Unhinged: Unpredictable Responses to a Predictable World

The single malt scotch burned its way down his throat, scratching at his insides with sharp precision like the red polished nails of a high-end escort.

His sense of entitlement, nestled in the depths of his insides, sat next to his guilt about the damage he was responsible for, the arrogance of his youth and pomposity of a wealthy middle age, each of them drowning in a sea of Chateau Montifaud Cognac, regret and just a shy sliver of hope.

“You’ve gone mad!” They told him. “It just isn’t done.” They hissed at him. And it isn’t. So maybe he was mad. But he also felt better than he had in years. More sure. Calmer. His acid reflux, a sure symbol of corporate manhood, was receding like a warm nighttime tide under a sweet tropical moon.

He had redistributed 99% of his assets: savings, property, stocks, bonds, all of it. He’d liquidated most of his properties and miscellaneous cars, boats and big-ticket items he’d acquired like some people accrue extra socks or hats. He’d given that 99% to 99 different communities starting in his state and in the poorest neighborhoods—they got the biggest percentage. No strings. No government hand out hooks. Just delivered checks to three community centers, 12 different churches, temples and mosques, and dozens of different neighborhood development projects and then in a final fait accompli he simply handed out bundles of cash to people at the local corner stores and coffee shops like some drunk Santa Claus. And it did feel a little bit like Christmas. Not the Christmas’ of his adulthood, crammed with stressful shopping trips in order to find just the right gift for this or that associate, investor, partner, politician, not to mention wife, lover, children, parents and siblings. And good god if being rich wasn’t just a pain in the ass sometimes—they all expected perfection from him. After all, he could afford it. It took a toll, all that striving towards and expectation of perfection.

He sighed slowly and took another meaty mouthful of amber liquid puffing out his extract-of-Scandinavian-seaweed moisturized cheeks, savoring the smoky film that lingered on the back of his throat.

It was a pain in the ass, both the spending and hoarding of riches, the constant search for expansion balanced by a need to keep everything tightly controlled. It was a pain in the ass, and the back—more specifically and more literally a pain in his hemorrhoids and his slipped disks and pinched sciatic nerve. He shifted in his chair, the buttery leather softly caressing the backs of his thighs.

His body told the story of ladder climbing and bootstrapping. He had soft un-calloused fingers and manicured nails, shinny with clear polish designed “to look manly for the dignified executive,” claimed the beautician. His belly rounded out the front of his $500.00 Paul Fredrick button up shirt just enough to let the world know he could afford both a personal trainer and a private chef. His posture was erect but his shoulders rounded forward with the rolling edge of someone always having to bully their way through rather than sit back and enjoy. Even when he sat back to enjoy, which he tried more and more of as he matured and grayed around the edges, there was a restless look about him—all energy still in forward motion.

He sighed again, shoulders drooping in a familiar forward gesture. The second city had been fun. He was in and out in a single day having arrived unannounced and ahead of the press buzz from his previous stint in his hometown. He was chauffeured efficiently by a long time and well trusted driver from one end of town to the other with checks and thick envelopes of cash. Again, he’d started with the poorest part of town. His black town car, a study in contrast, garnered long sideways glances and interrupted neighborly conversations as people paused to watch him drive by, held their breath when he stopped, and held themselves erect when he got out. Some automatically started giving him directions back to the highway assuming he was lost and his driver incompetent. He wasn’t lost. “I’m not lost.” he’d say, “Well not in that sort of sense,” he’s sometimes added quietly with a soft smile. The people would smile back politely. Waiting. He was used to being indulged. When he handed them the envelopes or asked their names to write a personal check, they would often refuse to accept, holding arms up in front of their chest in both a protective and defensive posture. Or, they might not raise their arms at all, but tilt their head at a sharp investigative angle watching him as they took an instinctual step back. In the first, second and even the third city he had been confused. After countless exchanges such as this he finally understood. There was no reason to trust him and every reason to believe he would do them harm, or at the very least make them a pawn in a dirty rotten joke at their expense. He got it. He got it because he came from a world where these sorts of people were expendable, faceless, nameless and even human less. They were numbers on a graph, statistics in a power point presentation. Data to be crunched then mulled over during a three-course lunch or stint at the driving range. And they knew it. Knew he knew it. Their eyes called him out and reflected himself back to himself.
……
He pulled the trigger back. Boom! Then silence, save for the soft splatter of gristle, bone shards and blood sliding down the mahogany panels of his office walls and the slight tremor of his left hand which lay on top the handwritten note drafted carefully on the monogrammed stationary he preferred to use. “I don’t like what I saw when I looked at myself through other people’s eyes,” it began, “You will be tempted to think I am crazy or unbalanced, while I, of course, prefer to think I am not. I don’t suppose you can begin to look clearly at the world that we have made, that I have helped to build without teetering on the edge of sanity. Had I stayed, I would have gone mad.” The note continued with personal assurances of love and pleas for family members to not place blame on themselves. Of course, they participated in making the world he was trying desperately to disentangle himself from and he knew they were to blame in some regard. But this decision, to end it this way, was all his.

He made sure his family was taken care of to some degree in the way they had come accustomed to, but not completely. After that, he gave the rest of what he had to the homeless man he passed every day on the street walking into his building but never really saw until he put this plan into motion. The homeless man threw a party at the shelter handing out fistfuls of cash to everyone he ran into. No one called him crazy or told him “That’s just not done”. They all took the money and threw parties of their own.

Skirting Sexism

It was one of those music shows where people shushed angrily if you dared to speak quietly to a friend standing next to you. During any of the bands or spoken word performances if you tried to talk at all someone would glare at you, snap a forefinger to their lips and give you an angry SHHHHHHHHHHH, which was inevitably louder than your whispered conversation. My band was playing a very short set in a very long lineup of what was being billed as “revolutionary radical political women performers.”

The three of us were on stage sound checking franticly when one of the women organizers elbows her way past the sound guy. She’s an L.A. suntanned white girl with long blonde dreads spiraled in a lopsided pile on top of her head. She’s sporting an ankle length “wrap” made from a multi-colored tapestry that looks like she bought it at what she might call an “ethnic” store. She has a tank top tied around her neck in the same pattern, different color combination of red, orange, yellow. She has a clipboard, she’s in charge and she’s pissed. Slapping her palm down on the stage, she points a finger at the bass player and barks, “you know, if you’re a guy you have to wear a dress on stage. You need to find a dress. Now.” We look at each other. It was almost nine o’clock. Stores were closed. We were supposed to play in ten minutes. Matt, our bass player who’s round face is always sporting a smile, looks up from his bass, smiles and asks, “Um…know where I could find one?” Eric, our lanky drummer who in addition to drumming does double duty as a father and clothing designer, pulls out a crumpled white prom dress from his bass drum. Tries to yank it over his head. “Is everyone wearing a dress?” It’s to small for him. He tries to pull it up over his knees. Still too small.

Rebuffed and snorting resentful puffs from flaring nostrils, she blurts out something like “Work on finding one—give it some effort guys. You need to support your sisters, yo.”

She pronounces sisters like sistahs and yo like a command. Why do I find it irritating when white people say yo? I don’t think it rolls off our tongues easily. I know a couple of white people, whose working class tongues can wrap around yo gracefully. But for the rest of us, it sputters out from between our lips like two pieces of stringy spittle—yyy-ooo. Makes my teeth itch.

Great, I’m thinking. A tightly wound event organizer with an attitude, who thinks making men wear skirts will help close the gender divide. Don’t get me wrong, I’d gladly wear a skirt for a good cause. The guys in my band love to dress up. If the promoters of the show wanted it that way, none of us would have any problem showing some leg for an evening. I don’t even have a problem with dress codes in general—they have their place. However, no one had mentioned a dress (or skirt) code. Now, we have a embittered stage manager yelling at us to just go find a skirt—like we all had one stashed in a back pocket or backpack and hadn’t put it on yet just to piss her off. I went to the bathroom wondering why they didn’t keep a box of skirts backstage for instances like this?

What got me muttering under my breath was the idea that making men wear skirts equalizes anything. I know misogynist drag queens and homophobic frat boys who wear dresses on stage—neither of which address gender oppression in any particularly revolutionary way. Having men in skirts doesn’t make me believe they know how to back me up any better than they could wearing pants, or shorts, or suits. What about the trans men and women in the show—do any of them have to wear skirts? If so, who has to and how do you decide? How is “feminizing” men via dress code (and being really rude about it) going to build an anti-sexist community? Hemlines have changed along with gender roles, women’s rights, civil liberties for g/l/b/t folks. The skirt it’s self has stitched a new identity threaded with various possibilities. Each skirt is a symbol as variable as the legs it covers. Mini skirts, suit skirts, business skirts, wrap skirts, flowing skirts, ankle length skirts, Betty Page skirts, punk rock skirts. Each one gives definition to a person. What I’m struggling to understand is how putting male performers in skirts creates a safer, or more feminist, or more women centered environment.

Instead of making men wear skirts, can we help them in addressing gender oppression of all kinds? Can we help them learn how to call their friends out in a locker room sexist shake down? Can we help them gain the skills to interrupt homophobia when it happens across bar stools at their local watering hole? Gender oppression puts us all in tight, narrow boxes. Neither feminine nor masculine is inherently bad and personally, I want macho, heterosexual (looking) men of all kinds to know how to call out sexism—in their own language. I can’t expect that a man calling out homophobia at a football game or on a construction site will use the same language I would.
I keep wondering how identifying sisterhood with dresses will liberate us? How are men on stage in skirts backing up a woman any more feminist or revolutionary than two guys in pants backing up said woman? How can we learn to support each other if we have codes about what a feminist man looks like (or a feminist woman)—especially if that “look” involves using rigid codes of gender identity that keep us isolated and separated from each other—like said skirts? Instead of wrapping our white middle class feminist consciousness around serapes bought at “Authentic/Ethnic” stores, let’s drape our brothers and sisters from everywhere in love and respect and dignity.
We can work with the men in our lives, in our bedrooms and in-between our legs to create models of liberated and respectful relationships. We can share and compare these with each other. For those folks who don’t want to be around men, have at it—as much as you can, don’t be. But, please don’t think forcing them to wear skirts when you do have to be around them makes them any less male, or masculine, or threatening, or capable of understanding gender oppression, or even better dressed.

Making men wear dresses does not break down linear definitions of gender and does not help us see gender as the fluid and ever developing phenomena it is. How can we learn to embrace trans people of all kinds of genders and orientations, fems, butchs, girly straight chicks, macho-feminist men, women who like porn, sex workers of all genders and orientations, fat chicks, muscled chicks, skinny dudes, beefy dudes, bisexual folks, asexual folks, pan sexual folks and everyone else on this sexual planet if we treat each other so badly at some “revolutionary” performance show? Getting distracted by a skirt means we often miss opportunities to do the real work; changing how gender oppression connects to and supports other forms of oppression; creating revolutionary gender oriented change in our shows, our relationships, our non-profits, our sex lives, our families, our bedrooms, our friendships, our social interactions and our way of being in the world.

I’m not feeling it in the skirt—yo.