Query

Jerry-rigged pagan.

I am a

Jerry was a friend I betrayed by staying Julia. I knew her from the mental hospital and from Rainbow Heights. She knew the song 42nd Street and used to sing it to the drug abusers in the state hospital at South Beach Staten Island as part of the entertainment portion of the program. She knew how to belt it out. She had been Ruth. A couple of years later her lover died and she died three months later. She was warm while I turned toward "womanhood" and its condescension toward mere gay people. I hope she is happy and that someday she will be where there's pleasure. That's cold too, isn't it.


Maybe someday i will pick out a more androgynous name like Geri.


I knew a Geri Fortino when I spent some months working for CrossLand Savings Bank across 6th Ave. from Macy's. She was an evident butch lesbian who was the assistant manager of the pension department as the manager was an evident femme gay man. There was no discussion of any of this by me or anyone else in the department. This was in the late 80s. I was still Bruce, and still thinking I would get my M.A. in political science instead of what ended up happening.


I made 10 dollars an hour at CrossLand as the secretary, which I considered pretty good money. Now I would have trouble finding a job making that same wage even with inflation.


I think the decimal system is a lovely thing. I am glad that India invented zero and that Arabs invented the numerals we use. I only wish that 1 and zero were not the sole numbers used in binary mathematics/computers. Why not zoo/chicken. Zoo over chicken is infinity after all.

This is an appeal to Marina who probably won't read this. I turned to words where she turned to numbers, convinced that made me more "humane." But humanity is either there or not. It doesn't depend on whether you're a humanist or Isaac Newton or both, which is what Isaac Newton was, at least in some religious sense.


Newton Minow claimed around 1962 that TV was a "wasteland". Then Marshall McLuhan came along and said the medium is the message. Does that mean that I am messaging my own life in everything I say (because I am the medium of these words?) Probably.

I hope that this freely composed set of paragraphs interests someone. Let me know, won't you?

P.S., don't drink a shot of brandy within only seven hours after getting a shot of estrogen.

Be jolly and remember that it's okay to like kisses.