"You put writing first, and I put teaching first."-- John Tassoni trying to put a positive spin on one of my disappointments as our real time relationship was drawing to a close.
We've seen where those respective value judgments have left me, though you cannot see it in John himself, his evolution as I have plotted its points. He was not necessarily drawn to violence as my brother was. Two years older than I, since I was a late comer to the collegiate scene because of the surgeries and rehabilitations subject to that, I know only the sketchiest details about John's life in the smaller, if not less dangerous badlands of Chester. My brother did not have to go far to find trouble in the suburbs, to cope with a mild personality disorder that bordered psychosis once he was dying from AIDS. Both he and John used drugs to cope with emotional pain. John's vanity, masking an intrinsically warm and basically kind man, is what enabled him to use meritocracy for his present day satisfactions. How much more I am going to drop about his past, I leave unresolved, not particularly desirous of confrontation even in writing to preserve what escaped me, narrowed my own scope because it eluded me, what I thought desire held to be authentic. There would be absolutely nothing to resolve between us. Had we dated it would not have worked, however genuine I believed my feelings to be; not simply because of my broken and florid homily peasant Italian body that rated his same ethnicity as quality grade stock "I'd never get," to quote my sister. I believed, initially, that he was attracted to me, but feared the burden of fucking a naive cripple twit, and that I then dimmed his interest through my lack of reticence. He would deny this, maybe accurately, maybe not, but spent a good deal of time catering to my want of his attention until the woman who commanded his balls hit the scene, and, if I wanted to be even crueler to my deluded youth, he strung our interaction along because I was a special education dilemma; that degree of veracity hurts even more, but this frank assessment doesn't contradict the initial poignancy of having been utterly smitten. Without a shadow of a doubt, I know that sleeping with him when I was nineteen or twenty would have been transformative, would have healed my sense of inadequacy. Desire can be counter intuitive, but not in this case; it would have been a culminating union, not born of lust.
However his urban environment scathed him, John remained human. My brother did not. He was Tessio and what frightens the able bodied world about me is exactly the fact that my father gave me Tessio's temperament and satisfaction in being an assassin, a temperament that may one day take over what is left of my empathy. I have been struggling for thirteen years with the fact that my supervisor should pay for her assault on my dignity, and my nature, being what it is, will never lose sight of this injustice, and the deployment of a medieval code of lex talionis against it. I murder Linda daily when my scars open at their most vulnerable points, and what is actually going on in my creative execution of her charming sociopathic sensibility is the restoration of my power that she psychologically raped, and a fantasy of choreographed physical control that bests her own. This is impossible. I am merely contorted, florid cellulose, and she is the prevaricating stick bitch who mews like a kitten and gets a slap on the wrist every time she unsheathes her claws to leave some subordinate's gut dripping stool blood; that her career is protected by the very disability lawyers I am supposed to be able to turn to, by Liberty's board of directors, by my former gay activist associates with their own ethical sleaze, activists who despise her, novas the sun in front of my eyes, and I either achieve justice in some way, or I break the law trying. Feed that into the breach of manner calculator while I change to drive to the same old CVS, with its carnival of souls. It is time to hit the dead zone, except for the fact that I have been malingering, unmoving, perhaps wishing my strength would collapse. Eventually it shall.
After I eat, a convenient delay tactic into the urban poverty I cannot handle again with the fortitude of youth, this supposition of an overlay will return to what it superimposes, and that is, John's assimilated manner is as much an affect as Conte's acting in Italian dramas..
The editorship I did want to make an effort to aspire toward is not part of this, but in the time I had remaining, my aunt knocking me off my game, and now my infection, escalated finally into a cold, was a factor. I have to go through mounds of documents that the move displaced, and when I had the strength, my aunt would not listen, and I have an unsightly, useless piece of foam blocking my back wall until I find a booster or throw it out, so I have to bide my time, and if something else turns up, try again. Even if I do find my AccessLife editor, his stewardship was brief, and taking myself seriously in strange lands in North Carolina requires a will, an assertion, that my aunt wore out of me, because she is sick herself, and in pain, and my father is hitting his eighties. If I had a choice, this evening, I'd simply resign.
Yet I cannot bring myself to put an end to this conclusively. Give my damn notice if I need movement more than anything else, and that would put me into an eclipse, anchor me compact to a speck of dust under the constraint of a police baton; hunger must be sated. When I hit auto destruct, it will reverberate, rippling like a pebble, or thrashing, an inept swimmer soon to sink
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