INTERVIEW WITH A BGM

“Life is a GREAT WHITE MAN …old chum…”Part I

Dear Anderson,

As you know I have returned home to Rochester, NY. I wish you were here with me but I know that your partner would not permit it. I wish you weren’t so emblematic of the Great White Male…As a young Black MO-HO (That’s homo backwards) who comes from a dysfunctional family*

*I know that word is certain to bother you and I suppose those of us who know what it means only banter it about because we are privileged enough to have gone through therapy (years and years and years of it) to know that to understand dysfunction is to understand the true meaning of the entity of all living beings…in other words…we have time enough to plod through our life trajectories and arrive in our forties and go “ Oh god I am so passive aggressive and I used drugs and drank too much when I was trying to have a career and now I am all alone with my four dogs, 3 cats and my ferret, Chewbaca…I must have had a father that fought in the Big War and got his MBA from Harvard on the GI Bill and then ignored me until he smiled when he made CFO of the largest bank in the continental United States and sort of publicly thanked his family which shortly therafter about to be split into fifths…he didn’t share much until he lay in his death bed and like the good ole boy he thought he must be said “ I ‘m sorry I was such a bad father.” And then I say: “Oh no you were the bestest father I never had…and I hate you. But…but…but I love you….” The sobbing leads to drooling all over his crisp hospital linens and he looks at the catheter in his arm and then his lower lip quivers and I have to truly love this man who ignored me as a child and made me love Harry Chapin…’cause I grown up just like him….he who never learned to cry and left my mom for a younger woman exacerbating her depression and poorly timed attempted suicide caused by her plummeting to the depths of the abyss-low self esteem and alcohol induced dementia…but I have to love him…I have to…his lip gives way to real live tears…I can see them…he shoots his eyes up at me as my drool just misses his wrist with the shunt in it….he mutters something with a vibrato induced by his lip quiver and then his raises him arms towards me for me to enter into them…..like the lowering of the gate to his castle over the mote I traipse and I collapse on his chest in a gooey glob of a conundrum like puddle of misdirected affection…in the end it is affection nonetheless…no, its love.

You know love Anderson like my love for you…I will get to crux of the Ballade of the Great White Male…To be continued….