A Month of Rainy Ash Wednesdays

A Month of Rainy Ash Wednesdays

When we saw the banana trees were yellowed, dying, burnt looking mounds, surrounded by patches of dirt with blades of grass peeping through and the litter of beer bottles and cigarette butts, my heart sank and my son always wiser then his years said “Somebody died can’t you see it?” I could see it, but I didn’t want to believe it. The yard was never a manicured or well thought out kind of garden, more an urban jungle with shrubs, azalea bushes, and the famous nick named Gary banana trees vying for attention in a haphazard sort of way. The yard always looked green and loved and watered, with the bottles, butts, and litter that accumulated every night picked up by someone in the famliy every morning. The porch swing that sat between the two apartments in the family leased duplex that had served as a family meeting place with someone usually sitting and swinging on it was gone, too.

It’s the day before Mardi Gras, Lundi Gras they call it and we pick him up from the hospice and he’s as yellow and dying as his banana plants, with tiny purple veins bursting on the side of his face, his eyes jaundiced and his skin a muddy pinkish brown. (I'm a nurse and I've cared for end stage liver and AIDs patients and I know these signs.) I see the ascites stretched across his tight abdomen, but I don't want to see him like this with my nurse eyes, but I can't help it. He tells us that Pops and his Step Mom (my sweet beautiful, elegant, forever, party friend Margaret) both died last year, all of a sudden within three months of each other and the family (what was left of them) let the duplex go and he ended up staying here. It’s a very, very nice Catholic run facility for end stage AIDS patients with smiling pleasant staff members, and clean halls, it’s the model of efficiency.

He has his own room, and it’s a world away from the rest of the place decorated like a New Orleans bar with all different kinds of Mardi Gras masks, and beads, and bright purple, gold, and green feathers all over the walls. Mardi Gras always was our holiday, our favorite. One time we lost our ride at a Drag Queen Ball at the Cajun Dome in Lafayette. And we were both wearing black velvet formals and we tried to hitch hike home in our tux and ball gown. Our friend finally drove from Baton Rouge and rescued us. We ended up waiting all night for her at a biker bar in Breaux Bridge. Boy were those guys laughing at us, but we always had a good time, every day of the year, nothing but laughter, when we were together.

25 years of Mardi Gras and he’s too weak this year to go to the parades, so we end up at a booth at the Chimes by LSU drinking pots of coffee and eating all the appetizers on the menu instead of ordering dinner. He tells me that they’re busy trying to cure him of his addiction to pain pills, a kind of a twelve step program when he only has maybe two or three faltering painful footsteps left and somehow we both laugh at this. In between mouth fulls of cheese sticks and fried boudin balls, he asks me to write his eulogy. I have known him forever and I‘ll know him forever and I don‘t want to say goodbye. (Not while he is still alive)He was and is my very best friend, a sister, a soul mate. He tells me that they say he has less than six months to live. And I don't tell him, but I know that everyday for the rest of my life will always be like the day after Mardi Gras without Gary, my life will be like a whole month of Ash Wednesdays.

So how do I go from Mardi Gras to death to Ash Wednesday to a eulogy? Before we left Gary took all his Mardi Gras stuff off the walls of his room and gave it to me and my son and we hugged goodbye a little longer just in case it was for the last time. I desperately don’t want to leave him, but I have a job, a home, and a sort of (misfit) life 400 miles away. I head west through Port Allen over the new Mississippi River bridge and finally due north. It starts to storm and I start to cry, the windshield wipers need replacing, and I can’t wipe my eyes fast enough to see, so we stop in Natchitoches. Eddie my son purchases crawfish pies, Kleenex, and wiper blades and we eat and cry and talk and do the needed repairs. Somehow I make it home over the next seven hours and I try to think of ways for him to live, and I refuse to write this damn eulogy, or say goodbye. I get home and hang up the feathers and the mask and the beads and all the pretty stuff he gave me that he’s collected over the years. It’s decorating my bedroom and I wake up in the middle of the night staring at a purple sequined mask with his face hiding somewhere behind it in my dream/wake state and with the dull nagging voice of my unconscious saying, “What will you do without him?” I don’t know. And I'm thinking that if I was there with him that I might be able to nurse him back to health, to some sort of remission, and I feel guilty and sad and angry. He took care of me for so many years. He fed me and clothed and let me stay with him when I had no place to go. He bought all my son's baby clothes years ago when we had no money. He was the best friend you could ever hope for when you were down and out. And now it's another rainy Ash Wednesday and I don't know how to help him.


Frankie (another extended family friend) died on this past Christmas Day of HIV complications. They put him in a hospital right at the end, that’s the way they do it and you’re very lucky if you don’t die out on the street or on a family member’s spare couch because hardly anyone gets treatment. So many of us are dying now of HIV, Hepatitis B or C, chemical industry related cancers, that they barely manage to dispose of our bodies, nobody can afford burials or funeral services anymore, it’s too expensive, just a quick cremation, and the ashes go to who ever loved you the most or has the most clout in the family. There’ll be no grave markers or tombstones for any of us, you’ll never know we existed at all; I don’t know if that is good or bad, it’s just the way it is right now. Whole families decimated. This is Louisiana and I can almost hear the police officer/doctor/ politician/court reporter/orderly say good riddance as they zip us up in body bags and move on the next one.

Melanie Burke-Zetzer for Gary White

(I have more to say)

Gary April 2005
my house on Sleepy Valley
in Hot Springs

u were laughing in your sleep
Chuckling in between snores
You slept with your eyes open
Kind of a strange trait
If you were snoring then I knew you were asleep
The next morning
You said you were dreaming about champagne wells
All so improbable
You said
Some people you didn’t recognize
Were digging a well
And they hit a geyser
And champagne came gushing up
out of the ground
(land of milk and honey? Heaven has champagne wells)

And it was so funny
That you couldn’t believe it
And that’s why you were still laughing
And later as you slept
You said you dreamt that your step mother
And father stood at the foot
Of your bed
Not saying anything
Or looking any different after death
Just standing there staring at you
And then you woke up

All in one night
But it was a good night
That night
Because you weren’t hurting

Gay people pray
Gay people believe in God
and every night and morning
you said a prayer
all the way to the last day of your life
on may 13, 2005
and you would hold my hand
and you always included me
and you made me feel so special
worthy of prayer and even blessings
but we couldn't go to church
you and I
not here in arkansas
because the hatred and ignorance
spewed from the pulpits
about being gay

made me nauseated
like all these right wings
bible beaters
can think of is sodomy.
and if
Heaven is a spiritual plane
without hormones or flesh
would our earthly body chemistry
even matter

I mean really what if
Heaven is chock full of sweet people like you
(I hope)
They can't put you in hell
you'd make it too nice of a place
you, my friend
who happened to be gay on this earth
what will those preachers of hate and intolerence say
if you stand next to God
and St Peter is flying a rainbow flag

I remember the first time I met you
in Baton Rouge
I was 16 and you were 17
Your brother macho Mitch introduced us
And you came flying into the room
Almost on a mission
Moving about the apartment and talking so quickly
From one project to the next
Showing off new shoes
A flower arrangement
What you were cooking for dinner

You were so pale
hair so blonde almost white
5'11 130 pounds
Your body and your hair seemed to blend into the walls
Except for when the light
would bounce off your skin
And make you glow
Your eyes were sky blue
You were like a woodland sprite
A true fairy
An air of cheery other worldliness
Hung about you
Your feet rarely touched the ground
As you competed with the sunshine
with your smile
YOU
were
Always laughing
back in those days
that’s the first thing that I remember about you.
Later that night we were already best friends
Sitting in an empty gay bar
called The Emporium
on Highland Road
just outside the gates of LSU
On a Monday light
Listening to what ever pleased the DJ
And getting up to gyrate on the lit dance floor
Just you and me

I still miss you

Being in Chronic Pain and 

Life without Pain Medication 

or

Why I always look so pissed off lately

It makes you draw further and further within 
Hoping to disappear in soft flickering candle light 
The purr of electric fans and the TV on just for the murmurs 
If everyday could be 
Like this 
To the point of 
someone is knocking, again
No 
No I am not home
I tell them
which totally confuses a tweeker
from next door
he wanders away muttering 
counting his fingers again
off to play hours
of window ntendo (like solitary for tweekers)
he comes back
realizing
that I am home
and I tell him
No I’m not going anywhere 
with you
Go away 
little ghost boy
and
No
I don't want your drugs or 
your dick 
just
Leave me alone
Alone 

I need to suffer in silence
by myself
A doctor visit is out of the question
no money or insurance
A written paper waits for me, 
patiently it sits there
in his office pushed aside 
by now
stacked up in a corner
i could read this script
every name tells a similar story
a pharmaceutical 
deck of  tarot cards
always 
predicting a happy
near future
but not today.

Today

Loud noises are not allowed
No bright lights
No anger
Everything boring moving slow
And
No
I’m not home
Go away
Please
I open my door
peeping at the crack
\
No i say one more time
and shut out everything
and I m a Shut in, again

Quiet static fills the air like happy voices
I do not want people around me
I don’t trust
I don’t like
and
don't want street drugs 

I tell them this
over and over
but they don't listen
they have rocks in their heads
and their hands

I am too old for this

I think about a cabin
Somewhere away from
Everybody
I could be a hermit
if I had a  little weed patch

right now

Complicated people fill my day 
everyday
all night
they
Litter my drive
my thoughts
my walk
I hate apartments/duplexes
this is called 
a neighbor-Hood
for a reason
Loud angry
Arguments
fill every inch of stagnant
air out there
it's
Crack, crank, ice
 and god knows what else 
made by 8th grade drop outs
who never took chemistry
I don't want what they have
and
I don’t want to know them
Why do they want to know me?

Mel 

About Abortion (a work in progressing/ still writing and editing it)

I have never told

anyone

why I feel like I do (about abortion)

or what it was like to go hungry while I was pregnant

my stomach growling with a baby in it.

begging the welfare office not to cut my food stamps

(they did anyway)

Waiting two days, three days,

I was so hungry during the first half of my pregnancy.

That I kept loosing weight for the first five months.

I remember scraping pennies from every corner of my house

to buy a box of macaroni and cheese for 24 cents.

And making it without milk or margarine

Nothing left in the cupboards

and no car to go and argue with an office of sneering strangers

Stranded without a way to leave a rural area.

Calling family and asking for help and being told

Too bad. (Too fucking bad)

years ago 

that feeling like a punch in the gut

when every tear sucks inward and won't fall

and helpless to help yourself

There is an anger that won't ever leave no matter what you do.
Exasperation, indignation, and finally determination

It's not the emptiness of a hollow
yet pregnant stomach that you remember

It's being turned away
Told no

and
it's knowing that you will not (barring failed birth control)
get pregnant, again and if you did
you would go to any lengths to terminate it
legal or not
clothes hanger, back alley, or drinking poison
throwing yourself down a flight of steps

Just like the good old days

Nothing would be out of the question
and

If Roe is overturned
we'll have some more new fucked up laws
we'll have to break.in order to survive.

I mean it's not like the poor or homeless
will
ever make the endangered species list.
Fetuses and zygotes are not pandas.

And

Rich (republican/right wing evangelical )women
will all still have access to safe sterile DNCs
in the privacy of their doctor's office
and poor women/girls will have
so-called unfortunate accidents/'miscarriages

Ru 486 and drugs like it will be big money
for traffikers and dealers of all sorts
Chemical abortion shots/pills
will be as easy to score
as heroin
at the court house
and sold on every street corner
and as common as crack houses are to small towns
in modern day rural America.

but I digress
back to my dumb fat
so stupid for getting
knocked up, being poor
and having no money

A real
SOB story

Where all  morals



Anyway, about 6 months into my pregnancy
and finally mercy is offered

by the only person who would help 
someone like me

an old friend from childhood

(a person misunderstood by just about everyone else,

but she understands you )

So, so, thankful to have this friend, who cared

and who makes sandwiches at a deli

She would drive 20 miles out of her way

She would sneak the day old ones home to me.

She was told to throw them away

but she’d bring home a whole bag of cellephane wrapped

sandwiches just for me.

and how good it felt to have day old barbeque

and how rich and greedy I felt

with a whole bag of whole wheat, rye, or white

ham, pastrami, and roast beef,

and just how good it tasted

and there was no limit to how many of them

I could eat in the evening

as she arrived at my house 
with the big bag of sandwiches

meant for the dumpster

that ended up in my stomach instead.

Oh yeah,
About abortion
First of all
A zygote is not a baby
All birth control pills are not
abortificants,
Condoms are always a good idea
And should be handed out
As early as Grammar school.
And people who have 17 kids
Should not have fucking TV shows.
Because men's penises are not
God's anointed vessels
And all sperm is not sacred.

What I know about abortion is

The one lesson that I learned in life

My main fact in life

That I learned in my young adulthood

Growing up the hard way

in the southern United States

Louisiana in particular

Was if you’re

POOR

Don’t have children.

If you can help it.

Nobody wants you or them.

My poor friends have kids, now

and I try to help

People have hooked up to my electricity

I've fed entire families

Given out instructions on how to fill out

food stamp, welfare, student aid forms

(stuff I wished I'd known back then)

 Louisiana is  a third world country

in the US.

Tourist come and go
and enjoy the atmosphere
and the food
listening to blues and jazz
and we all
dance, drink, do drugs,
fuck for fun
and
ignore the poverty
live in our squats
and try stay out of

the growing
for profit prison population
while

the crime, the murder rate

the poor kids/crack babies
contine to accumulate.

And there are alot of them

in that state doing

without things that most people in this country

seem to take for granted

like healthcare, adequate housing

and food.

I think abortion, birth control, and sterilization
should be safe, free and legal.

Melanie

(You know it's funny that the same people

who want you to have all these children

are the same ones who want to cut back on

school lunches, welfare, and food stamp programs)

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