Listen to the interview here: Joseph Megel and the Process Series

I heard a few cat calls from front stage and knew it was time to weave back through the mass of tall bodies that refused to acknowledge the existence of shorter ones. By the time I reached the front, I was pretty well ready for a fight. Enter drunk girl. A decidedly beautiful twenty-something trying to look like a 1970s super model interrupted her faux, stage-side photo shoot to get up in my face. She reeked. I no longer regretted opting for Aquafina vs. Fat Tire. I got a contact buzz just from the fumes. “Where do you think you’re going? What’s happening here?,” Glamour Girl challenged. I still don’t know why.

“Are you a bouncer?,” I asked. She let me pass.

I rejoined my friends and within the next thirty seconds, the opening act owned the room (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ_BZM0GrD0&feature=related). An L.A. band, they call themselves “Fitz and the Tantrums” and they put on the best live show I’ve seen since David Byrne performed with the Tosca Strings in 2005. And speaking of David Byrne, Fitz looks like the love child of Byrne and Geraldine Ferraro, a trait that certainly works in his favor for me.

It took me a moment to recover from my recent and unanticipated confrontation, but soon all the soul in the air had me shaking my groove thing. Glamour girl was too, and I even felt a slight kinship with her as with everyone else in the night club. “We are all just stardust together,” a friend lists on her Facebook profile under “Religious Views.”

I felt a slight sense of loss after the Tantrums ended their set and I fretted that Ms. Jones might not live up to the hype. Um, she lives up to it, with her eight-piece brass band, perfectly controlled wail, and a fifty-year old strength that makes every woman in the room want to be just like her. As her song lyrics indicate, she learned a lot the hard way. But she learned a lot.

If I could even just stand still as confidently as she does, I know no one would dare get in my face to ask me where I think I’m going.

And Jones was kind. Even to drunken, Glamour Shots Girl. Jones invites a lot of crowd participation, a habit I would not tolerate from any other stage diva. Note: I really hate sing-a-longs. Jones invited “the youngest man in the room” to join her on stage. And let me tell you, baby-faced, white, and likely an SAE, that child did not look like he was going to be able to handle her. Ah but he delivered. Hip swinging, shoulder shaking, and a down and dirty groove face-to-face with one of the most spirited songstresses on the international music scene. Button down polo shirt or no, that frat boy got downright pornographic. Get it, frat boy.

Then it was “the ladies” turn. Two of my friends took Jones’ offer alongside about five other femme fatales from the audience. I stayed glued to the sticky floor down below but enjoyed seeing them shine. They were awesome, though a bit eclipsed by the aforementioned horribly intoxicated young woman who kept blocking Sharon Jones’ spotlight. The shit-faced urchin kept bending over and shaking out her hair like a stripper; spinning around, wiggling her booty, stumbling drunkenly, bending over like a stripper again, and then repeating the whole cycle almost indefinitely. She did do this Wonder Woman whirl that was pretty good. It was hard for Sharon Jones to get her off the stage.

For much of the remainder, the young woman’s friend banged an empty beer bottle against the stage in rhythm with the songs. “She’s going to break that,” my friend yelled into my ear. Smash. After the crowd dispersed, we noted the jagged remnants left behind for the clean up crew.

Once we reached the open air, we saw shit-faced girl running wildly into the street and then back to her boyfriend like a pet dog that’s just been let out to pee before dashing back to its master.

I was a little worried about her.

I hoped her friends and (MUCH older) male companion would make sure she got home safely and that she would remember a great night fondly (if not a bit spottily). I hoped we both went home “a better woman than we were before.”

They vowed to restore it and preserve it as the space that housed generations; this gave my grandmother solace. She sold it at a third of its worth, and within five years, the couple tore it down to erect something bigger, newer. “We gave it a try; we really did,” they wrote us. “But it just wasn’t working.” The couple still sends a card to the private nursing facility at Christmas, and they have my Grandmother’s full forgiveness.

But there Grandmother and I were together, suddenly in the present moment, standing in the study. Sun illuminated dust in the air, where there was only a brief silence and emptiness. I used to explore the peach trees and the Rose of Sharon bushes that flanked the house like rare tropics in the dry west Texas dust bowl. Here, in the “dream” house, Rose of Sharon grew straight in, absent of window panes to trap it outdoors. It leapt inward in 3-D, the purple blossoms hyper-rich and as much a part of the room as the book cases and old rotary phone.

We were looking about us but never at each other. Through the arched entry to the formal living room with its old-timey velvet sofas, slick, shiny green dominoes lay scattered across a card table. Bacon crisped in the kitchen. There was activity there, but no signs of life driving it.

Grandmother’s space on the sofa was empty as was the chair behind it where her mother once enjoyed cornbread and buttermilk in aqua disco-era glasses. Until she died, I called my great grandmother “Mom Murphy” and danced with her in the living room, the one with the dominoes. We shared our last dance when she was ninety-seven. I was thirteen.

She liked to wear her favorite pink polyester dress, take me by both hands, and sway me around to Lawrence Welk on 8-track. Sometimes, it was Jim Neighbors instead. At nap time, we’d sink deep into her egg crate mattress, where she would tell me stories of our ancestors’ adventures settling the wild west. Then, without fail, she’d remind me that a good nap a day is the key to a long and happy life. Of course, I could never sleep. I’d marvel at the false teeth she soaked in Efferdent, their hard gums the same color as the dress she wore for dancing. The room smelled of baby powder and White Rain hairspray.

But Mom Murphy’s chair was just a mutual acknowledgment. A stop on the way. It was my Grandfather’s easy chair that caught our steady focus. Granddad was lucky in the way some men were in the thirties. He didn’t have many choices, and so he didn’t want any. He married his high school sweetheart, got a job he liked, had two beautiful daughters, and spent his weekends at a small cattle ranch with them and a few horses.

He rode in rodeos from time to time, though I never saw him in those days. By the time I arrived, the horses were gone, and he just had a few cows to feed. We’d ride out to “the place” in his big Ford pick-up truck. It was the same powder blue as their dining room, and it had a rack for the rifle he carried as protection against rattle snakes.

He’d gas up in Merkel and let me pick out enough penny candy to fill a small lunch bag: candy lipstick, fake cigarettes, wax lips, licorice. Then, we’d greet the cows by the water tank and give them a salt lick. I could never get close enough to pet them, but I wanted to. I loved their giant brown eyes that looked like love, if not loneliness.

When Grandmother joined us, she’d take me treasure seeking. We’d step through cacti and crab apple bushes, finding old pink “fancy” glass and boot spurs, surely remnants from a lawless saloon. I treasured the old shoe buckles most and then the horse shoes, buttons, and especially the arrowheads. I still keep them in an old shoebox in my dining room hutch.

But his blue valour easy chair was leaned out with the foot rest engaged. I used to climb up in that gaping seat when I’d sneak away from nap time to watch Yogi Bear and the other Hanna Barbera cartoon animals. I was too young to care much about longevity anyhow.

But now the chair was open for use, but no one was there to watch the huge, oak television set or to reach across and grab my Grandmother’s hand to tell her how lucky he still felt after 65 years. In his retirement, when he wasn’t painting in the summerhouse or feeding cows, this is where my grandfather spent most of his time. And he was happy.

Standing there together, the absence was all right with my Grandmother and I. The dusty air was all right. The near silence even felt fine. There was only the sound of the bacon. No dinner table chit chat at Christmas-time 1976, stopped short by a gunshot blast from upstairs. Not the kind of silence they must have experienced before rushing from the table, then finding their daughter like that.

To be honest, I always expected her room to be haunted. And even though I can remember her in it, remember her brushing her thick black hair, letting me dress up in her old pink taffeta prom gowns, it wasn’t. She wanted to be gone.

(So, perhaps this is the better question: Why did they stay in that house, dipping their cornbread in buttermilk, dancing to Lawrence Welk, playing dominoes? Why weren’t they the ones to tear it down?).

The dream continues, but the atmosphere changes. The house is gone and now my grandmother and I are walking down a dusty path at the ranch, looking for treasures again. I fade to the background and my grandfather’s palm replaces mine in my grandmother’s hand. I watch as they continue walking ahead together, leaving me behind.

Did you know: Orange is supposed to be the most intellectually stimulating color.

I found out that one can actually be arrested for having an expired
license tag. I could be locked up wearing a fashionable orange jump
suit right now, and Big Barb could be waiting for me to drop the soap
in the shower. So, if I’m arrested for having a suspended license tag
for lapse of insurance that never really lapsed, and I decide to spend
my one phone call on you, here’s what to do (don’t lose this email):

Sound comforting while I sob some incoherent nonsense about jail
cafeterias, the Bone Yard, and How I had to hammer out my own new
license plate while visiting “the Big Yard.”

Next, instruct me on some crucial martial arts maneuvers that could be helpful for surviving any sudden and violent prison riots.

Finally, say something sweet about how I look great in orange, and
hang up the receiver.

Now, call Ablaze Bail Bonds at 542-BAIL.

Tell the sales rep that “No, we won’t qualify for the discount since
this is only my first arrest.” For future reference, they grant discounts to third time customers. But you have to have done something really bad.

Find out how much it’s going to be to bust me out, and go to the
Chatham Marketplace and take up a collection.

Pay Ablaze whatever they ask, and don’t leave without grabbing one of
their bright red promo ink pens labeled, “When You Need a Little Help from the Pen.”

If you can’t raise enough money, buy a dry erase board from Staples
and haul it on over to the Bynum General Store. Call a Community
meeting and devise a way to rig up some explosives near my jail cell
for a break out.

For what is enjoying the constant challenge of life-long love if not to have someone to help you plan prison breaks or to call when your neurotic fear of unjust arrest becomes a bright orange reality?

You know I’d do the same for you.

Recently panicked to note that lemon custard was no longer listed even as a "seasonal" flavor on the Baskin Robbins website, I began calling every franchise I could find in the Yellow Pages. I even got Elrond to call a few. We were told that no one liked Lemon Custard, so they stopped making it.

Desperately, I set out on a letter writing campaign. I created countless email accounts and aliases to inflate the aura of public demand and outrage. I know I'm not the only lover of the lemon custard, so I was merely representing the disappointed masses who lacked the metal to stand up for what they believe in. Lemon Custard makes the world a better place and humanity a little more pleasant.

Then, my summer miracle arrived. I talked Elrond into a spontaneous raid on the Northgate location of BR. "You're just wallowing in denial," he told me. Still, their chocolate is one of the stickiest, creamiest to be found, so it couldn't be a total bust.

He spotted glory before me. I lingered over the yellowing vat of French Vanilla, willing it to be a labeling mistake. That's jaundiced enough to be the custard, I thought. He took my arm and lured me toward my salvation. It's back!!! They've read my passionate pleas for mercy. On Friday night, side by side, Elrond and I each savored a single scoop of maalox-inspired citrusy goodness.

Life could not be any sweeter.

“Is he gay?,” Lisa queried.

I paused at least 40 seconds before answering. “He’s sensitive,” I defended defensively.

(Eight years after the fact, I discover this: at a subsequent gourmet dinner cooked for us by the alleged soul mate, my friends passed a note under our faux finish oak table. It bore tiny check boxes below the fateful questions, “What do you think? Gay or Not Gay? Check yes or no.” The result was a 50/50 split.

He was gay, but that’s beside the point.

Will was one of those ill fated romances that fades into unforgettable, um, friendship leading to hilarious road trips, mischievous scheming, and treasured mixed tapes. I still listen to his mixed tapes: the Sundays, Morissey, Erasure. Okay, Erasure. I know, all right?

For our first date, he drove me downtown in his beat-up Honda Accord that he’d worked really hard to buy. Conversation was running smoothly, but I was nervous. We were at a stop light when we wrecked into our first awkward silence. I panicked.

Think fast, I said silently to myself. Okay, you know that he has a cat. You can either ask him how long he’s had his cat, or you could ask him how old his cat is.

What I said was, “So, how long is your cat?”

40 second pause. He looks at me and sets his palms about 2.5 feet a part to illustrate his precious feline’s measurements.

We’re bonded for life then, and I’m relieved to know that I can be safely and openly nervous with him.

We’re heading downtown because of my freak pheromone. I’ve told him about it, but he doesn’t believe me. “Stick around,” I’d warned.

He believes that if there’s some freak pheromone action to be had, it’s going to be in downtown Greenville, SC. He’s spot on.

We visit the one and only thrift shop on Main Street in 1993. This is pre-Falls Park, before Greenville embraced the creative class. I buy a ring that looks like an abacus, and Will gets a fedora. I ask the clerk if they have a public restroom. He says that it’s for employees only but sends us up the street to the Hyatt Regency. I like the Hyatt for its water falls and decorative pools. I take my shoes off and wade briefly, but this makes me need a ladies room more urgently.

We walk in at the second floor and hear a ritualistic drum beat. At the Hyatt Regency. We lean over the balcony rail to see a flood of figures dressed in black robes. They’re beating the floor with long, wooden staffs. Together, we look to our right. There stands a hard-bodied female wearing a black leather bikini and spiked dog collar. She’s holding a whip, and she looks quite sure of herself.

“See?” I look to Will for acknowledgment that the freak pheromone is not merely mythical.

“Let’s go before we get strapped to the sacrificial alter,” he says.

We cross the street to Fudrucker’s. Will scoots into a booth, and I walk briskly and awkwardly to the rear restrooms. I notice more darkly attired devil worshipers, but I don’t have time to worry about that.

I hear a ruckus. When I depart the lavatory, I notice that Will is ashen and appears to be in some sort of trance.

I shake him by the shoulders and ask, “what happened to you?”

He points to a robed renegade in the corner.

“You see that guy over there?,” he asks.

I nod. “Of course I see him. He’s as solid as my pheromone.”

“Okay, now. You see that group of people over there?”

“Yeah. Just tell me,” I say, noticing that two of them are wearing t-shirts innocuously advertising a sci-fi convention.

“Okay. Well, that guy yelled, ‘Give me a K!’”
“They all went, ‘K!’”
“Then, he yelled, ‘Give me an I!’”
“They all went, ‘I!’”
“Give me an ‘N!’”
“They all yelled, ‘N!’”
“Give me a ‘G!’”
“They all went, ‘G!’”
“Then [like a cheerleader], he yelled, ‘What does that spell?’”
They all yelled, “ELVIS!!!”

Will and I got chocolate chip cookies to go and left.

Pachelbel played over sidewalk speakers.

“Oh, do you like Pachelbel?,” he asks.

I think he’s said, “Do you like Taco Bell?” I’m hungry, and the cookie is not enough to satiate my growling stomach’s demands.

“Yeah! I would totally LOVE one of their beef burritos right now.”

He stares at me quizzically.

As we stand at the street corner waiting for the light to change, another freak stops his car, leans out, makes a grotesque face, and exclaims, “Moowaaaaaaaaaaaa” at us.

“See?,” I ask.
******
Afterward:
Will and I were friends for a long time after he came out. Before then, we’d almost kiss, but something felt not quite right. One of us would always interrupt the moment. We talked about this later, how I’d look at him and feel raw unbridled attraction, but when I got close enough to smell him, there was nothing. No spark, no young adulthood, over-sexed need to grab him by the shirt and stick my tongue in his mouth. (Plus, I was brought up by my Victorian Grandma, so I was a bit square anyhow).

One night, a week after Will and I had argued and stopped talking to each other for no real good reason, my friend Kasey showed up at my door with a bottle of Boone’s Farm Blackberry wine. “It’s from Will,” she tells me. “He sent me here b/c he needs to tell you something. He said you should have some of this first.”

I know what this is about. I drink straight from the bottle.

A bit later, I hear a pebble strike my apartment window. Then another. And another before I reach my front door to greet him. Will asks if we can go for a walk.

We head across the street to campus. He tells me, and I feel relief. Relief that we’re talking to each other, relief that we know each other, and relief that this typically “open as a book” guy can be fully open about this.

I remember a time at lunch when a bunch of Sigma Nus were at our table. They weren’t with us. They were just at our table. I loved eating in the dining hall. It had huge windows from floor to ceiling, about three stories high. You could see the full span of the lake, the swans, the miniature marsh that was forming from partially submerged cedar trees. The year before I matriculated, there’d been a MASSIVE food fight in there. White Merita rolls launched from wall to wall. Leftover mystery meat casserole hit students square in the face. I was so mad at my parents for not conceiving me a year sooner so I could have been there.

But times were not so bright in the Furman cafeteria this semester. The frat boys (not my favorite of campus populations, as I established in “Far More Fond of Cabbage”), were discussing their views on homosexuality. Like the stereotypical bible beating, sorority-scamming cad he most surely was, one “brother” declared, “If I ever find a fag around here, I’ll make sure he transfers and never comes back.”

Proud and self-righteous, I slam my silverware down on my tray, stand up, and stomp away in indignation.

Will stays and commiserates like nothing said there is offensive.

As we stride toward the lake, I think about how lonely that moment must have felt for him.

Will tells me that he’s always had a girlfriend. Always.

His father is a baptist minister.

He says that he’s had some sense of his sexual orientation since he was about six. I think back and guess that I have too. Well, come to think of it.

He’s tried experimenting sexually with women, but it felt so unnatural that he got physically sick.

“Seriously. I actually threw up. I always thought I could change. I’ve been going to Sunday school for a long time, and I didn’t think that God could possibly want me to be this way. He wouldn’t want me to be anything that would hurt my parents as much as this. I’ve tried now, and I’m ready to stop.”

Will is an environmentalist, a liberal, an animal rights activist, an obvious subversive.
Will is a devout man of faith.

I was the one who transferred. My dad lost his job. I only had a tiny scholarship, and private school was expensive. Will and I visited each other. We were only a few hours apart.

By that fall, he had a boyfriend named, Stephen. They stopped to kiss as we hiked somewhere on Paris Mountain. It seemed completely natural to me. How surprising that their affection didn’t phase me at all. But I still felt a tinge of jealousy when other women would flirt with Will. I let my mind settle on this only briefly and abstractly.

I was glad this happened during a weekend I was there. Stephen and Will enjoyed another PDA session in the Piggly Wiggly while we were there grabbing our traditional bottle of Boone’s Farm. His dad walked past our aisle. By then, Will and Stephen were only standing close and holding hands. We weren’t sure that his father, the preacher, had seen them. We waited and hoped that his dad would leave before we did.

We didn’t see the Reverend again, but the next morning, we found a yellow sticky note taped to the steering wheel of Will’s Honda. It read, “Will, I want you to know that I love you. No matter what. Dad.”
*******

Will and I once discussed starting our own night-time poetry readings. Again, Greenville hadn’t yet become the mecca of underground, artsy fartsy coffee shops and riverwalk galleries that it is now. We would call these cutting edge cultural offerings “Moonlit Musings.” I went on to start this series in Charleston. Will went on to make an important difference in the world. I thought he would.

In another ghost dream, I’m a guest at a Caribbean resort that once operated as a sugar plantation. Gauzy whiteness dominates the place, spreading and ensnaring as Kudzu. I’m sitting in a white wicker love seat on a rear patio. Nearby palm fronds casually sway atop tall, thin and bending trunks. Something about their carriage reminds me of 1920s catalog models with their chic cigarette holders. Elegant, relaxed, aloof.

Across the room, a woman wearing a white sundress sits with her feet folded beneath her in a chair matching my hard woven seat with pale floral cushion. I do not know her. She reads a contemporary home decorating magazine, yet something about our surroundings feels like an Agatha Christie mystery set in the jazz age – or maybe it’s more Victorian era. Mist hovers like mosquito netting as the white ceiling fan above us whirs with slow-motioned repetition.

Though the air feels heavy and too sticky to inhale, the current from the fan feels sensual as it brushes my shoulders. I catch a brief chill. A young girl approaches me and places a miniature teapot in the cup of my hands. She explains that if I hold it to my ear like a seashell, I can hear the sounds of the house where she found it.

She clasps my fingers around the handle and gently raises my hand to my ear. And I do hear the sounds of home: the clanking of pans, footsteps, a call to dinner. Then there’s the voice of another young female who explains to me that her house was destroyed by a hurricane years prior. The teapot comes from the ruins where her family perished. Again, I feel a chill, this time coupled with suspicion.

The pre-pubescent girl on the patio with me bounces, happy and eager. “See?,” she says, indicating that no one else would believe her. Somehow, I realize that the spirit voice is using the teapot as a conduit to return to the living, like a body snatcher. I want to consume more of her story, but I know that the more I hear, the more she’ll consume me. I tell the little girl never to play with the teapot again. “It’s dangerous.” I carry it with me as I walk away from her before waking.

Last summer, my significant other worked on a certain reality t.v. show that has recently become the darling of tabloid covers. The episodes he did were set “on vacation” at yet another NC island touting Iberian Stallions as a prime tourist attraction. The female lead, normally a shrew of Shakespearean proportions, suddenly began to wax Snow White: “Oh they’re so free,” she crooned. “Those are the happiest horses in the world.” If one didn’t know better (but believe me, one did know better), one might have thought the Wizard of Oz had bestowed upon her a soul.

In contrast, my findings held that those horses weren’t happy. They weren’t unhappy. They were just eating grass to the fill the time until there was no more time to do so. They were fine with that.

Looking for a spot clear of bio waste stacks, I settled into the sand 10 feet from them. Apparently, this was their boundary. I tested 9 feet, but they took a few steps away now placing me at 13. I stepped again closer but stopped at the estimated 10 foot force field. They seemed fine with it.

The island was vast, as islands can be. Something about the spotty patches of grass and low lying shrubs evoked memories of Cape Cod. I closed my eyes to better hear surf, grass chewing, and big bugs who were far less motivated to feed on human juices than I’d feared. I half fantasized that the most elegant of the herd, sensing our kindredness, would allow me to jump right up, grab some fitsfulls of mane and ride him bareback like Alec in the Black Stallion. But I couldn’t remember the time line required for Alec to step across the 10 foot personal space barrier. The horses didn’t know me, and I hadn’t even thought to bring them offerings of carrots.

So, I just was and I just watched.

The stillness made me need more stillness.

Just over the bank lay long bare stretches of beach, bayside and seaside. And beyond that lay “the line-up.” On my walk to the horses, I briefly met “David,” a stereotypically sun-bleached, sanded-down surfer who instructed, “Enjoy the day; that’s what it’s all about.”

“Really?,” I asked. “I thought the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about.” We watched one of his wet-suit be-clad friends glide through the “tube,” not something one sees a lot in North Carolina. “Hope I’ll see you again,” an inspired David called back as he took off toward the water. “You’re the King of the Waves,” I called back doubting that he could hear me.

He was the third in a week to tell me to live like the horses. Another man in a weathered red ball cap was grabbing take-out from the all-locals cafe in Beaufort. The cafe manager ordered him to have a nice day. “Every day is a nice day,” He said. “Isn’t it?,” he asked looking directly to me for an answer. Do I really look like a completely harried non-profit director weathering the worst economic crisis in US history, even when I’m vacationing? Do I look like I need to be reminded to enjoy my day? Do I look paranoid about people reminding me to enjoy my day?

For the surfers and the horses, problems are not problems. Chasing happiness is just something people do to keep themselves unhappy. There’s no difference between good and fine. They are fine with being just fine. Now that I’m back inland doing non-profit management (something often akin to indentured servitude) with no horses or surfers in sight, I hope I can be too.

Fini and Fine.