Shabdkosh

About a decade ago I moved to a country. My friend was my boss, my boss my friend.

I could get sued for this because of the nondisclosure agreement, but fuck it, me and Rose McGowan.

Unlike Harvey, she, my harasser, was very pretty.

When I arrived, they were still putting the finishing touches on my house around the corner.  Or so I was told. In retrospect.... So I stayed with her. The way her house was set up, my bedroom was a respectable number of yards away from hers, but there was a back path between them that the staff couldn't see.

It gives me shivers to remember it.

We would have breakfast, then sit on the veranda underneath a spinning fan working Sudoku, swimming every 45 minutes, playing. ("Shep! You have a good body!") We would drink beer on ice beginning at eleven, and watch Bollywood movies in her bedroom, the shutters drawn against the perpetually 82-degree sun.

She taught me how to dance the men's parts.

By night, she would start touching me. People might have come by, or we'd have been out to a Western dinner with them, but the song remained the same. I didn't want to touch her, or to be touched, for many reasons. But I played a fool rather than walk the path back to my bedroom... until 7am.

I was attracted to her, which showed, in all of the ways it always does. But I was also a world away from any power I'd ever had, and behaved like a very dumb version of myself. At this point, I had decades of defending myself against comparable situations. Just not with bosses, nor women.

There was insistence that I spend the night in her bed. I was weak enough to do it a couple of times, strong and canny enough not to do anything but put my arm around her until she fell asleep.

None of this would have happened if I'd been Robert in New York. None of this would have happened if I hadn't abandoned that guy in search of experience that I erroneously determined would be good for me psychologically and professionally.

Elegant as I thought I was about it all... Catastrophe.

It took months to play out, but I did not have the job anymore once I made it clear that my arm was all that was available, my willingness to dance like Saif.

Every story that comes out about established power vs. striving power will make me think of Kemang. Understand that you don't think of yourself as weak, just sophisticatedly navigating an untenable situation. You. Are. Not.

Manners, disbelief, and self-respect conspire to allow it.

It is only afterwards that you see it for the insanity it was. It's only afterwards that you are sad.

Forget about your house of cards
And I'll deal you mine

You Say You're Changing: Madison

I am in the only spot in Madison where my computer steadfastly refuses to connect with the WiFi. This place is ur-Wisconsin. I don’t dislike it.

Everybody’s changing and I don’t feel the same.

Outside, the weather dismal. Light rain, dark and grey and cold. No amount of smiling co-eds can overcome the gloom, can warm me.

It was 90 and humid when I arrived three weeks ago. So, a seasonal shift.

I’ve worked a week landscaping an intractable plot of land around a cursed wooden ranch house in Middleton, which is apparently a place of its own, Madison also being a place of its own that is not Milwaukee or Green Bay.

I am, today, a waiter in a pub that has not a healthy thing on the menu. But cheese curds and a thousand kinds of aioli.

It is pretty here. The lakes and the architecture, and despite the insane amount of University wear, the kids. They are as gorgeous as in Ohio and Michigan, and mostly well behaved.

I have no idea, beyond landscaping and waiting tables, what the adults are up to. I hear they are fucking up politics?

The pretty and kitschy Capitol looms over us all. Not my first time at this kind of merry-go-round, rodeo, other accepted metaphor.

The music is great, I’m always Shazam-ing, and the beer is decent.

Try to understand that I’m

Trying to make a move

Just to stay in the game

I try to stay awake

And remember my name

There is an element of tabula rasa that I appreciate.

Bars have gaming machines and electronic dart boards. The former not something I’d ever do; I have been to Vegas five times and never played so much as a slot machine. (There are empirically more enjoyable ways to lose money.) The latter profoundly unsatisfying, for the boards aren’t cork. You don’t even know how much darts were part of my life in Jakarta, swatting away potential Indonesian wives to beat Baba at cricket.

It's a couple-mile hike to Trader Joe’s, but I take it. It’s a drab drive to Middleton in Roger’s truck, all strip malls and lousy roadmates. But I take it.

Am rendered absolutely filthy. Recover surprisingly well from muscle ache.

Madison IS a place, which is all I ask. There are lakes on either side, M one lake and M the other. There are old theaters that get all the good bands and comedians.

Not everybody says, “I’ve never been to New York,” as they do in San Francisco (still) and Portland.

Friday night I am going to man the door at a “club” with “dueling pianos.” Your guess as good as mine.

This is the kind of shit I did at 24, and I am doing it again at 54, and I’m game. It’s exhilarating in a low-key kind of way.