There's not enough room at the Inn

I think about death and dying quite frequently. Call it a byproduct of a warped childhood. I remember when I was about 10 or 11, visiting my Dad in California and suddenly being hit with the subject of mortality. We were all sitting around the TV watching some Chuck Norris movie (MIA I think) and there was a scene in which a prisoner was shot in the head by one of their Vietnamese captors. In that instant, all I could think of was the final thought that went through that man's head before the bullet extinguished his life-force. I was obsessed with how his death, so tragic, was just quick and unrelenting. It made my stomach hurt. I found myself having to go to the bathroom a lot when the though of death came to mind. It hurt my stomach terribly and gave me the worst IBS.

In 1985, the movie Return of the Living Dead came out in theaters. The commercials for the movie really did me in. I would hear "brains...." exclaimed from the radio. The announcer would speak in his best creepy voice and talk about the living dead coming back to life. "BBBBRRRRRAAAAIIINNNSSSS!!!!!" I couldn't stand it. I would cover my ears and make happy noises until the commercials were over. It creeped me out more than anything I can ever remember.
Except....

In 1983 Michael Jackson released a music video for the song "THRILLER". The video, as most of you can recall, had a bunch of dancing zombies and loads of occult references. Michael portrays himself, a dancing singing zombie and also a werewolf. The sight of his glowing eyes at the end were enough to freak me out. But what really messed with my head was Vincent Price's introduction and his haunting laughter at the end of the video. I couldn't listen to it. Whenever the sound of his voice was on the radio, I had to turn it down, cover my ears and make a funny noise to block out the sound. I was genuinely creeped out about it so much that the song didn't become one of my favorite songs until I was an adult. 

Death had always impacted me mentally when I was younger. I couldn't go by a cemetery without my stomach turning sour. Couple that with a commercial of moaning zombies and I pretty much couldn't function. It was a trying time for me. When I was eight, I had a lunchbox that I was afraid to use because it had classic Hollywood monsters on it. I was legitimately scared that the monsters would come to life, find a way to come off my lunchbox and magically turn into life-sized creatures that would consume me in the night. I swear, that lunchbox stayed under my bed until my Mom threw it away because I never used it. If she had gotten me something cool, like E.T. or Scooby-Do I am sure things would have been different.

My views these days have really changed when I think about death/dying. It could be due to age or an imbalance in my brain. I have recurring tremors about dying in my sleep and not being found for days (or weeks). I can't say that it is healthy to think about such things all of the time, but I can say that I don't always fear the things that used to scare  me as a child. I grew up in the age of HIV and AIDS and being gay the only outcome seemed to be death. That was how it was always portrayed in the media. If you had gay sex, you would contract a fatal incurable disease. And people would shun you and you would suffer unimaginable horrors until your heart and body finally gave out and you died. It was an ending that still turns my stomach sour.

Being gay almost seemed like an unlikely death sentence. Still, it wasn't looked upon as anything more than a one way ticket to the morgue. And I suppose that I would have succumbed to an early death had I been older in the 1980's, but I didn't start having sex until I was in my late teens and the early 1990's were a different kind of beast. I used to read books that enlightened me on the joys of gay life. Sometimes they were nothing but smut, like Men on Men 4, sometimes I would read something so heart wrenching like Paul Monette's Becoming a Man - Half a Life Story.  The book was published in 1992 and I immersed myself in it from page to page. I read it in secret at home and at school. No one ever asked me what it was about. Whenever my Mom walked in on me reading I would put the book away quickly because I didn't want her finding out that I was reading about a gay man and his life. It was a weird shame thing that I had before I came out of the closet. 

Paul Monette was the one author that illustrated what being gay would mean to me. All of these years later it is hard to pick up his books and not think of the scared teenager that I was thinking about so much suffering. When Paul Monette died in 1995 due to complications from HIV/AIDS I was sure that there was nothing else in the world that could save me. Things changed after I came out in the summer of 1994. The love of a man was elusive. Acceptance from friends and family was conditional. Living life out in the open suddenly became theater and I didn't quite know how to accept it. And I was still afraid of dying. And there was no one to talk to about it. When I broke up with my first boyfriend there wasn't much anyone could or would do for me. I remember feeling sad and trying to tell my Mom about it and somehow she shrugged it off and made some vague comment about gays getting AIDS and dying. There was no comfort. There was no "this too shall pass" moment over flavored coffee. The only thing that really got me through anything was drugs and my writing.

George Michael had a song from the album PATIENCE called "My Mother Had A Brother". It's a beautiful song that I can rarely get through without shedding a tear. My Mother actually had a step-brother who was gay. I met him one time when I was a teenager. His name was Curtis and he was kind of a nice guy. I knew that he was gay and I wanted to know so much about him, because I was the only one like me in my family that I knew of. Upon first meeting him I can't say that we had much of a conversation. I think that my Mom warned me about his sexuality in a way that wasn't exactly transparent as it was suggested. He was what my Mom didn't want me to be. He was open, had a lover, and was unapologetic. He died from HIV/AIDS sometime in the late 80's or early 90's. And since then, my Mom has never really been able to see anything more than death from a lifestyle that she perceived as deviant.

And then there was actual death.

I never was the kind of kid who thought about committing suicide. It was something that only troubled kids did. The kids who had no escape from abuse or torture. I figured that being closeted was my cross to bear and I wouldn't entertain the thought of suicide. Even after my very first breakup, I never really thought about going the distance and offing myself. Sure, I felt like dying almost all of the time, but I was getting pretty used to being high that it didn't really matter how fucked up I was feeling. Say what you will about drug addicts and their pain, but forgetting about everything that makes you feel mortal is so much better than dealing with a painful, temporary existence. I have never said that junkies should be ashamed of themselves and I probably never will, because most people can't even understand how a junkie thinks. I suppose most of the time I thought "maybe I will do so much of this one thing that my heart will finally give out" but nothing ever did. I would go off and come back and still be in the same spot that I couldn't escape from.

My friend Ray died in the beginning of 1997. He was a beautiful man. I loved him and his boyfriend Paul like they were my own family. Ray had been murdered outside of his apartment because of some drug deal or turf issues. When the news came to me at work, I was afraid. I was afraid that the people who hurt him were going to find their way to me and make me suffer the same fate. It was months later that I finally got myself away from the situation (and the people) that I was in. If death was going to get me, I was determined to make Death work for it. I wasn't shy about my drug use either and from time to time I tempted everything until one day when I found myself swallowing a bunch of pills just to make everything stop. I wanted it all to stop. I wanted the voices in my head to stop. I wanted the pain in my life to stop. I just wanted everything to stop. And about five minutes after swallowing the pills, I stuck my finger down my throat and regurgitated them back into the toilet. I called my Mom and my Grandmother soon after that and had them come spend some time with me. I didn't tell them why, just that I needed family. They came over for a while. I don't remember what happened throughout the day, but the general theme afterwards was "pick yourself up and move on". I had no time to pity myself or grieve for a loss of something that wasn't real to anyone other than me. I started to understand why I liked feeling numb.

My Grandfather died in 1996. When we were driving to the cemetery to bury him I remember crying while I was listening to a song from Candlebox called You. My Grandfather wasn't always the best person that he could be, but he was one of the only male figures in my life. I wasn't close to him, but I was close enough to feel the pain it caused when he passed away. Driving through the cemetery gates, I remember hearing these lyrics,

"I'll never try
I'll never die
I'll never push for you people
I'll tell you how I feel
I'll never lie
I'll never cry
I'll never try for you people
I'll tell you, yes it's real
As you lonely people
Keep on passing time away
Yes you lonely people keep on passing
Pass away"

I thought about just how much my Grandfather's own addictions kept him from being anything more than he ever became. He was an alcoholic and he was a smoker. Life for him was nothing more than feeding his buzz and going on camping trips. And I am sure that I am simplifying it more so than it actually was, but I understood how his demons affected him and consumed him right up until the end. Shortly after that, his youngest son Meredith died. Meredith started life with a complicated heart issue. He had heart surgery to repair a whole in his heart and from that moment on, he was the prodigal son. He could do no wrong and my Grandparents never held him accountable for his progressively damaging behavior. His drug use and his alcoholism would eventually be the thing that complicated his lifeline. After he passed away, about 3 months after his father (my Grandfather), I needed a change of scenery to change my way of thinking.
I didn't always entertain my thoughts about death and dying in my 20's. I made my way through the late 90's and early 2000's clinging to a love that would never come to be with a man who would influence me in more ways than he would care to admit. Then I would meet another man in October of 2000 who I was sure would be my rock and savior in a life that I felt was trying to drown me. And we had what I thought was a good life, regardless of the number of times I felt my soul crushing paranoia from the thought of contracting HIV/AIDS and dying. I mean, I was finally happy and I wasn't going to let life beat me the way that everyone said it was going to beat me. Then my Grandmother died from cancer, or complications from cancer, or she beat cancer and then she had some sort of hemorrhage and she died in her sleep. When I got word that she passed, I was numb. During her wake and her funeral, I was numb. I remember seeing her in her casket and thinking to myself "that doesn't look like her" and I could barely bring myself to cry the kind of tears that my mother had been crying for days. In my Mom's eyes she was now an orphan. In my eyes, I couldn't see my Grandmother anymore. Something changed me.

Something changed my relationships too. Steven and I started becoming this couple that people looked up to. My friendships with my closest friends started to evolve into distant friendships while I was making friends with superficial people who fall by the wayside after Steven and I split up in 2006. That was also the year that Jay died. I lost Jason and Steven all within the same month and I found myself alone, without anyone to help me. 

Death had found me.

I hadn't always been the  type of guy to entertain thoughts of death/dying, but after 2006 it seemed like an all to real possibility in order for me to end the pain that was consuming me. I thought about suicide all of the time. Even at the end of my relationship with Steven, I toyed with slitting my wrists. I carried a box cutter everywhere I went and would occasionally drag the blade along my skin just enough to cause it to bleed, but not deep enough to be life threatening. After Steven left, it was very hard for me to will myself out of bed. After Jason died, I was convinced that nothing else would be the same in my life. I set out to meet new men. Entertained sleeping with HIV positive men, just to get it over with. I had some drugs here and there, but nothing substantial that I could use to cause an overdose. 

At some point in the mid to late aughts I came out as an atheist.   To most, this was more troublesome than me being gay. It meant that I was turning my back on God and Jesus and everything that I had grown up to know as "truth" in favor of something much more heinous and deviant than sexuality. And it didn't have anything to do with me not believing in a particular god or that I came out as a way to say "God doesn't give me what I want so fuck him/her!" It was something that I eventually came to know and accepted that my fate was in my hands and not some super celestial beings master plan. And to be honest, it didn't make sense to believe in something like Christianity when the bible indicates that 144,000 people will be resurrected to heavenly life. Every other turd on Earth was doomed.

And without knowing what was/is going to happen to me, I have fallen further into the rabbit hole that is life. It consumes me at every moment. I think about death/dying and suicide more than I ever did before. I think about how it will happen and what it will do to my family when it happens. I worry about hurting them and then I think about how pain only affects the living and I justify my escape from life. And when I climb into bed, doped up from sleeping pills and melatonin, I wonder if I am going to wake up until I fall asleep and I am stuck in a dream cycle of constant memories or picture show delusions. I over eat sometimes because I know that my feelings don't really matter regardless of how much I eat. the boredom I face sometimes isn't half as bad as the isolation I feel. 

Isolation.

It feels like I have to keep distancing myself from those things in my life that make me feel like being miserable and yet, I am still miserable. A change of scenery only works for a small time. A friendly voice or a hug, only masks what I am feeling for a small time. Ultimately I find myself sitting on the couch, or in a chair, or driving in traffic, or wandering through the grocery store, or humming along to a song, or working on a project, and I am still thinking heavily about how I will die and whether or not it will be accidental, or by my own hand. I worry about growing older and having these thoughts because I cannot even begin to imagine what senior citizens must go through when their families have grown, moved on, or passed away. There are LGBT seniors and I can't even imagine how much more they feel isolated. 

I guess writing helps me get some of it out. I have been writing since I was a kid and to some people this kind of purging is self gratifying. To me it has mostly been about getting a story or a thought out of my head, in hopes that someone might understand me a little more when I am gone. And I do want to be gone sometime, I just don't know when? The voices in my head that echo the same things over and over say contradictory things; be strong, you're weak, you're a beautiful person, you are fucking ugly, you're boring, you're talented, take the whole bottle, only take what you should... it is an echo that I can barely quiet in my everyday life. And lately, it seems to be a ringing in my ears that makes me the most irritable. I know that silence is deafening. I know that it doesn't hurt to pick up the phone to call someone and say "how are you doing". I am just not that person. I don't know how or I forgot how to be that person. The only person I am comfortable with being is the only person that I hate being. Contentment is a son of a bitch and it has taken up so much in my life. It has turned me into someone who is afraid to shower with the lights on. I am afraid to eat food in front of people. I don't sing because I was always mocked when I was a kid even though I was in choir and I always came in second in karaoke contests during my drunken late 20's. I shouldn't fear fear or be afraid of everything, but it is there like a big ugly pimple.

My fear gave birth to anxiety and the pills to cure/curb that are too expensive now. I can't put on my clothes normally like I used to. I can't walk the way I used to without feeling the pain in my lower back. My fat has now started to show in places that it never used to exist and it is causing me to breathe heavily when I walk a few steps from front door. And sleeping throughout the night hasn't been a reality since I was in my late teens. My bladder has taken on this alien form that has been waking me up to piss 2 to 3 times a night. Drinking before bed is no longer a choice. Binge drinking is only a choice when I don't have somewhere to be the next day. And drugs really only speed up the blood causing me to either want to piss more or eat more. Whatever I do, I feel fucked.

And it brings me back to death and dying.

And I wonder if another day is just another day or if another day is just prolonging the inevitable.

Somewhere out there, in someones mind, they are thinking "just get the fuck up off your pity pottie and do something about it"

You got it!

I have been doing that for this many years now.

But it doesn't always work.