Lonsdale

After visiting a friend one evening in the East Village, I stopped by a restaurant and sat at the bar to order a solo meal and read my book. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an attractive young lad looking at me intently. Eventually, I glanced in his direction and he came over to talk. Immediately, I noticed his very strong London accent, and I thought what I thought about that.

"Are you enjoying the music?" he asked, smiling.

"I guess," I replied. "Mostly just trying to read."

"How," he asked, "can you read while the Beatles are playing?"

"Oh, I'm not a tremendous fan of the Beatles, although I do like 'Paperback Writer.'"

"What?!" He seemed incredulous. "Well, can you at least admit that British music is the best? British everything is the best. I mean, the Beatles! The Rolling Stones!"

"Well," I replied sensibly, "there would have been no Rollings Stones without Muddy Waters, and there would have been no Beatles without Chuck Berry. I can appreciate that the Rolling Stones mixed elements of American blues music with elements of American rock 'n' roll and got some interesting songs out of it, but I'd say that their music was a synthesis of what other people had already created."

The cute London man glared at me with great pathos.

"Why," he asked, "are you so anti-British?"

"I'm from Antigua," I replied.

"Oh!" He brightened. "Do you know who the greatest Antiguan ever was?"

"J. Rowan Henry," I said.

"Who?"

I began to describe some of my late father's activism as head of the Labour movement in Antigua, activism that eventually led to Antigua's independence from Britain and would have meant he would have been overwhelmingly elected as its first President. Until, of course, his untimely demise ...

"Oh, no," he said, dismissively. "The greatest Antiguan is Viv Richards," and then he walked back over to chat with his friend.

I sort of smiled at this exchange, but I gamely googled Viv Richards and saw that he was a cricket player. Immediately realizing that the London fellow was insane, I literally picked up my plate and walked to the other end of the bar, completely out of sight of the young man. But about five minutes later, he found me.

"Did you google Viv Richards?"

"Yes. That's why I moved over here."

"Oh, why, because he was an athlete?"

"I suppose."

He snorted with disgust and left me again. I hurriedly paid for my dinner and left the restaurant. Unfortunately, he was outside smoking with his friend.

"You," he said. "What do you have against the British?"

"Um, because they're usually people like you. People who have never even visited Antigua, but who try to tell me who the greatest Antiguan was. I was born there. My family lives there. I've read dozens of books about the island. And I'm certainly..." (here's where I jumped the shark!) "...not going to stand here and listen to some youth of a country that oppressed my ancestors..."

"You know what?" he said. "Fuck you! Just ... just fuck you!"

I was going to say, Ah, some of that legendary British wit! But I wisely kept my own counsel, especially since his friend had at that point had to restrain him from physically attacking me. I walked home, burning with the shame of letting some drunkard get me angry.

In my adulthood, I've had to do serious work around my prejudice against British people, along with people of other ... groups. A sane person shouldn't be prejudiced against anyone - or, at least, they should not reveal their own stupidity by discussing it in public. Two of my own authors, the amazing Caitlin Moran and Simon Van Booy, have taught me that British people can be cool, and kind, and down-to-earth, and incredibly smart. (Smarter - shocker! - than even me). It's a wonder it took me so long to learn such an obvious, elementary lesson: all people from a country do not act the same. Why did I spew such vitriol against this dolt?

In my adulthood, my anger towards the British led me to eschew certain fashion labels. I turned up my nose at Penguin, at Paul Smith, at Burton. I made an exception for Burberry in the 90s because I was highly amused by how American rappers had appropriated the brand as a symbol of excess. They lampooned it, even though the joke quickly became real and now, I think, that joke is on the young people of today, who listen to this materialistic music and grow angry that they do not have Louboutins and Cristal. I love the semiotics of clothing choices.

Long story short: I saw these briefs on a model on L'Internet. They're from Lonsdale, a British sporting goods company. So I ordered them and they arrived looking, ahem, a little skimpier than they were depicted on the site. No matter! I made my 30 euro purchase, and now that night, that unfortunate blip on my evolution towards enlightenment, has been absolved. Observe! The power of fashion. 

Henry family reunion

Maxine and I (and Mary!) traveled down to Antigua to visit with some of the Henry family. I owed my niece Melany a visit, as she just had a baby (my grand-niece!) and I wanted to meet her.

I could have predicted this, but I did not enjoy sharing a hotel room with my sister. She likes to watch the Cooking Channel into the wee hours of the night, whereas I love going to sleep really early and then waking up in a panic at 8:00 a.m., smoking cigarettes and drinking cup after cup of coffee. A couple of times, I ended up down at the Coconut Grove by myself in the morning, waiting for my traveling companions to join me, smoking away at the bar and being stung by mosquitoes.

Maxine rented a car, and terrorized Mary and I by driving into ditches and generally menacing the (terrible) roads there. With Mary in the back seat videotaping us (unbeknownst to Maxine) I tricked Maxine into launching into her favorite argument with me, that I was "shown a lot of attention" by my maternal grandmother when I was a baby, and so therefore needed a lot of attention when I was adopted by my aunt and uncle in Queens. Attention, according to Maxine, that they were unwilling to give me - just on the principle of the matter, from the sound of it. In Antigua, Maxine unveiled a new angle on the argument - that my aunt Grace, when I was living with her and my late uncle Max in St. Croix before embarking for Queens, used to dress me up and have me come out and "perform" for her guests, singing and dancing and reciting Bible verses. It sounds almost lewd, doesn't it? That's the power of Maxine - to take the innocent foibles of a child and make them sound damning and perverse. But she's my sister, and I love her, though I am putting extra money aside to care for her when she finally goes insane.

We drove into town and I bought an Antigua keychain, a very stylish Antigua t-shirt, and a (zipped! very rare!) Antigua tote. I like looking at Antigua t-shirts online, but the ones I like are always expensive, so I was glad to find a nice cheap one. I also wanted to buy some Antigua rum, but unfortunately, whenever I get my hands on a bottle of liquor, it is my custom to sit down and drink the whole bottle, then take my clothes off.

Here we are at a party Ann threw for us, with some assorted (and very fashionable!) Henrys. Because I left Antigua when I was two, some of these people I had never even met, really, so it was fun to catch up with everyone. Louise reminded me a lot of my mom, with her stories of being outraged, and Pat sort of reminded me of me. (He told a story about taking a poop and finding a frog in the toilet). I had a good time with my relatives. Because I was raised by crazy people, I keep expecting my relatives to dislike me, because I'm sure they've all heard crazy stories about me from my crazy immediate family. But life has taught me that everyone is crazy, and our families are too busy dealing with their own craziness to care too much about ours.

Afterwards, Maxine nearly killed us again in that car. When she was returning the car the next evening, she found the Antigua t-shirt and my "precious bag," as she put it, in the trunk, and returned them to me with an evil, knowing chortle, as though my forgetting them in the trunk was indicative of my whole persona. Harrumph!!!!!!!

My mother and 9/11

My mother had terrible timing in fashion - this picture, taken in the 90s, shows her wearing an ensemble from the 70s, a decade whose fabrics and bold textures seemed to appeal to her, for some reason. Perhaps it was the era's crop of strong, famous women, and progress in social justice? I don't know. She had terrible timing in other matters, too, which was punctuated by her untimely death on September 10, 2001. The ten-year anniversary of her death, a moment I'd been waiting for for most of my adult life, for many reasons both good and bad, is tomorrow. I'll forgive you for observing other anniversaries.

When our loved ones die, I think most of us have the reasonable expectation that it is, to some degree, our moment. We get to grieve, have privacy, arrange a funeral or memorial service, have relatives and friends fly in to comfort us, and eventually get over it. When my mother died the day before September 11th, we had less than a day to proceed as though it were our moment and try, in our grief, to make our plans. Then the next day arrived, which of course, became everyone's moment, and made privacy, funeral arrangements, and certainly loved ones flying in to comfort us, impossible.

My mother was a very strong woman, though an unusual parent. She adopted me and my brother Jonathan after our real parents (my real father was her brother; it's a long story) were both killed by our gardener (an even longer story) in Antigua in the mid-70s. She and her husband made sure that every need of ours was filled, and they raised us as their own. Strangely, they regaled us with stories about how, before we arrived, they'd dined out most nights, but now were forced to eat meaner fare at home, stuck there with two small, traumatized boys. And they were already so tired, from raising their own two children.

My brother and I were very good at finding ways to "act out" that must have perplexed these older, tired people from a different era. Over the next ten years or so, I learned to overeat, shoplift, talk back, get in trouble at school, and lie. When I was still just a tween - though we didn't have that word back then - I began showing an interest in "dirty" magazines. Bad timing on my part - I was a little too young for that to possibly sit well with anyone. My brother, over that same ten-year period, became sickly, slow in school, was frequently hospitalized, and later on, counter-intuitively, began hanging out with a rough crowd.

Willful though we may have been, we were no match for my mother, who was frequently a terrifying presence in the house. After my father's first heart attack, she threatened to send me and my brother to an orphanage if he died. I don't know about my brother, but I believed her, and was frightened to sleeplessness at the thought. She and her husband weren't stingy with the beatings, either. Once she sent me to school with a note for my guidance counselor. I read it over the counselor's shoulder: "Thank you for letting me know that our son misbehaved in school yesterday. He was soundly whipped last night." Soundly whipped! What an old-fashioned phrase, but, again, they were from a different era. When my mother found a Playgirl in my room once, she told me that if she ever found out I was gay, it would be worse to her than when her brother (my real father) was killed.

Many times during my childhood and teen years I prayed for my adoptive parents' death, which is common enough behavior as to have entered the territory of the unfortunate cliche. But eventually, I developed a very macabre sense of humor, and then found them quite hilarious. But I started fighting them, too.

Years later, when I was in my very early 20s and living in Manhattan, I got into my head that I wanted to move to California. My mother was stunned. Her two real children, after all, both lawyers, had lived under her roof until their mid-30s. They both still visited her almost daily, although she had been, by all accounts, even meaner to them than to me and my brother. None of her children had ever been as difficult as I had been as a child. And now, in the ultimate form of rebellion, I was moving away to the other end of the country, beyond her reach. She told me I would fail there, of course. On the day I went out to Queens to say goodbye to her, she shook her head at me and announced with great grimness, "I don't know who you are anymore." "Mom," I said, expasperated, "that's what mothers say in movies, not in real life." Then she gave me $500 and a hug.

I didn't have such a great time of it in San Francisco, as it turned out. I was pretty broke all the time, underemployed, and San Francisco's delis are allowed to sell liquor, which helped me to, ahem, develop quite the taste for the sauce. Feeling like I was flaming out in SF, I began looking for a reason to retreat back to NYC, without it seeming like my mother had been right. Her timing was great for once: she got sick and was hospitalized for an extended period of time. Seizing the opportunity, I announced to my family that I would return to be closer to her in her time of need.

Years passed. By now, I was in my late 20s, and I had learned to balance my terrible memories of my childhood with my gratitude for her willingness to take me and my brother in. She started getting weirdly sweet around the time she turned 80. She would call me up and tell me not to go down to the West Village, "because they're killing gay men down there." I had never come out to her, only to my siblings, because of what she had said to me that time with the Playgirl, so that was a somewhat awkward phone call. My sister, who still visited her every day, told me that she was "slipping," forgetting things. Entering the first stages of some sort of dementia. Which explained her being nice, too. That's how it works sometimes. (But at first I didn't believe my sister. My mother had always developed "illnesses" that to my mind were direct comments on the lives of her children. My sister and brother were overweight, so she developed arthritis. They smoked, so she became short of breath and claimed to have emphysema. When we heard her emphysema self-diagnosis, we were horrified, and asked if she had seen a doctor. "Why do I need a doctor to tell me what I know I have?" she replied. She even started carrying around an inhaler. That was my mom!)

During the last conversation I ever had with my mother, I was telling her about my best friend's baby, who had said or done something particularly adorable that week. My mother laughed and said, "Well, you could settle down with a nice young lady, you know, and have a baby of your own!" This was her fondest wish, for a grandchild. My sister had lost a baby once, and could no longer conceive. The same thing had happened to my eldest brother's wife. My real brother, Jonathan, was long dead by then (that rough crowd). I laughed at my mother and replied as emphatically as I could, "Mom...I don't think you have to worry about a baby with me." She laughed, knowing exactly what I was saying - that I was finally coming out to her, in a way - and we said goodbye. Although I obviously couldn't know this was happening, my sister told me later that my mother put down the phone and immediately started telling everyone that she was ready to die. Three days later, on September 10th, she was dead. And then it was the next day.

Sometimes when we are hit with a tragedy, it makes us more aware of, or perhaps more sensitive to, how others deal with the tragedies of their own lives. Over the next few years, I watched with morbid amusement and some jealousy how the relatives and loved ones of the 9/11 deceased dealt with the tragedy, with the rest of the world expected to mourn with them. This isn't a blog post about them, however; many blog posts have already been written about these people, and deservedly so.

Every fall I almost forget that the anniversary of my mother's death is coming, but then with the news coverage, I am reminded again. Because this year is the all-important 10th anniversary, maybe each subsequent anniversary will be heralded less and less, as everyone moves on with their lives? When I accidently tune in to a 9/11 anniversary "special" on television, it can still take me back to those terrifying days ten years ago, when my mother stopped breathing and died, and we had to wait for the ban on airline flights to be lifted so her son Michael could return home from vacation and attend her funeral.

A few years ago, my father let me know what my mother's last word was: my name. Not her real children's names, but mine. I was deeply touched by that. Today, in my late 30s - too late to let her know, but still early enough to make a difference - I've finally grown to love even the bad memories of her. They're useful, after all: there's usually a crazy mother character in the fiction I write, for example. And the macabre sense of humor my childhood gave me now enables me to laugh at the emotionally unavailable men who make up the dating pool in New York. And laugh, too, at the indignities that are heaped upon me (and everyone else who works in an office) throughout the average working day. Do I think my mother experienced a similar evolution in her feelings for me? I theorize that my mother eventually learned to love and respect me because she realized I was a worthy opponent. And that's exactly how I like to remember her.

Uniqlo tee

I went out to Queens last night, and walked in to find my father and sister looking through my father's ADT papers. His ADT alarm was malfunctioning, so every few minutes, it was emitting a tooth-grinding shriek. But the only person who knew the security code to turn off the alarm was Miss Webster, his former home health aide, who recently moved back to St. Kitts! They forced me to get on the phone with ADT, and ADT walked me through the steps of disabling the alarm - I felt like Macgyver with a screwdriver in my hand, disabling an alarm - it felt like I was disabling a bomb. Why doesn't my father - an accomplished man with a strange fear that bands of roving maladroits are rampant in Queens, lurking about and waiting for the opportunity to kidnap 90-year-old men with incontinence issues - know the code to his house's security system?

Afterwards, my nerves still on edge from the shrieking of the alarm, my father sat me down and told me that my real father's estate may have finally been settled, and that there may be "some money there waiting for me." Ha! That estate has been in a mysterious limbo for 30-plus years, and I don't believe it will ever truly be settled. But that's between you and me. My father told me to call my cousin Ann in Antigua, who is the lawyer for the estate. What an awkward conversation that will be - especially since Ann's daughter Joy herself was kidnapped a couple of weeks ago (it turned out okay) and I haven't called Ann yet to see how she's doing. My slowness in showing my concern for my relatives has cost me dearly in the past, and that trend continues, it seems.

After that weird talk with my father, I went into the kitchen and saw a roach! Gaaaa! Maxine wanted to spray it, but I refused to use the spray, instead choosing to kill it with my bare hands. People are far too squeamish about using their hands to kill roaches, I feel - it's the most environmentally friendly method, and you get to kill a living being with your bare hands! (If you sometimes feel powerless, killing is one way to take your power back. Over the years - especially my childhood years - I have clapped mosquitoes between my palms, squeezed beetles, de-winged moths - and now, in my adulthood, I feel a strange sense of power, which sometimes manifests itself as a paralyzing anxiety). After I killed the roach, my sister smiled weakly and said "eEeEeEeE." I cracked up. Then I went downstairs into my childhood bathroom and took this picture. I'm wearing a recent purchase, a dark grey tee from Uniqlo. There were many options of colors in this particular tee shirt model, but I chose this color and a purple one, too - because those reminded me of tee shirts of mine from the past. To someone who is powerful, though, ahem, "between inheritances," with a seemingly never-ending gig providing technical support to a surprisingly helpless father and sister, wearing a familiar tee is perhaps the only self-comfort available at times. That, and Paxil.

Seen in the audience at a Richard Milward/Sarah Hall reading

I decided to come out of retirement and play a couple of songs as "Gee Henry" at a British-themed Richard Milward/ Sarah Hall reading. Here were three ladies in the audience. I won't give their names, because I work with them, but I love them! I want to hang out with them after-work, but my one invitation thus far, to a dance thing at Juilliard, illicited no replies from any of the three ladies. I will keep trying, though. As a publicist, and as a middle-aged man in the gay mileu that is NYC, I am quite accustomed to rejection! The reading was held at the Slipper Room, a venue that is heavy on burlesque performances. As a nod to the venue's history, I wore a black, see-through shirt made by Helmut Lang. (I've had that shirt for ten years and have only worn it twice! What price, haute couteur?). And what a strange evening it was. I chose to sing two songs about topics that I and the authors share a fascination for: drugs and skin. And I refrained from over-sharing about my people (the Antiguans) long and complicated relationship with the British, which was probably for the best.