Men (1): The Beautiful Amazons

I’ve been thinking a lot about men recently, straight men and gay men and DL men and transmen, boyfriends and “girl” friends and regular ol’ friends and tricks and acquaintances and passing strangers. A series of inchoate thoughts disorganised by theme and genre. The other day I was wandering listlessly with La Gamine through Macy’s, she detoured to look at the silver jewelry while I went in search of the Biotherm counter, when I was confronted with a huge image of the latest Lancôme woman, wet and pink and mauve and huge, perfect eye shadow and luscious, full lips spread over with a creamy, glittery lip gloss. As I stood in this veritable centre of femininity, focused on this seductive image, senses heightened by the smells and reassuring chatter of the cosmetics counters, the glass and chrome, the pure white light, the last redoubt of women and girls and fags, it struck me that my threads of thought leading towards “men” were pulled through and mediated by women— the women I have known, the “woman” I am, and “Woman” as paradigm.

As readers of this blog will have noted, I was raised by a fierce pride of women, with my grandfather the only permanent man in residence. The absence of the father was never remarked upon either in a positive or negative sense. It just was. I was not one of those children who pine longingly for the absent father. I never knew him, and my relation to him was almost wholly abstract, a racial stain perhaps, an equation with no solution necessary. The various Lotharios that passed through my mother’s putative sexual-romantic life were hardly better than the absent father. Some were nicer than others, some lasted longer than others, but they all came and went without leaving much of a mark, aside from their various peccadilloes, their strange habits, their general description.

Recently I remembered that one of them had a house in Redondo Beach with a large backyard that featured blackberry bushes and a tree with a bent limb that was perfect for climbing and sitting. My mother had a photo of me sitting in the tree, preternaturally blond and in a perfectly hideous jean jacket ensemble, very circa ’76. The mechanism for the memory was of course the fact of the photo. That one was named Michael, and I suppose in the spirit of the times, he had a bit of the dreamboat about him. He was blond, fashionably shaggy and moustached, drove an MG 5-speed convertible, but the exact year or two of his presence are lost to me. I do remember disliking his obvious self-involvement, in spite of or perhaps because of his sexy car.

In any event, my maternal grandfather, the one constant in the constellation of masculinity pendant ma jeunesse was hardly what one would call an affirmation. I never felt emotionally connected to him, fascinated as I was by my grandmother and her sisters, with their matronly woolen dresses, their big dyed hair (Chicana "Blondes," aka Orange), their penchant for brooches and turquoise rings, their mysterious dressing rooms with small tables loaded with cremes and lotions and toners and perfumes, their appointments at the Beauty School on Hollywood Boulevard, followed by suppers at Love’s BBQ, where the rib platters were served with small bowls of rose water for rinsing one’s fingers. The fascination was similar but different from many gay men’s narratives about identity formation through the magic and performance of femininity.

While it is true that I was known to wear my mother’s high heels on occasion, in the privacy of empty bedrooms on hot Southern California afternoons, my role in relation to the mechanics of femininity was definitely under the hood. Very early I understood and demystified the superstructure of the feminine for the women in my family, and adopted their critical eye, their manera of self-presentation, which was a very obvious but at the same time subtle application of make-up, clothes, and hair. Just tonight, Philosopher Mom, in response to my disdain for her sock collection, accused me of being an Aggressive Femme. And on some level I had to agree with her assessment. I had, after all, the most excellent teachers, task mistresses all.

Femininity, a particularly virulent strain, I knew from. It held no mystery or sexual compulsion. Often, one reads in straight men’s memoir, about the power of the objects of women’s sartorial and hygienic cultures on young male protagonists, the touch or thought of a bra triggering an orgasm (or several). I washed the bras and panties from an early age, applying Spray n' Wash to the occasional stains caused by a sudden, unexpected menstrual flow on my mother's undergarments. I dusted the jars of potions and lotions, and used them myself, as we did not support separate toiletries for women and boy in my house. I grew up with the original green smell of Clairol's Herbal Essence and Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific in my nose. I used Dove soap. I untangled the cords of the curling irons and makeup mirrors in an attempt to plug something in, and dusted foundation powder off the phone when I went to use it. I watched and assisted as my mother and the other women in my family made themselves into the feminine, surrounded by impenetrable clouds of hairspray and Chloé. The unknown territory for me was men, men and their worlds.

Understanding the aerodynamics of the feminine superstructure was easy enough, but getting to the base was a harder task. Like many proud, fierce tribes of women, those of my family were hard as nails, critical, not coquettish: a sort of take-no-prisoners and suffer-no-fools kind of school, for which I was always glad I was born a boy. To be raised as an actual girl by these women would have been difficult. Their surface was soft, pretty in pink, but underneath the layers of chiffon and Maybelline and ashtrays overflowing with crushed lipstick-stained butts, their depths were harder to plumb. Capricious Amazons, they seemed to simultaneously disdain and need men. Some were better at this game then others, with my mother being more on the losing end than her other woman relations, with their gentle hen-pecked husbands in tow as their high-heels clacked on the walk into the house. They were unburdened by the feminist principles of equality in relationships that so drove my mother nuts with men unreceptive to such ideas. They were, in short, the boss, a position that struck me as about right.

They encouraged my effeminate antics, the dressing up, the lip-synching to diva hits with a towel on my head, they helped me perfect my Wonder Woman spin, they bought me Bionic Woman dolls and saintly icons. It was only later, after I had begun to break into adolescence, that the opprobrium of my mother and grandfather in particular began to attempt a course correction, a shift in perception, but by that time it was rather too late. My maternal grandfather was a man’s man. He had been a submariner in the Pacific theatre during the war, he had tattoos on his arms, a rather large penis that I saw once in passing. He worked for the government in something mysteriously nuclear, with a Q clearance. He sported an astronaut’s buzzcut his entire life. His abundant masculinity, in contrast to my grandmother's strength, led to a strong sexual frisson between them. While he may have turned his eye during my early youth, indulgently, the arrival of the age of masculinity triggered, among a host of other things, a sharp reaction to my engrained effeminacy.

In the tortured interregnum between my grandmother’s early death and his own, his displeasure came through violent tongue-lashings on appropriate masculine behaviour, the usual things, nothing too special to recount here, although once, while with my mother, she channeled his critiques by pointing out a teenaged boy my age and asked why I couldn’t walk and act like him. At that moment, I was wearing a loose white cotton shift over a golden oversized vintage business shirt with Sally Ann plaid pegged slacks and white Vans slip-ons, with heavily gelled hair and soft, manicured hands of which I was particularly proud of the buffed, glossy nails. I was in no position, at 16, my 16, to transform myself into an appropriate boy. For I was a boy raised as a girl, in a culture and a society that viciously hates women and the men and boys who identify with them.

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The Story of Squirrel (2): Chrysalis

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person “the world today” or “life” or “reality” he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

— John Knowles

The clika that the Squirrel and I were at the centre of was a social phenomenon that was intensely personal, interlinked with friendship and subjective relationships. It was also, unbeknownst to me at the time, extremely fragile. Two moments marked the end, which like all disasters, came rather suddenly: the first was the Squirrel’s desire to transform our socio-personal nexus into a sexual one, which I was not terribly interested in. In retrospect, the first and primary Oops! The second, more professionally typical moment, was the decision for the clika to engage in a professional project together. A bigger and far more common Oops!

My sexual rejection of the Squirrel unleashed not only a frantic search on his part to find a "boyfriend" (the third boy brought home was the charm) but also led directly to the collapse of the professional project. As our personal relationship soured, the Squirrel almost immediately initiated a code red effort to marginalise me within our shared social and professional circles, of which our project was one. Even though I was the co-lead on the project and obtained funding for it through my leadership and work, questions were soon raised in the collective about my “political reliability,” and whether a potential pocho vendido such as myself should be on board in a leadership position. Joined together with another falling out within the circle, which I may write about later, the effort soon feel apart, mired in recrimination, blame, distrust, and ridiculous identity politics.

The project, needless to say, never happened. But what was surprising and devastating to me was how quickly the clika, my clika purportedly, turned against me, took the Squirrel’s side in our personal disagreements, and moved ruthlessly to banish me, flowing from the personal to the professional in a sleight of hand that was both hopelessly common and for me, at the time, profoundly affecting. Excluded from my former social life, I woke up from my domestic fantasy to realise how isolated I was, how I had basically given my energy and time to a joint socio-professional operation, le projet OsoSquirrel, that was now alles kaput. Mistake #3, as Boy George once intoned. My friends were now, stunningly, the Squirrel’s. My work was now the Squirrel’s. I did manage to keep my advisor, but other Chicana/o faculty and graduate students chose sides, mostly through the guise of the failed project.
“Who made Oso boss?” was something that was heard more than once in the hallways of the department, emanating from the mouths of armchair generals, the resentful and jealous, and the sullenly louche whose connection to the project was remote but who smelled blood and moved in for the kill. What happened between the Squirrel and me was not connected to Chicana/o Studies ideology, although it quickly became indicative of those differences in a ridiculous manner. I had become political unreliable not due to a change in professional and political perspective, focus of work, or because I was shilling for the Heritage Foundation (if only!), but rather because I had a personal falling out with someone who was unscrupulous and insecure enough to broadcast and promote this view of me for his own selfish and self-serving ends.

The house, my little dream cottage, became a battleground of silence and distrust, until finally after a spectacular argument, the Squirrel moved out to be with his child bride, the undergraduate he was now enamoured with (who, in retrospect, looked, sounded, and acted a lot like myself when I was an undergraduate. Funny that.). I spent the last two months in the house alone, preparing for a summer research trip to France and licking my wounds, depressed and worried about my future. Being truly alone for the first time in almost two years also demonstrated to me how dependent I had become on an illusion, now that the Oso/Squirrel nexus was ruptured. When I returned from France at the end of the summer, I moved away from doctoral town for four years, in exile in some ways, but also moving into a different phase of my life, Now Voyager-like, a necessary chrysalis, living in San Francisco and Montréal and discovering other things about myself, even if at the time this did not feel like a choice so much as a fait accompli banishment.

Payback, as they say, is always a bitch. And in this sense, there is a strange karmic sense to the tale of the Squirrel. After I moved away, he became the head Chicano fag in the department, but more like a symbolic figurehead. He was, frankly, not original enough to truly assume my role, or as I would describe him later, he became a gay mascot for those who couldn’t really stand a sassy, sharp gay man: safe, neutered, inoffensif. While my social life (and to a certain extent professional life, for some faculty decided it was best not to be associated with me) in doctoral town lay in tatters (after I moved away, he crowed triumphantly to old friends from PU that “That bitch [i.e., Oso] is out of favour now!”), he assumed in many ways what had been my life there. But he was obviously not an astute judge of human character. If people are so ready to throw off relationships for the flimsiest of reasons, for their own personal and ideological edification, it is only be a matter of time before the pattern repeats itself. Even now, years later, the reasons remain shrouded in mystery, but at the end of one academic year and ABD with some substantial work completed for the thesis, the Squirrel left campus quietly, resumed his old life in the real world, and never returned to the program or completed his degree.

He never discussed the matter with his advisor, never talked to the department administrator, nothing. One day, he just disappeared back into the non-academic world, literally with grading left behind. Both advisor and the department admin have made occasional inquiries to me if I know what happened. I do not, and the silence of mutual friends from PU, so anxious not to get in the middle of something, means I still don’t have the whole story, although I do know he is basically doing the same thing he was before graduate school and apparently has an abusive boyfriend (not the child bride, who is ancient history now). Perhaps the Squirrel realised that assuming a life is not the same as having one, and returned to a truer incarnation. At this point, over ten years later, the details are less important than the allegory, not necessarily for me or for the Squirrel immediately, but for how the vaunted pipeline for faculty of color remains treacherous, and how sometimes we cooperate with the forces arrayed against us, how we become and remain tools of the very hegemonies we putatively seek to undermine. The Squirrel is history, but several of his co-conspirators are rather well-placed, elegantly spouting appropriate rhetoric and making some money. I find myself in the odd position of wondering whatever happened to the Squirrel, when those who once found in him a convenient tool have moved on: luscious, glossy, ruby red rhetoric hiding their vicious fangs.

There is no transparent moral to this tale, necessarily, and I certainly was not the only one in the program to suffer such ideological fates, which is one reason why certain graduates from my program have terrible reputations as polemic automatons and unpleasant, rigid colleagues. I remain marked by this experience in ways that are idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. People can be mean, people can be capricious, but the collapse of the clika and the simultaneous destruction of the professional connections based on it, was a deeply affecting shock, a lesson ultimately in human cruelty but also social frailty, the tenuous emotional and social bonds of collegiality, of which the Squirrel is only but one possible example. Intellectually, the limits of identity politics as a true basis for socio-professional affiliation were reasserted, and a deep skepticism of those who rely on such easy equations grounded in my own bruising experience flowed directly into my intellectual project, which refused explicitly these politics in favour of deconstructing their bases in rhetoric and discourse. And such decisions have a direct influence on where we are, who we become, and how we function within the profession, as much as for our individual personalities as for how we become, through trauma and enlightenment, paragons for esoteric ideas and themes.

The house on the street bordering campus remains a reminder of this strange time in my life. It is cuter now, painted fashionable colours and the home of an equally cute lesbian couple, from what I can tell from randomly passing by and seeing the new residents trim their grass, or bring in groceries. The house represents the apex and nadir of particular fantasies about my life, my friends, and my career that were once powerfully determinant in my life. As The Fierceness once intoned, with her usual perspicacity, “These people are your colleagues, not your friends.” The desire to keep these things kosher, or at least consider them critically, is rooted in that small house, where I grew morning glories and baked quiches and hosted parties and lived, briefly, the life I thought I wanted to lead, at one time.

The Story of Squirrel (1): Mimesis

Gay men and lesbians are the people of drama. I have a theory that gay identity is really founded on storytelling and gossip, not sex, that in fact often have sex so they can talk about it. From the moment of that first entry into “the community” or “the life,” we’re embedded in a legendary network of gossip, tale-telling, and multiple interpretations of the same events. There will always be layers upon layers and nothing should ever be taken for granted. Identity becomes an art form at time, a pastiche of meanings, affiliations, and self-parody that can be baroque.

— Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall

Being back in doctoral town has triggered, natürlich, different memory cues that have been submerged like Atlantis, now resurfacing in strange, illuminating ways. Like coming upon particular scents that reveal memory suddenly, these memory triggers are relatively unexpected, surprising in their detail. In many ways, I am given to brooding, but this process of memory synapse is not necessarily depression, but neither is it quite elation. Rather, it has tended to have the effect of an uncanny curio: was that really me? Was that then? Did it really happen that way?

On the main drag separating the campus and the town sits a house I lived in for two years in the early nineties, when such a thing could be found for an affordable price. A Spanish Revival bungalow, it has of course been renovated since my time there, but retains the shape and feel of the house I knew. A small front yard shaded by a weeping willow, contained by a delightful wooden picket fence, a red-tiled covered front porch and relatively modest stucco façade. The house had two bedrooms, one small and one large, a cute kitchen, a glass enclosed dining room that was always too hot or too cold, a funky seventies-style back deck, and a yard that stretched out behind the property for 15 metres where wild fennel and geraniums grew, with a gnarly bottle brush tree that was untended and always covered by spider webs.

I lived there for my two years with the Squirrel, my nickname for a former good friend whom I had known at Prestigious Eastern University as an undergraduate and who had come to join me for graduate study the year after I began the program. We lived here together, thick as thieves, for his first two years, and my second and third years in the program, as friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators. The break-up of our friendship and its connection to my subsequent graduate career in the program and formation of my theoretical and intellectual worldview, especially against the back-drop of those two years together, is what gives pause in the memory synapse, although now, so many years subsequent, the pain and hurt of the moment, the memory, is blunted, disconnected: intellectual, esoteric, a lesson as instructive as a primer but more vague, dissolute, inchoate.

The Squirrel was a senior when I was a freshman at PU. Short of stature, with the scars of severe teenage acne, and an intriguing interest in dance music, the Squirrel was a minor player in the relatively large crew of gay Chicanos that made my moment at PU so extraordinary. Not as glamourous as J’aime with her backless sweaters, floppy hair, endless virginity, and white linen santero palazzo pants, or as sluttishly motherhennish as La Martina, with her lively past as a young hustler specialising in Anglo men in Houston, the Squirrel made his name on his dance tapes, always with the latest hits, that he produced for the MEChA parties he would DJ. We weren’t as familiar with each other during that shared school year, but when I returned to Los Angeles for the first (and only) summer back home, he was there too, as we both were from California. What turned out to be a series of phone calls initially grounded to a certain extent in summer ennui became a strong friendship, one with particular resonances in the gay man I would become.

The Squirrel took me, in his old VW bug, to my first gay pride parade. He took me out to the gay clubs of the city, introducing me to “the life” for gay men and lesbians of color in a manner I would have never been able to negotiate on my own: living at home, carless, and in the closet with my family at the time. In addition to the Anglo West Hollywood bars, we went to clubs that catered at the time to Chicana/o and black gays and lesbians, places invariably surrounded by laundromats and gas stations, including the fabulous Peanuts and a notorious little club on Sunset called 2326 (the address of the place, cleverly enough), where the butch cholas would get into knife fights over their sexy femme rucas and people would do an incredible amount of coke on the patio out back. We went to dance to Cha-Cha, House, and early techno, as neither of us were big drinkers and sex, at least for me, was mostly abstract at that point. Even though the Squirrel was relatively ugly, he always seemed to land a cute boy on his arm, a curiosity to this day I am unable to account for. In any event, that summer introduced me to the larger urban meanings of gayness, both good and bad, and provided the base for a friendship that continued through my career at PU. I would see the Squirrel when I returned home for holidays, and we maintained a sort of old-fashioned written correspondence mixed with dance tapes sent back and forth.

His decision to apply to my graduate program was initiated by my enrollment, and I helped marshal his application through the process. When he was accepted and decided to move to doctoral town, it was a foregone conclusion we would live together, and after we found the small house and moved in, we settled into a strong domestic routine against the backdrop of the ideological battles happening in the program and at the university. This schism between the personal and the political determined the pattern of our entertaining and socialising, as well as pre-determined the demise of our relationship and my subsequent banishment from town. The program at the time was embroiled in the battles of identity politics that were characteristic of the early nineties, which in some ways can be summed up by the simplistic, naïve dicho of “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

In retrospect, of course, this ready-made sloganistic solution to complicated questions of politics and identity formation does not satisfy, but we were young, relatively politically engaged, and attempting to sort and categorise our way through minefields with the tools we had. At the moment of the arrival of the Squirrel, a critical mass of graduate students and faculty working on Chicana/o cultural studies had emerged on campus, and most of us became friends and from that basis in personal relationships and socialising, began to develop professional networks and projects together. This is pretty standard, in my experience, but when it all goes awry, the professional recriminations echoed through the personal are what compose the elision, the willful forgetting. The interstices of the personal and professional is what is so complicated and messy about the academic machine, how one knows and also “knows” is often grounded in friendship, sexual connection, falling out, and the turning of those personal disagreements into professional antipathies. This is a falta of professionalism, of course, but academic professionalism is always two-thirds personal and one-third (if that) professional.

The Squirrel and I, in our domestic fantasy house, became a powerful social centre. We hosted parties, barbecues, and coffee hours. We held dances, communal Melrose Place viewings, department birthday parties. We made the scene around town in the Squirrel's little Japanese car, sound system booming out some disco tune: Boom! by MC Luscious, Martha Wash, C + C Music Factory, or some other faded diva. Our lives very quickly became closely intertwined, so where it was no longer Oso or the Squirrel, but Oso and the Squirrel, or rather OsoSquirrel, SA. At that point in my life, I preferred such intense interrelationships, the melding of the minds (not the bodies, as I was still a prude) and the incestuous cross-fertilisation of the social and personal, a surrogate family in an unsophisticated, ham-fisted way. Along the way, unrealised on my part, the Squirrel actually moved into my life, the social relationships I had formed, the politics and pronouncements I made, almost like a body snatcher.

Slowly, silently, stealthily, and most likely unintentionally (at least initially), the Squirrel used the foundation of my own life to build his own, so that instead of remarkable contrasts between us, or alternatively a melding that created a new whole, the Squirrel had positioned himself cleverly to replace me. The nickname Squirrel, by the way, comes from the post-mortem by La Martina, who declared, after everything had gone to shit, that the Squirrel was indeed like a squirrel, gathering nuts selfishly for his own winter survival. Similarly, he had the disagreeable habit of being a collectionneuse de bavard, a gossip queen who loved to gather and regale with shocking and personal stories of others but who himself was a closed book, carefully and jealously guarding his own secrets. In other words, the worst type of gossip. The nickname still seems apt, if not a bit cruel, even years later.

Like the plot of the filmic versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the alien clone cannot exist at the same time as the original, where the birth of the clone from the alien seed pod from outer space signals the immediate filmic demise of the original homosapien, my time as a celebrated and controversial star in the program, a fat loud mouth, was incrementally being replaced by the Squirrel making a home for himself, a safe sinecure built through my social and academic work. The contrast would work, later, as a milder, safe, more controllable, version of myself: ersatz Oso. My friends became his friends, my concerns became his concerns, my work became his work, my advisor became his advisor. Being a relatively generous soul, I was not concerned by this mimesis, feeling on some level complemented by it even, although I should have been concerned. Who needs the original when one can have the knock-off was not a principle I was thinking about. The first echoes of concern came from third parties, who began to report some bad-mouthing happening, the negative reportage and chismes of the Squirrel to others about me. Wrapped up in my domestic and social clika, I did not heed the warning of betrayal or possible betrayal. The fantasy felt too good, frankly, to let go. And I was on a trip where the only way to go was down...

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California Dreaming (2): Village of the Damned

California, California
You're such a wonder
That I think I'll stay in bed
Big time rollers, part-time models
So much to plunder
That I think I'll sleep instead

Ain't it a shame that all the world
Can't enjoy your mad traditions?
Ain't it a shame that all the world
Don't got keys to their own ignitions?
Life is the longest death in California

— Rufus Wainwright

Chaucer Dad and Philosopher Mom live in the faculty housing compound on the edge of the campus of doctoral university, which is itself a little slice of dystopic hell: a company town filled with the academic version of the Desperate Housewives: professors of both genders and their partners (again of both genders) living in a mix of suburban track and hodge-podge designer homes (here a Cape Cod, there a modern Californian), whose magnified socio-professional competitions on campus lead to conflict and petty disagreement chez eux over the size of exterior patios, the height of the hedge rows, and whether plantings are blocking “the commons.” The already small battleground of academia becomes even more miniscule when you’ve got to field complaints about which fern is blocking which access to the burnt, parched lawns that no one walks on, except maybe to relieve the dog. Ridiculous!

There is no socialising, for the most part, and very little empathy. The child-rearing competition is fierce, unfriendly, and takes no prisoners, as it is in most BoBo communities, of which this is a strange example. At night, the curtains are drawn and the community retreats, but even during the day the complex has an abandoned quality, an aspect of moonscape, albeit with those Californian touches that enamour, like the fragrant lavender and rosemary in places. People come and go in their ubiquitous two to three cars, and most gardens remain weedy and undeveloped, surrounded by brown patches of grass (apparently the sprinkler system is suffering from systemic sabotage by some mild-mannered egghead ecoterrorist who continually destroys the timing apparatus, no doubt to save water but at a steep aesthetic price. I ask you: is it worth it?). Do people live in these houses? Theoretically yes, although in practice I’m not sure. There is a creepy feeling, as if the neighbors will only come out to eat you, or suck out your brain or drag you under the house to feed on your bones. Beyond the perimeter of this compound, right on the other side of a haimische countrified wooden fence, the town begins and glowers, astronomical housing prices and indifference and ressentiment towards the university laying thick on the ground.

The Town around the Gown is as ridiculous as the university in its pretensions, its misguided community principles, its distorted self-conception. Eco-friendly soccer moms and dads with environmental bumper stickers on their SUVs cruise too fast down streets designed for about 20,000 less residents. The crystal worshippers and gym aficionados and mountain bikers and obsessive joggers and jewelry designers and moon goddesses and cognitive therapists gather and depart from several nodes of “community”: the local cafés (Starhooch is for the homeless and tourists; too corporate, you understand), the gym, the yoga studio, the nature reserves, the art cinema. At City Hall and the county offices and the local newspaper, radical BoBos blithely practice the worst sort of anti-development NIMBYism as property values skyrocket and it becomes harder and harder to find affordable housing within the town limits, delivering a financial windfall for their constituency as local landlords can now charge between $600 and $900 for a single room in town, The practice of several undergraduates sharing a nothing-special crap ass house two or more to a room to afford the rent is not unheard of.

The town’s motto might as well be: I’ve Got Mine, Now Fuck Off! Armies of tanned beefy forty-quelquechose dads in O’Neill t-shirts, wraparound sunglasses, and flip-flops join sleek, North Face-clad minimal make-up women with cute little Keen clogs in carting around their invariably brilliant, heavily sedated children from high-priced organic supermarket to sushi stand to art camp in SUVs and high-priced shiny European sedans with tinted windows. The city council dickers and dithers, debating whether to ban smoking in city parks, whether they should pass a resolution opposing the oppression of indigenous people in New Guinea, and how best to frustrate the efforts of the university to expand. The usual assortment of patchouli-scented oddballs and poorly controlled schizophrenics appear before the aldermen to denounce the CIA, the FBI, George Bush, and the University, even when what is being debated at any given moment is the width of sidewalks, garbage collection, or a redesign of the city logo.

Like many university towns, the town elders have made the fundamental error of thinking they can exist outside the bounds of the machine that has created the very conditions of their Valhalla-like existence. There is much hemming and hawing over quality of life (whose quality and whose life remain unanswered, for the answer is self-evident), with little care neither for the working poor of the town nor the painful contradictions of being, like a developing world economy, dependent on a single market. If the university were to disappear, the town would revert, in a twisted Cinderella act, to its original form: a cow town. Gone would be the bookstores, the funky little hippie shops, the hyper-expensive boutique supermarkets, the CD and scented candle emporia, the designer jewelry shops, and the ubiquitous cafes. The slackers and hanger-ons would have to meander elsewhere to pontificate all day long in the sun over a $4 soy latte and $3.75 vegan scone about how evil the university is. Maybe they could go to Palo Alto? I doubt they would be welcome in that particular self-congratulatory hothouse of teleological advancement. If the slackers of this town are disagreeable, the good people of Palo Alto are even worse, like boarding school with no vacations and compulsory buggery with no lube. Personally, I'd rather eat nails.

Don’t get me wrong. The University is, basically, The Man, evil incarnate (really), and will take the proverbial foot without so much as a “more, please,” given half the chance, and if it weren’t for the cadres of professional refuseniks who now equate any development with loss, with change, with transformation, and therefore resist it steadfastly, incoherently, in a knee-jerk fashion that speaks more to monosyllabic ideology, the soft smother of revealed truth, and a deep-seated selfishness than critical thinking, consensus, and negotiation. The effect of this resistance, on one hand, in a place as racist and classist as California, is to effectively close the gate to different people, those excluded whether by history or situation or money from the Golden Dream of the fragrant arbour, the garden filled with gladioli and roses, the chemical-free heirloom tomatoes, the hand-watered and trimmed bib lettuce.

The hopelessly symbiotic relationship of town and gown is what grates here. Years ago, greedy town fathers saw picnics with co-eds in twin sets and pearls and football tailgate parties in their eyes when they courted the university for a campus. In the interim century, the American understanding of higher education has shifted, and the local politics of the relationship between town and gown have correspondingly changed as well. After the sixties, for many conservative Americans, universities were no longer places readily identified with their world and interests. They were incubators of long hairs and homosexuals and Communists, and thus a heavy suspicion lay on their intentions, their transformations of our children.

Here however, there is the flip side of this socio-political coin: the former cow town has been so thoroughly transformed by the university that it no longer resembles the sleepy meat-eating American nowhere it had once been. The place is lousy with loud-mouthed and unpleasant lefty ideologues whose distrust of the university (as an aspect of the system, as opposed to the inculcator of Red, un-American values) is the strange twin to the hate spewed out on the airwaves and Fox News against intellectuals and academics. The approach may be different, but the result is the same, ironically enough. The fact that such resistance has generally paid off handsomely, and not only through escalating property values, for these refuseniks is just one of those little mysteries of how hegemony works.

Like most Americans, Californians now do not consider the relationship between materiality and existence, cause and effect, collaboration and consensus. They are all sui generis, profound creatures awaiting their moment in the spotlight, as the stage becomes increasingly crowded. The conflation of the words public and university, the responsibility and mission that entails to people not from here, not already with their perfect house, never seems to penetrate their defense of their utopia, their patch in the sun, and the public infrastructure and subsidies to support it. This is a battle happening all over the state and indeed the nation for the last forty years. It just seems more annoying here, where, in the words of Depeche Mode, the “grabbing hands grab all they can” but with a beatific, do-gooder lefty smile on the face as they fuck you over, tell you “no” or more often, “That’s not allowed,” and generally make life miserable in ways identical to their purported political opposites.

Then along comes the moments when you live the fantasy, and you can see, in the margins of your mind’s eye, the beginning of the delusion, the slippery slope of the insanity, fed by memory and longing: a long dip in the university pool under a clear blue sky, endless laps in the embryonic embrace of the water. The excellent Mexican food, along with real-life Mexican Americans, people who remind you of your family, people like you, from the striving Anglo-identified lawyer with the briefcase and power suit to the listless gangbangers in their cholo drag, all refusal and silence. A long hike through the local nature reserve, the spicy mace-like odour of the forest baked under the heat of the day intoxicating your senses. You pause, inhaling deeply, attempting to divine the different components of the scent: smiles, secrets, alienation, hunger, memory, joy, tears, disappointments. Isn’t that forested corner the place too where you once made out (interrupted by a passing jogger) with a boy you felt special about, him not so much? Robust tall and tanned Asian Americans, like the ones you went to school with, named Karen Takashima and Brad Cho and Margaret Chen and Steve Yamashita and Joanne Nguyen, cheerleaders and football players and cool slackers in heavy black eyeliner. Spending the day on a boondoggle, under the sun, in the fresh breeze, a long drive out of town into the country, past woods and fields and forest. A meander downtown, to eat at a Polynesian-Californian fusion restaurant that specialises in grilled fish, followed by a mochi ice cream cone eaten on the street, then visits to your favourite used bookstores for remaindered Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, home to brownies and tea and bed, under a duvet, the cool breeze outside.

Waking from this dream of memory and recognition, I am not blissful but feel hung over, as if given a dose of Burundanga. Where’s my wallet, my passport, my virginity?! The fantastical utopian possibilities of the perfect day, the insanity of the mimesis, the creeping pod person effect, cannot penetrate what I know to be true: a longer stay, a commitment to living this fantasy full-time, a delusional slip into the easy solipsism of the Californian quotidian, and I would go stark raving mad. Stark. Raving. Mad. Because California the idea(l), my California of memory and experience, is in retreat, bounded behind walls and fences, frozen in time. At least in this particular metaphysical part of California, and memory and familiarity is simply not enough to make up for the building asco of this Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In two generations, Californians have gone from visionary to reactionary, forward-looking to finding comfort in idle pastiche, from planning moon shots to considering self-actualisation, whether at the gym or the shrink. This is a stereotype of course, but one with more than an ounce of truth in it. The worst part, of course, is the fact that Californians are lousy with self-aggrandising congratulation, like a cult believing their society of unequal and cruel squalour is the best of all possible worlds. In this sense, California is, as always, an allegory for the American drama, which is ultimately a tragedy. As a Californian in what is becoming increasingly a permanent exile, my home state is a nice place to visit, to wander among the ruins of one’s life, the mismatched remnants of memory, the scent of the lemon tree recalling a vision of my grandparents and their wonderful, robust garden, but I prefer to live someplace else, with winter, with fat people, with ugly people, with smokers, with children who are dullards and have no future, with despair, with all the imperfections of life, in another, different archipelago of American dystopia.

California Dreaming (1): The Gown Made of Curtains

C'est sexy le ciel de Californie
Sous ma peau j'ai L.A. en overdose
So sexy le spleen d'un road movie
Dans l'rétro ma vie qui s'anamorphose

— Mylène Farmer

So sorry for the long silence. I have been, for the past several weeks, ensconced in California teaching a summer course, and out of my typical spaces for work. I am in residence with Chaucer Dad and Philosopher Mom, tending to my summer tan, catching up on both meaningless and meaningful readings, swimming at the university pool, and generally participating in the socio-cultural dissipation that can make California seem, after a spell outside of her cartographical and psychic boundaries, hallucinogenic in the extreme.

I am writing this on the shade of the stone patio, surrounded by the daisies, hydrangea, rosemary, jade plants, fragrant sage, and Japanese Aralia I planted when I lived here, in what seems another lifetime. Behind me, in the house, lunch percolates someplace, one teenaged boy watches the Animal Planet while another tends to his pet birds. A cool breeze blows, and time seems to have stopped on this moment, the latest in a series of perfect moments that together make the past weeks meld into one beatific, amorphous cloud, whilst elsewhere I imagine Mr. Gordo and Big Sis sweating in the heat of Big Eastern City, Prancilla sexily sipping lattes in the street cafes of Lake City, La Vicks back in Cold City from México lindo with Love Buckets, La Donna slinging hash in a pink satin hot pants in Calgary, and The Voice on the île of Montréal. Oddly enough, it does seem like most of my friends have spread about the continent like seeds on the wind, with chance encounters and brief visits the only respite from the relentless sun and obligatory holidays someplace else where one is at this particular moment.

Being back teaching at my doctoral university and the town that surrounds it has been surreal, to say the least. So much history under the bridge, experiences and memories overlaid on each other transparently, so that I am the long-haired and clueless first-year graduate student, the jaded ABD TA with a buzzcut and a bad attitude, the post-doc adjunct sporting a Caesar and kissing admin ass madly (Please hire me again to do your drudgery! Please!), and the relatively well-placed professional, currently mildly shaggy, all at once. Places and spaces are constantly shifting and changing, and this place is no different, although it retains the dystopic qualities that have been the subject of some theoretical speculation, as well as remaining generally indicative of Californian life after Proposition 13, if not before. The boundless good weather leads the uninitiated into actually believing in immortality, a mistake some native-born Californians like myself recognise as pure folly. But it is easy to understand the fundamental error in judgment, to see the formation of the misapprehension of possibility, which has led aüslanders and transplants into disasters of the macro and micro variety, from cannibalism in a snowbound valley to the elusive promise of fiduciary and spiritual nirvana that haunts the ruins of Silicon Valley. For the native Californian, the indigene Californio/a, the sun and mild weather and benevolent breezes mask the sudden tragic change— the firestorm, the earthquake, the flood, or alternatively, more contemporarily, the single-handed destruction of our once enviable social services and educational infrastructure through greed, selfishness, and racism. The point for us is not nirvana but survivance. And for some of us, that survival is found outside the bounds of the state that formed and nurtured our character.

My doctoral university, the Gown on the Town, has grown immensely since my salad days here. In fact, it is really a different place. Once a sort of public country club for the children of the Californian white élite, it has become much more racially diverse, and much more professionally oriented. Of course it is experiencing the pressures most public universities are: to increase enrollments, raise the profile of “excellence,” and better serve its public mission, however you want to define it. Here, for the most part that seems to be contained in an effort to throw up as many cheaply constructed, vaguely PoMo buildings as one can. The construction boom that has filled in the previously idle campus niches of parking lots and fallow fields seemingly reflects a manic effort to demonstrate some sort of socio-political work ethic: Jesus is coming, look busy! Although in this case it would be the Regents, bureaucratic functionaries from the State legislature, and fat cat business folk. The aesthetic rationale, like so much of America, is definitively Potemkin village— And here is a University, PLC.

The architectural modus operandi seems to be camp (as in bears and the woods, not Tiffany lamps). The new buildings all look the same, cheap stucco construction with burnished steel touches and corrugated tin decoration. The floors in the new buildings boom when you walk on them because they are made of wood, not concrete, and the walls are made of poor quality dry wall that does not contain sound. The classrooms seem invariably hot and smelling of old garbage, with poor lighting design and lacking all the Mod Cons even the classrooms at Cold City U. have. Gone are the days of particular seminar rooms with views and air and round tables, where perchance during class one could catch a whiff of marijuana smoke from outside the window, which had some personality to distinguish themselves from others, so that you at least knew you were in a particular building as opposed to another. Introducing mass education on the cheap! Drug-free, smoke-free, thought-free. A well-padded luxury booby hatch!

The increasing tilt towards the sciences, pronounced here but present everywhere, has meant a growth in the science complex and a reduction in the space and money devoted to the liberal arts tradition. The shiny young soldiers of science march to and fro across campus, brows furrowed by equations and labs. When I was trained here, most undergraduates seemed enamoured with the humanities in a touching and perhaps naïve manner. Even in a lecture of 300, they still wanted (annoyingly, to be true) “more feedback on my writing.” They wanted to learn Gamelan, consider ethics in Arendt, study obscure sub-titled film noir. Now, my current students seem less interested in discussion, in the crazy quilt of new things, useless things, and more in assessment and landing an A, game design and Hong Kong cinema and law school applications, which I suppose on some level is fine, if a somewhat radical departure from the rules of the institution I learned here as a doctoral candidate. That training has served me well, only insofar as it gave me an appreciation of the work, the real artisanal skill involved in such educational processes. I can do it, and do it well, although increasingly it is a skill set, even here (perhaps especially here), that resembles making wooden clogs by hand. In other words, hopelessly antediluvian.

Visiting my old department, to plan a lunch with the department administrator, I couldn’t help perusing the dissertations and master’s theses lining the shelves, including my own. A tradition started by the previous administrator was the practice of taking Polaroid snapshots of incoming grad students. My photo used to be up on the corkboard where the snaps are displayed, first with long hair then later with shorter hair, and I regard the newer generation. I do notice some transmen, their old female names actually crossed out and replaced by rugged new masculine ones on the labels. The one transwoman I knew of graduated a couple of seasons ago, so her picture is missing. That naming practice seems handcrafted in a peculiar way: why the desire for evidence here on the label of the glossy oddly focused Polaroid? In my day, the bogey wo/man of the moment for the critics outside the department was the lesbian of color, crawling pirate-like through the classroom window with a knife held between her lips. Now it’s the attack of the 50-foot Tranny. My old department, always on the cutting edge! This makes me happy, in a strange sort of way: a reassurance that no matter the vagaries and furies outside, the department is still making interesting choices.

The new faces tell me nothing, really, all grinning in a delusional, Jim Jones “Drink the Kool-aid” sort of way, as if they've either just survived or are about to embark on a life-threatening adventure. A different framed photo of a graduating cohort from my own time provides more fodder for commentary. As the department admin and I look at the photo, I trace out the faces with my finger while entoning, “Nut job, nut job, nut job, sorta kinda nut job, nut job.” The graduates collected within the bounds of this particular photo have all gone on to jobs both mediocre and spectacular. Some of them parlayed their moneymakers into some rather good placements. But do you ever have those moments when you actually feel your tongue turning into a knife? I realise I am being too fresh in a shared office with other ears around (the department admin demurs, even though I know she agrees with my assessment), but I cannot help myself: I turn into a mad, evil queen at a glance of the faces of old “enemies.” A feeling of rage wells up within me, and I want to verbally destroy the modest artifacts of the program, the photos and memos on the walls and the collected blue books of academic work, cut them up like Uma with a sword.

Afterwards, walking home under a hot sun, I wonder why this impulse? It seems immature and hateful, as well as being perhaps just a bit too easy of a task. Bitter, table of one? Perhaps it is because now I recognise the strange and tortured games played here in the last decade for what they were, pure mind fucks that were grounded in ridiculous political rigidity as well as Lord of the Flies socialization. Maybe if I had realised what we were actually doing was burlesque, the sexy bump-and-grind of marketing our identity, whether corporeal or intellectual, to the highest bidder, then I would have done “better,” have become better institutionalised with a permanent chip on my shoulder. Although I have come to recognise my current professional state as not too shabby, there is always ressentiment and competition, old friends in the Biz. Another sharp recognition has been the special and particular qualities of a Western, but also specifically Californian training, one that doesn’t necessarily translate well afuera. In any event, I’m sure I’ll get caught up on all the department drama next week when I lunch outside the office with the department admin. Some of those comedic tragedies will bring an evil smile to my face. What can I say? Nothing feels quite as good as Schadenfraude.

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