Actually My Job, It's Just Beach.
Flashingback from the Yucatan
Holy crap, have I not been here since February? I guess I haven’t had a lot to say! It’s strange, how things are constantly happening all the time, and sometimes it feels like urgent to get it all out, and sometimes it’s like, eh, who would care about that, I barely care about that? Probably it’s normal to get bored of your own internal voice, even if it’s a really voice-y voice. Especially, even.
I type to you from the smudgy glass table in a condominium on the beach in Akumal, Mexico. Sixteen years ago I’d gotten out of a long relationship and then smack into a new one with - well, it has fallen out of vogue to diagnose one’s exes with personality disorders, so I will refrain, but suffice to say dating him was both bewildering and abjectly miserable, spiked with moments of euphoria that spoke to all my unresolved delusions about romance. Sigh. When we broke up I had a revelation that love was more or less stupid but international travel was everything, and vowed to say yes to even the merest of suggestions that I should go anywhere. My mentor at the time owned a condo in the Yucatan - an elder fag who I will call J-Jo, as that is what we called him when not calling him dad, ‘we’ being the queer arts friends and comrades whose lives this man changed by showing us how to get actual funding for our art. We, who did not even apply for grants, presuming we were far too dirtybaggy and weird for the gatekeepers of cash to want to sponsor.
J-Jo has had a long and fascinating life. A Texan by birth, of a generation that almost invariably got heterosexually married before - if they were lucky, and brave - coming out and living a big gay life. When he was still in Texas he got involved in activism via anti-nuclear organizing, and did that until he came under the threat of very scary pro-nuclear Texans and, in a Silkwood moment, drove his pickup to his house out in the sticks and found a whole convoy of pickups waiting there to mess with him. He did a donut and barreled out of town, into Austin where his lesbian best friend let him stay with her, but only on the bottom floor of her two-story home because fucking Audre Lorde was staying upstairs and she did not want to see any men. Incredible. J-Jo has tons of stories like this.
When he got to San Francisco, he made it his life’s work to disrupt the city’s arts funding. At that point, almost all (if not all?) the dough was going to the ballet, the opera and the symphony - this in a city with a thriving, crucial grassroots arts scene helmed mostly by queers, people of color, and women. Through his very aggressive efforts over many years he not only bullied the city into a more equitable distribution of its wealth, he helped create a pool of funding that was specifically for under-served arts organizations. He’s seen that I had been doing the work of a non-profit for years, staging regular reading series and events and staging national tours, but without any money or infrastructure. I recall when he told me I had a more impressive programming than many of the amply funded non-profits in town, and it was just me. With his help, I sort of rounded up all of the work I’d been doing for free for the past decade-plus, and called it RADAR Productions, and at first I didn’t get the grants, cause that’s how it goes, but then I did get the grants, and it became one of my great works in this life until I split for Los Angeles in 2015, leaving it behind.
But, J-Jo owned a condo on the beach in a little town called Akumal, which means place of the turtle (I think) due to the onslaught of turtles every nesting season, hauling their heavy mom-bods up to the sand and spending like an hour, at least, laboriously shoveling out a big hole with their stubby flippers. What dedication! They dump their eggs in the hole, sort of cover it up some, and drag their sandy turtle vaginas back into the ocean. Seriously. In a few month, the turtles crack out of their rubbery shells and if that wasn’t enough, have to dig themselves out of the earth and then flutter down into the sea before being picked off by a gull of feral cat, and then, once in the ocean, avoid the predators down there until they hopefully grow into grown-up turtles and do it all again.
J-Jo had offered me his place for free and it had taken me til becoming disillusioned (albeit temporarily) with love to take advantage of this generosity. I looped in Pickens, who J-Jo had ordered me to hire as RADAR’s Managing Director after I’d phoned him sobbing and left unhinged messages on his voice about how I was, like, super grateful that he had changed my life and everything but it seemed I was now expected to do budgets and Quickbooks and shit and I had to peace out, sorry for investing so much love in me. He responded with, Hire Pickens, in this tone like he had a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Apparently, he had gotten me a grant to do this very thing, thereby saving RADAR from me. Me and Pickens and Ali and Annie all went to Akumal that first time, and it didn’t take us being there very long to start conspiring how we might spend much, much more time here. As we were in the business of writing, a writing retreat seemed to be the thing to do, and so we started the Radar LAB, an annual queer writing retreat. Summer is off-season in the Yucatan, hurricane season, and J-Jo agreed to donate his place, and his friend Marie, another non-profit arts worker, let us have hers very cheaply, and we did a big fundraiser in which we cajoled artist friends like Cathy Opie to donate work and put on a big show and auction. It is because of this that I have original art by Maira Kalman, Michelle Rollman and Phoebe Gloeckner in my home, for RADAR’s audience was, like we had been before J-Jo, low-income, and could not easily splurge on art even at these rock-bottom prices, and so we, RADAR, were (not unhappily) forced to bid on it. I mean, a Maira Kalman! An original sketch from Diary of a Teenage Girl! Anyways. We decided that anyone who had performed at any of RADAR’S events were eligible to apply, and this amounted to hundreds of people. We sourced three individuals from the literary world and asked them to judge the work samples blindly, to evade accusations that we were simply taking our friends our friends to the beach (the accusations were mumbled anyways). Me, Pickens and Ali also judged. And for years we held this free retreat, two sessions of 11-days each, and Pickens and her helper Xtina would cook lavish meals for us all day while we wrote at these glass-topped tables, or the plastic ones on the porches, and then we would all stumble about like zombies (the origin of Pickens coining ‘spooky writer face’, that visage all writers wear when we pull ourselves up and out from the depths of our mind) and chill out, and then we would work some more.
The condos were so small, we all lived atop each other for the days, the applicants even being asked - if you can believe it - if they were willing to share a bed with another writer, to which many said yes, thank goddexx, because we wanted to pack these places to the gills and share this spot and the experience with as many queer writers as possible. But, because we were living like 4 or five people to a condo, we had to have mandatory quiet hours, and those would be our morning and late afternoon writing times. At night we ate, and sometimes shared work, and we would go into Tulum to sing karaoke or down the beach to La Buena Vida where the barstools are wooden swings and you can hoist a pail of bears up into a rickety palm treehouse. Or we’d hear that a turtle nest had erupted and run down the beach with our red flashlights - white light confuses the turtles, who are wired to follow the moon into the ocean, which is why all the homes along the beach had red bulbs on their porches, so as not to lure them into our homes, regardless of how badly we all wanted to be friends with them. Under the guidance on an elder man named Elio, who as quite handsome and a dear friend of the turtles, we would smooth out the white sand to make a clear, easy runway for the turtles. We were not allowed to touch them (Elio’s authority felt correct and was easy to respect), but when they veered off course we could put our hands out and sort of gently nudge them back onto their runway. Sometimes a nest would hatch during the day, and Elio would scoop up all the babies in a big watery bucket, and keep them on his porch until the sun went down, to up their chance of survival. On the beach at night he would heap sand upon them, forcing them to build their little muscles for their lives ahead.
Anyways, the retreat has been gone for nearly a decade I think, but this place is inside me now and I have to come back every now and then, when I’m able. The town has changed very much, no longer the sort of sleepy, off-the-beaten path place but now stuffed with tours and day tourists from nearby Tulum and Cancun. They come to see the turtles, which we have seen none of this time, but it’s not nesting season, so you have to take a boat way out into the waters to find them. In the summer months they stick closer to shore and you see them all day, their craggy ancient heads sticking up through the water. You can spy on them beneath the waves, marveling at how they look like strange, weightless angels in the water, when their movements on land are so heavy. In the summer months the beach is dotted with rings of coral delineating turtle nests, and you avoid stepping on them. You can spot huge depressions where a nest was laid but not yet marked. At night, a momma turtle will come right up to your door looking for a place to do her instinctive, ancestral thing.
We’ve seen lots and lots of iguanas, a colony of which we fed watermelon too at the lagoon down the road. We’ve seen coatimundi pop out of the jungle across the street and suss us out with their friendly, long snouts; we’ve seen bunches of birds and of course lots of pretty fish. I’ve seen an imprint of the poet CA Conrad sitting on the shore, meditating with their crystals soaking in the sea, like they did when they were here on the retreat. Yes, it was as magic as you might imagine to be in glorious nature with CA Conrad. And with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, even though Annie was quitting sugar and kept hiding the Oreos so she wouldn’t be tempted. With Maggie Nelson, who translated the shaman at the temescel and made sure the honey water we were being served in tiny, hollow gourds was not alcoholic. With Eileen Myles, when there was a storm that knocked the power out and so we all went outside and looked up at the stars and shared who would want to go to space and who would not (Eileen would). I was pregnant the summer that Brontez and Tara came, and my doctor told me not to come and so I did not, though I regret having listened. Especially since it was here that I first really decided to get pregnant, and was cruising various bartenders and cenote guides, smiling back at random men in the village (as opposed to my usual scowl) thinking maybe it could lead to a baby. And now I’ve brought my baby here for the third time, and he’s not a baby anymore but old enough to go fight the waves while I sit on the shore on a lounger; young enough to be scared of the cenotes, the dark, flooded caves, hung with bats, created by the meteor that killed the dinosaurs - but old enough to bite down his fear and explore the wet stactites and stalagmites, shine his flashlight on the tiny, blind fish that live in the waters. One of my favorite toddler pictures of him was when he fell from an hammock and his sanded face looked like a sugared cookie; it still has all week, sprinkled with sparkling bits of pulverized coral.
I didn’t realize that my psych meds, Effexor, made me extra sensitive to the sun, so now at the week’s end I’m pretty seriously sun burned, which triggers a mortality crisis - like, this is the thing that is finally going to give me cancer, this very sunburn (never mind the two Marlboros I’ve smoked this week, from the pack with the European-style warning of an emaciated baby on the pack), and I have to text friends for reassurance that I’m not going to die. Which is false, because I am going to die and should probably use this experience to get cozier with the fact, not bum lies off my friends. If sunburns killed people there’d be no Gen Xers left, Tara texted back. Don’t forget to be happy. Kirk, a nurse, advised oil-based lotion and said my coconut body butter will do just fine. Miles - who I am here with, along with his partner Bree, and my kid - wrapped an ice pack in paper towels and I slept with it under my shoulders until it became a nuisance, and then fell asleep into dreams of being, like, super good friends with Phoebe Bridgers, and I woke up with a faint sense of regret that we’re not besties, like I lost a friend, a dream-friend. I had a dream like that about David Bowie once, where we were walking together in silence through the New England Aquarium and I felt perfectly loved and understood by him, then awoke with a pang of grief that such love was not available to me. Though it is, of course, it was total god-love and I can’t wait to bask in it again.
Speaking of magic - this coming Sunday, April 7th, I’m starting a four-week generative writing workshop, Writing for Witches. We’ll meditate, write to witchy prompts, share work with the class, cast spells, show-and-tell our mini writing altars, etc. Noon to 3pm, pst. Email me for more info, if you’d like to join, etc.
I want to know more about the witchy workshop pleeeease!
Somehow I got behind so I’m catching up tonight.