Operating Instructions (15 page)

The story is about a man and woman who’ve ordered a cake from a bakery for their little son’s birthday, but then the boy gets hit by a car and is in a coma. So they don’t pick up the cake. The baker just thinks he’s been stiffed and keeps calling and leaving mean messages, but then—oh, God, can you imagine—their little boy dies. And at the end of the story, the parents go to the bakery at dawn and against all odds end up eating bread and rolls with the baker.

I can’t tell you the dread I felt as I read the story. I think
there was something inside me that just felt we had to confront that awful possibility and wallow in it, instead of its being an evil shadow always walking behind us. But it was like having a rattlesnake in our little house, that’s how huge the fear felt at first, that’s how petrified I am of losing Sam. But then I suddenly realized that it was a Eucharist story, the breaking and sharing of bread, the dawn.

I tried to console myself, assuage my fear of children dying by saying we can’t know what a soul’s function on Earth is, but even so I couldn’t stop crying. Everything felt so sad and precarious. I wished so desperately right then that I had a mate who would comfort me. It almost made me wish that I’d never had a baby. I read a line once in a book by Jonathan Nasaw about a place where children who were dying could stay with their parents. A hospice for children. I can hardly write these words. But there was a banner, tie-dyed, I think, over one of the rooms, or maybe over the entrance to the huge house, that said, “Turn off the light, the dawn is coming.” I’ll never forget that as long as I live. I stayed up very late, watching the baby sleep, trying to exhort him psychically to take deeper breaths. If I could have one wish,
just one crummy little wish
, it would be that Sam outlive me.

M
egan told me today about the first time she baby-sat for an infant, a five-month-old, when she was about twelve and living in Kansas. The mother said there was cereal for the baby in the cupboard, but all Megan could find were Wheaties, so she assumed that’s what the mother had in mind. She put them in a lot of milk, and waited until they were really soggy, and then tried to feed them to the baby. “And did he eat them?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “he did as well as he could.”

Sam had strained carrots again tonight. Big huge mess, carrots everywhere, all over the kitty who passed by at a bad time, on Sam’s socks, in his hair, in my hair. I can see that things are going to begin deteriorating around here rather rapidly.

When he is asleep in his bassinet, the motions of his hands are as fluid and graceful as a ballerina’s. They are like birds.

T
onight Sam and I took a friend of ours out to dinner, a young man in his late twenties who is badly strung out on booze and Methedrine but who is also a very sweet, bright guy. We went to McDonald’s and got Quarter-Pounders and fries, and we were sitting in a booth with Sam on the table in his car seat, babbling. I was talking to the young man about recovery, which he was starved to hear about—I think it must have been like hearing about the sun during an ice age—and then Sam made a loud spluttering noise, so I said jokingly, “Shhh, honey, be patient, I know John plans to share his food with you,” and I went on blithely with my recovery pitch, eating at the same time, not particularly paying attention. Then I looked up and noticed that my friend had torn off about a third of his burger and was holding it tentatively in his left hand, and he said to me, “Is that about right?” and I said, “Is what about right?” and he held out the small piece of hamburger and said with exasperation, “I just really don’t have any idea how much he eats.”

I mentioned this story to Pammy later, and she said, “Boy, scratch
him
off the baby-sitting list.”

S
am loves the kitty more than anything else in life except for me and my breasts. On Valentine’s Day we were in the kitchen and Sam was lying on his back on a blanket on the floor, and suddenly the cat came in and started rolling around on the floor near him, like some blowsy Swedish farm girl rolling around in the hay. Sam laughed for ten straight minutes. He sounded like a brook. The kitty would stop rolling for a moment, and Sam would kind of get a grip, catch his breath, and all but wipe his eyes like an old man, and then the kitty would fling herself into the rolling motion again and Sam would just go nuts. So I got down on all fours to be near him. I stared at him, listened to him laugh, and said out loud, “Now,
where
did you come from again?”

He loves his solid foods these days, plunging in with great vigor and pride. Every meal is like eating with Falstaff. His poops are like little meatballs now. Sometimes when I’m changing him, the little meatballs roll off the diaper and onto the floor, and I have to chase them down. It’s sort of exhilarating—sort of sporting, or something. It makes me feel a little like Babe Zaharias.

Perhaps I am not getting out enough.

We are having a hard morning. I didn’t sleep much last night; I woke up at 3:00 feeling discombobulated and afraid. I wish I had an armed husband or at least a dog. Everything would feel safer. I’m tired and wired and fat and feeling about as feminine and spiritual as the late great Divine. I am also totally bored. The kitty has been crying the blues all morning, and it is wearing badly on my nerves. I think I’ll have her put to sleep this afternoon. Maybe that would cheer me up. At least it would be something to do.

Later

Sam has a marvelous new look of impatience. You see it cross his face when he first notices that he’d like to nurse. His brows furrow in a slightly sarcastic way, like he’s about to ask, “Who the
hell
do you have to know to get a drink around here?”

He’s so beautiful, so funny, so incredibly dear, and he smells like God. When Mom or Dudu have to hand him back over to me when they are about to leave, they lean into his airspace and sniff one last time, trying to memorize him, maybe storing a little hit for later.

We all lean into him, soaking him up. It’s like he’s giving
off a huge amount of energy because he hasn’t had to start putting up a lot of barriers around it to protect himself. He hasn’t had to start channeling it into managing the world and everybody’s emotions around him, so he’s a pure burning furnace of the stuff. This is my theory, anyway, that he radiates it; it’s probably affecting us all like a spray of negative ions, like being in a long hot shower or at the seashore.

For instance, I notice that the kitty, who, like all cats, is a heat freak, stands right next to him all the time. She basks in him. He’s her own private tanning salon. When he falls asleep, she waits patiently for a moment and then begins to butt him with her head, as if it’s 2:00 in the morning and the bar has just shut down and she wasn’t ready to go.

He’s sleeping now, loudly, like a drunken baby angel in a cartoon.

It’s great to feel better, to be back in the saddle again. And it’s so hard to let chaos swirl around without needing to manage or understand it. It’s so hard to get quiet enough, free enough of the bondage of self, to hear the voice in the whirlwind that Job heard. There’s always so much shouting going on in here. It’s a cacophony of sounds from my childhood—parents and relatives and teachers and preachers and voices distilled into what has become my conscience. But I don’t think the still small voice is my conscience. Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the true unique essential me—and maybe those are the same thing. It’s so hard to hear it though, and sometimes
when I think I hear something in my own true voice, I’m so nuts that I’m not sure if it’s me or someone pretending to be me. It seems like when it’s really you, the voice doesn’t even have to talk.

My friend Larry, the scholarly one who has HIV, says it’s important to remember that God is present in many, many ways in the world if you’re just looking. You don’t have to go to the cathedral or the temple or the sacred grove to find calmness and faith. Sometimes we just can’t quiet the mind—it’s like some crazy riled-up two-year-old who can’t get to sleep—but we can find our own steadiness in the middle of that and see it as some form of God. We can notice all the chaos and voices and know that they are one aspect of the mind but that they are not our
nature
. Our true nature is more like Sam’s, lovely and alert and peaceful and entranced.

Sam is a happy person. He has this little Yoda smile. He is a poem. It seems like he’s turning out okay. It’s all these people who love him so much and take care of us both. Maybe it also helps that there is no angry dad stomping around. But that always hurts so much to think about, because it would also be great to have a kind and funny dad here with us, hanging out, maybe even helping a little. I take a long deep breath.

Sam’s such a gift. Dudu and Rex love him passionately, would kidnap him and raise him on their own if they thought
they could get away with it. And my mom and her twin sister, who used to bicker a lot more, take him every Thursday for most of the afternoon so I can either see my therapist or go to a matinee with Pammy. They sit around beaming at one another, like Christian Scientists or something. It’s like Sam opened this window for us, and all this grace flooded in.

Little by little I think I’m letting go of believing that I’m in charge, that I’m God’s assistant football coach. It’s so incredibly hard to let go of one’s passion for control. It seems like if you stop managing and controlling, everything will spin off into total pandemonium and it will be all your fault.

S
am looks exactly like the baby pictures of my dad in Tokyo. Watching him sleep, I sometimes bite my lip.

My gay friend Jane, who, like me, used to drink a little bit more than was perhaps good for her, said on the winter solstice this year that for her, being a pagan, the solstice is not just about the darkest night of the year but also about the darkest night of the soul. She and her goddess-worshiping
friends celebrate this because the seeds of new growth lie in this darkness and develop in the winter to bloom in the spring. I said, What do you pagan homos do at your midnight celebrations—put a bunch of dogs in wicker baskets and push them off cliffs, with Holly Near playing on a nearby boom box? And she looked over at my big Italian crucifix on the kitchen wall, at the thorns, at the bloody wound, the nails through his palms, and then she turned to me with a look of such amused condescension that all I could do was laugh. As soon as she left, though, I went and stared at the crucifix for a long time and breathed it in. I
believe
in it, and it’s so nuts. How did some fabulously cerebral and black-humored cynic like myself come to fall for all that Christian lunacy, to see the cross not as an end but a beginning, to believe as much as I believe in gravity or in the size of space that Jesus paid a debt he didn’t owe because we had a debt we couldn’t pay? It, my faith, is a great mystery. It has all the people close to me shaking their heads. It has
me
shaking my head. But I have a photograph on my wall of this ancient crucifix at a church over in Corte Madera, a tall splintering wooden Christ with his arms blown off in some war, under which someone long ago wrote, “Jesus has no arms but ours to do his work and to show his love,” and every time I read that, I always end up thinking that these are the only operating instructions I will ever need.

•   •   •

The cross, though: was it Lenny Bruce who said that if Jesus had been killed in modern times, we Christians would all go around wearing little electric chairs on chains around our necks?

S
am can sit up by himself now without having to be propped up with pillows. I used to surround him entirely with pillows so he could sit around without my having to hold him. Donna used to call it Fort Samuel, and she used to tell him that Fort Samuel was a state of mind. But now he can sit up by himself. Everything is going by so quickly. You know how when you’re at the library, and you get one of those reels of tape that hold two weeks’ worth of newspapers, and you put the reel on and then wind it forward really fast to the date you’re looking for, but you see every day pass by for about half a minute? That’s what it feels like to me now.

Sam, who was so recently larval and incompetent, is almost crawling. He moved backwards half a foot tonight. I feel that these are his first steps out of the present. He used to trip out only on whatever was within his narrow vision and grasp, but
now he sees something a few feet away and he gets this glinty Donald Trump look in his eyes, like in the old cartoons where someone gets a greedy brainstorm, blinks, and we hear the sound of a cash register and see the dollar signs in his eyes.

He’s crawling inexorably away from the now. He’s crawling toward anticipated pleasures. Soon there will be scheming and manipulation, a dedication to certain outcomes, to attaining certain things and storing them for later. I’m trying so hard to learn to live in the now, to bring my mind back to the present, while Sam is learning to anticipate and plan, to want things that are far away.

It’s funny to watch a baby crawl backwards because it’s something you grow out of—after a while you’re only supposed to go forward. I think this is a part of the voice that says constantly, Fix, fix, fix; do, do, do—the part of us that believes there is always something to fix or to do. It is so fucking bizarre and excruciating just to be. Just to be still. I mean, except when I’m in church or nursing Sam, nothing can make me more frantic than sitting and trying to just
be
. Have you ever tried meditating? For me it’s about as pleasant as coming down off cocaine. My mind becomes like this badly abused lab rat, turning in on itself after one too many bouts with Methedrine and electroshock and immersions into ice water, and I can’t get into some fantasizing and mind-fucking fast enough.

Anyway, I watch Sam be a baby and crawl backwards, and it’s such an alien concept because it seems so natural to think
that all the action is forward. Actually, backwards is just as rich as forward if you can appreciate the circle instead of the direction.