More Cleaning

So yesterday I had Jesus (Hey soos) come by with his College Hunks Hauling Junk truck and he and his co-worker managed to fit in a bunch of stuff to take to the dump.  He remembered me from two years ago "when your roof was being redone."

1. The old chest of drawers I'd originally purchased from Goodwill back in 1988 when I moved here. It was pretty much junk anyway. So Sunday night I opened its drawers and found several "trip memento" boxes that I stacked in tubs awaiting my desire to create a few more memory books.
2. An old trunk covered in peeling-off floral wallpaper that had originally accompanied me to Pocatello, Idaho, in 1971.  When I cleaned out this trunk I found A WONDERFUL surprise: a photograph I had lost since 2006!*
3. A bunch of linen paper saving boxes that my dad had packed his columns in.
4. A box of throw away books once used for crafting.
5. Old wooden shelving.
6. Scraps of tarp material.
7. a weird old 20 lb weight (metal with concrete inside)

Jesus managed to fit it all into the very last part of the truck so I wound up paying only $139.

 

*Now, about the photograph that once was lost but now it's found. I had noticed it was missing after I moved from my "airlock office" in Deschutes Hall and into the "Administrator's office" in Pence. So I haven't seen it since 2006. I found it wrapped in a bunch of material I'd used to line one wall of my teacher office.

 It's a picture of old friend Lee, me, Mike's boyfriend, Mike's friend who was a girl, and Mike. I still feel embarrassed by the way Mike's boyfriend and I behaved at his funeral in 1986. We were horrified by the way the Catholic priest, who didn't know Mike at all, talked about him and we acted badly. I feel sorry for Mike's parents. At some point his mother gave me a bad smelling knitted bedspread as a keepsake. Mike once told me that he was the only gay man he knew with a cliche relationship with his parents.

Mike was my closest friend in graduate school. From January, 1985 until his death in August, 1986 he lived in the apartment upstairs from mine in an old, chopped up mansion on East South Temple in Salt Lake City. I've mentioned him before. It's hard to describe what a wonderful relationship we had. At the time I was separated from Will and working through my terrible relationship with Chris. And I was struggling with the doctoral program at one of the top ten comm. schools in the country.  Mike helped me survive my first two years at the University of Utah. He was so much smarter and better educated than I was, having gone to a "good" four year university where they actually read academic articles in classes rather than "original" work by Aristotle and Churchill, as I did in my Idaho classrooms. Mike also introduced me to the work of Matt Groening and the world of Dr. Who. For months we'd end most weekday nights having cocoa in front of his small tv, watching Monty Python or Dr. Who as they played on KUED. We would quote the Pythons as we walked to class and talk in silly voices and do silly walks.

My brain was not working for a full quarter after his death. So much so, that a member of my committee, Dave Eason, later told me that he "gave" me a B in his class that fall only because he felt sorry for me.

I'm so happy to have found this photograph so I can remember better what Mike looked like. It's also helpful to remember a time when Lee and I were still good friends. That close relationship ended in 2012 (though it should have ended in my head much earlier). Lee and I are still friends but not in "that way."

"That way" of knowing what the other would say, of being in the other's heart and mind.

I don't know what friendship is anymore. Is it the relationship I have with someone I see once a month?  Once a quarter? Once a week? Is it determined by what we talk about? By what we do together?

I'm clearly at a loss as to how to do it. I'm in mental pain so much of the time because I'm such a failure at it. I've lost people because of my ineptitude.  And then there is the "friend" I gave thousands of dollars to to help her out and just got a texted "thank you." Not a card. Not a call. Basically someone I've loved for 20 years just shitting on me. To me, because of Will, giving money is a way of showing love. He couldn't tell me he loved me or that I was beautiful, but he used money to support me in spite of all those moral decisions I made with which he disagreed. Why would I show so much love to a person who shit on me? Because I'm a loser. Because I hoped that giving someone money would encourage them to care about me.

So it's such a blessing to have this picture to remember a time when I had no "lover" but I had a friend who I saw every fucking day. A friend I lived near. A friend I watched tv with. A friend to go dancing with.

Drawing mix of Tom of Finland and Matt Groening by Mike Swan

It's my relationship with Dead Mike (murdered Mike) that I use to measure my relationship with Dead Will. I still have four years to go before my brain is working properly.