Jamie Brickhouse's Blog: Lagniappe
June 6, 2016
Overcoming the Shame of a Suicide Attempt
reprinted from The New York Times Science Section
May 31, 2016
I don’t remember much about the first time I tried to kill myself, 21 years ago, because any time the memory popped up I deleted it from my mind like an unflattering photo on Facebook. Despite being open and public about my second attempt, in 2006, which I revealed in a memoir about my alcoholism, I’ve never told anyone else about that first one – not my partner of 25 years, my therapist of 10 years, family, nor friends – until now.
Here’s what I remember about that first time, in 1995. I felt hopeless, that my 27 years of life were done (27!). I’d come home drunk from a glamorous Manhattan book event, which I had organized as the publicist. The wattage of successful artists in literature, fashion and theater was blinding. I felt like a failure, that I would never be more than the hired help, that my own dreams were just thin air. When I came home and poured another drink and remembered the leftover painkillers in my medicine cabinet – prescribed for a sprained ankle earned by a drunken fall — I thought, “Why not?”
My attempt was impulsive, not premeditated. Had it been successful, I’d classify it as suicidal manslaughter. I climbed into the antique wrought iron bed I shared with my partner and passed out. The next morning, I woke up next to him and he was none the wiser. I got up in a daze and went to work feeling like I was moving under water, so heavy was my triple hangover from booze, pills and shame. I kept moving, kept drinking (I was blind then to the cause and effect of booze and depression) and kept silent.
My silence nearly killed me. Eleven years later, I tried again. I had been fantasizing about suicide every day for months. I was more hopeless. I was drunker. That time I did it with sleeping pills I’d been taking to prevent me from drinking as much at night. Booze, pills, suicide attempts: it was all one big happy “Valley of the Dolls” family. That time I took the pills in the morning after my partner left for work, and I didn’t wake up on my own. My partner found me in that antique bed when he came home from work. The jig was up, and my winding path to recovery began.
Why bother talking about the first one? Now that I’ve been sober for almost eight years and my artistic dreams are coming true, the secret made me feel like a house rebuilt on a foundation still riddled with termites. I knew I would have to own the attempt eventually, so when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a report that suicides had surged to the highest levels in 30 years, I knew it was time for me to come clean. With two attempts on my score card, I forever remain in a suicide high risk group. According to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a history of suicide attempt is one of the strongest risk factors for suicide, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reports that approximately 40 percent of those who have died by suicide have made a previous suicide attempt at some point in their lives. I don’t want the third time to be the charm.
The further away from that first attempt, the deeper the secret grew and the less real it became. I didn’t really do that. I didn’t think a few painkillers would kill me. I didn’t mean it. But I did do it and I did mean it. I’m mortified by that. It was reckless, rash, stupid, selfish, pathetic.
As a recovering alcoholic I know that admitting to my behavior and owning my story is the only way it can no longer own me. I’m not ashamed of being an alcoholic, but I’m still ashamed of trying to kill myself, even though I know I did it under the temporary insanity of alcohol. According to the A.F.S.P., approximately 30 percent of those who die by suicide have blood alcohol levels in the range of intoxication at the time of their deaths.
After my second attempt, I went to rehab and then to sober meetings. The focus quickly shifted from my suicide attempt to my alcoholism, and rightfully so. Once my alcoholism was treated, the depression lifted. It was alcohol that brought on my depression and thoughts of suicide, and ultimately twice gave me the courage to try it. Since I’ve been sober, I no longer suffer from depression, do not take antidepressants and no longer think about killing myself.
I’m fortunate to live in New York City, where there are almost as many sober meetings as there are bars. These are peer-led meetings of alcoholics helping other alcoholics, free of judgment and condescension. These meetings keep me sober, hence nonsuicidal.
But what about the nonalcoholics and nonaddicts who’ve attempted suicide? Where are their meetings? I could find only a few peer-led suicide attempt survivor support groups via Google, and none in New York City. When I called the National Suicide Hotline requesting local suicide attempt survivor support groups, the operator suggested just one option: a Safe Place Meeting hosted by the Samaritans, a suicide prevention network. But those meetings are for those who have lost loved ones to suicide, and they have no meetings for attempt survivors.
I admitted my second suicide attempt because I was found out, and had to. But shame kept me quiet about my first attempt. I admit it now, and I throw out a call for other closeted suicide attempt survivors to do the same: Own it, and find – or create — a safe group where you can talk about it.
Today I own my story, so that my story doesn’t kill me.
May 31, 2016
I don’t remember much about the first time I tried to kill myself, 21 years ago, because any time the memory popped up I deleted it from my mind like an unflattering photo on Facebook. Despite being open and public about my second attempt, in 2006, which I revealed in a memoir about my alcoholism, I’ve never told anyone else about that first one – not my partner of 25 years, my therapist of 10 years, family, nor friends – until now.
Here’s what I remember about that first time, in 1995. I felt hopeless, that my 27 years of life were done (27!). I’d come home drunk from a glamorous Manhattan book event, which I had organized as the publicist. The wattage of successful artists in literature, fashion and theater was blinding. I felt like a failure, that I would never be more than the hired help, that my own dreams were just thin air. When I came home and poured another drink and remembered the leftover painkillers in my medicine cabinet – prescribed for a sprained ankle earned by a drunken fall — I thought, “Why not?”
My attempt was impulsive, not premeditated. Had it been successful, I’d classify it as suicidal manslaughter. I climbed into the antique wrought iron bed I shared with my partner and passed out. The next morning, I woke up next to him and he was none the wiser. I got up in a daze and went to work feeling like I was moving under water, so heavy was my triple hangover from booze, pills and shame. I kept moving, kept drinking (I was blind then to the cause and effect of booze and depression) and kept silent.
My silence nearly killed me. Eleven years later, I tried again. I had been fantasizing about suicide every day for months. I was more hopeless. I was drunker. That time I did it with sleeping pills I’d been taking to prevent me from drinking as much at night. Booze, pills, suicide attempts: it was all one big happy “Valley of the Dolls” family. That time I took the pills in the morning after my partner left for work, and I didn’t wake up on my own. My partner found me in that antique bed when he came home from work. The jig was up, and my winding path to recovery began.
Why bother talking about the first one? Now that I’ve been sober for almost eight years and my artistic dreams are coming true, the secret made me feel like a house rebuilt on a foundation still riddled with termites. I knew I would have to own the attempt eventually, so when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a report that suicides had surged to the highest levels in 30 years, I knew it was time for me to come clean. With two attempts on my score card, I forever remain in a suicide high risk group. According to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a history of suicide attempt is one of the strongest risk factors for suicide, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reports that approximately 40 percent of those who have died by suicide have made a previous suicide attempt at some point in their lives. I don’t want the third time to be the charm.
The further away from that first attempt, the deeper the secret grew and the less real it became. I didn’t really do that. I didn’t think a few painkillers would kill me. I didn’t mean it. But I did do it and I did mean it. I’m mortified by that. It was reckless, rash, stupid, selfish, pathetic.
As a recovering alcoholic I know that admitting to my behavior and owning my story is the only way it can no longer own me. I’m not ashamed of being an alcoholic, but I’m still ashamed of trying to kill myself, even though I know I did it under the temporary insanity of alcohol. According to the A.F.S.P., approximately 30 percent of those who die by suicide have blood alcohol levels in the range of intoxication at the time of their deaths.
After my second attempt, I went to rehab and then to sober meetings. The focus quickly shifted from my suicide attempt to my alcoholism, and rightfully so. Once my alcoholism was treated, the depression lifted. It was alcohol that brought on my depression and thoughts of suicide, and ultimately twice gave me the courage to try it. Since I’ve been sober, I no longer suffer from depression, do not take antidepressants and no longer think about killing myself.
I’m fortunate to live in New York City, where there are almost as many sober meetings as there are bars. These are peer-led meetings of alcoholics helping other alcoholics, free of judgment and condescension. These meetings keep me sober, hence nonsuicidal.
But what about the nonalcoholics and nonaddicts who’ve attempted suicide? Where are their meetings? I could find only a few peer-led suicide attempt survivor support groups via Google, and none in New York City. When I called the National Suicide Hotline requesting local suicide attempt survivor support groups, the operator suggested just one option: a Safe Place Meeting hosted by the Samaritans, a suicide prevention network. But those meetings are for those who have lost loved ones to suicide, and they have no meetings for attempt survivors.
I admitted my second suicide attempt because I was found out, and had to. But shame kept me quiet about my first attempt. I admit it now, and I throw out a call for other closeted suicide attempt survivors to do the same: Own it, and find – or create — a safe group where you can talk about it.
Today I own my story, so that my story doesn’t kill me.
May 24, 2016
Memorial Mass for Mama Jean: A Gay Son's Tribute to His Mother
Huffington Post
May 24, 2016
When I booked a memorial Mass for my mother, Mama Jean, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it wasn’t to pray for the repose of her soul. I was seeking a formal ritual to grieve, but I was also making up for the time I couldn’t get her into St. Patrick’s.
Several years ago before one of her trips to visit me in New York City from Texas, she told me emphatically, “I want to go to Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so look into it now to make sure we get in.” This was a couple of months before the trip. She always planned ahead to insure she got what she wanted.
“Get in? It’s a church. Anyone can get in,” I said.
“Yes, but it’s Easter Sunday. And it’s St. Patrick’s.”
I didn’t look into it until the Thursday before Easter. She was right. A reservation was required, and like the hottest Mario Batali restaurant, St. Patrick’s was fully booked. When I broke the news to her she took the Lord’s name in vain with a cut glass shattering, “God.. DAMN... it!”
We went to the Church of the Holy Trinity a block from my apartment. At Mama Jean’s insistence we arrived forty-minutes early to get a good seat. She wore a hot pink Easter bonnet of straw, carefully pinned to her done-once-a-week raven coif. We arrived to an empty, half-lit church. The only other person was the janitor making a final sweep with his push broom.
“Well, we have our pick of the best seats,” I said, “There’s no one here.”
She turned to me with her head cocked and cheeks sucked in. “That’s because they’re all at St. Patrick’s!”
When she died of Lewy body dementia several years later, just two weeks before Christmas, I was there when she took her last breath. I was part of every step in sending her off: writing her obituary with my father, planning the wake with my brother, and all of us arranging “Mama Jean’s Final Christmas Party.” (She loved Christmas.) I was grateful for all of these rituals, each one an important step in processing the death of the person who loved me the most.
How deeply did she love me? When I hit a low alcoholic bottom and downed a bottle of sleeping pills, Mama Jean flew to my side. Before she shipped me off to rehab she told me, “You know, suicide is a mortal sin. It’s a good thing you didn’t succeed. If you had, you couldn’t spend eternity in heaven with me.”
I understand the power of ritual from both my childhood days of going to Mass every Sunday and now as an alcoholic in recovery. There is always a formal observance to the meetings I regularly attend. Unlike the Catholic Mass, the ceremony may vary, but the one common ritual is acknowledgement of who you are and why you are there so you never forget. It’s a way of paying homage, gratitude, and respect.
As the first anniversary of her death approached, I felt untethered. I wanted a ritual to commemorate her death and her life. On the subway ride to work, I listened to “The Music of Mama Jean,” a playlist I made when her mind had all but gone and music was one of the last things to which she responded: Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love,” “My Best Girl,” from Mame, Mimi’s aria from La Boehme, “High Flying Adored” from Evita, and Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” By the time I reached my subway stop for work, my face was downcast to hide my wet and red eyes. It was all wrong. Listening to a few songs on a packed subway had all the reverence of holding a funeral in a train station.
For the next anniversary I needed more, but what?
St. Patrick’s.
I’d finally get her into to St. Patrick’s via a memorial Mass. When I stopped by the rectory office the next week to book the Mass, I could hear Mama Jean in my head, “You’re just now looking into it?”
She was right. St. Patrick’s was fully booked. I’d have to wait another two years. On the third anniversary of her December 14th death I arrived early — not forty minutes early — but early enough for her twelve-thirty Mass. In the outer aisles of the massive Gothic church marched a steady but orderly flow of Christmas tourists in dotted lines. I joined the ant trail around the church, listening to Mama Jean’s playlist, which included not only songs she had listened to, but also music I associated with her. Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” always took me back to 5 years old, perched on the edge of the pine-green nylon bucket seats of her white Mercury Marquis as it played on the radio.
A Mass was in progress. It was twelve-fifteen. I panicked. Had I screwed up the time? Did I book a noon Mass? It had been so long since I booked the damn thing. Had I already missed the priest announce, “This Mass is offered for the happy repose of the soul of Jean Brickhouse?” I had waited two years to hear her name said in St. Patrick’s.
The priest was already blessing the gifts for Holy Communion, so he was in the home stretch of the Mass. I pulled out my ear buds and asked an usher if there was a twelve-thirty Mass. “Yes,” he said, not knowing the relief that simple affirmation gave me.
I continued in the steady parade around the church until I stood in front of the life-sized crèche. Mary and friends were all staring at an empty crib. Someone stole the Baby Jesus? Oh, right, its only December 14. He hasn’t arrived yet. So why are they here so early? To get a good seat, of course.
I sat in the main part of the nave and the Mass began promptly at twelve-thirty. The priest opened with, “This Mass is being said for Jean Brickhouse.” My heart skipped. He said her name, right here in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He spoke her name again near the end of the Mass: “We pray for the sick and suffering. For the victims of war and poverty, and for the memory of Jean Brickhouse for whom this Mass is being said.” It made me think how excited she was when she saw her heartthrob Hugh Jackman on Broadway in The Boy from Oz for the second time and he called her name from the stage. “Hi Jean!”
“He said Jean! He said my name!” she cried like a schoolgirl. I made fun of her when she told me that, but on that day, I understood how she felt.
A Roman Catholic requiem Mass is offered on specific appointed days of the year for the repose — or rest — of a dead person’s soul. It is when we are interceding for the poor souls in purgatory praying that they may find rest (in God). In other words, finish their time of suffering and enter into the eternal rest, which is heaven. It’s not for me to say, but I don’t think Mama Jean wasted much time in purgatory waiting to get into heaven. I’m sure she called ahead and reserved a spot.
After Mass I reinserted my ear buds and walked around the apse of the church behind the altar, listening to the music of her life as I acknowledged (accepted, really) her death. For something to be reposed literally means for it to be put away and not used. Since that St. Patrick’s Mass, I’ve made it my solitary annual ritual to bring Mama Jean out of repose to be formally loved, appreciated, and adored. She and I are getting a tour of the city, since I choose a different Catholic Church for each requiem. The subsequent year’s memorial Mass was at Holy Trinity. Like that Easter Sunday, the church was almost empty, but I didn’t need the crowd of St. Patrick’s any more.
May 24, 2016
When I booked a memorial Mass for my mother, Mama Jean, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it wasn’t to pray for the repose of her soul. I was seeking a formal ritual to grieve, but I was also making up for the time I couldn’t get her into St. Patrick’s.
Several years ago before one of her trips to visit me in New York City from Texas, she told me emphatically, “I want to go to Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so look into it now to make sure we get in.” This was a couple of months before the trip. She always planned ahead to insure she got what she wanted.
“Get in? It’s a church. Anyone can get in,” I said.
“Yes, but it’s Easter Sunday. And it’s St. Patrick’s.”
I didn’t look into it until the Thursday before Easter. She was right. A reservation was required, and like the hottest Mario Batali restaurant, St. Patrick’s was fully booked. When I broke the news to her she took the Lord’s name in vain with a cut glass shattering, “God.. DAMN... it!”
We went to the Church of the Holy Trinity a block from my apartment. At Mama Jean’s insistence we arrived forty-minutes early to get a good seat. She wore a hot pink Easter bonnet of straw, carefully pinned to her done-once-a-week raven coif. We arrived to an empty, half-lit church. The only other person was the janitor making a final sweep with his push broom.
“Well, we have our pick of the best seats,” I said, “There’s no one here.”
She turned to me with her head cocked and cheeks sucked in. “That’s because they’re all at St. Patrick’s!”
When she died of Lewy body dementia several years later, just two weeks before Christmas, I was there when she took her last breath. I was part of every step in sending her off: writing her obituary with my father, planning the wake with my brother, and all of us arranging “Mama Jean’s Final Christmas Party.” (She loved Christmas.) I was grateful for all of these rituals, each one an important step in processing the death of the person who loved me the most.
How deeply did she love me? When I hit a low alcoholic bottom and downed a bottle of sleeping pills, Mama Jean flew to my side. Before she shipped me off to rehab she told me, “You know, suicide is a mortal sin. It’s a good thing you didn’t succeed. If you had, you couldn’t spend eternity in heaven with me.”
I understand the power of ritual from both my childhood days of going to Mass every Sunday and now as an alcoholic in recovery. There is always a formal observance to the meetings I regularly attend. Unlike the Catholic Mass, the ceremony may vary, but the one common ritual is acknowledgement of who you are and why you are there so you never forget. It’s a way of paying homage, gratitude, and respect.
As the first anniversary of her death approached, I felt untethered. I wanted a ritual to commemorate her death and her life. On the subway ride to work, I listened to “The Music of Mama Jean,” a playlist I made when her mind had all but gone and music was one of the last things to which she responded: Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love,” “My Best Girl,” from Mame, Mimi’s aria from La Boehme, “High Flying Adored” from Evita, and Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” By the time I reached my subway stop for work, my face was downcast to hide my wet and red eyes. It was all wrong. Listening to a few songs on a packed subway had all the reverence of holding a funeral in a train station.
For the next anniversary I needed more, but what?
St. Patrick’s.
I’d finally get her into to St. Patrick’s via a memorial Mass. When I stopped by the rectory office the next week to book the Mass, I could hear Mama Jean in my head, “You’re just now looking into it?”
She was right. St. Patrick’s was fully booked. I’d have to wait another two years. On the third anniversary of her December 14th death I arrived early — not forty minutes early — but early enough for her twelve-thirty Mass. In the outer aisles of the massive Gothic church marched a steady but orderly flow of Christmas tourists in dotted lines. I joined the ant trail around the church, listening to Mama Jean’s playlist, which included not only songs she had listened to, but also music I associated with her. Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” always took me back to 5 years old, perched on the edge of the pine-green nylon bucket seats of her white Mercury Marquis as it played on the radio.
A Mass was in progress. It was twelve-fifteen. I panicked. Had I screwed up the time? Did I book a noon Mass? It had been so long since I booked the damn thing. Had I already missed the priest announce, “This Mass is offered for the happy repose of the soul of Jean Brickhouse?” I had waited two years to hear her name said in St. Patrick’s.
The priest was already blessing the gifts for Holy Communion, so he was in the home stretch of the Mass. I pulled out my ear buds and asked an usher if there was a twelve-thirty Mass. “Yes,” he said, not knowing the relief that simple affirmation gave me.
I continued in the steady parade around the church until I stood in front of the life-sized crèche. Mary and friends were all staring at an empty crib. Someone stole the Baby Jesus? Oh, right, its only December 14. He hasn’t arrived yet. So why are they here so early? To get a good seat, of course.
I sat in the main part of the nave and the Mass began promptly at twelve-thirty. The priest opened with, “This Mass is being said for Jean Brickhouse.” My heart skipped. He said her name, right here in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He spoke her name again near the end of the Mass: “We pray for the sick and suffering. For the victims of war and poverty, and for the memory of Jean Brickhouse for whom this Mass is being said.” It made me think how excited she was when she saw her heartthrob Hugh Jackman on Broadway in The Boy from Oz for the second time and he called her name from the stage. “Hi Jean!”
“He said Jean! He said my name!” she cried like a schoolgirl. I made fun of her when she told me that, but on that day, I understood how she felt.
A Roman Catholic requiem Mass is offered on specific appointed days of the year for the repose — or rest — of a dead person’s soul. It is when we are interceding for the poor souls in purgatory praying that they may find rest (in God). In other words, finish their time of suffering and enter into the eternal rest, which is heaven. It’s not for me to say, but I don’t think Mama Jean wasted much time in purgatory waiting to get into heaven. I’m sure she called ahead and reserved a spot.
After Mass I reinserted my ear buds and walked around the apse of the church behind the altar, listening to the music of her life as I acknowledged (accepted, really) her death. For something to be reposed literally means for it to be put away and not used. Since that St. Patrick’s Mass, I’ve made it my solitary annual ritual to bring Mama Jean out of repose to be formally loved, appreciated, and adored. She and I are getting a tour of the city, since I choose a different Catholic Church for each requiem. The subsequent year’s memorial Mass was at Holy Trinity. Like that Easter Sunday, the church was almost empty, but I didn’t need the crowd of St. Patrick’s any more.
May 16, 2016
You’ve Got Republican Mail!
This essay by me ran in The Daily Beast May 14, 2016.
Daddy was a conservative and on every right-wing mailing list under sun, and when he died, his mail kept coming in bushels to his gay, liberal son.
The week my father J. Earl died I smirked like Sarah Palin as I threw away his 13-year collection of George and Laura Bush Christmas cards that had grown like a Republican cancer. I was convinced I’d given the Fox News side of him a thorough Karen Silkwood shower. But God and the dead have a merciless sense of humor. When I opened the mailbox of his Texas home, that smirk was slapped off my face. Out poured a diarrhea of letters from the Republican National Committee, American Conservative Union, the NRA, Tea Party Express, Ted Cruz, Heidi Cruz, pleas from priests and sisters to save the newly-inseminated, and of course the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Oh, and my mother’s—dead for six years—still thriving subscription to Soap Opera Digest.
My father called me Jamie Poo. I called him Daddy Poo. I am junior to his senior, his only child, and like him in many ways with my love of theater, art, and old movies. Daddy Poo, who was born in 1931, more easily accepted my homosexuality than my politics. We both liked to focus on our common interests and let politics remain the red-white-and-blue elephant in the room. On the rare occasions we did get into political fights when I visited from New York City, he’d switch the TV from Fox News to TCM as a truce, and we’d meet on the neutral ground of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. However, we continued to harbor opposing wishes: he wished I’d start voting Republican and I wished he’d stop. I suppose I finally got my wish, but was the onslaught of mail his ceaseless campaign from the grave?
Before returning to New York, I spent the next few months in Texas settling his estate and trying to winnow the important mail from the conservative junk that arrived in daily droves like anti-LGBT discrimination bills in Southern states: Bishop’s Faith Appeal, Disabled Veterans, Blind Vet’s Association, Catholic Vote, Sacred Heart Monastery, Hon. Newt Gingrich, Easter Seals, Sisters of St. Francis Assisi, Priests for Life (the unborn kind, I assume), and on and on. He gave piddling amounts to almost all of these groups, so it’s no surprise that the mail kept coming around like stray cats that knew they’d be fed. It was cathartic to wave good-bye to Hefty bags full of Hillary-hate letters and Obama-scare jeremiads as the garbage truck crushed them into fresh landfill.
Daddy Poo’s junk mail seemed fraught with meaning in the same way that advertisements in another country—the kind of ads we’d barely notice at home, so inured are we to our own surroundings—have the power to define that country and its inhabitants. When I lived in a depressed industrial working-class section of southeast London, there was an ad for Courage beer that loomed heavily across a bridge over desolate train tracks. “Take Courage,” its ominous message read, which I interpreted as, “Get drunk. You’ll need to.”
Visiting Daddy Poo was sometimes like visiting another country. While he clung to the Catholic values and right-wing politics he’d known his entire life living in that same small Texas town, I had shed those ideologies, first to attend a liberal arts university and then to live in the cosmopolitan cities of London and New York. Daddy Poo’s mail with its pleas to feed the children, help the maimed, fund the Republicans, fear the black president, save the unborn, and bankroll the Catholics seemed to define a life of doing the “right” thing based on guilt and fear. If there were a subliminal slogan in the flotsam and jetsam of his mail it was, “Take courage before ‘they’ take over!”
Seven months later I sold his house and shut the door on his mailbox forever. “The mail is done,” I said smugly. Two weeks later a deluge of conservative correspondence arrived with yellow forwarding stickers, and the tiny mail slot of my New York apartment could barely contain it. “It’s following me!” I screamed in horror.
The mailman, once a beacon of postcards and paychecks, became a specter of Republican propaganda. I emptied my mailbox furtively as if it contained an issue of Blueboy instead of what it actually contained: an offer to buy Pat Boone’s new album. Once I accidentally dropped a stack of mail at the feet of one of my many liberal neighbors in the lobby. Did I blush brighter over the envelope emblazoned “Ted Cruz for President,” or the one still claiming Planned Parenthood sells baby parts?
Daddy Poo’s fatty tissue of mail forced me to look at my own. From President Obama: “When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free.” There’s a monthly—not daily—pile up of mail about LGBT and HIV/AIDS rights from Lambda Legal, GMHC, ACLU, AMFAR; requests to renew my annual memberships with NPR, Film Forum, and the Museum of Modern Art; weekly flyers of discount offers to shows like An American In Paris; pre-approved, zero-percent credit card offers; and magazines: The New Yorker, Writer’s Digest, Poets & Writers, Out, Vanity Fair. Now there are two Vanity Fairs and two Entertainment Weeklys. That’s where Daddy Poo and I overlap.
What does junk mail say about a person? It’s not all I am, but it’s certainly some of who I am: a Broadway musical-loving, liberal, gay writer with credit card issues and a strong interest in celebrity culture. What does Daddy Poo’s mail say about him? He was a Catholic, conservative, veteran, senior citizen with a strong interest in celebrity culture.
I’m old enough that I still receive real mail—fun mail—and a fair amount of cards at Christmas. My best friend Mr. Parker sends vintage postcards almost weekly, always written in his instantly recognizable upright script of fountain pen blue ink. Another friend, DCC, sends me newspaper clippings in colored envelopes beautifully franked with color-coordinated vintage stamps. The clippings are peppered with bitchy annotations written in his highly stylized calligraphy to which I make additional acerbic annotations in my cacography of orange felt-tip ink and mail them back to him.
But there’s one sender of fun mail missing: Daddy Poo. Now that I’m receiving all of his mail, I’m no longer receiving mail from him. He’d routinely send me clippings with his comments written in blue ballpoint ink on square, yellow Post-its in his fine Catholic-boy script that had morphed into the shaky spook house letters of his octogenarian hand. Regarding an article about a bestselling author who was scheduled to give a lecture, he wrote: “Jamie Poo: This will be you someday soon.” He was referring to the then eminent publication of my first book. He never saw that someday.
I sighed as I looked at the yellow forwarding stickers on the envelopes addressed to Daddy Poo at his Texas address but overflowing in my New York mail slot. “Calm down,” I said to myself. “Once the mail forwarding window expires, the mail will stop.” As much as I hated the junk mail, I was also worried about its cessation. It had become a perverse way to stay connected to Daddy Pooevery day.
“Dear J. Earl, Congratulations on your recent move!”
I whimpered when I saw that the envelope had been mailed to Daddy Poo at my address sans forwarding sticker. Either the conservatives were in serious denial about his death, or Daddy Poo’s Republican ghost had taken up residence in my mailbox.
I began carrying Daddy Poo’s mail upstairs to my apartment, rather than throwing it away in the lobby garbage can. “They have to be stopped!” I said out loud with Norma Rae passion. Like a mad man I maniacally scribbled on each envelope with a red, felt-tip marker: “RETURN TO SENDER!” “DECEASED. DEAD!” “CAN NO LONGER VOTE OR GIVE MONEY.”
GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!
My common-law husband, Michael, asked, “ Do you think that will work?”
“I don’t know, but I have to try.” I read out loud the Priests for Life headline on one envelope: “‘Late-term abortions are provided more widely than media reporting.’ Really?” I asked Michael. “I mean, who is actually having late-term abortions?”
“Procrastinators?” he deadpanned.
A week later the mail was even thicker as my red-inked “return to sender” envelopes sat in my slot like proud carrier pigeons come home. Because of its special postage rate, junk mail can’t be returned. Daddy Poo’s mail became the bottomless salad at the Olive Garden.
I refused defeat and continued my crusade. I called every single organization and politely, but firmly, demanded they cease mailing the deceased and remove Daddy Poo from their lists. I was as relentless as a Republican senator trying to overturn Obamacare.
After a month of these Sisyphean calls, each of which could last up to five minutes, my work started to suffer, I missed meals, I forgot to bathe, and yet I’d barely made a dent. My eyes darting across the dining table littered with Daddy Poo’s postal assault, I said in a deranged whisper, “The mail is winning.”
I was close to giving up the ghost, so to speak, when a nice conservative Christian lady from the American Bible Society pointed out that my individual calls were as effective as using postage stamps to plug holes in the Titanic. She informed me that I could make a one-stop shop and register his name online with a service that removes dead people from mailing lists.
“Thank God!” I exclaimed.
“Please do,” she said.
By Christmas, almost a year after Daddy Poo’s death, his mail started to dry up. “I think it’s finally over,” I said with moist eyes. After I opened my junk mail, I moved on to the fun stuff: holiday cards from friends near and far. I gleefully sliced open the last one, a large envelope bursting with the promise of a deluxe Christmas card. Out popped a photo of a heterosexual couple in front of a giant Christmas tree. The man in his red tie wore a monkey-mischievous grin. The woman in a green dress with pearls had the lobotomized gaze of a Stepford Wife. The greeting read: “To Mr. J. Earl Brickhouse, with best wishes, George and Laura Bush.” My letter opener in one hand, George and Laura in the other, I howled with laughter at the portrait of Daddy Poo that used to hang in his study and now hangs in mine and cried, “Merry Christmas, Daddy Poo!”
Daddy was a conservative and on every right-wing mailing list under sun, and when he died, his mail kept coming in bushels to his gay, liberal son.
The week my father J. Earl died I smirked like Sarah Palin as I threw away his 13-year collection of George and Laura Bush Christmas cards that had grown like a Republican cancer. I was convinced I’d given the Fox News side of him a thorough Karen Silkwood shower. But God and the dead have a merciless sense of humor. When I opened the mailbox of his Texas home, that smirk was slapped off my face. Out poured a diarrhea of letters from the Republican National Committee, American Conservative Union, the NRA, Tea Party Express, Ted Cruz, Heidi Cruz, pleas from priests and sisters to save the newly-inseminated, and of course the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Oh, and my mother’s—dead for six years—still thriving subscription to Soap Opera Digest.
My father called me Jamie Poo. I called him Daddy Poo. I am junior to his senior, his only child, and like him in many ways with my love of theater, art, and old movies. Daddy Poo, who was born in 1931, more easily accepted my homosexuality than my politics. We both liked to focus on our common interests and let politics remain the red-white-and-blue elephant in the room. On the rare occasions we did get into political fights when I visited from New York City, he’d switch the TV from Fox News to TCM as a truce, and we’d meet on the neutral ground of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. However, we continued to harbor opposing wishes: he wished I’d start voting Republican and I wished he’d stop. I suppose I finally got my wish, but was the onslaught of mail his ceaseless campaign from the grave?
Before returning to New York, I spent the next few months in Texas settling his estate and trying to winnow the important mail from the conservative junk that arrived in daily droves like anti-LGBT discrimination bills in Southern states: Bishop’s Faith Appeal, Disabled Veterans, Blind Vet’s Association, Catholic Vote, Sacred Heart Monastery, Hon. Newt Gingrich, Easter Seals, Sisters of St. Francis Assisi, Priests for Life (the unborn kind, I assume), and on and on. He gave piddling amounts to almost all of these groups, so it’s no surprise that the mail kept coming around like stray cats that knew they’d be fed. It was cathartic to wave good-bye to Hefty bags full of Hillary-hate letters and Obama-scare jeremiads as the garbage truck crushed them into fresh landfill.
Daddy Poo’s junk mail seemed fraught with meaning in the same way that advertisements in another country—the kind of ads we’d barely notice at home, so inured are we to our own surroundings—have the power to define that country and its inhabitants. When I lived in a depressed industrial working-class section of southeast London, there was an ad for Courage beer that loomed heavily across a bridge over desolate train tracks. “Take Courage,” its ominous message read, which I interpreted as, “Get drunk. You’ll need to.”
Visiting Daddy Poo was sometimes like visiting another country. While he clung to the Catholic values and right-wing politics he’d known his entire life living in that same small Texas town, I had shed those ideologies, first to attend a liberal arts university and then to live in the cosmopolitan cities of London and New York. Daddy Poo’s mail with its pleas to feed the children, help the maimed, fund the Republicans, fear the black president, save the unborn, and bankroll the Catholics seemed to define a life of doing the “right” thing based on guilt and fear. If there were a subliminal slogan in the flotsam and jetsam of his mail it was, “Take courage before ‘they’ take over!”
Seven months later I sold his house and shut the door on his mailbox forever. “The mail is done,” I said smugly. Two weeks later a deluge of conservative correspondence arrived with yellow forwarding stickers, and the tiny mail slot of my New York apartment could barely contain it. “It’s following me!” I screamed in horror.
The mailman, once a beacon of postcards and paychecks, became a specter of Republican propaganda. I emptied my mailbox furtively as if it contained an issue of Blueboy instead of what it actually contained: an offer to buy Pat Boone’s new album. Once I accidentally dropped a stack of mail at the feet of one of my many liberal neighbors in the lobby. Did I blush brighter over the envelope emblazoned “Ted Cruz for President,” or the one still claiming Planned Parenthood sells baby parts?
Daddy Poo’s fatty tissue of mail forced me to look at my own. From President Obama: “When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free.” There’s a monthly—not daily—pile up of mail about LGBT and HIV/AIDS rights from Lambda Legal, GMHC, ACLU, AMFAR; requests to renew my annual memberships with NPR, Film Forum, and the Museum of Modern Art; weekly flyers of discount offers to shows like An American In Paris; pre-approved, zero-percent credit card offers; and magazines: The New Yorker, Writer’s Digest, Poets & Writers, Out, Vanity Fair. Now there are two Vanity Fairs and two Entertainment Weeklys. That’s where Daddy Poo and I overlap.
What does junk mail say about a person? It’s not all I am, but it’s certainly some of who I am: a Broadway musical-loving, liberal, gay writer with credit card issues and a strong interest in celebrity culture. What does Daddy Poo’s mail say about him? He was a Catholic, conservative, veteran, senior citizen with a strong interest in celebrity culture.
I’m old enough that I still receive real mail—fun mail—and a fair amount of cards at Christmas. My best friend Mr. Parker sends vintage postcards almost weekly, always written in his instantly recognizable upright script of fountain pen blue ink. Another friend, DCC, sends me newspaper clippings in colored envelopes beautifully franked with color-coordinated vintage stamps. The clippings are peppered with bitchy annotations written in his highly stylized calligraphy to which I make additional acerbic annotations in my cacography of orange felt-tip ink and mail them back to him.
But there’s one sender of fun mail missing: Daddy Poo. Now that I’m receiving all of his mail, I’m no longer receiving mail from him. He’d routinely send me clippings with his comments written in blue ballpoint ink on square, yellow Post-its in his fine Catholic-boy script that had morphed into the shaky spook house letters of his octogenarian hand. Regarding an article about a bestselling author who was scheduled to give a lecture, he wrote: “Jamie Poo: This will be you someday soon.” He was referring to the then eminent publication of my first book. He never saw that someday.
I sighed as I looked at the yellow forwarding stickers on the envelopes addressed to Daddy Poo at his Texas address but overflowing in my New York mail slot. “Calm down,” I said to myself. “Once the mail forwarding window expires, the mail will stop.” As much as I hated the junk mail, I was also worried about its cessation. It had become a perverse way to stay connected to Daddy Pooevery day.
“Dear J. Earl, Congratulations on your recent move!”
I whimpered when I saw that the envelope had been mailed to Daddy Poo at my address sans forwarding sticker. Either the conservatives were in serious denial about his death, or Daddy Poo’s Republican ghost had taken up residence in my mailbox.
I began carrying Daddy Poo’s mail upstairs to my apartment, rather than throwing it away in the lobby garbage can. “They have to be stopped!” I said out loud with Norma Rae passion. Like a mad man I maniacally scribbled on each envelope with a red, felt-tip marker: “RETURN TO SENDER!” “DECEASED. DEAD!” “CAN NO LONGER VOTE OR GIVE MONEY.”
GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!
My common-law husband, Michael, asked, “ Do you think that will work?”
“I don’t know, but I have to try.” I read out loud the Priests for Life headline on one envelope: “‘Late-term abortions are provided more widely than media reporting.’ Really?” I asked Michael. “I mean, who is actually having late-term abortions?”
“Procrastinators?” he deadpanned.
A week later the mail was even thicker as my red-inked “return to sender” envelopes sat in my slot like proud carrier pigeons come home. Because of its special postage rate, junk mail can’t be returned. Daddy Poo’s mail became the bottomless salad at the Olive Garden.
I refused defeat and continued my crusade. I called every single organization and politely, but firmly, demanded they cease mailing the deceased and remove Daddy Poo from their lists. I was as relentless as a Republican senator trying to overturn Obamacare.
After a month of these Sisyphean calls, each of which could last up to five minutes, my work started to suffer, I missed meals, I forgot to bathe, and yet I’d barely made a dent. My eyes darting across the dining table littered with Daddy Poo’s postal assault, I said in a deranged whisper, “The mail is winning.”
I was close to giving up the ghost, so to speak, when a nice conservative Christian lady from the American Bible Society pointed out that my individual calls were as effective as using postage stamps to plug holes in the Titanic. She informed me that I could make a one-stop shop and register his name online with a service that removes dead people from mailing lists.
“Thank God!” I exclaimed.
“Please do,” she said.
By Christmas, almost a year after Daddy Poo’s death, his mail started to dry up. “I think it’s finally over,” I said with moist eyes. After I opened my junk mail, I moved on to the fun stuff: holiday cards from friends near and far. I gleefully sliced open the last one, a large envelope bursting with the promise of a deluxe Christmas card. Out popped a photo of a heterosexual couple in front of a giant Christmas tree. The man in his red tie wore a monkey-mischievous grin. The woman in a green dress with pearls had the lobotomized gaze of a Stepford Wife. The greeting read: “To Mr. J. Earl Brickhouse, with best wishes, George and Laura Bush.” My letter opener in one hand, George and Laura in the other, I howled with laughter at the portrait of Daddy Poo that used to hang in his study and now hangs in mine and cried, “Merry Christmas, Daddy Poo!”
May 10, 2016
‘Boy Erased’: A minister’s son trapped between religion and his sexual identity
Washington Post book review
by Jamie Brickhouse
In 2004, when Garrard Conley was 19, he entered a Christian fundamentalist program, Love in Action, to cleanse himself of homosexuality. “I was here by my own choice,” he writes, “despite my secret wish to run away from the shame I’d felt since my parents found out I was gay. I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the increasingly blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler.”
Conley, the only child of his devoutly Baptist parents in small-town Arkansas, had been dramatically outed by a fellow student during his first semester at a small liberal arts college. The timing couldn’t have been worse. His decision to enter the fundamentalist group (known as LIA) came as his father was becoming an ordained Baptist minister.
It’s a powerful convergence of events that Conley portrays eloquently, if a bit earnestly. Conley was full of confusing contradictions — as deeply embedded in the teachings of the Bible as he was in the prose of great literature. And although he paints a convincing picture of why the foundation of his loving parents’ religious faith made his fight against homosexuality vital, he leaves the reader wondering why an erudite and intellectually curious young man didn’t find more cracks in that foundation.
He does find cracks in the foundation of LIA, which uses a warped version of a 12-step program that replaces addictive behavior such as alcoholism with “sexual deviance,” lumping homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia. As a 12-stepper for addictive behavior, I found LIA’s reinterpretation of the steps both disturbing and ironic. After all, the 12 steps were adapted from Judeo-Christian principles, but they were designed to bring one closer to a God of one’s understanding. LIA’s 12 steps, on the other hand, are designed to bring practitioners closer to the God solely of LIA’s understanding: Jesus.
Conley’s journey is wrenching, but it would have benefited from more shots of humor. He doesn’t take note, for instance, of the absurdity of reading, with his mother, two wildly divergent books. One has a title that sounds like a bad country song — “Where Does a Mother Go to Resign?” by a Christian mother coping with losing her son to the “sin” of homosexuality — and the other is a coded novel by Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Conley’s close relationship with his mother, who sits vigil with him in a depressing hotel room as he tries to weather the ordeal of LIA, is a tender portrait of that special bond so many gay men and their mothers have: “For the moment, it seemed like the two of us could go on this way forever, living only for literature and each other.” As for Conley’s father, he remains abstruse, despite Conley’s explorations of his abusive childhood. Ultimately their paths diverge. His father is ordained and Conley rejects LIA.
“God’s voice is no longer there,” Conley writes. “My ex-gay therapists took Him away from me, and no matter how many different churches I attend, I will feel the same dead weight in my chest.” God erased. Let’s hope that the parents still reading “Where Does a Mother Go to Resign?” start reading “Boy Erased” instead.
by Jamie Brickhouse
In 2004, when Garrard Conley was 19, he entered a Christian fundamentalist program, Love in Action, to cleanse himself of homosexuality. “I was here by my own choice,” he writes, “despite my secret wish to run away from the shame I’d felt since my parents found out I was gay. I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the increasingly blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler.”
Conley, the only child of his devoutly Baptist parents in small-town Arkansas, had been dramatically outed by a fellow student during his first semester at a small liberal arts college. The timing couldn’t have been worse. His decision to enter the fundamentalist group (known as LIA) came as his father was becoming an ordained Baptist minister.
It’s a powerful convergence of events that Conley portrays eloquently, if a bit earnestly. Conley was full of confusing contradictions — as deeply embedded in the teachings of the Bible as he was in the prose of great literature. And although he paints a convincing picture of why the foundation of his loving parents’ religious faith made his fight against homosexuality vital, he leaves the reader wondering why an erudite and intellectually curious young man didn’t find more cracks in that foundation.
He does find cracks in the foundation of LIA, which uses a warped version of a 12-step program that replaces addictive behavior such as alcoholism with “sexual deviance,” lumping homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia. As a 12-stepper for addictive behavior, I found LIA’s reinterpretation of the steps both disturbing and ironic. After all, the 12 steps were adapted from Judeo-Christian principles, but they were designed to bring one closer to a God of one’s understanding. LIA’s 12 steps, on the other hand, are designed to bring practitioners closer to the God solely of LIA’s understanding: Jesus.
Conley’s journey is wrenching, but it would have benefited from more shots of humor. He doesn’t take note, for instance, of the absurdity of reading, with his mother, two wildly divergent books. One has a title that sounds like a bad country song — “Where Does a Mother Go to Resign?” by a Christian mother coping with losing her son to the “sin” of homosexuality — and the other is a coded novel by Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Conley’s close relationship with his mother, who sits vigil with him in a depressing hotel room as he tries to weather the ordeal of LIA, is a tender portrait of that special bond so many gay men and their mothers have: “For the moment, it seemed like the two of us could go on this way forever, living only for literature and each other.” As for Conley’s father, he remains abstruse, despite Conley’s explorations of his abusive childhood. Ultimately their paths diverge. His father is ordained and Conley rejects LIA.
“God’s voice is no longer there,” Conley writes. “My ex-gay therapists took Him away from me, and no matter how many different churches I attend, I will feel the same dead weight in my chest.” God erased. Let’s hope that the parents still reading “Where Does a Mother Go to Resign?” start reading “Boy Erased” instead.
May 6, 2016
Mother's Day Tribute: Mama Jean
I always dreamed that when I finally gave birth and held my first baby, the moment would be divinely special. I’m not a new mother, nor even a father, but a first-time author who delivered a book. It’s no coincidence that Dangerous When Wet, my first born, has just been published in time for Mother’s Day. It’s about my relationship with my Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean, who always wanted me to be a writer. She recognized the talent early in me, because it was a talent I’d inherited from my father.
She also recognized early the other talent I inherited from my father: drinking. The memoir is about that too. With the same dauntless and determined drive that made her a financial success in the good ole boys’ club of the Southern small-town where I grew up, she loved me fiercely and tried unsuccessfully to grab my hand from the bottle and shove it onto the writing keyboard. I tried to outrun her love, which cast a shadow as big and wide as her Texas-sized hairdo. “No mother could love a son as much as I do,” she often told me.
Meanwhile, I fell deep in love with alcohol, which I tmay have loved as much as Mama Jean loved me. Thousands of miles away from her, Mama Jean was always with me no matter how deep in booze I swam. I couldn’t escape the thought - especially when I was doing something of which she wouldn’t approve or just making stupid decisions - WWMJT? (What Would Mama Jean Think?). Near the end of my drinking, her voice in my head was just about the only thing left of my conscience. When my love affair with booze died in 2006 in a big way (my suicide attempt) she rushed to my side to foot the bill for rehab.
Three years later, on December 14, 2009, just as I was rebuilding my sober life, hers ended after a rapid decline from Lewy body dementia, a progressive neurological and muscular disease. I helped my father plan every detail of her funeral down to her burial dress (her red St. John Knits gown), the red roses on her casket, and the music. At the wake a vocalist sang her namesake song, “Jean,” from the Maggie Smith movie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Jean, Jean, roses are red
All of the leaves have gone green
Ironically, a year after she died I started to become a writer, what she always wanted me to be. I had to overcome the fear that by writing about her, I was betraying her, and the only way I could do that was by writing about her. It wasn’t a betrayal but an honest portrayal and a love letter to her.
The shadow that Mama Jean cast while alive stayed with me as I wrote the book over the next three years, which was the second hardest thing I’ve done after getting sober. I usually write in the living room of my high-rise New York apartment at the head of my dining room table with my “old person” online radio station from Jacksonville, Florida streaming a mix of Muzak-y instrumentals and American popular standards. Behind my chair Mama Jean, in a black-and-white glossy from 1965, stares down upon me from a high shelf in an Art Deco vitrine. She is in a pose you rarely see anymore: she gazes over her shoulder, which is in the middle of the frame, perpendicular to the viewer. Her hair is one solid bouffant flip, a “Cat Five” - as in it could withstand a category five hurricane.
I pulled an all-nighter when I finished the first draft of the manuscript. I was not elated. I didn’t scream, “I did it!” I was too exhausted to feel joy. I felt like what I imagine it must be like after giving birth. I was simply spent from a task that nearly killed me. I lay my head down on my outstretched arm for a while on the table. Then I looked over my shoulder at Mama Jean who was looking over her shoulder in that penetrating gaze of hers.
I looked at the time. It was 12:48 A.M., December 14, 2013. I finished the manuscript on the third anniversary of Mama Jean’s death.
The work wasn’t done. Over the next year, I worked with my editor at St. Martin’s Press, writing and revising the manuscript, finalizing the book jacket, asking famous authors to gold-dust it with their endorsements, copy editing, proof reading, legal reading until I signed off on the final manuscript. I had a few more months to wait for the finished hard cover, the newborn.
I was determined that I would have a special solitary and sacred moment when the book arrived. Would I make a cup of tea, take off all my clothes, slip into a bubble bath surrounded by candles and read the book cover-to-cover? Would I wait to open the book until I was seated alone in a fancy restaurant, order an extravagant meal and toast myself with something bubbly and non-alcoholic? Would I just throw it up in the air à la Mary Tyler Moore in the opening credits of her TV show?
The day the book was expected to arrive, I worked that morning, as I usually do, at the dining room table with my old person radio station playing and Mama Jean’s photo over my shoulder. I left at noon to go to the gym and run errands. In the lobby I saw that there was a package waiting for me. I was certain it was the book, because my editor’s assistant had told me that she’d overnighted it to me. “It’s here,” I said to myself. “But not yet. Get it when you come back.”
I returned an hour and half later with shopping bags of groceries and some new clothes. “I believe there’s a package waiting for me,” I told the doorman. He opened the cabinet behind his desk and searched for probably fifteen seconds, but it seemed like an hour. He pulled out a rectangular, padded envelope, about the size of one hardcover book. He set it down on the credenza. I looked at the label, which had the return address of St. Martin’s Press, but I didn’t touch the package. First I had to sign for it in the doorman’s log. The doorman handed me the package, which seemed as heavy as a boulder and as delicate as an infant.
“Not yet,” I told myself. “Wait until you get upstairs. Damn! I never decided how this super-sacred, solo moment I’m finally about to have should play out.”
On the elevator ride to the tenth floor of my apartment, I was weighed down with my gym bag and shopping packages, but the package that held my book was the one that tipped the scales.
I walked into the empty apartment with both sunlight and my old person music streaming in. I went straight to my bedroom. I placed on the bed my gym bag and shopping packages, and then the book. “Not yet,” I said. “It’s got to be right.” I put away the gym bag. I put away the groceries. I ripped off and threw away the price tags of the new clothes. I put away the clothes. The bed was clear, save for one, rectangular, padded envelope.
I opened it. I certainly knew what the cover, looked like since I’d approved it, but I was worried that the finished version might not be just right. I pulled the book out of the package and actually gasped as I gazed at it. It was beautiful. It was better than I imagined it could be. Between its hard covers was something I’d created, born of pain, suffering and love. It was my baby.
I carried the book into the living room. I held Dangerous When Wet in both hands and stared at it with the gaze of a mother’s love. I caressed the glossy finish of the cover photo of three-year-old me sitting by a pool bar at a table with two cocktails in front of me and Mama Jean’s purse beside me.
I stood there in a fog for I don’t know how long before I pricked up my ears. My heart raced when I heard the song emanating from my old person station. It was “Jean.”
I walked to the dining room table and held the book up to Mama Jean’s photo as her song played: Jean, Jean . . . come out of your half-dreamed dream
Instantly, I knew that I was having my super-sacred, special moment, a moment far beyond anything I could have dreamed. But it wasn’t solo. Mama Jean was there to share it with me.
She also recognized early the other talent I inherited from my father: drinking. The memoir is about that too. With the same dauntless and determined drive that made her a financial success in the good ole boys’ club of the Southern small-town where I grew up, she loved me fiercely and tried unsuccessfully to grab my hand from the bottle and shove it onto the writing keyboard. I tried to outrun her love, which cast a shadow as big and wide as her Texas-sized hairdo. “No mother could love a son as much as I do,” she often told me.
Meanwhile, I fell deep in love with alcohol, which I tmay have loved as much as Mama Jean loved me. Thousands of miles away from her, Mama Jean was always with me no matter how deep in booze I swam. I couldn’t escape the thought - especially when I was doing something of which she wouldn’t approve or just making stupid decisions - WWMJT? (What Would Mama Jean Think?). Near the end of my drinking, her voice in my head was just about the only thing left of my conscience. When my love affair with booze died in 2006 in a big way (my suicide attempt) she rushed to my side to foot the bill for rehab.
Three years later, on December 14, 2009, just as I was rebuilding my sober life, hers ended after a rapid decline from Lewy body dementia, a progressive neurological and muscular disease. I helped my father plan every detail of her funeral down to her burial dress (her red St. John Knits gown), the red roses on her casket, and the music. At the wake a vocalist sang her namesake song, “Jean,” from the Maggie Smith movie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Jean, Jean, roses are red
All of the leaves have gone green
Ironically, a year after she died I started to become a writer, what she always wanted me to be. I had to overcome the fear that by writing about her, I was betraying her, and the only way I could do that was by writing about her. It wasn’t a betrayal but an honest portrayal and a love letter to her.
The shadow that Mama Jean cast while alive stayed with me as I wrote the book over the next three years, which was the second hardest thing I’ve done after getting sober. I usually write in the living room of my high-rise New York apartment at the head of my dining room table with my “old person” online radio station from Jacksonville, Florida streaming a mix of Muzak-y instrumentals and American popular standards. Behind my chair Mama Jean, in a black-and-white glossy from 1965, stares down upon me from a high shelf in an Art Deco vitrine. She is in a pose you rarely see anymore: she gazes over her shoulder, which is in the middle of the frame, perpendicular to the viewer. Her hair is one solid bouffant flip, a “Cat Five” - as in it could withstand a category five hurricane.
I pulled an all-nighter when I finished the first draft of the manuscript. I was not elated. I didn’t scream, “I did it!” I was too exhausted to feel joy. I felt like what I imagine it must be like after giving birth. I was simply spent from a task that nearly killed me. I lay my head down on my outstretched arm for a while on the table. Then I looked over my shoulder at Mama Jean who was looking over her shoulder in that penetrating gaze of hers.
I looked at the time. It was 12:48 A.M., December 14, 2013. I finished the manuscript on the third anniversary of Mama Jean’s death.
The work wasn’t done. Over the next year, I worked with my editor at St. Martin’s Press, writing and revising the manuscript, finalizing the book jacket, asking famous authors to gold-dust it with their endorsements, copy editing, proof reading, legal reading until I signed off on the final manuscript. I had a few more months to wait for the finished hard cover, the newborn.
I was determined that I would have a special solitary and sacred moment when the book arrived. Would I make a cup of tea, take off all my clothes, slip into a bubble bath surrounded by candles and read the book cover-to-cover? Would I wait to open the book until I was seated alone in a fancy restaurant, order an extravagant meal and toast myself with something bubbly and non-alcoholic? Would I just throw it up in the air à la Mary Tyler Moore in the opening credits of her TV show?
The day the book was expected to arrive, I worked that morning, as I usually do, at the dining room table with my old person radio station playing and Mama Jean’s photo over my shoulder. I left at noon to go to the gym and run errands. In the lobby I saw that there was a package waiting for me. I was certain it was the book, because my editor’s assistant had told me that she’d overnighted it to me. “It’s here,” I said to myself. “But not yet. Get it when you come back.”
I returned an hour and half later with shopping bags of groceries and some new clothes. “I believe there’s a package waiting for me,” I told the doorman. He opened the cabinet behind his desk and searched for probably fifteen seconds, but it seemed like an hour. He pulled out a rectangular, padded envelope, about the size of one hardcover book. He set it down on the credenza. I looked at the label, which had the return address of St. Martin’s Press, but I didn’t touch the package. First I had to sign for it in the doorman’s log. The doorman handed me the package, which seemed as heavy as a boulder and as delicate as an infant.
“Not yet,” I told myself. “Wait until you get upstairs. Damn! I never decided how this super-sacred, solo moment I’m finally about to have should play out.”
On the elevator ride to the tenth floor of my apartment, I was weighed down with my gym bag and shopping packages, but the package that held my book was the one that tipped the scales.
I walked into the empty apartment with both sunlight and my old person music streaming in. I went straight to my bedroom. I placed on the bed my gym bag and shopping packages, and then the book. “Not yet,” I said. “It’s got to be right.” I put away the gym bag. I put away the groceries. I ripped off and threw away the price tags of the new clothes. I put away the clothes. The bed was clear, save for one, rectangular, padded envelope.
I opened it. I certainly knew what the cover, looked like since I’d approved it, but I was worried that the finished version might not be just right. I pulled the book out of the package and actually gasped as I gazed at it. It was beautiful. It was better than I imagined it could be. Between its hard covers was something I’d created, born of pain, suffering and love. It was my baby.
I carried the book into the living room. I held Dangerous When Wet in both hands and stared at it with the gaze of a mother’s love. I caressed the glossy finish of the cover photo of three-year-old me sitting by a pool bar at a table with two cocktails in front of me and Mama Jean’s purse beside me.
I stood there in a fog for I don’t know how long before I pricked up my ears. My heart raced when I heard the song emanating from my old person station. It was “Jean.”
I walked to the dining room table and held the book up to Mama Jean’s photo as her song played: Jean, Jean . . . come out of your half-dreamed dream
Instantly, I knew that I was having my super-sacred, special moment, a moment far beyond anything I could have dreamed. But it wasn’t solo. Mama Jean was there to share it with me.
December 18, 2015
Interview with fellow Texan Memoirist David Crabb
Out in San Antonio
December 15, 2015
by Jamie Brickhouse
“You know how some serial killers are “returners” — they’ll go back to the scene of the crime to see their handiwork?” David Crabb asks me. “I’m not a serial killer, but I’m a returner.” I’m not a serial killer either, but like Crabb, I’m a memoirist, so by definition, a returner.
We are having brunch in Hipsterville, New York (aka Williamsburg, Brooklyn) but in our conversation we’ve returned to the North Star Mall food court circa 1990. It’s where a pivotal moment in his touching and hilarious memoir Bad Kid takes place. He was a freshman in high school about to shed his “lesbian employee of Blockbuster Video” look and go hardcore gay, goth and druggie. I could have been around the corner buying a mock turtleneck at The Limited, sporting my Simply Red look. I was a senior at Trinity University — as seasoned as your grandma’s iron skillet when it came to booze and drugs — and about to hit New York for a career in publishing and a deep dive into the bottle.
Crabb is a three-time Moth StorySLAM winner and hosts Moth events around the world. Bad Kid is his adolescent coming of age that takes place in early-1990s San Antonio. It’s based on his critically acclaimed, one-man show of the same name. My memoir, Dangerous When Wet, rose out of the ashes of my recovery from alcohol and drugs. It’s about my Beaumont childhood with my Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean, gay coming-out at Trinity, and the “high” life in New York.
Over eggs and virgin Marys, we became “returners” and traded stories about our favorite haunts in San Antonio, our mothers and the fine line of addiction.
“In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B.”
Jamie Brickhouse: I love that you called the Bonham Exchange “The Bottom Exchange.”
David Crabb: The Bottom Sex Change.
JB: Even better. It made me think of a Mama Jean story. My college friends and I were talking about the Bonham Exchange this and the Bonham Exchange that in front of her. She looked appalled and said, “The Bottom Exchange? I think I know what that means!”
DC: (Laughs) I loved going there. That was the first real club I ever went to.
JB: Me too. But you first went to FX and the Z clubs: Changez and Phazez. You nail the mise-en-scène of those clubs perfectly. Have you been back to the Bonham?
DC: It’s different. I went on a Saturday recently, and it was like a tourist club. That thing happened that us gays are so good at. We find a dilapidated neighborhood, make it lovely, and all the straight people come in. There used to be this giant Hispanic drag queen named Ramona, and she hated it when gay guys brought their straight girlfriends, and she’d look at their hair and declare, “Your tint is for filth.”
JB: I remember a tall, striking man dressed head-to-toe in black with a long, ebony ponytail. He was there every weekend, danced alone to every song and knew every lyric. We called him Miss Bonham. All was right in the world once we saw her.
In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B. Your acid-trip stories are both a riot and harrowing. I tripped on acid down the Guadalupe River and saw Nell Carter on a float.
DC: Really?
JB: No. It was the acid talking.
DC: Damn. I got so excited.
JB: But what I noticed about your drug and alcohol intake is that you didn’t seem to have the unquenchable thirst that I had.
DC: Yeah, I know. An addict has that little seed that’s waiting to be awakened, and for whatever reason I didn’t have it. I’m lucky. I loved the social experiment and the adventure of drugs (like watching fucking tulips grow). I feel like your book did a great job of showing what addiction is.
JB: Thanks. Did you ever think you were an addict?
DC: When I was a teenager I wanted to be one. Going to rehab was this sort of alt-youth rite of passage. “Guess what? Sarah went to rehab.” You know what I mean? I can’t do the heavy stuff anymore. I think if I did acid now, I’d want to call my accountant and ask where my 1099s are.
JB: I get that. Acid was the first drug that turned on me. I remember acid-tripping on the River Walk during Fiesta. I started freaking out about every bad thing — catastrophizing — that could happen. Someone could open fire from a riverboat! These cascarones might be hand grenades! I had to return to the safety of campus.
DC: I showed up with my friends at the Tower of the Americas on acid. We were already conspicuous because of our goth look. I straddled that line in the floor where it rotates and put one foot on either side until I was frozen in a full split. Um, I was asked to leave. Now when I visit San Antonio, I always go to the Tower of the Americas and have a cocktail alone to take in the city. It’s a ritual.
JB: You are a returner. I have to say that your book gave me blue balls. I kept waiting for you to get laid, but you didn’t — which is actually kind of sweet. When did you lose your virginity?
DC: It was college. Sophomore year.
JB: Wow. You were a late bloomer.
DC: But an early bloomer with drugs. I’m jealous of your hotel story.
JB: You mean when I was 15 and lost it in a three-way on the family vacation in Acapulco?
DC: Yeah. I was frightened of intimacy.
JB: Of sex? Of AIDS?
DC: All of that. For all my hedonistic boldness, I was very insecure and scared of intimacy. It took someone shaking me and saying, “Hey, can we do it?”
JB: Our mothers are very different, but I love how they were both cringe-inducingly confrontational about our sex lives: Mama Jean telling me there is no safe sex, only two kinds of sex (oral and anal); your mother Teri shoving condoms in your lap as you’re frantically trying to drive away from her. If Mama Jean were alive, I think she’d be proud of my book. How did your mother react?
DC: She’s proud, but she has this odd split ownership of stories about her. At my readings, she’ll turn to the person on her left and claim she never said X. Five minutes later she’ll turn to the person on the right and say, “Can you believe I did that?” But the book made us closer in ways we hadn’t been before.
JB: That’s great.
DC: So who would play Mama Jean with her big hair in the movie?
JB: I could see Christina Hendricks. But I’d really like Meryl Streep to play both Mama Jean and me.
DC: A tour-de-force. Who would play you?
JB: I’d like to finally be hot, so Eddie Redmayne. Bad Kid is perfect for the screen.
DC: I’m in the midst of writing a pilot for Bad Kid and have some meetings with television producers in LA later this year.
JB: Fantastic! I know you continue to perform Bad Kid around the country. Are you working on another book?
DC: I’m writing a comedic memoir about the gristmill of health issues. A big part of my life the last few years has had to do with my health — I was extremely sick a few years ago — and being a working artist with 11 jobs and dealing with Crohn’s disease. And you?
JB: A comedic memoir about my father, Earl, who died last year. Working title: I Favor My Daddy. Let’s do this again when our second books come out, but let’s be genuine returners and meet at the Tower of the Americas and sit and spin.
Jamie Brickhouse has been published in The New York Times, Salon and Out, guest blogs for The Huffington Post and is a Moth StorySLAM winner.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother
December 15, 2015
by Jamie Brickhouse
“You know how some serial killers are “returners” — they’ll go back to the scene of the crime to see their handiwork?” David Crabb asks me. “I’m not a serial killer, but I’m a returner.” I’m not a serial killer either, but like Crabb, I’m a memoirist, so by definition, a returner.
We are having brunch in Hipsterville, New York (aka Williamsburg, Brooklyn) but in our conversation we’ve returned to the North Star Mall food court circa 1990. It’s where a pivotal moment in his touching and hilarious memoir Bad Kid takes place. He was a freshman in high school about to shed his “lesbian employee of Blockbuster Video” look and go hardcore gay, goth and druggie. I could have been around the corner buying a mock turtleneck at The Limited, sporting my Simply Red look. I was a senior at Trinity University — as seasoned as your grandma’s iron skillet when it came to booze and drugs — and about to hit New York for a career in publishing and a deep dive into the bottle.
Crabb is a three-time Moth StorySLAM winner and hosts Moth events around the world. Bad Kid is his adolescent coming of age that takes place in early-1990s San Antonio. It’s based on his critically acclaimed, one-man show of the same name. My memoir, Dangerous When Wet, rose out of the ashes of my recovery from alcohol and drugs. It’s about my Beaumont childhood with my Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean, gay coming-out at Trinity, and the “high” life in New York.
Over eggs and virgin Marys, we became “returners” and traded stories about our favorite haunts in San Antonio, our mothers and the fine line of addiction.
“In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B.”
Jamie Brickhouse: I love that you called the Bonham Exchange “The Bottom Exchange.”
David Crabb: The Bottom Sex Change.
JB: Even better. It made me think of a Mama Jean story. My college friends and I were talking about the Bonham Exchange this and the Bonham Exchange that in front of her. She looked appalled and said, “The Bottom Exchange? I think I know what that means!”
DC: (Laughs) I loved going there. That was the first real club I ever went to.
JB: Me too. But you first went to FX and the Z clubs: Changez and Phazez. You nail the mise-en-scène of those clubs perfectly. Have you been back to the Bonham?
DC: It’s different. I went on a Saturday recently, and it was like a tourist club. That thing happened that us gays are so good at. We find a dilapidated neighborhood, make it lovely, and all the straight people come in. There used to be this giant Hispanic drag queen named Ramona, and she hated it when gay guys brought their straight girlfriends, and she’d look at their hair and declare, “Your tint is for filth.”
JB: I remember a tall, striking man dressed head-to-toe in black with a long, ebony ponytail. He was there every weekend, danced alone to every song and knew every lyric. We called him Miss Bonham. All was right in the world once we saw her.
In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B. Your acid-trip stories are both a riot and harrowing. I tripped on acid down the Guadalupe River and saw Nell Carter on a float.
DC: Really?
JB: No. It was the acid talking.
DC: Damn. I got so excited.
JB: But what I noticed about your drug and alcohol intake is that you didn’t seem to have the unquenchable thirst that I had.
DC: Yeah, I know. An addict has that little seed that’s waiting to be awakened, and for whatever reason I didn’t have it. I’m lucky. I loved the social experiment and the adventure of drugs (like watching fucking tulips grow). I feel like your book did a great job of showing what addiction is.
JB: Thanks. Did you ever think you were an addict?
DC: When I was a teenager I wanted to be one. Going to rehab was this sort of alt-youth rite of passage. “Guess what? Sarah went to rehab.” You know what I mean? I can’t do the heavy stuff anymore. I think if I did acid now, I’d want to call my accountant and ask where my 1099s are.
JB: I get that. Acid was the first drug that turned on me. I remember acid-tripping on the River Walk during Fiesta. I started freaking out about every bad thing — catastrophizing — that could happen. Someone could open fire from a riverboat! These cascarones might be hand grenades! I had to return to the safety of campus.
DC: I showed up with my friends at the Tower of the Americas on acid. We were already conspicuous because of our goth look. I straddled that line in the floor where it rotates and put one foot on either side until I was frozen in a full split. Um, I was asked to leave. Now when I visit San Antonio, I always go to the Tower of the Americas and have a cocktail alone to take in the city. It’s a ritual.
JB: You are a returner. I have to say that your book gave me blue balls. I kept waiting for you to get laid, but you didn’t — which is actually kind of sweet. When did you lose your virginity?
DC: It was college. Sophomore year.
JB: Wow. You were a late bloomer.
DC: But an early bloomer with drugs. I’m jealous of your hotel story.
JB: You mean when I was 15 and lost it in a three-way on the family vacation in Acapulco?
DC: Yeah. I was frightened of intimacy.
JB: Of sex? Of AIDS?
DC: All of that. For all my hedonistic boldness, I was very insecure and scared of intimacy. It took someone shaking me and saying, “Hey, can we do it?”
JB: Our mothers are very different, but I love how they were both cringe-inducingly confrontational about our sex lives: Mama Jean telling me there is no safe sex, only two kinds of sex (oral and anal); your mother Teri shoving condoms in your lap as you’re frantically trying to drive away from her. If Mama Jean were alive, I think she’d be proud of my book. How did your mother react?
DC: She’s proud, but she has this odd split ownership of stories about her. At my readings, she’ll turn to the person on her left and claim she never said X. Five minutes later she’ll turn to the person on the right and say, “Can you believe I did that?” But the book made us closer in ways we hadn’t been before.
JB: That’s great.
DC: So who would play Mama Jean with her big hair in the movie?
JB: I could see Christina Hendricks. But I’d really like Meryl Streep to play both Mama Jean and me.
DC: A tour-de-force. Who would play you?
JB: I’d like to finally be hot, so Eddie Redmayne. Bad Kid is perfect for the screen.
DC: I’m in the midst of writing a pilot for Bad Kid and have some meetings with television producers in LA later this year.
JB: Fantastic! I know you continue to perform Bad Kid around the country. Are you working on another book?
DC: I’m writing a comedic memoir about the gristmill of health issues. A big part of my life the last few years has had to do with my health — I was extremely sick a few years ago — and being a working artist with 11 jobs and dealing with Crohn’s disease. And you?
JB: A comedic memoir about my father, Earl, who died last year. Working title: I Favor My Daddy. Let’s do this again when our second books come out, but let’s be genuine returners and meet at the Tower of the Americas and sit and spin.
Jamie Brickhouse has been published in The New York Times, Salon and Out, guest blogs for The Huffington Post and is a Moth StorySLAM winner.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother
November 5, 2015
Mama Jean & Robin Williams: The 'Stars' of Lewy Body Dementia
I feel the pain of Susan Williams, the widow of Robin Williams. When she told Good Morning America, "Lewy body dementia killed Robin. It's what took his life," I understood, because Lewy body dementia (LBD) is what killed my mother, Mama Jean (Brickhouse). By speaking publicly, Susan Williams is shedding a desperately needed spotlight on LBD, whose biggest challenge is awareness. Thanks to her, people might stop responding "Lewy who?" and start asking, "What's being done to treat and cure LBD?"
Mama Jean didn't take her own life, but she completely lost her mind to LBD. I hope to raise awareness of LBD through my memoir, Dangerous When Wet. Much of it is about my relationship with Mama Jean, and I chronicle the loss of her mind, rapid decline and devastating death from LBD. My book is the first to tell one person's story about the effects of this little-known disease.
Mama Jean was a star to me. With her raven mane professionally done to a tease, makeup always camera ready, she was the Elizabeth Taylor of the small Texas town where I grew up. Like a star, she was self-made. Her jungle-red fingernails clawed out a huge chunk of the financial pie as a stockbroker in the 1980s -- no small feat in what was still a good ole boys' club. So it was doubly devastating when this force of nature started slipping away in much the way that Robin Williams did, as Susan Williams describes the last part of his life.
LBD is named for Friederich H. Lewy, who discovered in the early 1900s the abnormal protein deposits that disrupt brain function. In Alzheimer's patients, lapses in short-term memory are among the first symptoms, while LBD patients might encounter severe disruptions in attention and judgment, hallucinations, delusions and acute sleep interruptions. According to the Lewy Body Dementia Association, LBD "affects an estimated 1.3 million individuals and their families in the United States, but many doctors or other medical professionals still are not familiar with LBD."
Despite that million-plus figure, awareness of LBD is so low -- in and outside of the medical community -- that obtaining a proper diagnosis is often extremely difficult. As the New York Times recently reported, "The disorder is often mistaken for Alzheimer's disease, or Parkinson's disease: There's an Alzheimer's-like slippage in memory and thinking, as well as stiffness and movement problems seen in Parkinson's. The similarities in the three disorders are extensive enough that it often takes more than a year -- and multiple visits to specialists -- to get an accurate diagnosis."
That was the challenge my family faced. After Mama Jean lost her mind, it took four months, several doctors, two geriatric hospitals, and one nursing home before we received a diagnosis. And yet, in all that time, the first time we heard the words Lewy body dementia, was not from doctor but from a family friend whose husband had LBD. The path to diagnosis should not be that circuitous.
Every tragedy sheds a new ray of light. Every disease needs a star. The tragic death of Robin Williams cast a ray of light on LBD and made him a new kind of star, the star of LBD. To me, the biggest star of LBD will always be Mama Jean. We can all do our part by spreading the word about our own stars who are suffering or have died from LBD. The more stories we hear, the more LBD will have beat the challenge of awareness, so it can move on to the momentous challenges of treatment and cure.
You can learn more about LBD by visiting the Lewy body dementia association's website: www.lbda.org.
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother
Mama Jean didn't take her own life, but she completely lost her mind to LBD. I hope to raise awareness of LBD through my memoir, Dangerous When Wet. Much of it is about my relationship with Mama Jean, and I chronicle the loss of her mind, rapid decline and devastating death from LBD. My book is the first to tell one person's story about the effects of this little-known disease.
Mama Jean was a star to me. With her raven mane professionally done to a tease, makeup always camera ready, she was the Elizabeth Taylor of the small Texas town where I grew up. Like a star, she was self-made. Her jungle-red fingernails clawed out a huge chunk of the financial pie as a stockbroker in the 1980s -- no small feat in what was still a good ole boys' club. So it was doubly devastating when this force of nature started slipping away in much the way that Robin Williams did, as Susan Williams describes the last part of his life.
LBD is named for Friederich H. Lewy, who discovered in the early 1900s the abnormal protein deposits that disrupt brain function. In Alzheimer's patients, lapses in short-term memory are among the first symptoms, while LBD patients might encounter severe disruptions in attention and judgment, hallucinations, delusions and acute sleep interruptions. According to the Lewy Body Dementia Association, LBD "affects an estimated 1.3 million individuals and their families in the United States, but many doctors or other medical professionals still are not familiar with LBD."
Despite that million-plus figure, awareness of LBD is so low -- in and outside of the medical community -- that obtaining a proper diagnosis is often extremely difficult. As the New York Times recently reported, "The disorder is often mistaken for Alzheimer's disease, or Parkinson's disease: There's an Alzheimer's-like slippage in memory and thinking, as well as stiffness and movement problems seen in Parkinson's. The similarities in the three disorders are extensive enough that it often takes more than a year -- and multiple visits to specialists -- to get an accurate diagnosis."
That was the challenge my family faced. After Mama Jean lost her mind, it took four months, several doctors, two geriatric hospitals, and one nursing home before we received a diagnosis. And yet, in all that time, the first time we heard the words Lewy body dementia, was not from doctor but from a family friend whose husband had LBD. The path to diagnosis should not be that circuitous.
Every tragedy sheds a new ray of light. Every disease needs a star. The tragic death of Robin Williams cast a ray of light on LBD and made him a new kind of star, the star of LBD. To me, the biggest star of LBD will always be Mama Jean. We can all do our part by spreading the word about our own stars who are suffering or have died from LBD. The more stories we hear, the more LBD will have beat the challenge of awareness, so it can move on to the momentous challenges of treatment and cure.
You can learn more about LBD by visiting the Lewy body dementia association's website: www.lbda.org.
Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother
October 9, 2015
DWW Makes Mary Karr's "Required Reading List"
This quickie post is a combo book recommendation and book brag.
The rec part first: Gallop, don't saunter, to your bookseller of choice and get Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir. It debuted at #3 on the NYT Bestseller List, is #1 on the NYT Culture List & has been rave-reviewed everywhere. The San Francisco Chronicle says it best: "It could have been called 'The Art of Living.'"
Brag part: Karr includes a "Required Reading" list of "mostly memoirs and some hybrids." I'm proud to say that Dangerous When Wet made the cut. I'm ever so honored.
The rec part first: Gallop, don't saunter, to your bookseller of choice and get Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir. It debuted at #3 on the NYT Bestseller List, is #1 on the NYT Culture List & has been rave-reviewed everywhere. The San Francisco Chronicle says it best: "It could have been called 'The Art of Living.'"
Brag part: Karr includes a "Required Reading" list of "mostly memoirs and some hybrids." I'm proud to say that Dangerous When Wet made the cut. I'm ever so honored.
June 21, 2015
Why I stayed in the HIV Closet
Salon.com Personal Essay
The first person I told about my HIV status was a complete stranger. Despite that initial confession, I spent the next years mostly in the HIV closet, like a bird in a cuckoo clock that only comes out every third hour.
I met the stranger at the bar in New York, where I live. It was a scant 30 minutes after my doctor had delivered my test results over the phone: “The good news is you don’t have gonorrhea. The bad news is you’re HIV positive. But these days it’s a manageable condition.” That was 2002 and I was 34. I came of age sexually in the mid-1980s, when AIDS was a deadly epidemic and safe sex was protocol for gay men. I had a domineering and fiercely protective mother, Mama Jean, who warned me that “a moment’s pleasure isn’t worth a lifetime of regret.”
Feeling as if I’d been hit by a two-by-four, I did what I did best in times of crisis: I headed to a bar near my apartment in New York. I felt someone watching me as I downed my second martini. My face must have looked like a Picasso, all the features in a tortured jumble. The stranger asked me what was the matter, and I told him. Through sobs that would put Lucille Ball to shame, I melodramatically cried, “And the worst part: No one will ever have sex with me again!”
“That’s not true,” he said with a smile. “I will.”
He took me around the corner to a porno bookstore and proved he was a man of his word. I understood then what Blanche Dubois meant when she said, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Afterward, drunk and shell-shocked, I went home and waited for Michael, my longtime boyfriend and partner. (Like many gay male couples, we have an open relationship.) As soon as he saw my Picasso face he asked, “What’s wrong?” My lips curled inside my mouth as the tears started to flow again. He maintained his unflappable poker face. “What is it?”
“I had an HIV test. I’m positive.” The dam broke again.
“Oh no.” His face cracked – a hairline fracture – but it cracked.
I guttural cried as he held me and caressed my head. Michael, who remains negative, has stood by my side ever since.
A week later I told Mr. Parker, my best friend since college. I told him at Marie’s Crisis piano bar, the site of many heart-to-hearts for us. We got stinking drunk and belted show tunes – “What I Did for Love,” “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The songs felt painfully prescient or woefully ironic. I made him promise not to tell anyone else. “Of course,” he said. “There’d be some clucking.” The implication was that friends would judge me for my promiscuity. I silently promised myself to never tell my parents.
After that I kept the news in the figurative bottle for the next four years until my problems with the literal bottle forced me into rehab and a step farther out of the HIV closet.
At rehab, everyone was required to testify before the group their 10 consequences of drinking. I rattled mine off in ascending order of importance: biting my assistant on the neck at a party; shouting “I piss on my inner child!” in a crowded restaurant; getting rolled by handsome strangers; losing my job; attempting suicide. When I got to No. 1 on the list, I needed the drum roll from “The Late Show With David Letterman.” “And No. 1 of the Top Ten Consequences of Jamie’s Drinking … Becoming HIV-positive!”
I felt ashamed that I got it, because I should have known better. I felt ashamed that people would know how I got it. I felt ashamed of my self-pity when so many before me who were not lucky enough to be alive when anti-viral drugs became available and died miserable deaths, lived angst-ridden lives in fear of miserable deaths, or suffered the hellish side effects of early drug regimens.
The shame turned to fear. Am I crazy? I thought. It’s one thing to tell a roomful of other alcoholics the exploits of my drinking since many of these strangers had done the same things or worse. But why tell them that I’m positive? They might judge me.
I shut up about HIV for another six years. I told people with whom I hooked up, but even then I thought, I’m telling a complete stranger what I won’t tell my mother. But then again the first person I told was a complete stranger. HIV makes strange bedfellows.
When friends would mention they were positive as casually as I might say, “I’m a Capricorn. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a Joan Crawford nut,” I felt like a fraud and a coward, a liar by omission. When other recovering alcoholics mentioned their HIV status while sharing at a sober meeting, I never raised my hand to say that I identified. I remained silent, sitting not in judgment of the person who shared, but in harsh judgment of myself.
Two years sober and a year after Mama Jean died, I started writing my way out of the closet. I joined an intimate writing workshop where I felt safe to lay the foundation for a memoir. I wrote about Mama Jean. I wrote about my alcoholism. I wrote about my suicide attempt. The act of writing about them brought acceptance until I was ready to go public about these aspects of my life. The last thing I wrote about was my HIV status, but I was undecided about sharing that semi-secret with the world.
Mama Jean went to her grave without knowing. I thought the news would kill her and I couldn’t bear to hear her say, “I told you so.” I regret my decision. It robbed us both of our fundamental roles: me admitting I needed her and she loving me unconditionally.
As I debated whether or not to disclose my status in the memoir, I knew it was time to belly up to the bar and tell my father. All the come-to-Jesus talks had been with Mama Jean. Dad and I talked about movies, my job and the latest gossip in the small Texas town where I grew up and he still lived. Like many men, he was uncomfortable talking about the uncomfortable.
But even then I couldn’t do it until forced. A family member had accidentally found out and threatened to tell him, if I didn’t. It was time to come to Jesus.
I decided to tell him over one of our daily morning phone calls. I ran my fingers through my hair and walked around my apartment in circles for several minutes before I could hit send on the phone.
He answered. “I see on ‘Regis and Kelly’ that y’all are having some pretty weather up there. So what’s happening with—”
I cut off his small talk. My words came like an avalanche. “I never wanted to tell you this, but I need you to know since I may be writing about it in my book.” He already knew the book was about my alcoholism. “I’ll just blurt it out. I’m HIV-positive. I have been for 10 years. I never told you and Mom because I didn’t want y’all to worry.” I spoke so quickly I was almost talking over myself. I didn’t want to give either of us room to react. “And you don’t have to worry. I’ve never been sick. I take one pill a day. I don’t have any side effects. You know these days it’s a manageable disease.” I quoted my doctor whose same words were infuriating when I first heard them 10 years prior. “It’s a chronic condition like diabetes, but not even as bad as diabetes.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. And then. “But you’re OK. You’re going to be OK?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Dad. It’s not like it was. I’ll die some day, but probably not from this. It’s just a chronic condition.”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I’ve been hearing about it. That it’s not even anything big anymore. Nowadays they have some good medicine for it, don’t they?” While Mama Jean would have shrieked melodramatically and fired a barrage of questions – what, when, how, and who gave this to you? – he glossed over the virus and jumped to the good news part.
Then we moved on to the celebrities “Regis and Kelly” interviewed that morning. We both ended the call with a “Love you.” Done. A month after that call, he sent me an article from the Houston Chronicle about the progress in AIDS treatment and the different kinds of HIV meds. His Post-it note read, “Which one of these are you taking?” In one of our phone chats he told me he was going to the annual “Paint the Town Red” gala AIDS fundraiser. It was a casual mention, but it was loud enough for me to hear.
Until I told Dad I was not only in the closet, but still in denial. However, I give myself a pass for that time. We all need doses of benign denial. If we thought of every possible disaster that could visit us – another Republican president, an entire chain of gluten-free restaurants, one more “Real Housewives” spinoff – we’d never get out of bed.
Telling Dad freed me. I wasn’t going to be a liar by omission anymore. I started openly sharing about it at sober meetings. I even joined an HIV-positive sober meeting. The longer I’ve been open about my HIV status, the more people I meet who are positive. Many are in the semi-closet: haven’t told their parents, keep it from their co-workers, only tell select friends. If more positive people are open about it, the more people will see it for what it is in this country (a chronic condition) and the less HIV will be weighed down by shame and stigma.
I’m relieved that my HIV status is no longer a secret I have to manage. Not something to be pitied or celebrated. It’s simply a part of who I am.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir
The first person I told about my HIV status was a complete stranger. Despite that initial confession, I spent the next years mostly in the HIV closet, like a bird in a cuckoo clock that only comes out every third hour.
I met the stranger at the bar in New York, where I live. It was a scant 30 minutes after my doctor had delivered my test results over the phone: “The good news is you don’t have gonorrhea. The bad news is you’re HIV positive. But these days it’s a manageable condition.” That was 2002 and I was 34. I came of age sexually in the mid-1980s, when AIDS was a deadly epidemic and safe sex was protocol for gay men. I had a domineering and fiercely protective mother, Mama Jean, who warned me that “a moment’s pleasure isn’t worth a lifetime of regret.”
Feeling as if I’d been hit by a two-by-four, I did what I did best in times of crisis: I headed to a bar near my apartment in New York. I felt someone watching me as I downed my second martini. My face must have looked like a Picasso, all the features in a tortured jumble. The stranger asked me what was the matter, and I told him. Through sobs that would put Lucille Ball to shame, I melodramatically cried, “And the worst part: No one will ever have sex with me again!”
“That’s not true,” he said with a smile. “I will.”
He took me around the corner to a porno bookstore and proved he was a man of his word. I understood then what Blanche Dubois meant when she said, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Afterward, drunk and shell-shocked, I went home and waited for Michael, my longtime boyfriend and partner. (Like many gay male couples, we have an open relationship.) As soon as he saw my Picasso face he asked, “What’s wrong?” My lips curled inside my mouth as the tears started to flow again. He maintained his unflappable poker face. “What is it?”
“I had an HIV test. I’m positive.” The dam broke again.
“Oh no.” His face cracked – a hairline fracture – but it cracked.
I guttural cried as he held me and caressed my head. Michael, who remains negative, has stood by my side ever since.
A week later I told Mr. Parker, my best friend since college. I told him at Marie’s Crisis piano bar, the site of many heart-to-hearts for us. We got stinking drunk and belted show tunes – “What I Did for Love,” “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The songs felt painfully prescient or woefully ironic. I made him promise not to tell anyone else. “Of course,” he said. “There’d be some clucking.” The implication was that friends would judge me for my promiscuity. I silently promised myself to never tell my parents.
After that I kept the news in the figurative bottle for the next four years until my problems with the literal bottle forced me into rehab and a step farther out of the HIV closet.
At rehab, everyone was required to testify before the group their 10 consequences of drinking. I rattled mine off in ascending order of importance: biting my assistant on the neck at a party; shouting “I piss on my inner child!” in a crowded restaurant; getting rolled by handsome strangers; losing my job; attempting suicide. When I got to No. 1 on the list, I needed the drum roll from “The Late Show With David Letterman.” “And No. 1 of the Top Ten Consequences of Jamie’s Drinking … Becoming HIV-positive!”
I felt ashamed that I got it, because I should have known better. I felt ashamed that people would know how I got it. I felt ashamed of my self-pity when so many before me who were not lucky enough to be alive when anti-viral drugs became available and died miserable deaths, lived angst-ridden lives in fear of miserable deaths, or suffered the hellish side effects of early drug regimens.
The shame turned to fear. Am I crazy? I thought. It’s one thing to tell a roomful of other alcoholics the exploits of my drinking since many of these strangers had done the same things or worse. But why tell them that I’m positive? They might judge me.
I shut up about HIV for another six years. I told people with whom I hooked up, but even then I thought, I’m telling a complete stranger what I won’t tell my mother. But then again the first person I told was a complete stranger. HIV makes strange bedfellows.
When friends would mention they were positive as casually as I might say, “I’m a Capricorn. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a Joan Crawford nut,” I felt like a fraud and a coward, a liar by omission. When other recovering alcoholics mentioned their HIV status while sharing at a sober meeting, I never raised my hand to say that I identified. I remained silent, sitting not in judgment of the person who shared, but in harsh judgment of myself.
Two years sober and a year after Mama Jean died, I started writing my way out of the closet. I joined an intimate writing workshop where I felt safe to lay the foundation for a memoir. I wrote about Mama Jean. I wrote about my alcoholism. I wrote about my suicide attempt. The act of writing about them brought acceptance until I was ready to go public about these aspects of my life. The last thing I wrote about was my HIV status, but I was undecided about sharing that semi-secret with the world.
Mama Jean went to her grave without knowing. I thought the news would kill her and I couldn’t bear to hear her say, “I told you so.” I regret my decision. It robbed us both of our fundamental roles: me admitting I needed her and she loving me unconditionally.
As I debated whether or not to disclose my status in the memoir, I knew it was time to belly up to the bar and tell my father. All the come-to-Jesus talks had been with Mama Jean. Dad and I talked about movies, my job and the latest gossip in the small Texas town where I grew up and he still lived. Like many men, he was uncomfortable talking about the uncomfortable.
But even then I couldn’t do it until forced. A family member had accidentally found out and threatened to tell him, if I didn’t. It was time to come to Jesus.
I decided to tell him over one of our daily morning phone calls. I ran my fingers through my hair and walked around my apartment in circles for several minutes before I could hit send on the phone.
He answered. “I see on ‘Regis and Kelly’ that y’all are having some pretty weather up there. So what’s happening with—”
I cut off his small talk. My words came like an avalanche. “I never wanted to tell you this, but I need you to know since I may be writing about it in my book.” He already knew the book was about my alcoholism. “I’ll just blurt it out. I’m HIV-positive. I have been for 10 years. I never told you and Mom because I didn’t want y’all to worry.” I spoke so quickly I was almost talking over myself. I didn’t want to give either of us room to react. “And you don’t have to worry. I’ve never been sick. I take one pill a day. I don’t have any side effects. You know these days it’s a manageable disease.” I quoted my doctor whose same words were infuriating when I first heard them 10 years prior. “It’s a chronic condition like diabetes, but not even as bad as diabetes.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. And then. “But you’re OK. You’re going to be OK?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Dad. It’s not like it was. I’ll die some day, but probably not from this. It’s just a chronic condition.”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I’ve been hearing about it. That it’s not even anything big anymore. Nowadays they have some good medicine for it, don’t they?” While Mama Jean would have shrieked melodramatically and fired a barrage of questions – what, when, how, and who gave this to you? – he glossed over the virus and jumped to the good news part.
Then we moved on to the celebrities “Regis and Kelly” interviewed that morning. We both ended the call with a “Love you.” Done. A month after that call, he sent me an article from the Houston Chronicle about the progress in AIDS treatment and the different kinds of HIV meds. His Post-it note read, “Which one of these are you taking?” In one of our phone chats he told me he was going to the annual “Paint the Town Red” gala AIDS fundraiser. It was a casual mention, but it was loud enough for me to hear.
Until I told Dad I was not only in the closet, but still in denial. However, I give myself a pass for that time. We all need doses of benign denial. If we thought of every possible disaster that could visit us – another Republican president, an entire chain of gluten-free restaurants, one more “Real Housewives” spinoff – we’d never get out of bed.
Telling Dad freed me. I wasn’t going to be a liar by omission anymore. I started openly sharing about it at sober meetings. I even joined an HIV-positive sober meeting. The longer I’ve been open about my HIV status, the more people I meet who are positive. Many are in the semi-closet: haven’t told their parents, keep it from their co-workers, only tell select friends. If more positive people are open about it, the more people will see it for what it is in this country (a chronic condition) and the less HIV will be weighed down by shame and stigma.
I’m relieved that my HIV status is no longer a secret I have to manage. Not something to be pitied or celebrated. It’s simply a part of who I am.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir
May 19, 2015
The Rivard Report
Feature from San Antonio's Rivard Report by Thomas Payton
When I lived in Atlanta I was spoiled. Every week – usually several days a week – a cavalcade of the nation’s best LGBTQ authors would pass through, reading their new books at the famed but now-defunct OutWrite Books in Midtown or other stores. There is no doubt that San Antonio is barely a blip on the national LGBTQ literary radar and that has been a disappointment.
I’ve been in the book business for more than 25 years, and in moving to Texas I’ve been surprised to see such a shortage of books about LGBTQ life and history in the Lone Star State. For a state so large, anchored by cities like San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Dallas, LGBTQ history is profoundly unreported – and, as a result, certainly misunderstood in many circles – when compared to other parts of the nation including the Deep South from Mississippi to Virginia.
We have an opportunity to help fix that this Thursday at The Twig Book Shop. Acclaimed debut author, and Trinity University alumnus, Jaime Brickhouse returns to his native Texas to read from his new memoir, “Dangerous When Wet” at the book shop located in the Pearl on Thursday, May 14 at 5:30 p.m.
The memoir is ultimately a testimony to his adoring mother, Mama Jean – a matriarchal Texas woman with the flair of Elizabeth Taylor and bluster of Auntie Mame. She was strong, flamboyant and outlandish, and she adored her son and wanted him to remain her little boy forever. From a young age, however, he longed for the drink she held in her hand and to discover his own path to recreate her fabulousness, or discover his own. That path led to New York and a star-studded career in the publishing and entertainment industries. The journey was laden with challenges also, and he struggled to overcome alcoholism while coping with an HIV diagnosis.
Brickhouse wrestles about reconciling a life lived fast and brazenly but at a distance with moving past the barriers to open disclosure to family members. From coming out while a freshman at Trinity to sharing his addiction and HIV status with his mother who held her son on a pedestal, he navigates familiar terrain with great finesse poignantly laced with a mix of camp and hometown humor.
Storytelling in the South has a distinct flavor, and one can spot Brickhouse’s Deep South roots as he spins tales that hit as simultaneously outrageous and thoroughly authentic. Equal parts “Steel Magnolias” and an evening with David Sedaris, it is not a surprise to find reviewers nationally making writerly comparisons of Brickhouse to Mary Karr and Augusten Burroughs.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir
When I lived in Atlanta I was spoiled. Every week – usually several days a week – a cavalcade of the nation’s best LGBTQ authors would pass through, reading their new books at the famed but now-defunct OutWrite Books in Midtown or other stores. There is no doubt that San Antonio is barely a blip on the national LGBTQ literary radar and that has been a disappointment.
I’ve been in the book business for more than 25 years, and in moving to Texas I’ve been surprised to see such a shortage of books about LGBTQ life and history in the Lone Star State. For a state so large, anchored by cities like San Antonio, Austin, Houston, and Dallas, LGBTQ history is profoundly unreported – and, as a result, certainly misunderstood in many circles – when compared to other parts of the nation including the Deep South from Mississippi to Virginia.
We have an opportunity to help fix that this Thursday at The Twig Book Shop. Acclaimed debut author, and Trinity University alumnus, Jaime Brickhouse returns to his native Texas to read from his new memoir, “Dangerous When Wet” at the book shop located in the Pearl on Thursday, May 14 at 5:30 p.m.
The memoir is ultimately a testimony to his adoring mother, Mama Jean – a matriarchal Texas woman with the flair of Elizabeth Taylor and bluster of Auntie Mame. She was strong, flamboyant and outlandish, and she adored her son and wanted him to remain her little boy forever. From a young age, however, he longed for the drink she held in her hand and to discover his own path to recreate her fabulousness, or discover his own. That path led to New York and a star-studded career in the publishing and entertainment industries. The journey was laden with challenges also, and he struggled to overcome alcoholism while coping with an HIV diagnosis.
Brickhouse wrestles about reconciling a life lived fast and brazenly but at a distance with moving past the barriers to open disclosure to family members. From coming out while a freshman at Trinity to sharing his addiction and HIV status with his mother who held her son on a pedestal, he navigates familiar terrain with great finesse poignantly laced with a mix of camp and hometown humor.
Storytelling in the South has a distinct flavor, and one can spot Brickhouse’s Deep South roots as he spins tales that hit as simultaneously outrageous and thoroughly authentic. Equal parts “Steel Magnolias” and an evening with David Sedaris, it is not a surprise to find reviewers nationally making writerly comparisons of Brickhouse to Mary Karr and Augusten Burroughs.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir
Lagniappe
Lagniappe (pronounced LAN-YAP) is the name of the most coveted Jr. League cookbook where I'm from, Beaumont, Texas. The nearby Louisiana border haunts Beaumont, so there's a heavy dose of Cajun or "co
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