Imagethief

Tag: Memoir

  • The Big Move

    The Big Move

    Emptying the nest all the way out

    When I cradled my newborn son, Zachary, in a daze in Beijing in 2008, the idea of him as a young man seemed as remote as the planet Neptune. Babies are all-consuming in their baby-ness and it’s hard to imagine someone as an adult when they’re the size of a pineapple, can’t hold their own head up and merrily shit themselves. There is so much growing-up to come! Jesus, when he’s eighteen I’ll be…well, best to not think about that.

    A thing about time is that if you wait long enough, even the remotest of deadlines will eventually arrive. Zach turned eighteen in March, which makes me…well, still best to not think about that. He graduated from high school two weeks ago and I am all the things you’d expect: proud, a little sad, mystified at how the years of his childhood seem to have compressed into a heartbeat. Relieved that I don’t have to change diapers at 2AM anymore.

    Despite mostly growing up in California, Zach is obligated to return to Singapore for 22 months of national service starting this August. When he was born, my wife and I didn’t know whether we would return to Singapore, where she is from, or to the US. We hedged our bets and got him both passports. The Singapore passport was hand-delivered to our apartment by two young embassy staffers along with a national service obligation and, to cushion the blow, a delightful gift basket. A reasonable trade, I thought, as I ate the butter cookies in the basket. Somebody had to eat them, and Zach didn’t have any teeth yet.

    Friends have asked me over the years if I couldn’t get Zach out of national service, but this misunderstands my feelings. I am fully NS-pilled and excited for him to do it! This is easy for me to say since I’m definitely not the one doing it. But, in hindsight, a couple of years of discipline before I showed up for university would have done me good. I sacrificed my freshman year on the altar of monster bong rips and two-liter Sapporo mini-kegs before my parents gave me The Talk.

    Fortunately, Zach is a better student than I was and has no discernible interest in monster bong rips, which are frowned upon in Singapore, or Sapporo mini-kegs, which start good but finish flat, warm and pungent, like a road-killed tanuki in a Hokkaido summer. He’s grown up knowing that NS was coming and seems to accept it as the price of being half-Singaporean.

    My wife and I have always planned to return to Asia while Zach is in NS. For a long time this was a distantly appealing prospect that we chatted about with other parents at playdates full of six year olds. It was a thing that would happen, you know, someday, like AARP membership or a prescription for statins.

    Well, motherfucker, someday is here and now we have to move back across the Pacific. I also get regular AARP membership pitches in the mail, which makes me…honestly, best not to think about that.

    Read the rest on Substack

    Hey, kid, easy on those throttles.

  • Rocketship to Planet Urologist

    Rocketship to Planet Urologist

    Getting older, one awkward gland at a time

    It’s been getting harder to pee.

    It’s not that I can’t pee. That would be time to rush for the emergency room and get catheterized, something that (so far) I have not had to do. But for several years the stream has been getting thinner. There is also turbulence in what should be—forgive me for this—a smooth, laminar flow.

    I’m told that this is a normal part of male aging. The prostate enlarges. The urethra is compressed. Take it in stride, like hair growing from your ears or junk mail from the AARP. Fair. I’m pushing 60 and I count myself lucky that, other than back pain, I haven’t had to manage chronic health issues. It couldn’t last forever.

    Reduced flow has led to some embarrassing moments. Once this happened at Changi Airport in Singapore as I was waiting with my family to board a 15 hour flight back to the U.S., an awkward moment to low-key wet yourself. I’ll often sit to pee if that is option. Most men’s bathrooms at public venues have a high urinal-to-stall ratio, so this can be a pain. I know that women have lived with this inconvenience since the Greeks invented theater 2500 years ago. But also, as you’ve suspected, men are filthy.

    I like to think that I am an intellectual, above comparing myself to other men in superficial ways. But when I’m squeezing out a thin stream and the guy one stall over sounds like he’s emptying a margarita pitcher into the bowl, I can’t help but think, fucking large-bore show-off, I hope you get hit by a Cybertruck and dragged three blocks before the driver notices. Uncharitable, I know.

    In one of the most traumatizing rituals of American life, I recently had to switch health insurers. For thirteen years I’d been with an HMO, where the insurer is also the provider and all the costs are internalized, so you are made to go through elaborate rituals and attestations before you can see a specialist. This saves money for the HMO and you’re never going to get a surprise bill, but the failure mode is death because they missed a problem.

    I had raised the slow cinching of my prostate with two doctors at the HMO a few years ago. Neither felt it was worth escalation, which was probably correct at the time, though I did get my inaugural digital rectal exam. It was quicker and less mortifying than I had feared. Societies have all sorts of rituals for welcoming young men into adulthood, from the bar-mitzvahs of Brooklyn to the bullet ants of the Satere-Mawé. But we all get ushered into old age with a finger up the ass.

    My wife thinks this is hilarious. When I sulked about it, she reminded me that I haven’t had a lifetime of pelvic exams and mammograms. “At least you don’t get the speculum,” she said. Implied: you wuss.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Ward 86: Growing Up in the Time of AIDS

    Ward 86: Growing Up in the Time of AIDS

    My father’s memoir of the terrible epidemic of the 1980s

    My parents separated in 1973, when I was six years old. I sometimes think the amazing thing is that they got together in the first place. They are very different people. My mom is tightly wound, organized and meticulous, the daughter of Jewish bourgeoisie from the Philadelphia suburbs. My dad is shambolic and improvisational, a dreamer and aspiring revolutionary, the child of British leftists.

    But when I look at old photographs of them together I see it. She’s the American anglophile abroad in London, waif-slim in a peacoat and ‘60s bangs. He’s raffish and good looking, a Hampstead rebel, pouting and restless. They look beautiful and intense, youth on the threshold of a new era.

    They came to San Francisco in the late sixties, had two kids while still in their early twenties, me and my younger brother, and then it all fell apart. Then it fell together again for one more kid, my youngest brother. Then it all fell apart again in 1975 or 76, this time for good. My mom moved down to Palo Alto with my brothers. But my parents wanted to keep me in the same school I’d been going to, so I moved into my dad’s recently acquired ramshackle Victorian in the Castro.

    In the late ‘70s, the school bus used to drop me off at 17th and Clayton, at the top of the hill between Cole Valley and the Castro. I would walk down 17th Street to Castro, and then up Castro to Liberty Street, where my dad’s house was. By then, the Castro had supplanted Polk Street as the epicenter of late ‘70s transgressive gay culture, and my walk took me right through the heart of it. This was the era of leather boys in assless chaps and chains, spilling out of the Phoenix bar and onto the sidewalk. I used to go into Mainline Gifts, next door, because they had an R2D2 cookie jar I was infatuated with. They also sold marzipan cakes shaped like giant dicks out of their glass deli case. That was the Castro in the late ‘70s. Also, I like marzipan. Make of that what you will.

    A great thing about being a kid is that the neighborhood is just the neighborhood. I took the weirdness for granted, and nobody ever hassled me. But behind the good times and sex a contagion was lurking, about to devastate the generation of young men I walked past every afternoon.

    Read the rest on Substack

    My parents in England in August, 1966.

  • In Space, No One Can Hear You Spin

    In Space, No One Can Hear You Spin

    Crisis PR for science fiction’s most evil company

    Note: Minor spoilers for the recent “Alien: Earth” series.

    I was eleven in 1979 when my dad took me to see Ridley Scott’s Alien at the Geneva Drive-In, in South San Francisco. I watched from the back seat of the car, peeking over the front seats and retreating to the safety of the footwell when things got too intense. I saw about half the movie, by which I mean about half of the screen at any given moment.

    46 years and endless sequels later, we forget how revolutionary the alien was as a cinema monster. The face hugger. The elongated head, ooze and dento-phallic jaws of the final form. It was a psychosexual nightmare rendered in latex and KY Jelly.

    Alien fucked up my head for years. Well into adulthood, if I was stressed out about something the alien would stalk my nightmares. At some point I started kicking its ass and it fucked off from my dreams, to be replaced by other stress proxies, like the nightmare I had last week where I couldn’t navigate Spotify. I preferred the monsters.

    Alien is my favorite movie of all time. I still have the complete set of trading cards, two copies of the Heavy Metal magazine comic adaptation of the movie, a vinyl of the original soundtrack, and the photo book of the film. Relics of me, age 11.

    Unstoppable Horror! (#76 in a series.)

    It is a truism that most science fiction is about the present, using fantasy and extrapolation to tell stories about contemporary society. Alien takes place on a spaceship, but it’s a 1970s labor movie from the cinematic era of Norma Rae, Blue Collar and F.I.S.T. Seven schlubby, grease-stained astronauts fly a grimy, long-haul space tug while dealing with contractual issues and an employer so cold and remote that it is only referred as “the Company.”1 The first intelligible dialogue in the movie is the engineers bitching about their poor pay relative to the other, whiter-collared crew members.

    Read the rest on Substack

  • Getting Rid of a Python

    Getting Rid of a Python

    Welcoming the year of the snake by remembering my weirdest pet

    The following is the first chapter of a memoir I have been writing about my doomed attempt to co-found an internet game company in Singapore in 1995. It is snake-themed and, with the year of the snake arriving this Wednesday, I thought I’d publish it here.

    1995

    I had to get rid of a python.

    This was not straightforward. The snake was thirteen feet long and weighed as much as a Rottweiler. You couldn’t just tape up a note with a bunch of tear-away phone-number tabs in the Peets Coffee down in the Castro. Home wanted for large snake. Loves baths. Eats live rabbits monthly. Hazardous to pets and small children. Or put her in a padded box on the corner like you would a litter of kittens. None of my friends had any business caring for a Burmese python. I had no business caring for a Burmese python, but I’d been doing it since my then girlfriend, Michelle, had gifted it to me.

    That conversation, three years previously, had gone like this:

    Her: “Hey, my friend’s son has a Burmese python that he can’t take care of any more. I know you like snakes. Do you want to adopt it?”

    Me (trying to recall how big Burmese pythons get and playing for time): “Can I think about it?”

    The next day I came home from grad school and the snake was in my apartment, in a much too small enclosure, with an infestation of some kind of snake lice and an unshed scale obscuring one eye. 

    I took the BART train from San Francisco across the bay to Berkeley, where there was an exotic reptile store, and bought a paperback guide to Burmese python ownership. The first paragraph boiled down to, “You, an idiot, should not own this snake.” I also bought a brick of frozen rats, stuck together like miserable, furry burritos, and lugged it home. I was still not the weirdest person on BART.

    Read the rest on Substack