The Man Upstairs

Reflections on Identity from a mind (mine) still discovering itself

“Stop me falling down, stop me making movies of myself….”

Like I had a complete film crew in my head, that’s what the 80s and 90s were like for me, whether in the dingy being pulled by my dad’s sailboat, biking the neighborhood or daydreaming in class, I’d dream out the stories I could not live in real life.

I was only friends with someone between the ages of 12 and 18, and during that time, how I saw myself wasn’t under my control, but from someone I’ll refer to as Gary. Over the course of years of friendship that started in 5th grade and ended over the phone in 2001, for a good chunk of that time, he would cut me down, subtle like at first, then deeper, I was too distracted by video games, whatever music was on, and eventually drugs and alcohol.

He’d put me down for almost everything I did. Gary said it in a calm voice like a newscaster on TV.

There’s something about you that people just can’t stand. Don’t you wish you knew what that thing was so you could live a normal life?

Or

You’ve got these problems, Adam and they prevent you from having friends and getting a girlfriend,

Or

you’re just a stuttering freak, but hey at least you’ve got me.

When he’d cut me down, my eyes would glass over, my world went underwater-slow, so I could see each cut delivered in slow motion.

I bought his vision of me as gospel. So for a long time, I didn’t know who I was, especially in the eyes of others.

During a critical period of my adolescence I was convinced I was this terrible person, this series of genetic missteps (stuttering, being a spazz, which was really just ADHD before the diagnosis existed) that was permanent in nature, but at least I had a friend who was kind enough to tolerate all of that.

If I had any friends before, once Gary came along, he saw to it that all of my fake friends be purged from the register. Once Gary said they were gone, they were gone. One time in 11th grade he actually called someone I’d been wanting to hang out with, looked up their number in the phonebook and told them not to hang out with me.

“He said you were a psycho or something and I should stay far away “ the kid later told me.

Kind of goes without saying that Gary was obsessed with me, and the idea that a male would be obsessed with another male, begins to put ideas in one’s head. Ideas that were there already.

His handwriting in a letter to me, when I was on Outward Bound.

There’s really no one else quite like you, Adam

No one else who gets me.

You really are the only one.

A friendship like that, opens the participants up to the potential of what is possible between boys, this obsession, it was destructive, he saw someone like himself and he saw someone he could control.

I wasn’t ever attracted to Gary, repulsed by him was more like it. But over time, with no other friends around, I depended on him.

He’d deliver one part good news to every five deep cuts.

I don’t know how you do it, but you are an incredible writer. Maybe I’m wrong about you, maybe you aren’t an idiot.

So I was confused, and there were all these cool parts of myself that got discovered, like my, illustrations, a recent Adult ADHD diagnosis, and then last year, after doing a lot of soul searching and therapy. I figured out finally that I am bisexual. I came out on this stage a few months back.

But that part of me that was finally able to talk about it publicly, that guy had to have a space, an in between space, a closet ,if you will, to hide in,.

That space, that closet, for me was created mostly by Rufus Wainwright songs.

Rufus’s self entitled first album in 1998. Hearing first single Danny Boy was like hearing Elton John for the first time, camp, sure, but there was something about Rufus’s camp, it went beyond camp and into the sound, he owned camp in a way that no other male singer had for me.

That camp wasn’t a show, I saw it then, it was the way his queer voice sounded. And me, I could take that music in and listen to it, but have it resonate, with me, in my body.

And where it hit me, was in my chest, the sweet sad spot where my memories and emotions met , teachers told me was called a solar plexus,

That spot is where the music came in, its where the want to perform g came in, the ideas for stories, they all came from this place, wanting to act out and be on stage and look at me mom. Something in my chest sagged a little any time someone mentioned AIDS, which in the 80s usually in a ghoulish joke. In the 90s it was Whenever bible thumpers on the Carolina Campus talked about how homesexuality was wrong. Each time, the word Homosexuality moved slow through me like the put downs Gary would give me.

Over time I lost track of that place in my chest.

Rufus back to my Nexus: My Solar Plexus.

By 2000 Rufus had released Poses and I was newly unemployed for a summer sitting in parks in my new hometown of Portland, reading books in the sun and listening to Rufus talking about the Tower of Learning, about California, and part time models and such a wonder and that he’ll stay in bed, of the many times he’s debased himself in Poses, now I’m drunk wearing flip flops on 5th avenue, “One Man Guy”I could sing along quiet in my braint. and there was a sense of solitude on that record, that carried on to Want One. his follow up album and the one “Movies of Myself” is on.

Stop m falling down

Stop me making movies of myself.

Hearing this, the stories I told myself when I was growing up, I was starting to talk to myself in that way again, things were beginning to open up.

Tom, Tom Spanbauer, my writing mentor who passed away a little over a year ago, he wanted my writing to get better, and I chose to focus on Tom’s body language that told me it wasn’t my ability he questioned, but my execution.

And he was right.

But back then any criticism especially about writing and it felt like nothing less than an attack on the bones and blood of who I was.

But who Tom was, the way his sexuality was him and was not him. How sacred loving another man was. His partner, future husband lived upstairs in a fully furnished apartment in a style completely his own. It wasn’t Tom’s space, it was Sage’s. The downstairs was decorated in Tom’s style, and upstairs, Sage’s.

Two styles in one house

Thursday nights in Tom’s basement, Dangerous Writing, that table and all the penises, the big glass one, one that was a bottle opener, one was a wind up. you could read one extra page if it had a penis in it.

I’d be at work the day after Thursday night class and I’d put on Movies of Myself, and this little window started to open in me, a little bubble of delight floated up. I’d spend hours in this reverie of being in that house, the easy way they were with each other, like friends but then this added a chamber next to friendship where other stuff could happen.

In this chamber, my thoughts flowed a little easier, less jagged. I was free to express myself, the world didn’t contain judgement, people were kinder, patient, at least as they existed as thoughts banging around in my head.

That’s what it was like. Waking up in the middle of the night and there he was

With his own separate chamber and everything.

Words on a page declare statements

Statements have a relationship with facts

People associate facts with the truth, or at least they once did.

So if what I am writing about is true and if I am indeed writing about me,

Then I am telling you the truth, right now about me.

LIVE and, on stage.

The Author Performing the Essay.

That inside of me, was and is a gay man living there. He’s a few years older than I am.. He’s quite serious, reserved one might say. But it doesn’t take much to get him out. Start thinking about men too much, start pining about life in general, and there will be the side of me that starts talking about how informal everyone is, and how maybe if we all just dressed a little nicer this is the kind of world, about their company too much and wanting that company all the time, even though I’m married and in love with the woman who is sitting right there.

He stays inside for weeks and I’ll wonder if he still lives in there.

Then one day a song will come on,

Rufus or Perfume Genius or the Pet Shop Boys

And he’s there like he never left, he was just waiting for the right moment.

I didn’t tell anyone else about this place in me, I wasn’t sure it was really me it was in, whenever I tried to think too long about how I felt definitively about this weird queer space in my head, it would fall away.

For this room is a hidden room, with all those desires locked up, even I don’t know what they are, one thing for sure, it is fiction, a fiction that does what Tom told us to do, to write it all down, fact and fiction, lie and lie and lie and lie. Because, according to Tom Spanbauer, who heard it from Gordon Lish, fiction is the lie that tells the truth truer.

And for now, I’ll stick with that.