Steve Fellner
A Queer Autoportrait
I’ve never had a headache in my life. I’ve never burped either. Once, in grade school, I wrote “clouds burp rain.” The teacher heralded me a genius. If he didn’t, I would have become a forest ranger. Trees bore me. So do rainbows. Once I went into a confessional and told the priest that I vandalized a rainbow. I always wondered how heavy a rainbow is. The actual number of pounds. I asked a different priest that. He said, “What do you want to know? Are you planning to carry one away?” It was a bright idea. When I go to shave, I never turn on the lights and end up nicking my face, sometimes bleeding. I did this during the time my gay friends and I were all getting AIDS and dying. My favorite kind of wakes are the ones where they serve macaroni and cheese, which is what they do at a lot of them. Velveeta will always be my favorite. I’m a traditionalist. Except when I’m not. During my first year of teaching, I assigned an anthology called High Risk, which included the question, “How does homelessness impact a queer person’s sex life?” Someone’s parent called about it and said he didn’t go to college. If he had known the lectures were that interesting, he would have gone. My father didn’t want me to go and threw out all my admission letters. He wanted me to work as a meter reader at Commonwealth Edson. All that walking he thought would be good for me. A junior high gym teacher called me a “grazer.” One time on a baseball field, he tossed an apple core at my head and said, “Feed on that.” At the time, I didn’t know he was a Vietnam veteran. I might not have reported him. I hate watching people suffer. It’s tedious. But I do wish a fair number of people dead. One time I was trapped in an office with a boss who started yelling at me, because there were three chairs in his office and I sat in the wrong one. He said I was lucky he didn’t write me up. I sort of wish he had. What would he have written: “He sat in the wrong chair”? I wish I never became a teacher. I would have made an excellent producer for the Oscars, making sure all the sets looked right, and the presenters’ jokes weren’t too bad. One time a colleague said it was good I never had children. “You’d be the quintessential stage mom,” he said. When my best friend had a child, she asked me to be the godparent. Then something happened. No fight, nothing. She sent a thank-you note. It said: I changed my mind. I wonder if after my biological mother gave me up for adoption, she ever regretted her decision. I doubt it. That’s the good thing about capitalism: you can just replace one thing with another. I learned that in a college economic course. I got a C-. Here are some of the other failures in my life: I’ve never read a book longer than 250 pages; figured out how to prepare absinthe correctly; tamed a lion; saved someone through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; resurrected a defective computer printer; had the waiter return an ill-prepared meal to the kitchen; done karaoke. One time during Truth or Dare, someone asked me, “What is one quality that you wish you had that you don’t possess?” It was dancing. The next round, I received a dare: keep your eyes closed as we all shimmy around you. Their joy haunts me to this day. At fifty-one, I still don’t like staying home on the weekends alone. My only blessing: fun is as rare as a diamond. I don’t own anything of any value. Unless you count a special edition Beanie Baby from McDonald’s ($500). My best friend’s sister died and she left her all this jewelry in the will. A ring costs $25,000 at least. She’s rich and careless and lost it. I found it. I slid it into my front pocket. I didn’t say that I found it until the next day. After I saw a movie about what happens if you eat McDonald’s religiously for a month, I decided to do the same thing except with salmon. I felt better every day. Best I ever have. Once I realized this, I never ate it again. I feel closer to the Domino’s pizza delivery person than my own friends. They don’t expect anything from me. When I give them a tip, they’re grateful. My mother gave me power-of-attorney. There is no inheritance. She just trusted that I would pull the plug once it came to that. “Your best quality is you never regret anything,” she said. “You don’t know what doubt is.” My best friend in grad school died recently. He fell on a knife in a bathtub. Video cameras captured film of an escort jogging down flights of stairs. I can still remember the noise of my father’s Betamax recorder late at night: he was always rewinding his porn. I didn’t look at any porn until I was 27. No one believes me. Everyone believes everything I say because I am always emphatic. I’m bipolar, but I never ended up in an institution or spending a whole day in an ER. I feel that shows how strong I am. Before I had an episode, I told a student they should go off their meds. “Those pills are as likely to kill you as yourself,” I said. I never saw the student again. I’m so egotistical that I think I cause people to kill themselves. I never had a rubber duck. I hated Sesame Street when I was a child. I also hated Legos. I like Smelly Stickers. Once I was so excited that I found a new scent, I ran out of the store without thinking. My mother was so upset. She called me a goon. I never looked the word up in a dictionary to see what it meant. For me, the worst thing you can do verbally is to tell them to shut up. A geometry teacher once told me I was stupid. That’s when I started trying out for school plays. I played Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace. I did my own makeup. Too much rouge and lipstick. My drama teacher said I looked like a drag queen; the character was never meant to be played that way. She meant to hurt me. Now I wonder if I was simply ahead of my time. My husband and I went without a car for eleven months in a village with no friends. We walked everywhere. When we got a car, it was brand new and we still walked every- where. We were afraid we would crash and all our money would have felt like a waste. The last time I saw my father was at a Disney World tropical-themed restaurant with all those animatronic animals and birds making scary, clipped noises. He only stayed for 45 minutes. I don’t remember anything he said. But I do remember sitting there with the computerized animals, crying, imagining the hippopotamus talking to me. He had a sweet nose. When I sneeze, I always sneeze more than once. My record: twenty-five times. If you don’t take pills for your moods, I don’t consider you really mentally ill. There’s a part of you that’s still there fighting. For me, proof of my sickness is that I stop feeling rage. My mother told me that my biological mother held me for ten seconds before she handed her to me. I never asked: Did you time it? I feel like I need to know that more than what she looks like. It’s weird how things become so simple after you have a glass of iced tea. I went to see a fortune teller at Lilydale, NY, a commune of psychics who only come out during the summer months. She said I had too many lifelines on the palms of my hands. She went to get another psychic for a second opinion. She was flabbergasted, too. My husband has no wrinkles on his face. We get worried a group of evil scientists will kidnap him to find out why. I stole a piece of the AIDS quilt. I cut it up in little pieces and threw them all away except one. I take it wherever I go. I always wanted to be a writer who felt the need to carry a little notebook and pen. Like you would see something important and just had to jot it down. I bet people like that live longer than people like me. I am jealous of Joe Brainard who created a book full of small and detailed memories, each punctuated with the words, “I remember.” I assigned it to my class. They all said they got bored and only read the first page. I love that Frank O’ Hara said that he liked movies better than poems. Or something like that. I want to be one of those poets who can recite long sections of other people’s poems from memory. One of the saddest moments of my life: realizing that my aging mind can’t carry as many thoughts as it once did. I’ll never have a starring role in a community theater production when I become old. I will never receive a standing ovation. I have never recieved one ever, partly because I haven’t excelled in life. My undergraduate student newspaper voted me Most Likely to Succeed and Most Like to Die of AIDS. I still wonder if they cancel each other out. I like being a tragic figure. I played Egeus in A Midsummer’s Night Dream. It was my best role. Gym class always made me nervous. I was always afraid of locking up my clothes. I could never remember my combination. My father sat with me and made me practice. He was with me for two hours. I was lousy at baseball. When the coaches were picking the teams, I was labeled C.G.K.: Could Get Killed. I always played right field. Once there was a championship game. We were the best. Someone hit the ball and it flew toward me and I closed my eyes and ran toward the ball and it landed in my glove. Ralph “The Karate Kid” Macchio’s favorite food was mandarin oranges. When I had a crush on him, I forced myself to believe that it was my favorite, too. I love Chun King pizza rolls. I love food within food. Tupperware turns me on. Once I went a month without showering. The world looked the best it ever had.