Transcending Me

About the Author

Coming from a third world country, the author lives a very quiet family life in Switzerland with her daughter Viviana, a cat called Gatti and all of her paintings. The squareness of her life as a businesswoman is challenged by world events, the news, and is made colorful by her paintings and by some real-life characters who inevitably cross her way.

***

Dedication

To my father Alejandro and to my daughter Viviana. And of course to Holly the Great.

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TRANSCENDING ME 2018

Published by Austin Macauley at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Elba Barnes

The right of Elba Barnes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is

available from the British Library.

www.austinmacauley.com

TRANSCENDING ME 2018

ISBN 978-1-78629-588-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-78629-589-7 (Hardback)

ISBN 978-1-78629-590-3 (E-Book)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

CGC-33-01, 25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

Jud

Chapter 2

About Me and My Glass Menagerie in a House Made

Not to Stand

Chapter 3

About C and His Two Character Plays

Chapter 4

The Clown—For We All Wear a Mask, Outrageous or

Austere

Chapter 5

The Return Marked with the Longest Goodbyes

Chapter 6

The New Moon

Chapter 7

The Great Kabuki (歌舞伎者)

Chapter 8

And Then We Were Three

Chapter 9

New Explorations and Periods of Adjustment

Chapter 10

PsychoTheRapist

Chapter 11

La Caponera y Otros Cuentos

Chapter 12

Gallant St. Anthony

Chapter 13

New Territories

Chapter 14

Family Knots and Ties and Other Complications

Chapter 15

Period in Blue

Chapter 16

Sisters

Chapter 17

Motherhood

Chapter 18

God Bless Our Daily Lives

Chapter 19

The First of Two Storms and the Milk Truck Doesn’t

Stop Here Any More

Chapter 20

The Pressure Cooker

Chapter 21

The Bus Ride

Chapter 22

Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly

Chapter 23

The Second Storm: The One that Almost Sank My Boat

Chapter 24

Rolling in the Deep

Chapter 25

The Renegades

Chapter 26

Exile and the New Kingdom Suit this South of the

South, Southern Belle

Chapter 27

The Year of the Butterfly (Note: Perhaps the Chinese

Horoscope Should Be Modified)

Afterword

***

Foreword

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE, young, middle aged and old, women or men, gay or straight, black, Asian or white are infected with HIV each day.

As of 2012, approximately 35.3 million people are living with HIV globally, and these numbers grow every day. Ever since its discovery, AIDS has caused thirty-six million deaths (by official estimate), though you have to consider that many pass away in secret and shame or by the quicker route of suicide. Worldwide, HIV/AIDS is considered a pandemic—a modern-day plague, a modern black death, which is present over a large area of our planet and is actively spreading. By now at least one or two persons in our circle of friends has HIV or has died of AIDS.

HIV/AIDS has had a great impact on society, on members of majorities and minorities (like the transgender community) alike, both as an illness and as a source of discrimination. Though extremely cruel, seriously life-threatening and often fatal, it does not raise the same level of compassion and understanding that cancer does. Some, mostly straight, radical Republicans in the US think it is the result of gay, decadent transvestites, people practicing reckless, unprotected sex, much to the annoyance and shock of straight people; they resent their tax money being spent on healthcare and research, as the disease also has significant economic impacts.

There are many misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, such as the belief that it can be transmitted by casual non-sexual contact or by breathing the same air or sharing the same toilet. Infection with HIV occurs by the transfer of blood, semen, vaginal fluid, or breast milk. Without treatment, average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be nine to eleven years, depending on the HIV subtype.

The disease has become subject to many controversies involving religion, morals and sexual orientation. HIV infects vital cells in the human immune system and the body becomes progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections, cancers and diseases. It also opens the opportunity for the more rigid members of society to bitchslap and lash whoever dares to deviate and have HIV with harsh criticisms related to lifestyle, sexual orientation, gender and creed. Please stop and think before you judge, and try to understand those around you before you speak, for some of us—gay, trans, straight, Latin, women, men, black or white, gender clearly defined and accepted or transitioning—have suffered and endured more than you could ever stand or understand! Some of us have luckily transcended.

I have never met a strong person with an easy past

UNKNOWN

Perhaps I was born normal but I swear I have always been trying to improve

ME

Stated last month spontaneously during a group therapy session

THE IMPLICIT SYMBOLISM did not dawn on me when I picked up the anonymous present from in front of my doorstep; in fact I almost ran over it with Ollie’s bike. Carefully cradled inside a wooden box was a small replica of a Mexican theater stage, with small, brightly colored skeletons dressed in Frida Kahlo-cut, bright Mexican dresses and stuck in provocative poses, holding flowers in their hands. One only of the little skeletons was a male mariachi, complete with a small guitar, grinning broadly. Apparently the mini mariachi skeleton played the guitar all dressed in black, while the more colorful, definitely female skeletons danced to his tune.

Look, how cute, I said to my daughter, who tried to grab the little Mexican stage, a definite curio for her with its bright colors, to play with. No card. I wonder who left it here, I thought as I brought the anonymous gift into our flat. Strange, I thought, as I placed it on top of my dinner table and what little common sense I had left cut through my initial moment of awe. It is mid-spring, Easter actually, Hallowe’en and Dia de Muertos are so far away, my dwindling common sense finished saying as I noticed my daughter desperately needed to change her boots and jeans as they were soaked from our Easter egg hunt in the park.

The message became clear after visiting the doctor nine months, the exact duration of a pregnancy, later. There was a virus traveling like tiny, sinister snowflakes in my bloodstream, killing me softly, gently, decisively, invading every inch of me, turning my blood into my enemy.

The deadly snowflakes of this virus were stuck in my heart, my brain, behind my eyes, inside my tear ducts, making even my tears dangerous to those I love, turning my seed and my blood into poison. I left the red-doored clinic a small person, walking automatically in a trance through endless streets and into the city park. There, I looked up at the winter skies and snowflakes clung to my false lashes, making the mascara run from my eyes to my cheeks, giving me the look of a tragic Kabuki theater mask, the cold air finally freezing my tears and the truth fixing my sad expression. And then from inside me rose a small flame of hope. Perhaps somewhere there is someone who could freeze the virus inside me, someone who could stop the flow of deadly snowflakes inside my veins and hence stop my fall, just like Merlin. Somewhere out there, there must be a magician of sorts, a wizard, a bit of magic that can cure me. I smiled a sad, twisted, smile. A wonderful wizard of POS.

And in the middle of the city park I stood for a long, long time. A thousand more snowflakes started falling softly upon my shoulders from the cold, gray skies above and collected at my feet, along with the false lashes which finally fell from my eyes, allowing me to see clearly for the first time in years, and which were now lying on the snow-covered ground like gothic symbols, resembling the black underside feathers of a black, black swan, forever in contrast to this vast sea of white.

As I walked away, the snow had already covered them up, tortured gothic symbols as they were. I began to hurry up, cleaning my tears, and gaining the composure I had lost upon hearing the terrible news. With each step I took, my man’s boots crunched the snow beneath my feet. My daughter would be home waiting for her bath and for her bedtime story as she did every night and in the morning I would be outside in the park, making snow angels. I had to hurry up, for that was something I was not going to miss.

***

Chapter 1

Jud

SOMEONE IN A cab or in a convenience store or a bartender at a gay bar, I can’t exactly remember who, told me I used to call myself Jud. Jud used to hang out at pubs and bars, looking constantly for either fights or reckless sex at the slightest of provocations. Jud was simply a powder keg looking for a spark.

Jud was known to most drug dealers in the city selling snow in little bags and temporary happiness in the shape of powders and pills. Jud was known by most male prostitutes in town, just as Jud was known by most female prostitutes in town, and some would even do him for free. Jud was known to all for his explosiveness, his reckless ways and addictions. Jud left plenty of bruises on my body, a few dents on my skull, a chip on my front tooth, holes in my soul and big gaps in my mind. He often tore my clothes and left me lying on the floor, naked, on a pool of my own vomit. He would pee in every corner of my apartment in out of scorn or in protest to my bourgeois taste and my middle-class education. With no hesitation he would clean his cock of semen, or shit and other bodily fluids on my clean satin sheets and bathroom towels. Not to mention or even attempt to count the endless hangovers and memory gaps. However, he would never cease to sometimes surprise me and come back with little white fur capes, or silk stockings or even a sparkly rhinestone tiara and expensive bottles of perfume. As if, after beating the shit out of me, the only way out would be to give me a prize. Jud even left me with a police record for digging up holes and shitting in people’s gardens, though way above the high water lines, to avoid contamination of the river, the lake and other water sources.

Jud’s brightest times were my darkest nights, my never-coming tomorrows, and most of my lost weekends. In essence, he was the affirmation to all my denials; or perhaps the denial to all my affirmations.

Jud was known to all, except to me. It was the persona I took to be tougher and rougher in an ever-judging world, as Jud never gave a fuck what other felt or thought.

Jud was the other me, one of my Three Faces of Eve, or should I say Three Phases of Eve? Jud was a sailor, a son of a bitch, an ex-marine, a pirate, a junkie, an ex-con, a queer, a queen, a pirate. You name it, as his story would change every hour of the day but in the end a victim of me, my bottom-line; a monster of my own making, my own private Frankenstein, put together from pieces of my or other people’s personalities I had already rejected or found utterly disgusting and alien to me. He was my ultimate puppet with no strings other than a huge invisible umbilical or astral cord that tied him to me. Jud would wear leather vests and tight pants, high black soldier boots and no shirt, underwear or deodorant, when I would rather wear Prada or Gucci and walk around in loafers; though, again, he did buy a white Gucci mink cape with the month’s rent, whether for himself or for me or for the lonely slut or boy toy of his choice, I will never know.

Jud knew how to play ball. Jud would chase the ladies, and ruthlessly, instinctively put his hand up their skirts without even asking if they liked it, so long as he did. Jud would grab men’s penises in his hand without asking if straight or gay, enjoying either the erection that comes with excitement and desire or the flaccidity and shrinking that comes with fear. Jud would go to male strip clubs and shove men’s penises in his mouth already full of peanuts. Jud would fuck complete strangers, women or men alike, in any dimly-lit alleyway. Jud would squeeze and grab from life what I was too scared or to tired too plead for, to beg for, to pray for, to dream of or even to naïvely visualize. All he needed was a little cocaine to show up and snatch my days.

Jud would never pray, or dream of a heaven, as he only knew how to raise hell. Born in a Catholic home, raised by a controlling mother, semi-abandoned by my father, surrounded by women, an avid victim of endless 1950 movie reruns and Abba songs, I had no choice but to be cataloged as gay in a Latin country where to be a ‘macho’ is implicit to being a man. It is tattooed in invisible ink on the foreskin of your penis or, if circumcised, all over your chest and balls. The more women you have, the better; the more firewater you drink, the merrier; the more children you have, the stronger your sex drive. I have six kids, any man would be prone to say, all with same, pointing to his penis, but born from different women. These men in their testosterone-infused ‘machismo’ refused to use protection, for using a condom was for them like eating a candy with a wrapper. The Spanish word for ‘gay’