(8/6/11, via Facebook chat)

ME: i plan to do a big book surgery this week. take out all of the poop. literally

FRIEND WHO WORKS IN PUBLISHING: haha, ok

M: [also] take out the “dad” stuff.  and see what happens.

F: hmm. okay. why?

M: i think maybe this book should be about: TOUR / GAY / ARTIST[IC] GENESIS, and if it doesn’t have to do with one of those things, maybe it should go.  it’s not, like, my autobiography[, and] maybe i was making it so. 

F: hmmm. but it is you that we want to know about. what compels you to do what you do and to take this trip of literal and figurative discovery, so i wouldn’t shit that part off completely.

M: well — but it’s not really my dad who propels me, i guess.  the backstory can slow things down. we’ll see. i’m interested to see what happens if i just eject the familial backstory and the colitis stuff. 

F: okay. hmm. i am not sure about this, [if] you are really asking me.

M: well — i was trying to think of how to get from 400+ pages way down.  

F: okay, lemme read that when you want to send and let’s make a date to hang out. 

M: i — i —- i thought….. you’d like this (sniffle sniffle)

F: no, i might and it also doesn’t matter what i want.  send and we will make it happen.  it. is. all. happening.

——-

(NEW YORK)

I couldn’t get sick again.  During my preparations for the tour in Vermont, I started losing several buckets of blood a day from a self-destructing colon — something that hadn’t happened since my Indiana days — and this colitis flare-up landed me in the hospital just in time for my twenty-third birthday.  Colitis was one of the only things I may have inherited from my father, who called every day while I was in the hospital.  It was the most we’d talked in a long time, and there was a note of guilt to his voice, like he’d caused this.  Anyway, the memory of that flare-up, still relatively recent, was reminder enough that perhaps I couldn’t really afford to get nervous these days, not with a disease waiting in the wings to eat away at my insides.

——-

(OKLAHOMA)

The implications of [people dropping what they were doing to come to my concert] were all rather spellbinding, but I had to go to the bathroom, and with just a few minutes left to intermission, I was backstage again, chugging water and watching with a colon-pinched panic as Aida breezed into the room with arms outstretched.  Armen followed behind, camera in hand. He’d been taking pictures throughout the concert, and even forced me into a pose just before the show, a horrible shot where I looked like an effeminate cat.  I wanted to delete it that moment, but he seemed so happy with the result.  Even now backstage, watching as Aida hugged me, he was smiling and shaking my hand over her shoulder.  “My friend…” he said, and nothing more.

Then Aaron appeared.  “People love it!  There were two lesbians kissing beside me the whole time.” 

I muttered something in return, who knows what, because all I could think about was my churning intestines.  I addressed the room.  “I’ll be right out [to start the second half] in a minute.  I just have to use the restroom first.”  I prayed they would leave.  Only a thin door separated the bathroom from the cramped area we occupied.

By grace, they shuffled out and I rushed into the tiny bathroom, tearing my pants down and releasing another gallon of black liquid into the toilet.  To my side, a mirror hung lengthwise on the wall, framing me completely.  How comical it suddenly seemed, me all dressed up, hair done, even my popped zits clearing up, and a supportive audience waiting in the hall just a few feet away; and me, here, cringing as my stomach groaned, gurgled, and squirted another painful shot of diarrhea into the bowl, an almost involuntary function of a purging body which seemed to be staging a slow, constant, senseless mutiny from within.  Colitis.  But at least it wasn’t blood.  I kept repeating that to myself.  At least it wasn’t blood.  

 I came from the room wiping my brow, and within a minute was onstage.

——-

(MISSOURI)

… should have already been on my second round of meds that day, which meant I’d missed ten pills so far.  I’d all but forgotten how many enemas and suppositories I was supposed to be administering, it had been so long.  But things should be fine, I thought.  The explosion of mucus in the toilet I experienced earlier today was probably just nerves.

Such explosions had slowly become a part of my life again — not quite colitis, but something… something was going on, something significant enough to keep hidden from my family and friends when we talked on the phone.  I didn’t want people thinking my body was acting up again, especially so early in the game, and especially after the bloody spectacle that sabotaged America 88x50 when I’d originally planned to begin it earlier that winter.  Besides, these were just loose bowels.  There was no blood.  Thank God, no blood.

——-

(WYOMING)

[… the meds which] I’d all but stopped taking despite the fact that I’d begun running with more frequency to the bathroom, purging buckets of black diarrhea and undigested food — a fact I had no interest in disclosing to my mom, friends, or doctors back east.  They’d want me to come home, cut the tour short, increase the meds, the meds I wasn’t taking, the meds melting in the backseat — Colazol pills now hardened into a tangled mass, Rowasa enemas exploded in their packaging, white juice dripping out and filling the car with a putrid smell of slow-baking mayonnaise. 

I remembered that previous winter, when colitis ripped me from my preparations for America 88x50 and landed me in a hospital bed.  First admitted to the same Vermont hospital I was born in, I was discharged after a week to go to New York City to keep an appointment which, incidentally, I’d scheduled months before with my doctor there, the doctor who wrote the book on colitis [treatment], and the only doctor between Indiana and Vermont who didn’t think I should have had my colon removed.  By the time I got to his office on 86^th Street, I was keeling over.  He admitted me to Mt. Sinai as an emergency — “I won’t examine you like this” — where I stayed for weeks undergoing experimental treatments.

At Mt. Sinai I didn’t want to look at the musical scores stacked neatly on my nightstand, too terrified to be reminded of the notes I was forgetting and the tour slipping through my fingers.  When I returned to Vermont I weighed probably less than a hundred pounds.  I lifted weights and drank protein shakes for nearly a month, and succeeded in giving myself not one but two hernias, but I didn’t touch the piano.  I didn’t even go near it.

Finally, one night when no one was home I mustered the courage to the try out my program and see what I’d lost.  I played it a little slower but not by much, and every note flowed freely from my body, completely controlled, tension-free, intricate, tender, effortless.  I was just as much a witness as I was a participant; for the first time I could actually hear myself playing the music.  It was heaven.  And then, like bile leaking in around the edges of an internal wound, a sick insight drowned out my euphoria: This was the only time I’d ever experienced bliss like this at the piano, and it had required a month of hospitalization, a hiatus, a disease.  That was my prescription for a beautiful performance?  And in a second I was snatched back to normal.

——-

(ALASKA)

Still tapering down from last winter’s hospital stint, I had cut back to only about thirteen pills a day for my colitis — no more enemas and exotic immune-suppressants — but every time my stomach grumbled or my intestines gurgled, so would my heart flutter with fear.  Is this the moment?  Is this when I flare again?

——-

(MONTANA)

What was becoming a common side-effect of my celibacy, I woke up to the messy aftermath of yet another wet dream.   I couldn’t recall much of it, probably because of the instant and utter horror I experienced over the wet spot in the center of my bunk.  The hostel, after all, changed its sheets daily, and this puddle, which had by now soaked all the way through to the mattress itself — must’ve been a good dream — would be discovered in a matter of hours. 

I decided to take a shower and think about what to do.  With hot water steaming the room, I sat on the toilet, as always hoping for the best — No blood No blood — when the door began to crack open.  “I’m in here!” I yelped without thinking, and the door closed.  But then I heard it creaking open again.  “Hold on!” I shrieked.

A girl’s voice was meek outside the door.  “Can…can I use the toilet?”  The door was opening once more and I could see brown curls sprouting in around the edge.

I jumped into the tub, ripped the shower curtain around my waist and reached with my foot to flush the toilet.  Its contents were yellowed and liquid because of the Colazol I was taking — nine gigantic, yellow-powder-filled capsules a day, which often, if I burped just after swallowing one, would poof a small cloud of poisonous yellow dust from my mouth.  

I clamored for a towel, resisting the urge to kick the door shut and send her sailing down the stairs.  “I’ll just be in and out,” she pleaded, and burst into the room in a flurry of frantic bunny hops and “Thank Yous.”  I waited outside without a word.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one having emergencies.

——-

(SOUTH CAROLINA)

…my bowels were spastic backstage in Augusta before I played.  I hunched over the toilet and evacuated with only minutes to go before showtime, and then discovered that the toilet barely flushed.  I had flashbacks to Repha’s bathroom in Arkansas, the last time this kind of thing had happened [click HERE for that poop story], and I stood there, just flapping the loose nozzle over and over again as the water in the bowl twitched and rippled.  After dozens of tries most of my waste had been swallowed by the toilet — gravity, I suppose — and the water was relatively clear.  That is, all except for one very little chunk of crap, a small turd ball, and I didn’t want to leave it there for someone to find.  I was an artist, after all; I didn’t get nervous and shit in the backstage toilet just before going on. 

With my presenters introducing me, I grabbed a wad of paper towels, reached into the bowl, grabbed what appeared to be a partially digested piece of asparagus, and threw the dripping wad into a wastebasket.  I barely had time to wash up before hearing my name announced, at which point I galloped onstage, shook everyone’s hands, and sat at the keyboard to play.