put underground. Where is Queer Eye for Urban Planning? But it ends, and the old brick appears. My poet friend, Scott Bailey (son of a Pentecostal preacher and author of poems like "The Aristocracy of the Plow") just drips Mississippi, from the accent to his connection to place and the land. And he lives in Southern Gothic splendor and then some:  Past a cemetery, over a little bridge and through a big empty intersection with crooked stop signs, a tiny tree-shrouded house nestled in the trees, a big abandoned warehouse a block way. It's Boo Radley's house, I swear.

Scott has a big party for me and all the sweet bohemians of Hattiesburg and So. Miss U show up: Jenny and David, Tim and Takasha (who is profoundly and mystically beautiful), Newt and David, Ken, Hannah, Sarah. We went up to Newt's house where he cooked us a wonderful buffet meal of fresh beans, veggies, etc--things I've missed! It's a party and Scott takes me on a tour of the town and we end up in the one gay bar, listening to pop songs: "You've got the music in you.. don't give up.. we only get what we give...." Trite truisms, sure, but it's 2 am and I've got enough miles on me right now to appreciate the message.

Back to Boo's house, where all night long, acorns bang on the tin roof.

Thursday, Nov. 13th: Hattiesburg

Today, we wander the Southern faded grandeur, train-whistling, old part of Hattiesburg, strolling past the big Confederate  monument at City Hall-- which is graced with the Mississippi flag, boldly broadcasting the stars and bars--and sit in a coffeeshop where some boy goes on and on about stress-induced dwarfism and that the gay science is poetry. What did I tell you?--Southern Gothic.

But the 21st c. is here too:  the strangest 9-11 monument I've ever seen sits on a Main St. corner. It's a 10-foot stainless steel replica of the world trade center, complete with radio anttenae and the impact holes from the jets that crashed into it. It's disturbingly literal and crass and misguided. Mark, who I meet later, and who is from NY and went through it all, wrote letters to the editor he was so offended at how it focused on the catastrophe and not the attendant grief, which is what a memorial is for, yes? I don't see any statues of Lincoln with impact holes. Imagine a statue of FDR mid-hemmorhage and you'll have an idea how this statue affects you. Mark and I blackly joke about whether they'll stage reenactments with toy planes, smoke and falling toy people each 9-11. But we aren't laughing--we're nodding our heads. Dignity, that's what we're looking for.

Anyway--our event tonight is a benefit for Haven House, an HIV and AIDS hospice and residence. Scott has great connections in town (like I say, he's connected to this place deeply. He came back here from New Orleans to work in this community, and that's very rare for a 26-yr-old up-and-coming poet to do. I know lots of people and artists who return home eventually, but it's usually not until 40, and so often they are 'looking' for connection. Scott has it). He's arranged a whole dinner at 206 Front, a trendy new restaurant. It's a busy place and the benefit goes on and on so I don't read until 2 hours after I'm scheduled, but I meet lots of folks and sell a pile of books. During the course of the evening, someone stole a painting off the wall and sped away, but not before a waiter chased him and got dragged by the thief's car. He was fine, luckily, and when we went out back to find out about the ruckus, it was so different than how it would have been in CA, with police tape and the police pushing people away. In Hattiesburg, the cops just did their job with all of us chatting at them. Odd. The waiter made his report and discovered the thief left his credit card at the bar. He apparently works for the local TV station and everyone knows who he is. I think this crime is solved already. It's right up there with the big trial in town of a restauranteur/cocaine dealer who got caught with a huge shipment, while traveling with the daughter of the richest family in town (she later married a local man running for the state senate). Once again--Southern Gothic. I swear I'm not looking for this kinda stuff, it just keeps showing up.

I met some great folks at this party: Kathleen, who works for U of Alabama  Press, and her musician cousin who played with Willie Nelson and The Flying Burrito Brothers; Bruce and Mark, who has returned home here to live after all those years in NYC. There were so many others, and I'm so bad with names--Tom and Sarah who own the place and have a sweet little kid.

We end up back at David's for a post party. He lives in a big antebellum mansion and it is THAT right down to the chandeliers and jugs of bourbon. He's a sweet guy, David, very debonair, and along with elfin Newt, Ken and their friend Norman and a few others, we have a lovely evening.

Friday, Nov. 14th: New Orleans

I'll miss Scott and Hattiesburg--it's been a ride. He is one of the wittiest little characters alive, but I can't repeat most of what he said :).Well, here are a few:  As I drove in the exit of a drive-thru bank by accident and said whoops, he quipped: "Well, we do that." Later, he pointed out a sign in front of a Baptist Church that read: "Come Worship 10 am." "Really," he snipped. Trust me, he's hilarious. People can't help comparing him to Truman Capote as there are many parallels.

But I must bid ado, as I'm expected this afternoon in New Orleans! It's a quick drive back down through the pines. Mississippi is almost like a wilderness--endless tracts of pine forest. It's less developed than even much of the West. I like the pines of course, so it's a nice drive, and I'm excited, anticipating NOLA and Greg and Paul, who are like brothers to me. Not cuz I've known them forever, but just because of some strange chemistry. So for a few days, I guess you could say I'm going home.

Soon, I see the water and the old houses on stilts, and then a big bridge, flat on top of the water like the Dumbarton across SF Bay. And like that faraway bridge, it offers a few of distant Oz. One more way NOLA is like SF. Into the enchanted I city I go. . . . .

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Down the looping ramps onto St. Charles St., with its old brown streetcars running down the weed-choked median, among the ruined grandeur of old French and Victorian edifices, which give this city a character sorely lacking almost everywhere else. For some reason, NOLA seems immune to the Disneyland-renovation that plagues almost anything remotely charming in America, and this is its saving grace. Greg and Paul live in such dilapidated splendor, in an old bedecked house with its crooked upper floor and broken-brick courtyard, behind an often-as-not closed law office. Like always, the fecund, erotic film of sweat graces everything, including your forehead, the minute you enter the swamp city. Unlike FL, I have no desire to avoid it here. NOLA is irresistible on some level to me. I enjoy its discomforts.

Greg and I immediately set out for a coffeeshop on Magazine St. so I can get caught up on my journal. But we end up mostly chatting, enjoying the funky, punky, mildly tattooed, pierced crowd around us who don't fill me with my usual sarcasm about American cool, which is increasingly NOT. I soon realize it is because these people are disheveled, dirty, fairly unaffected--in a word, erotic instead of mental and self-involved, which is what trendiness generally is. I've been here once before, and I'm always startled at the lack of attitude here. It's odd, because bohemia often breeds attitude like crabs and it's just not here. Maybe CA is the prob, I don't know. Though the weather isn't, the people here are mild, and that is welcoming.

We amble back down the potholed, root-fouled sidewalks, all in a state of almost utter collapse. This city is sinking and what a glorious list it is. Along with NYC near a month ago, it's the only city that's given me that jolt of reveling in it on its own terms. If NYC is majesty and magnificence, elation and enthusiasm, this city is the erotic, the downlow, the poetry of ruin and decay, and the virtue of such un-Americanisms. People often quote Tennessee Williams's comment that 'there are only 3 cities you can live in in America: NYC,  SF and NOLA--the rest is Cleveland.' I've never been to Cleveland (does Akron count?), but I live in LA, and I've just been a lot of other places, and I know what he means as does anyone reading this. America's changed since he said that, of course, and you can see little bohemias everywhere now, so perhaps things have improved. But it's a critical mass thing (most fledgling bohemias are sooner or later victims to those insidious bloodless coups of corporate gentrification), and few if any cities beyond those mentioned by Tenn. have it.

We take a cab over to the French  Quarter for dinner and bars--ah, the joy of carlessness! We avoid the Coney  Island part of the Quarter, which is one of the foulest tourist dumps on earth--Fishermen's Wharf, but with better architecture and music. If anyone ever complains about gay bar districts (and oh how they do), have them take a look at the straight version. Gay bars may suck, but they are never as depressingly tacky as girly joints with sleazy barkers and drunken businessman staggering about, humming to the blaring rock music.

We end up at some non-descript restaurant with excellent food. Unlike Fisherman's Wharf, almost all the food here is good, even in the touristy places. We eat catfish and soon vanish into the eastern part of the quarter where the queer bars are. Bars are boring of course, but Greg is the best of company and, at least in NOLA, the strippers often as not have backs covered in acne and caved-in chests, which is dissonantly charming. Youth is the only bow made to the popular concept of lust and beauty--the rest is out the door. Ah, another kind of liberation flowering before my eyes.

Saturday, Nov. 15th: New Orleans

Like I say, these guys are like brothers, and Greg and Paul are up by 11 am in true  NOLA style, making pancakes and the largest and strongest pots of coffee I've yet encountered anywhere in the country. I'm sleeping on an air mattress in the kitchen, among the ashtrays and dog-eared books--bohemian splendor. I'm happy here, could stay here a good long time. And at 4 days, I guess I'm doing just that. This is where the idea for the tour began actually, so it's another full circle as off we go to see Otis Fennell at the Faubourg Marigny Art and Bookstore. He's got a table set up inside the door, with piles of my books and little signs welcoming me. He's a heck of a sweet guy, a real cool kat kinda guy, a jack of all trades, who manages apartment bldgs, is an excellent photographer, and seems to know everybody in the arts in NOLA. He's another Mark of Minh, a tour saint, and I have the good fortune to spend all afternoon sitting in his store, while a constant stream of kindly and off-kilter characters flows in and out and I sign and sell books. NOLA, like SF, embraces weirdness with a full bearhug (something I miss terribly since leaving SF), and so this is a joyful day where I notice myself becoming more and more myself as the hours roll past. By the time Benjamin Morrison rolls in, I'm groovin' like some gone Daddy with ole Otis in the Kerouac sundowning streets, sucking deep the reeking swamp stench like the best cigarette you've ever tasted, among the tired old leaning buildings of NOLA, their shutters like heavy eyelids, and their broken sidewalks like badly chapped lips. At night, it is a city of candlelight, and all lights here assume that quality, whether neon, streetlight or conventional bulb. Across the street, the huge black shadow of a cat graces a blue wall--but it is painted and there is no 20-foot cat to be seen. Oh, but there is. NOLA is a black cat, invisible to all but those who kiss her back long and deep in the fetid, erotically-charged night.

Otis and I are late for our next gig, which is out at a place called the Country Club in the Bywater, funkier still than even the Faubourg Marigny. It's housed in a big old mansion, with a pool in back and a half-dozen interconnected rooms with big armchairs and fireplaces (whatever for in such heat? to burn offerings?). The new owner, Carl from NYC, is trying to create an alternative space outside the gay bars of the Quarter, and hopes that when the new streetcar comes in, it'll be more accessible. A dozen or so folks are there, many from the book club who I'll meet with Monday, and who are just now reading my book. Elfin Bruce is there, who got me jumped into the South Carolina Book Festival when I was here last May, and I meet his partner and friends. Most of these people already have the book, so this ends up more of a party, and after selling 19 books this afternoon (a bookstore record! Thank you Otis :), we don't mind, though Carl was gracious to offer the space as he wants to develop it as an arts venue as well--Otis and I are an early effort to work toward that goal. Carl has invited us for dinner at his house next door--a dinner that turns out to be one of the finest meals I've been blest with on this trip. Carl is an accomplished fellow and went to culinary school, which is apparent in his many gumbos, jambalayas, etouffe, duck, squab and sundry gourmet dishes, all washed down with fine red wine. I lost track of the endless parade of courses and I'm bad with naming them--I'll only say that I once again ate lots of meat and enjoyed every morsel. It was an incredible onslaught of fine foods, putting my bean slop to eternal shame. Carl had a great story I can't pass up sharing. He was a huge fan of Helen Reddy as a kid, and when he learned she was coming to Minneapolis (where he grew up) for a Democratic fundraiser, he precociously went straight to Hubert Humphrey's office and begged for a seat at the dinner. He was all of 16, earnest and lively, so the receptionist alerted the former senator, who agreed to see him in his office. Of course he asked Carl if he were interested in politics, but Carl--a straight-shooter if there ever was one--snapped back: "Not at all--I want to meet Helen Reddy!" Hubie got a big kick out of this and Carl ended up sitting with him and his wife at the main table where he got to chat with Delta Dawn herself--and at length.

Sunday, Nov. 16th: New Orleans

I'm deep in the ditch of love by Sunday am, when the pancakes and coffee once again rouse me for another day of NOLA. And that's what this city feels like: a lovely ditch, full of weird insects and interesting plants. Because when you look up, the clouds are low and weird and humid like in FL, only they're not in the wide vault of sky because New Orleans sits below sea level, below the river, which is up over the big levy. And so there is no horizon. In FL, you can look out over Jack Nichol's mt. ranges and wonder about the Gulf out there, where the clouds all come from. Not here. They're above you and you don't know where they came from because you can't see in any direction. It's a concave sky, only oppositely concave--convex. A lovely gutter of sorts. What did Oscar Wilde say?: 'We are all  in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

Well, I'm a happy little spider in this ditch, so out around Lee Circle I go by streetcar (ole Bob Lee is generally ignored by traffic and pedestrians because NOLA seems to have the proper relationship to the war and history in general: a provider of statues; excuses for parks and grandeur that can fade; ruin, decay, human bombast laid low by death and memorialized in eternal stone that highlights glory and mythology over facts--very French that way, very imbued with perspective and a healthy skepticism; very un-American, which in terms of history lacks perspective on a level only rivaled by fundamentalist Christians--no wonder there: one ignorance breeds another.) In other words, NOLA is an island just like Tenn. Wms. says it is, not just of bohemia in a philistine culture, but of civilization and wisdom in an at-best dubiously and primitively civilized country.

I spend the afternoon in a coffeeshop among the ditch-blest denizens (and yes, a ditch is like a coffin, so vampires are no stretch here), packing up in the afternoon to go meet Bruce, Sal and Gregg at the Bourbon St. pub, where I'm plied with shots of lime and vodka under the blaring big screen video screen which features Martha Stewart's demise in stop-action, over-dub, mix-madness dance music. I end up making new friends and vanishing into the candlelit night, under clouds as silent and shapeshifting as ghosts. No visit to NOLA is complete, or maybe even possible, without frightening the horses, and the streets are lousy with them. It just happens. It's how this sultry little ditch says hello and farewell. I follow the same labyrinthine passageways of this haunted dream as all the vampires before me, and like the catholic boy I am, I receive my gothic communion with an amen.

Monday, Nov. 17th: New Orleans

I'm ready to go, but have agreed to stay one more day so as to meet the book club tonight, which will require an early rising for the long haul to Dallas, followed by a reading just hours after I arrive.

So I've got a free day of sorts, and since several people I know will not accept me visiting NOLA without the requisite stop at Cafe Du Monde for coffee and beignets, I stroll in and have a seat among the tourists, all of whom look around too much. American tourists are really a strange breed. So many do exactly what they are told. They have been told to go to Cafe Du Monde, as I have been told, and we all sit there doing our duty. God, how ghastly--that even on their vacations, they do their duty and require some kind of authority to tell them what to do. So much for liberation. I write a letter to Tin--one of my favorite pastimes--gobble the powdered-sugar drenched beignets, gulp the coffee and run for my life, careful not to trip over the pigeons who clean up after the tourists by pecking up the fallen powdered sugar, which in places is piled high as snowdrifts.

Fortunately, I've received an invitation to lunch with Benjamin Morrison, a fan from Otis's yesterday, as well as a former TV critic for the Times-Picayune and an all-around fabulous conversationalist. I meet him in his little bungalow and we wheel our way among the potholes to a hotel dining patio (Benjamin uses a wheelchair, which is not easy in NOLA with it's shattered streets--though the many broken curbs allow wonderful opportunities for random street and sidewalk access that wouldn't exist in a neater city.) Benjamin is a wonderfully happy and vivacious man, and we have a lovely afternoon, ending up at the bookstore where Otis is as hang-loose cool as ever, opening the shop at about  3:30 pm--so New Orleans. No one keeps regular hours in this town: they're open when they're open. A sweet soul wanders in and we strike up a conversation. Samuel is a violinist from Charleston and I swear he's one of those stars I saw from the gutter yesterday eve, fallen here to shimmer among the brightly-colored centipedes, amorous beetles and affable sowbugs of the loveliest ditch in the world. I  go back to meet Benjamin for falafels and then we head to the Community Center for the book club event, which ends up well-attended. We have a wonderful conversation about the book and its various characters--how could anyone fall in love with Vince someone asks. The others sigh knowingly.

Tuesday, Nov. 18th: Dallas

I'm up and struggling off the air mattress (I dreamed of boats last night, so volatile is the rubberized air under me) by 6:30 am, full of coffee by 7, courtesy of not-an-early-riser Greg, who has kindly roused himself for this farewell. Up the winding ramps out of the ditch, my windshield wipers attempting to wipe away the swamp scum that collects (New Orleans' signature thick humidity), wondering what my lungs must look like. To live in NOLA is to approach the amphibian. Adios turtles, frogs and snakes, I'm bound for the land of the cow people--Dallas. But first I have to traverse the bayous with their creepy moss-draped trees and endless wandering rivulets and ponds. In the distance, I can see powerplants and swaths of dead bayou pines and I'm assuming there is some kind of acid rain thing going on down here. What we've wrought. This country is a polluted mess and it's shameful and shortsighted-- considering it's destroying our health, not to mention that of all other living things, which don't have the ability to at least give it a wide berth as so many of us do. Which leads me to wondering about the guys who built this freeway, knee-deep in swamps, planting the piles, constructing the road, keeping at bay hungry crocodiles, insidious fungi and god knows what else.  I say an 'Om mani padme hung'--as I do for the endless roadkill--thanking those men for making it so easy for me to cross this swamp, and wishing for them non-polluted blessings.

And then the storm hits. And I mean storm. Complete with a tornado watch and interruptions on the radio station instructing me to keep an eye out for funnel clouds, but not telling me what I should do. And I haven't a clue. Cars begin to appear upended in the swamps and state troopers are flashing about like fireflies, and the rain comes down in a wall of water like I've never seen. I think to pull over, but I've visions of tornadoes flinging me back into Mississippi, or even up to Dallas. I'd rather drive, thanks.

I press on, but I really can't see at all. I've never been in a storm like this--my god, the ditch must have filled to the brim. Poor little insects. After about an hour it ends, and I'm so distraught that when I pull over for gas, I stoop to buying Krispie Kreme donuts, which I'm ashamed to admit. They don't even taste good, and they represent everything bad about America: ugly chain stores, minimum wage abuse, profiteering corporate lackeys and their fatcat bosses, over-packaging and environmental blight, the ignorance and negligence of stock-buying nimbies, not to mention the dubious product, which is a heart-clogging, fat/sugar perpetual obesity machine with a creepy southern nostalgia promo image that hints at, but would never admit, its redneck rebel pride roots and ethos. In a word--SHAME! FRAUD! Holy smokes, Treb--you done? Yes. I had to pull over and vomit them up. Just kidding.

Soon I was in Texas, where the skies open up and become huge again, hinting at the west. Dallas looks like the second coming of Denver or Atlanta, only minus the trees. It's the same old new city economic boom look, with ugly highrises, one of which looks like a giant vice.

After a few wrong turns, I find Chris Wynn's little house in Irving--out past Texas Stadium. Chris is a writer whom I met a few years back on the internet and he's graciously agreed to put me up and organize a reading for the two of us at Crossroads Market, the gay bookstore, which turns out to be a great place, rivaling Atlanta's Outwrite for a well-run store that is full of people, has a cafe and is well-stocked with all manner of books. Chris did a great job setting this up, going so far as to get a photo of me on the cover of the local Dallas Voice newspaper, and a feature on the two of us. The reading is well-attended and the books sell out, so I get to go get more out of the trunk, which is always a nice feeling. Then we head across the street for good, healthy Mexican food, full of veggies. Chris's boyfriend Steve is a real nice guy, who's currently a pastry chef, but has also been in the Navy and was a financial broker of some kind before he burned out and got into cooking. We're joined by delightful Darrin and Caren and Tascha, and the subject is "Dallas!" No one seems to be able to define it, which is the case with all these boom cities. They're devoid of soul on some level. But it's home to somebody I guess. I'm not really here long enough to give it a fair shake. Blanche in Rhinebeck told me the museums in Ft. Worth are great, and Darrin points out that Dallas and Ft. Worth compete for cultural bragging rights, and thus buy art and build museums, etc, which ends up benefiting both cities.

Wednesday, Nov. 19th: Dallas to Austin

I thought of the JFK assassination as I passed signs for Love Field on my way out of town, not realizing at the time that I was just 3 days short of the anniversary. I considered heading to Dealy Plaza, but figured 'why be morbid?' and drove on. Pretty soon I was in Waco. Once again, 'why be morbid?' It's a sweet old town, with old highrises from the 20s and 30s. Pretty soon I'm seeing signs for Heart of Texas auto parts, while I listen to Vietnamese radio cuz I like the sound of it--sweet and birdlike--and it makes me think of Tin. But I can't make out a thing and spin the dial to some news, which unfortunately turns out to be the nastiest talk radio rightwinger I've ever heard. The heart of Texas is not looking good. He starts trashing 'earth religion' in a really denigrating way. It's hard not to laugh at these morons, they are so out of it (such product really. you could can guys like this like jelly), but their words help miseducate an already woefully ignorant populous (the Bush stickers are appearing frequently). And I don't just mean Texas. I heard Ollie North the other day, on some national program, going on about the sentimental joys of the Bible and combat. Who are these heartless men and why do people listen to them? There is no connection to anything real in what they say. It's all just mental garbage and judgment. It is not different from Hitler, not at all. There doesn't seem to be any interest in looking, inquiring and trying to understand. And this is the vast majority of news channels now everywhere in the country, which is why I'm basically ignoring the news for 2 months.

I pull into a gas station in Troy and watch a man who just climbed out of a Humvee plastered with Snuff ads try to sell his wares to the Asian lady behind the counter. At Denny's, I see not one, but two rock bands sitting down for breakfast in their requisite black clothes and long hair. Must be getting close to Austin.

Back  on the road and outside my window, there are weird bubble houses--concrete, shaped like little puffball mushrooms--dotting the landscape, and then I see the source:  a big parking lot of them as model homes. I'm assuming they're sort of like geodesic domes, energy-efficient, etc. Imagine, even in Texas there is environmentalism--even though they have the laxest laws in the country in terms of protection. But I'm heading to Austin, the ground zero of Texas liberalism, so I'm not surprised. I shut off the radio and enter the quagmire of Austin traffic--clearly a city that is growing out of control on the scale of LA or Wash. DC.  There are signs for the LBJ library and so I'm once again presented with the whole Kennedy/60s thing, and how I've always thought LBJ is the real Shakespearean tragic president, not Nixon. Just consider it: He inherits the throne from the assassinated king, and is then driven from power by the ex-king's brother while he laments the boondoggle of a war that is killing 'young men' whom he dreams of at night and who make him doubt what he's doing. I doubt ole W has any dreams like that.

I pinball my way through town to meet Jeremy and his friend Kevin, who asks me where I got my name. I always suggest looking at it dyslexically, and sure enough he gets it that it's Robert backwards (I hated the name because it was the most common baby name in 1962, courtesy of Robt Kennedy, which launches Kevin into the trivia that it's RFK's birthday tomorrow, and the anniversary of the assassination on Saturday). Like I say, I'm avoiding morbidity--but I trust serendipity--so I obliquely digress and banter on about my old fantasy story that I actually used a few times back in my spoken word days:  that I am the love child of Jackie O. and Bobby, who had an affair in '68, of which I was the product. Part of the deal in marrying Ari was that I was sequestered away and raised as Trebor (to have Daddy's name but secretly, like a fairy tale) Onassis on Skorpios and kept a big secret to protect the holy family. So in case you're wondering, I am indeed a Kennedy. I've actually published some poems as Trebor O. and I miss my mother terribly.

We had some great Mexican food south of the river in hipsterville and then Kevin mentioned to Jeremy that a couple of his friends weren't going to be able to make it tomorrow, and maybe Trebor would like to come (Kevin works at a radio station). I'm game for anything of course, so my eyes glance back and forth between the two, wondering. Jeremy then turns to me: "Do you like Sarah McLachlan, Trebor?" "Yes," I answer enthusiastically as he then tells me that I am invited to a private concert at the station tomorrow morning. I nearly lost my tamales. "She can be the opening act for your reading," Kevin quipped playfully.

Thursday, Nov. 20th: Austin

Jeremy swings by the lovely Econolodge (the cheapest motel in Austin--which may explain the radioactive waste in the parking lot--I'll get to that), and off we go to K-whatever 107.1. I sat down, literally 5 feet from Sarah, who at the piano, immediately commenced to grace us with her new single--And I mean GRACE. I was a goner: "Heaven bent to take my hand and lead me...."  Me too Sarah! I was so blown away, I had to hold onto my seat. I've never been so impressed by a voice in my life. She went on and on mercilessly, while I muttered 'please stop before I completely break down.' It was humbling, being on a book tour and all. In some sense, all artists are trying to connect people to something beyond the mundane crap that drags us down into talk radio land (how far we have fallen), and Sarah McLaughlin can open a hole in the white noise bigger than Texas. It's not ego. This woman's voice is a pure stream that brings the Sierra Nevada right into my heart. She may have never even been there. It doesn't matter. She's a portal, a door, like Vince and Peter in my story, and like I say, it's humbling. What is my  book? Maybe a keyhole to peer through. This song with this voice is galactic in scale. Everyone in the room knows it. We look at each other dumbfounded. We're almost embarrassed by our fandom. And it's so clear:  if you wanna reach everybody, you gotta sing, you gotta write songs. A book is always a quiet, little secret on some level. A song is a proclamation in the marketplace and everybody hears it. The last song she sang was Angel: " ... always some reason to feel not good enough..." Yep. "....It's easier to believe in this sweet madness, this glorious sadness that brings me to my knees." And so she slays talk radio with a kiss, manifests a mudra of Buddhamind and we are all that mudra now, collectively in that room, and we feel the little boy dreams of JFK, and the grief of his lonely brother, and we know why Jackie crawled across the back trunk of the car, and we even forgive LBJ because we suddenly understand he was truly sorry for the war. As it turns out he once owned this station; his daughters still do. Well, there you have it then. I had to nearly run out  of the place, because on top of all that, I had once named my book--for a period of 6 months or so--'This Glorious Sadness'.

I'm crazy enough to understand Waco, and since Jeremy has to go to work, I'm free to spend my tears and all else down by the rivers edge, which Sarah sang about too: "There he walks down to the water's edge.." I love river songs, and all those I've listened to--as I've run back and forth across the Mississippi and the Delaware, the Hudson, the Potomac and the Colorado---come humming back to me:  Springsteen: "They went down to the river..." and Annie Lennox: "Let's go down to the river's edge...." Yeah, let's.

I stand on the Congress St. bridge and peer down at the elephant's ears and trees. This river hasn't been fouled at all by industry. It's a beautiful river, and in the middle of it, I see a turtle swimming--down he dives, and I know right then that I'm done with this trip even though I have an event tonight. Austin is about something else, and I set off to find out what that is. There are the superficial facts:  the capitol building, which is really beautiful  regardless of what goes on inside. It's the only capitol that is taller than the US Capitol in DC, which is in keeping with other factoids: The Texas flag is the only one that flies equal height to the Am. flag. Texas pride is all about BIG, which is profoundly juvenile, and far less poetic or interesting than tortured southern pride. But Austin isn't about stupid Texas, and as I wander the boulevards and avenues, I see the weirdos that make this city one of the islands of America, along with the others I've seen and know--NOLA, NYC, SF, Athens, MINH. Homeless youths with guitars jaywalk, their backs bent under army dufflebags; endless thrift shops line Congress St. and a coffeeshop beckons where I write Tin one more card and watch a man paint beachballs. Bright-eyed hipsters come and go. They are Auden's 'ironic points of light,' and they make me feel at home.

There are oak trees here too, which I've missed terribly, and the hills around the town look almost like CA's. I wander into a grove of  oaks and think of my brother Brian, blessed soul who's always known who I am and liked me for it, and who would exclaim in such a place: 'This is stony. What a great place to smoke pot or do shrooms!'. I laugh. Thank goodness for Brine, the blessed Bacchus of my tortured Apollonian youth. The Celts were right about oak trees--and so was Brine:  They're holy.

These small things that console me, wanderer that I am with no home but these images: oak trees and Vishnu, pine trees and ruined sidewalks,  and the smile of a man on the street in NYC who would desire nothing more all day than to give me good directions with a smile and a welcome to New Yock. 'Oh Mannahatta' I sing in corny Whitmanisms:  'Oh  oak tree in the hills of Texas,' 'oh pine trees among the ticketing sheriffs of southern Virginian,' 'oh Vedic gods pointing me to Rhinebeck,' 'oh Aspen trees fleeing down hillsides from the tourists of Taos,' 'oh, little Sam doing faceplants in the dunes of Michigan, and cheerily spitting out the grains!' 'oh, the alright kids of Kent State and Georgia, burning away all the previous generation's hangups about gender,''oh the tree that is the plural of leaf.'

At a latin art shop, I meet Nivia Gonzalez, a fine artist who I immediately like and spend an hour with. She paints these beautiful Diego Rivera-esque women, and I got a print of one called 'Meditation' for Tindo because his house is as crazy colorful as her paintings, and she signed it to him: 'Para Tin.' :) 'Oh Tin, oh Nivia, oh connection.'

Back out in the street, there are highrises, one of which is such an aesthetic mess it rivals the faux Empire State Bldg. at 1st and Mission in SF. Sadly, it's the tallest bldg. in Austin, scarring the skyline fatally. It's sort of light blue and looks like an upended insect, with its face planted in the ground because the top is a jumble of crooked, layered constructs of steel and glass that give the impression of closed wings--only it lacks the grace of organic chemistry--or should I say insectivorian anatomy. Spinning around it speed the SUVs of weekend warriors, with their expensive eyeglassess, thinning hair and requisite canoes strapped to the roof. There's something disturbingly CA-greedy about it, product no doubt of the city's dot.com boom. Funny, those who are manufacturing all these digital connections seem so disconnected.

Stickers exclaim: "Keep Austin Weird" for this is a threatened island. I sit and watch the critical bohemian mass struggle--'those ironic points of light,'--in the dark sea of America that supports war and an illegitimate president, and run off to Bookpeople early so I can look up the rest of that Auden poem.

Turns out I needed it, as this reading was among the strangest of the trip. One man asked me if I thought the media was the reason there were suddenly so many gay people. He said he thought the glamorization of being gay was causing people to choose to be gay; that it was being sold to them. I told him I didn't think that was likely since Heterosexuality was glamorized and sold to me for 25 years and that didn't take. I also asked him if he really thought one's sexuality was product. He pointed out that he was religious and had worked with religious groups (An odd irrelevancy to the discussion; and pitifully passive aggressive). I'm pretty sure he was a closet case, and I tried to have compassion for that cuz it's a hell to be there. Another guy concurred that people are suggestible, especially women. I asked a woman in the room what she thought of his statement and she said she agreed. We were getting nowhere. 'Studies have shown,' the man insisted. Studies have shown, blah, blah, blah. Studies have shown 4 out of 5 dentists recommend. Who cares what studies have shown? Studies have shown those who quote what studies have shown can't make their own conclusions. If I'd have been into what studies have shown, I'd have never written this book. We got your studies right here. They were talk radio incarnate, with the cheshire grins of the smug self-satisfied xtian: We know we're right--we saw it in the Bible. Mom told us. Oh, the muddied message of the Christ, warped through the dark fear-leaden centuries, forged into a tool of hatred and sloth that they hold clenched in their closed fist--one of the great tragedies of Western Civ. and maybe the thing that will bring it all crashing down. As practiced, Xtianity is one of the biggest frauds there is. When you're gay, you learn  that real quick. I was blind and now I can see. Now there's an ironic point of light.

At one point Jeremy said to me, 'You've given them enough, Trebor.' Thank you Jeremy. I gave and they simply took, and then they walked out, all smiles. Christian charity. I hate it how I always practice their religion better than them and I don't even espouse it. Next time I'll serve Krispie Kremes and Caribou coffee.

When the room cleared out, I felt like hugging Jeremy and Alex who were as dismayed as I. Kevin appeared as we were cleaning up, and though I was more focused on the sad stupor the world is in just now (and it's not just Texas--some of those present were from Orange County), I remembered the rest of Auden's poem, blest as I was to be in the company of some of those 'points of light':  "May I, composed like them, of eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame." Flame on. Cuz it's not just dust, xtians--it's eros too. I remember the Xtian crime that was visited on me--the negation of eros. What a fraud, and what a lie, and what a betrayal of the message of a man who hung with whores and outcasts, eros-composed all. He was a flame and a queer and a wanderer and you've made him into a talk radio host. How lost and sad, these people--and how then can I take them out to the oak groves or down by the river; how can I ever show them that tree is the plural for leaf? I honestly do not know. They crucified the J-man; they don't want to connect, they just want to protect what they have. Which in the final analysis is nothing, because all that matters is an open heart. That's all we got here, and if they'd go across the street and buy Sarah's latest cd, they'd see what god is: Love.

Friday, Nov. 21st: Marfa/Tucson

I'd noticed the radioactive sign on the container last night, and though I considered that it might simply be the trailer where last night's audience lived, I figured it didn't hurt to ask the proprietor as I checked out. He laughed heartily. "Oh, my kids did that, they switched the sign around. It's been that way for about a year. You're the first person to ask." 'Oh America, is anyone paying attention?' Our world in stupor lies indeed. They ask about cable TV and coupons and the pool hours and check-out time, but no one asks about the dragon sleeping in the parking lot.

All day I drive through the hill country, right on through Johnson City, which is tiny and non-descript, perfect origin for a fallen leader. One of the odder sights along the road was a whole herd of cows gathered around a billboard that was sitting ground level on a little hill. Some of the cattle were sitting, others standing about, and on the sign it said: Juicy Grilled Burgers at DQ. Ignorance is bliss and horror all at once. The next billboard advertised micro-surgery for vasectomy reversal. So Texan, that one. Read it however you want. Connections, or not.

Jeremy recommended I visit Marfa, so after coming out of the hill country and into the dryness of west TX--where I felt more and more at home in the desertness of it--I turned south into the Chihuahuan Desert, heading through desert-sleepy Alpine (not southern sleepy like a dog, but desert sleepy like a lizard) with its Mexican churches and empty nopales-dotted yards. And then Marfa, with its dramatic old West city hall and empty warehouses. Abandoned by the military, this town has been more or less revitalized by artists. Donald Judd came here to do an installation, and I guess people followed. Now it hosts the Lannan Foundation and all the Judd stuff at the Chinati Institute.

I see a bookstore/cafe and pull in to write in my journal, buy Tin a card, drink coffee--the usual. Tin likes Lucinda Williams and she's singing as I write him: "Lonely girls ... pretty rhinestones..." A lonely song in a lonely place, though right now the store is lousy with big city artsy types. They turn out to  be a group of art tourists, all loaded down in SUVs, out here to see Judd's installation and other works out at the Chinati Institute, which I wander out to later--but it's closing, so I just look about briefly and promise myself I'll return.

Back on the road, I blast west to El Paso, lonely trains chugging along beside me: "pretty boxcars. .. lonely trains..."

I'd planned on stopping in El Paso again, but decide to ball that jack all the way to Tucson if I can, and so I do. But not before passing over that strange freeway that sweeps over El  Paso, affording a grand view of Mexico, right over the river. And it's weird--among the SUVs and freeway signs, the highrises and shopping malls, Dennys and Chevron-- looking over into Mexico, not a sign anywhere, just little broken down adobes on dirt streets--it's like looking 300 years into the past. Very strange--and beautiful too. I know it's very poor and crime-ridden, but looking around at a modern American city, your heart sinks: Is this the price for law and order and plenty? The devil's bargain.

Past the belching cement factories and I'm in New Mexico again,  and not long after, AZ, and then I'm rolling past the big saguaros down to Rich's adobe where this whole trip began. Rich and his dog Cho-ey greet me heartily and we drink cans of Heineken from  Rich's foodless fridge and laugh into the night, sharing tales of the American road and the crazy crap we have to tolerate.

Rich is salt of the earth, a good soul, sincere and transparent. And two or three things I know for sure, and one of em is that you can spot an open heart at a hundred yards and it's always laughing and saying yes.

Saturday, Nov. 22nd: LA

On to Yuma through the desert after breakfast at Denny's, where I sat next to a group of hunters who went on and on about action adventure movies and all the cool killing and car wrecks. Like small boys they were, and all of them over 30. In stupor lies.

Tucson is a mixed bag, and it's growing too fast too. Into the desert I escape. AZ is very beautiful and for the next few hours, I watch rainbow-y trains of every color--yellow engine, red caboose, blue, green, white, rusty boxcars--passing far off across stubbled fields of gold before distant orange mountains.

Near Yuma, there are dunes and they actually cross the highway like ghostly animals, blowing in wispy streams above the pavement. Before long, I see dune buggies and the name makes sense for the first time. The dunes look like skin, undulant and smooth, and the wandering little vehicles look like crabs.

A border patrol SUV meanders about in the dunes nearby. How strange, though I guess if you dressed up like an American, whooping and wheeling about in your dune buggie, you might stand a chance of tricking 'em. And they ain't gonna let ya.

Over the Colorado and through the Imperial Valley, up along the vast Salton Sea to the Vegas-y outskirts of Palm Springs, and the bright lights of Indian casinos. I'm back on the 10 into LA, and it's crazy tailgaiting madness, and everyone going 90. I never feel like I have to worry about speeding here--there's always someone else flying by at 100 mph. There's a big wreck on the freeway and I have to stop with everybody else for a spell. I look around and there's a kid with a groucho mask on, waving at me. I wave back. There are Humvees and low-slung Hondas, and though I roll my eyes, there is something here in this desert, so much of it plastered over with concrete, that is essentially good. I can't say why, I just feel it. It's not really home, but it feels like it welcomes everybody. Nobody is not welcome in LA and that's something.

I drive up to the hotel to drop off my car, and I have to throw myself on the hood momentarily, while my best friend Isaac laughs, just to thank the humble beast. It's like Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums. He always thanks his campsites up in the mts. when he departs. Gratefulness is the only true religion, the poet Rita Dove said once. Well then, I'm a holy roller.

But I'm turning in these wheels for my old '82 Toyota, which sings as I start it up, sings through it's steering wheel and dashboard and warped wheel bearings--a small and humble voice, but one that'll run forever. And since I have no cd player and the radio has died, these sounds will have to be my Joni and Van Morrison and Sarah, my singing insects of Athens, GA, and the sweet self-talk of Sam and Matilda, the wind in El Paso and Tucson, the babbling creeks at Bruce's near Rhinebeck, the rhythmic swoosh-swoosh-swoosh of the subway in NYC, the pattering rain of New Haven, the pinging acorns of tin-roofed Mississippi, the rattling streetcar on St. Charles, and that one snow flake in the Alleghenies-- soundless as a river--all that sweet flow of connection (sweet, sweet thing), which blooms from the pages of books, and the notes of songs, the light of the sun, and the leaf of the tree, the letters to Tindo, and oh how I hope from this little journal which I dedicate now and forever to the blessed friends and strangers who did me some kindness along this way and showed me better how to love and stronger how to sing.