Date: Wed Jul 24, 1996 2:58:11 PM

Good grief! Accidents & make-up calls, house decorating & paperpushing. You are quite the whirlwind sass these recent days. Yep, your mom was sold the American dream and she is just tickled you are pulling her through it. Good work sweetie! Now if only I were so industrious.

Sure, I remember your Greek pal who once had the crush but you told him you didn't think of him that way. Yeah Themis, the story of our lives. Geez, you didn't waste any time, moving on this cyberslut quackery rampage right out the gate, did you? Naughty girl. Yeah, a nasty girl, a dirty woman. And indefatigably so alive! To ratchet up Jack Webb's Sergeant Friday from the dark side of sunshine, "there are a billion stories in the cyber metropolis, and hey baby baby, yours is just beginning...

The prostitute? It's a dead deal going nowhere. I have been planning for years to hire a model of a certain caliber, but have never stepped into it. The urge washed over me again last week, and I thought a streetwalker might fit the bill. Cheaper, and perhaps more willing to accept the terms upon which I want to explore with camera various states of mild bondage, exhibitionism, and clothing fetish (cottons & professional wear, not leather, it's so cliché these days with everybody from the president's daughter to Grandma Moses saddled up in punk rock garb) strategies. I WANT TO TAKE PICTURES OF WOMEN DAMMIT!!!

When I was young, thin as spaghetti, long-haired like my generation wanted & lurking along the fringe of the beautiful people in my early to late 20s, most women didn't take me seriously because I was too wimpy, nerdy, dandylike for them. They preferred the ruffians. A whole series of women who did take me seriously were ten to 20 years older than me, and when I pressed them to define their attraction to me, each to a nipple twist could only bring themselves to say they admired and loved me for my mind. Not a single one was honest enough to admit it was my young, muscled, pliable, blonde blue eyed, energetic body they lusted after and wanted to toss in their purse or their bed, always wishing they could give me more to make me be everything they wanted me to be. But I was never a victim. Or the victor. Let me be clear. I don't play that victim card, also known as the martyr card, though several wits over the years have accused me of this behavior, others quite the opposite. My job is to explain the matrix, the global positioning, the psychological DNA of a type. Say what you will, but I have my orders. If someone's not interested, go away. Find a three minute song to tell you basically the same thing, but over the long haul I do it my way, old school, long winded, hiding secrets behind words, detonating secrets with words. I have and will always play hard, or I don't play at all. I play to win within the context of the game, the art of the coin, the coin of the realm, the realm of the law, the law of the gods, the gods of humanity, the humanity of secret, of public passages, or I don't play at all if I can get away with the endgame. But win or lose, I am neither victim nor executioner, not that I reject either role's contextual placement within the humanity of passages, but I choose to sport for myself, to explore something else. Nor is it written within with the fading laws of my longing heart to create metaphorically lifeless victims or executioners. I cannot create what I cannot be, period. I'd rather create sentences. And we all deserve our sentences, even those who manage to escape them.

Inferiority about my appearance has plagued since childhood (crooked teeth, too skinny, lazy hair, hooked nose, bowed legs, southern vocabulary, lack of victorious pectoralis muscle despite a driving athleticism, et cetera), and continued to fester after high school as a that string of much older women took me into their confidence one after another only to feed me with flatteries and half-truths that burned off every time my mind ran counter to their mind, their body, their spirit of play and decorum. I was quite aware that my mind was sharp and curious to a fault. I knew that girls my own age were mostly too silly and worldly to understand the chasms of my intelligence. Early 1970s were not nice to me. And since—to escape the chaos of home I bolted as soon as I graduated from highschool—I was soon laboring alone a mere blue-collared college kid wannabe outside the academic environs of my childhood dreams and foundations, working in a goddamned steel mill in the coke ovens for chrissakes, I never chanced to meet a peer but soon was lost in a master mechanic's greasy world where I felt infinitely close to dead inside. I'll forward a couple more notes I've recently written to Ben (of Germany) which expand on this topic of my own general failure to achieve what I felt was my bounty, worthy of my intellectual curiosity and pedigree, even now, as the days grow shorter and are flying by quicker, so anything less than scaling the highest mountain is abject failure and a colossal waste of talent, duty, and knack for recording that is meant to move a generation. Boyhood dreams die hard.

I want to take pictures, surprisingly deviant, erotic but not in some highbrow ginger, actual I want an emphasis on the offbeat, the ironic, the artistic but approachable, Warholian so to speak. Just for the taste of doing it once, twice, a few times, not as a lifetime endeavor. I can't fathom that. Man Ray and Lee Miller moved on. So would I. I prefer the natural or plainer looking model to the drop dead gorgeous women who frankly all look alike, and to whom Easy Street is theirs for the plucking. They don't need me, and I don't need them because despite my limitations, I feel just as scooter as they do, and it's equality of opportunity, or nothing at all from me. Instead I am terribly fascinated with the average doll on the street, their psychology, their power. I'm not speaking here of prostitutes necessarily, but ordinary girls, women in general. That study has been done to death in literature, if not photography. But the average woman, her sexuaity, her fantasies, her willingness to please herself and others, and under what terms. These matters interest me beyond a few words. I might have made something of this long ago had I not been deceived by Sue. An ancient story. Her own formidable post-marital inhibitions prohibit any exploration. She now seems ashamed of sexuality, ashamed of her own femininity, not taking it seriously enough, in fact, bored, and subsequently boring. Bottom line, she's a bean counter, which sums up her sense of self, turned into a slack-shouldered bookkeeper who has trouble beyond the self-conscious snicker or dead-eyed "what do you want me to do" in both the commanding role, and the obedient, not just in the bedside trollop, either. Her lifelessness begins when she clocks out from work. She works hard. I understand that. But she operates on RAM, and her hard drive is shut down right before she leaves her office at Always & Forever. True all the way back to my earliest days, I've often been a free floater, seeking original sin, tweaking at the edges of a good time folly as long as it was mixed with smarts and a sense of direction. I do not like to let go without tracks back to the cave. A free floater, or at least I used to be until a decade of sexual sublimation and boredom conspired like the two components of a Reese's Buttercup to render my body a complete wreck. I am reminded of what Ravenholt opined rather offhandedly when the two of you were over at the old apartment.

"Gabriel, he's like me, we have a common sexual soul," he said. I was astounded that Ravenholt saw deep into my past and my future. I knew I was kinked along every ridge of my being, but I was quite sure most people looked right through me without seeing anything but a goofball. Where are those women now in the past so willing to love me not for my body but for my mind? Admittedly Sue is one, for our incompatibility in the almost every department of intimacy has made the sex a mute point. To use a phrase, "I love her, but not in that way."

Other than email among a few special minds, for which I am mocked by Bracken and Howell, my artistic spirit is nearly numb at this stage. Cold indifference a decade carved into our future neither of the three of us is innocent. And I would dare surmize that you Jennifer must "love" me as you say you do because of my mind because it is certainly not the flesh you seek from me, although you have provided it many times. But now that my body is rotten, my mind has no power, but has proven that old blowfish tale so often found fluttering off the plucky lips of femmes
énergique everywhere that "it's not what's on the outside, it's what's on the inside that counts" completely bogus in all its pretentious idealism, just as us eager but culled lads always knew it to be. What collapses my soul is that now I am hardly able to scratch beyond the mind past the second hand tools of my body to rework the conspicuous tropes of those I would even remotely glorify or testify against—if only a quarter measure of acceptance and cooperation in the deed down under was not sincere and gregariously made available in the hour of our mutual authority. The research is in. The tests have spoken. I got a failing grade. So, it's spit in the bucket, or not at all, my dears. Speak up, chest out, invest your stuff with the flair of dominance but in a spirit of "you've just got to have it," or else, know in the end I can only pine the box, pine the key that unlocks. Will never be quick or clever enough to transgress the boundaries, not any more. I lost. Trapped in the irritable bowels of sexual ambiguity—let's be clear, sexual ambiguity, not homosexuality, not bisexuality, not indifference, certainly not an incapacity for grueling matches of innuendo and thrust—just an excruciating ambiguity born of experience, I lost.

To stand erect, a reject before the world, patently needy for a welcoming acceptance without begging, yet dripping from every pore with a primal fear of rejection, or worse—dull cooperation—a player of notable former prowess, but one now relegated to the bench, the sidelines, where I observe mindless splinters with more aggressive behavior than I, knowing the game is much more about something else than the countless acts of sublime love, witty dominance and shrieking submission floating around the nucleus themselves. The Marquis couldn't possibly have planned it all, superior intelligence and high birth be damned. But to his credit, he and his deviating insights outlived most of the laws he broke.

Rather than gates crashing down, each year seems to bring more chains of thought, more depression, more rejection. Will I ever measure up to that fabulous burst of early potential I knew as a precocious & peerless child? Even among the adults I knew no peer. Sue fears me, and now you say you do. Vexation of the heart is rendering me increasingly useless for life. Failures of my mind to relieve the pressures. I peer between penitentiary bars of this side that side driving me insane, just as my mother has suffered great agony from the same unrealized potential in her own life, mostly a series of false hopes to break through into a recognizable, and compelling intellectual climate. The challenges of peace in my lifetime...

The hooker deal fell through because Mouse Morrison (hardly a close friend but rather a persistant pest over the past decade) bailed out due to an illness I guess I now am suffering, fevers, sweats, harsh throat, and sinus wammies. Both he & Tim were egging to donate their pipelines for the cause. Since neither has money, they offered peacock services. Steve was here that night, smartly demure as usual, noncommittal at the point the witching hour came, and still no news from Mouse. He called apologizing the next afternoon, and tried to reschedule for that evening. By then I had decided to keep the money in my pocket where it belonged, even thinking a drive to Ithaca was still possible. But Monday I was sick, and today still sicker. My fate determined.

You know Jennifer, you're not at all specific in stating your discomfort with what I had proposed as contingent to a visit. I suppose I can't blame you, though I find rather distasteful your coy kitten routine, except when you are looking to be touched, but you've got to know that I just put words out there. There is no action taken until words have confirmed themselves, and action is all that's left (along with whatever script comes to mind on the fly, don't you see?). I was vague myself in suggesting any such framework. I reckon I was just fishing for some personal feedback on what limits you have, what trust you have, what love you have, for me. You have often said you don't flash the L-word around unnecessarily. I can appreciate that. Honesty is the only trait worth fighting and dying for. My honesty seems sometimes all I have left as the black rupture of failure closes in on my sagging sense of purpose. I have often declared the two extremes of my psychological dichotomy to you. I suppose at the rate I am going, within a few years I may be a walking talking farting full blown case of schizophrenia, voices in my head and all. Day in and day out I race back and forth from being completely certain I am some sort of end days manchild whose time (while the symbols of my life rack up proof after proof of this latter truth) is not yet full, until I plummet into a full-blown depression signaled by a cheap self-congratulatory neuroticism, a smothering psychosis where self-loathing reaches beyond all this inner hype to bring me crashing to the ground zero point of self-destruction, seemingly only inches away. What is life but the fulfilling of purpose? Does it matter that I have felt a universal tug since my very earliest years, and as such have set myself up for this miserably fantastic failure? No, because without these fantasies whether they be artistic, religious, or merely delusional have kept me in the game thus far, among the living, after nearly being extinguished more times than a boozy feline's mythological nine lives.

And in that notion rests God the restorer...

GT

"Whoozy beer-guzzling turkeys. Good thing they aren't allowed to fly..."