Bad Time. The Jayhawks. 1995. American.

 The old lady I was shopping with that day was my grandfather’s sister, Victoria, whom everyone in the extended family called Tia. She was a quiet, well mannered spinster without any children, who lived in the small bedroom in my parents’ house in between mine and my sisters’. Painted a cheerful sky blue color, her room was abuzz conducting the energy of female solitude over loneliness. She had a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a hot plate. Working as what used to be called a domestic—which is just below a maid, more or less, in the delegation of household duties; and she cooked—my great aunt was employed by a white woman who lived with her daughter and grandson in a nearby neighborhood where homeowners could afford to pay for such things. When it came time to update her wardrobe Tia and I would walk together the three blocks south to the Seminary South open-air mall to a department store called Striplings. Though it cultivated the high bourgeois, adults-only  air of consumer stillness and calm, I liked Striplings because of its record department (even though they snobbishly refused to stock 45s; I had to visit G.C. Murphys to buy those). Tia dressed conservatively, sensibly, although anyone who really knew her wouldn’t have mistaken her for sensible. She was often paranoid; something to do with rumors everyone talked about of lesbianism when she lived and worked in Boston when she was young, teaching herself to live as an American in the twentieth century. It’s doubtful that anyone other than Victoria herself took these rumors seriously but if it were true that might explain how Tia developed such an over sensitivity to the supposed rumor that it finally became a paranoia. I’m tempted to describe her as elegant, but she transcended elegance, because its theater was beneath her. She stood poised, not posed, with an inner resolve that combated loneliness, while her commitment to independence barely left room for Christian faith. Because she had no children, she was only one of two persons of her generation I ever saw practicing Catholicism without the ostentatious piety meant to patronize children; the other person was her sister-in-law, my grandmother. In another age Tia might have been misidentified as a witch, and I think it was that sort of persecution she feared, the kind that reaches out from socially sanctioned fanaticism and attempts to impose its will by mob prejudice. While Tia shopped for dresses I wandered the store’s rows of LP display racks until I came upon a record that I picked up for concentrated  examination. The heads of the band’s four members were superimposed onto bodybuilders who’d been photographed in their posing bikinis against a black background, in those recognizable stances where every muscular deformation is accentuated to the point of gross overarticulation. What I find remarkable about the experience is that although the album cover artwork was almost surely designed to trigger an ironic response from the consumer—especially when contrasted with the album title, All The Girls In The World Beware!!!— my childhood brain jettisoned that irony and welcomed the image to its core centers where arousal and sexual curiosity commingled. It wasn’t the first time with Tia present that my eye had been excited by a sudden, destabilizing exposure to male pulchritude, so that when, two years later, Twentieth Century Fox distributed a film featuring Billie Whitelaw as the terrestrial protector of a child of dubious and exalted origin, I allowed myself to be entertained by godless fantasies of deliberately allowing my father’s Bargas birthright to die with me, the North American queer whose national history begins in the century of the Gay Revolution. Was Tia, from the monastic quiet of her cell in my father’s home, guiding me through the labyrinthine processes of homosexuality, and, every time I bottomed for some virile American stranger, was I chewing away at another bloodied remnant of my father’s umbilical cord? The pre-Obergefell tension that had prompted me, for reasons of safety, to develop three distinct personas—first my interior one, second the public face that everyone has, and third that public face, only with a secret lodged in its throat—also sharpened my attunement to the world of horror and cruelty we inhabit. Instead of studying it for meaning, however, I was lazy and swam in its media infested waters, where I became awash in the babble of signs and gestures—itself the very science of cruising. It’s only by confining oneself to an outsider status and understanding the value of subjective truths that you can finally see into the muddle of reality.