I always wonder if it’s purely the result of childhood socialization or if part of it might be genetic but either way I’m marriage oriented. It’s turned me into something of an evangelist. Every time I talk to my male friends I’ve known for decades if they seem like they’ve found their permanent life partner I ask them why they don’t get married. Everybody’s family situation was different than mine so I’ll get into a parental divorce, when it happened, how it made them feel – really pick at things.
I was just talking to one of my oldest friends who lives in Canada, a francophone part, and he told me nobody gets married there. That makes sense. There’s no real advantage to being in a threesome with the government that I’m especially aware of. Neither LaPorsha nor I have advance directives so it could be handy if either of us suddenly died but we don’t currently have a copy of our marriage certificate and everything is in both of our names.
Anyway I rarely write much about my romantic relationships and almost never write about sex but this time around I’ll be doing both of those things. Long time readers will most likely be rejoicing just to see the year and city title format and indeed, it means what you think it does. This piece will be memory movies and not a social essay brooding on the ideas those memories kick up from the brain mud.
My writing mind is a young goat still, just shy of two years, and tied to some kind of tree so it is inevitable that from time to time I will bite the same grass twice. Parts of the story I am telling have been told before but for the first time I will be telling our “origin story” in full and going into more detail surrounding our wedding. That’s right – this will be a wedding movie. Cake for some, if not for you at least you got an early warning.
I have been slowly succumbing to “marriage brain” where I will occasionally insert LaPorsha’s feelings toward whatever I’m talking about or clarify if she was the thing that connected me to a certain thing or experience – like with Wolfe’s social media posts in the Alraune essays. The reason for this piece should be obvious when I clarify that today, the day I am posting this, is our ten year wedding anniversary.
For people that haven’t physically met both of us I imagine that LaPorsha’s existence could be somewhat suspect. It has been a good number of years since she has used any kind of social media and prefers that I not post recent photographs where she is visible. This may be exaggeration but I like to imagine people thinking of me as a “Norman Bates” type of character often going on about a wife that is only in my imagination.
When we presented a series of planetary invocation performances with the band now known as The Lodestones at Human Resources gallery in Los Angeles we called it Union of Opposites. The name had nothing to do with the material we were presenting but instead was about us. Based purely on the literal Greek translation I think we are among the most heterosexual couples I have ever been aware of in the sense of different.
Our marriage, and partnership before it, has worked for as long as it has because of how different we are. I often think of us as a binary system in astrology – two planets orbiting each other because equal and opposing forces create a common center of mass that is found in neither body. Many of the ways that we are opposite become obvious the moment you lay eyes on us: sex, skin color, temperament…
I am an open book and LaPorsha is incredibly private. That one is a little harder to navigate but the solution has been to not talk about her except in little mundane passing references that I know will not be a problem for her. Our planetary performances at the gallery were Moon, Mars and Mercury. This is planet in the Classical sense (Sun and Moon are included) and an alternate title was Seven Planets Seven Days. We also did Saturn either just before or after with lead fishing weights in a swimming pool and a soundtrack I had recorded on piano.
Apparently the Tenth Wedding Anniversary is called the “Tin Anniversary” and if you look at the wedding photo above we are dressed in blue and some of this was written on a Thursday so I’m calling this Jupiter – the wedding ceremony was certainly jovial. The requirements are for us both to be dressed in a planet’s color, the planet’s metal must play a role and something must happen on the planet’s day. Our days of the week are already named for the Classical Planets but the colors and metals are what’s listed in the Mathers version of The Key of Solomon the King – a treatise on ceremonial Magic that first appeared in the Renaissance but claimed to be derived from much older sources.
We’ve always seen the project as an ongoing thing that will someday be completed so that leaves Sun and Venus. Sun will be difficult as neither of us likes the sensation of touching gold but maybe it will take the same route as this one and be on our Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary. For Venus I did a solo Venus when I portrayed that planet’s manifestation as Lucifer in the 2012 musical Diving God. That wouldn’t count because we weren’t both there wearing green, no copper played a role and it was on a Sunday instead of a Friday.
We’ll get it done some day. Anyway I should probably get to the “meet cute”. I know when LaPorsha first laid eyes on me but it’s doubtful that I would have seen her for reasons that will soon become apparent. LaPorsha’s memory of this night is uncharacteristically vivid and after a bit of digging I’ve determined that it was at an art opening for an exhibit called, ironically enough, Please Remember Everything at a much smaller Los Angeles Chinatown gallery called Actual Size on September 10th, 2010.
I had just moved to Los Angeles on my birthday August 23rd, 2010 and LaPorsha was still living in San Francisco but came down with her friend Gabo. She would move to Los Angeles on my next birthday: August 23rd, 2011. The tiny gallery was giving away free beer and had several bands playing outside. I had gotten a ride to the event with my former fiancée, referred to as “Rocky” in these stories, and although I don’t think we were romantically involved at the time LaPorsha says she tried to approach me throughout the night but Rocky, despite her small frame, was preventing access like a football line blocker.
It just so happens that there’s a photo of me from the night. LaPorsha doubted this being the same night because Rocky isn’t carefully guarding me in the picture but I’m pretty sure I’ve only been to Actual Size once, they only had free beer and multiple bands one time in 2010 and Rocky left without me then I took the bus with Cole Miller, in the center with purple pants, back to Women house. LaPorsha does say she wandered off herself to walk around a nearby indoor mega mall that had been left unlocked even though all the individual merchants were closed.
This mall would become important to me later when I discovered that one of the vendors had stacks of old CDs and tapes where popular songs had been translated into nonstop megamixes with MIDI instrumentation and intense karaoke style vocals. LaPorsha’s memory of this also adjusts my timeline on some older stories as the Tijuana chapters about getting arrested for Rocky’s pills must be 2010 and not 2009 – Rocky was in Mexican prison for a month and I didn’t see her again until after LaPorsha and I were already together.
Our next meeting was likely in 2011 when we both frequented a dance night called Mustache Mondays at a downtown bar called La Cita. LaPorsha has spent her entire adult life in intense partnerships but before me they were platonic pairings with female or gay male friends. By this time she was with Michael Shawn and they were trying to kick off art and modeling careers. Once again LaPorsha saw me and contemplated making a move but fate had other plans.
I have a bad habit of zoning out and staring across a room at some small detail on somebody’s clothing only to realize that a person’s eyes are right next to it and it seems like I’ve been intently staring at them. This happened with Michael Shawn and I realized he was smiling back and probably took my gaze as flirtation. I spend a lot of time in gay-coded spaces (or did in 2011 anyway) and I always feel bad that I might be leading guys on which makes me nervous and then I keep looking back out of nervousness. LaPorsha says she figured I must be gay and into Michael at this point, a pattern that had played out several times previously with other guys she was attracted to.
Dancing was a big part of my life back then too and I tried to be friendly and dance with everyone. When Michael came over I somehow balanced that with non-verbally communicating that the whole thing had been a miscommunication and I wasn’t interested. LaPorsha and I either met, talked and exchanged Facebook information this night or one soon after it. We started running into each other at a lot more stuff around town.
She probably initiated online communication first but on its own that wouldn’t have been enough for me to realize she was interested. It mostly comes down to cultural differences – a thing we’ve had to learn how to be very communicative about in our last ten years of marriage. We danced together at Pehrspace one night with a large black scarf she was wearing and I ended up leaving with it. I gave it back to her the next time we saw each other but nothing came of it.
As we rolled into the Spring of 2012 I left town on a series of tours and LaPorsha and Michael went to try to make a go of things in New York. In November I was finally coming back into town to stay and had to look for some kind of housing situation. LaPorsha was staying at Michael’s parents house with him out in Lancaster and sometimes taking the train into town. My Los Angeles housing strategy had been to look for small unused nooks in other people’s houses and then try to rent them for a pittance. It had been working since 2010.
There was a house called 1830 the two of us had been ending up at a lot of late night parties at but I always left to go sleep outside somewhere instead of asking to crash. I had a few spots in the area that were out of the way and moderately comfortable. I had noticed that there was a skylight in the rear stairwell with a small ledge inside just long enough for me to sleep on. I hadn’t actually climbed up in there to try it but I kept a mental list of similar spots I saw while party hopping to try to approach people about later.
The girl in this situation, let’s call her Tusk, seemed like the closest thing to a “house mom” at 1830 so I messaged her and asked if I could come talk to her about something. She said there were already too many people living there, probably for the best as I never saw an outlet in that stairwell and morning sun would have been brutal living in an alcove designed to collect and disperse it, but since I was already there she decided to try to have sex with me. I was easy. It was fine. Nobody “finished”.
Immediately afterward she said she felt a little guilty because she was good friends with LaPorsha and LaPorsha had had a thing for me for a while. This came as a total surprise but my natural reaction was to say it was mutual. I know I haven’t written anything to indicate I was interested before this point so let me explain something. Obviously I had noticed that she was stylish, beautiful and interesting before this point but most of my friends were stylish, beautiful and interesting women so I’d developed the emotional self preservation tactic of keeping things on the level of emotionally unsorted aesthetic admiration until I’d gotten a green light in some form.
It made my life as a socialite a little easier to not have crushes on all the beautiful women who were having me help with gallery shows of inviting me to see their father’s John Cage ensemble and that kind of thing. If this makes the story considerably less romantic for anybody I totally understand – at least I did my best to tell it as accurately as possible. I also realize that I’m using far less flowery language than is my usual style. If I use flowery language to describe mundane realities it should be obvious what type of reality mundane language is for.
One thing I found interesting in retrospect was that me and LaPorsha had been messaging each other prior to this but didn’t once message each other between the moment of revelation and the meetup Tusk set up for us several days later. I think it made sense to just stand back and let another party handle it, like a passed note in Middle School, especially considering how bad of a job we’d done communicating so far. Also if I had just messaged her to meet up it’s not like I had a place she could come to and she wasn’t in a position to invite me out to Lancaster.
If I had realized the extent to which Tusk would tax us for her role as host and matchmaker I might have done things differently. I think we both expected her to just laugh conspiratorially and close a door behind her once we were settled into a space where we could get to know each other a little better. That’s not what she did.
“What if all three of just started making out?”
It was the perfect trap. We were both slightly nervous, barely knew each other and didn’t want to look like the “square” if the other person was fine with this proposal. I do resent how far she took it. LaPorsha and I were clearly attracted to one another and would have inevitably moved toward consummation on our own schedule. We didn’t need for that to be mechanically brought about by outside forces like we were farm animals.
Eventually we were left alone to fall asleep in each other’s arms and, as I’ve written before, I felt like I was “home” in a way I never had before. With LaPorsha of course – not at 1830. Despite that neither of us had one and we spent the next few nights staying in a series of temporary arrangements. The first night would have been November 14th and we have another anniversary that we celebrate on November 17th – three days later. This was when we had our first fight.
I realize that I don’t feel like writing the specific thing that it was about beyond LaPorsha feeling that I had overstepped what would have an appropriate level of commentary on her personal life for a three day old relationship. I seemed certain that things had already reached a certain depth despite the short amount of time so she said she was finished and left the party we were at. A few hours later she called me to come stay with her in a friend’s apartment that was empty for the night.
That was the 17th. After this night we have mostly been on the same page in terms of where things sit and have only been apart when circumstances have caused us to be in different cities or at least trim camps. We consider November 17th to be almost the same thing as a wedding anniversary because it marks when we first started logistically operating as a married couple. The real wedding was a year and a half later in Mexico.
This wedding is another thing I’ve written about in other pieces but for the first time I’m about to describe the wedding in detail and what we did to prep for it. Barkev, who I had toured with as Bernard Herman, offered to officiate and joined the online church everybody joins for that. I set up a handful of shows on both sides of the border for me, Barkev and everybody he was traveling with but all of them came after the wedding itself.
There’s an artist/architect in Tijuana who builds structures in the form of colossal women and we first thought of holding the ceremony in his mermaid one called La Sirena but he wanted too much money. Instead we moved things to the base of a seventy five foot tall Christ statue called Cristo del Sagrado Corazón. I’m not sure we’d even hiked up to the statue ourselves before this point but we’d seen the open base from the highway and Mexico isn’t the kind of country where you’d expect a locked gate.
We expected somewhere between twenty and thirty people to show up due to the dissuading effects of an International Border, a passive-aggressive post telling people who couldn’t handle being in Mexico not to come and the publicly chaotic aspects of our lives and relationship. It wasn’t that we specifically wanted a small wedding so much as we wanted things at a scale where we could handle everything ourselves and we wanted everything to feel like it was on our terms without compromise. Nobody came from either of our families which was probably for the best.
The two to three days leading up to the wedding were insanely busy. I think our Tijuana apartment only had a single electric burner and a toaster oven but we made all the food ourselves. We got the big silver aluminum trays and made chicken mole, a vegetarian lasagna and vegan Thai curry with coconut milk and mock duck. LaPorsha had bought some cheap fabric used as lining in heavier jackets and found a seamstress to make her a dress of her own design for about 200 pesos.
She also got her nails done with cobalt blue flower accents but instead of spending a lot of time on her hair we’d picked up a yard of beautiful Chantilly Lace in LA’s garment district for a veil. I wore a matching suit we already had (I never realized how dirty it was until I saw the photos!) and made myself a kind of necktie from a large piece of acetate we’d found with circuit boards printed on it. I have to admit that I got the idea for making rings out of coins from my brother-in-law and then found a bunch of silver quarters in my grandmother’s house.
I actually lost mine getting robbed just before I got sober five years ago so I’ve been working on a replacement for this anniversary but I think I need a small file to finish it. Luckily back then there was a guy on Avenida Revolución who specialized in making jewelry from antique coins so I was able to drop the rings off, pounded down to size, to get the centers cut out while I was picking up liquor for the party earlier in the day. We were probably a couple of hours behind schedule by the time we packed up the food and liquor to quickly run from the seamstress to the jeweler to a colectivo down to the wedding party.
At the last minute I saw a party store to grab some helium balloons. Fortunately the shade of blue we picked to coordinate around is popular in Northern Mexico – usually referred to as azul colonial. We were definitely the last to arrive and I never got a phone that works down there so I’m sure there was some degree of trepidation as to whether we’d show up at all. We had fought, cancelled the wedding then quickly announced it was back on just a couple of weeks earlier – I’d imagine the vision of us emerging from a white and yellow minivan to splash vivid cobalt across the scenery came as something of a relief.
I don’t remember a whole lot about the ceremony itself. I had vows, and have kept them to best of my knowledge, LaPorsha hadn’t had time to think of any. Barkev was good as a minister – I wonder if he’s used this highly specific power on anybody else. The hill leading up to the statue had a few mansions scattered over it. Since living down there I’d been automatically thinking of these newer beachside mansions as a rich ex-Pat thing but the owner of one of them was a hard working local guy.
He came over to check out the wedding and ate some of our food when I offered – this is the thing that impressed me. It made him seem down to earth regardless of how wealthy he was or wasn’t. He’d designed and built his house himself and wanted to show it off so a small group came and quickly looked. I remember wooden stairs, a huge chandelier and an entire wall as a picture window overlooking the water. After everybody ate we took the party over to a sand dune recreation area and the ocean.
It would have been easy enough just to walk but a few people had brought cars and there was room to ride over. We had carried everything ourselves when first arriving but now handed off the bottles of liquor and our tent to friends preparing to march across the sand. My old friend Paul and his then-girlfriend-now-wife Toni needed to go so he gave us the blocky wooden bowl he’d made us for a gift.
We didn’t have a habit at this point in time but we had been using mysterious powdered heroin from a trap house in Zona Norte and I thought it would be nice to have something for after the wedding. I had picked up a 40 mg Opana, a crushable Oxymorphone pill, from Speedy’s back in Centro and the first thing we used the bottom of the bowl for was crushing, dividing and sniffing this pill. Afterward it became our fruit bowl and was one of the few things we carried back with us from New Orleans but still got towed in an RV a few years later.
The beach was a good time and we spent a little while swimming with everybody. Ronny from South Carolina got stung by a jellyfish but I don’t think it was super serious and I can’t remember if anybody peed on the wound for him or if he did it himself. I usually offer. It might have been a stingray and after a quick Google search I’ve learned that urine is not effective in either situation – just a persistent urban legend. Ronnie tragically died from a bicycle accident in New York City a few years later.
Some local guys walking down the beach offered to start a fire for a small tip as it was getting dark. To the surprise and consternation of the Americans they used bits of plastic packaging and styrofoam for kindling. As always this led to people trying to convince the locals to abandon this practice in the name of personal and environmental health but this particular reality of third world life will not be disappearing any time soon. The resulting gases are far too noxious for casual use, for me anyway, but I’ll certainly remember how effective it is if I ever find myself stranded outdoors in a cold environment with such materials on hand.
As to whether burning plastics, in specially constructed energy creating plants, is better or worse for the planet than consigning them to landfills there seems not to be a consensus. I find myself leaning toward the first option – especially if getting the garbage to the landfill expends more fossil fuels than building such plants close to population dense garbage generating areas would. Mostly I want to see a paradigm shift away from using and creating the stuff in the first place.
I really wish we had spent the night on the beach with everybody and maybe rented an ATV to ride together but that’s not the way things turned out. When unloading the car we had entrusted our tent to Barkev and soon learned the gravity of our error. As always Barkev’s main concern was getting laid and presumably he dropped it on the sand somewhere in pursuit of this primary mission. We didn’t discover this until fairly late in the night and walked back across the sand hoping to find where he’d discarded it.
Barkev was preparing to ride back to Tijuana with a local art scene girl and had no recollection of the tent at all but she offered to drop us off at our apartment. They were leaving right then so there wasn’t time to walk back across the sand and see if anyone else had one they’d be willing to loan us for the night. In a somewhat artificial feeling of urgency we just got in the car.
Unfortunately the girl driving was quite drunk and nobody else felt confident enough driving in Mexico to take over for her. I’m realizing for the first time that I may be indirectly responsible for the first half of this situation as I brought 1.5L bottles of Bacardi and Absolut Vodka for our guests. I don’t remember drinking at all but I thought providing this would make for a better party. If we had been more perceptive we might have tried to convince them to stay instead of climbing in the car with them but our senses were dulled by powerful pharmaceuticals.
Anyway I’m not writing this from the afterlife so nothing drastic happened – we just got pulled over and forced to pay bribes. Over and over again. I thought it would have been a good idea to have a decent reserve of cash on hand and I’d soon paid out two or even three times as much as just taking a private taxi home would have cost. Our apartment was hot and Catrick had probably pissed on something in retaliation for us expending so much energy on a party he wasn’t invited to.
Mostly it was obvious we had made the worst possible choice and the knowledge that we could have been happily laying on a beach that wasn’t even especially cold, mixed with the anxiety of the ride and the repugnant personalities of the various civil servants we’d just enriched, left both of us in a poisonous mood. I never would have expected something as unlikely as good wedding night sex but it would have been nice to finish the night less irritated and angry.
The next day lots of friends were still hanging around town, there was a show that night, and we put Catrick in his leash and harness to walk around the nearby park with everybody. A pair of walking police officers stopped us for questioning under suspicion of stealing a cat – besides the absurdity of leveling this accusation in a city where I’d tried and failed to give an adult cat away, Catrick’s leather harness was the exact same blue as our wedding outfits. A single glance made it obvious we were a family.
At the corner of the park Harrison was driving by and stopped to jump out and give us a wedding gift. He couldn’t have been blocking traffic for more than thirty seconds and nobody was behind him but a couple minutes later a police truck came to harass us anyway. They said we’d been “causing mayhem”. This is another connection I’m only making for the first time but it seems like word had gotten around on how many bribes I’d paid out the night before and now any cop that saw us would find some pretext to detain us hoping for similar treatment.
We were certainly a visually distinctive couple and if the highway cops had been bragging about a big payday it would have made the cops around our neighborhood jealous. I didn’t pay anything in either of these interactions but it did mark the beginning of police harassment reaching a point where we just decided to leave. I’m sure this last consequence was not an unintended one.
After the park LaPorsha and I ended up in separate vehicles in sudden lunch plans. Thankfully I can’t remember who any of these people are but the drivers of LaPorsha’s car seemed less than thrilled with the prospect of getting trapped at a restaurant table with the driver of the car I ended up in and lost us in traffic. A relatively minor setback but frustrating in the moment and I reacted poorly.
I thought of some pretext to hop back out and set about trying to get as fucked up as humanly possible. I started with a smaller, green 30 mg Opana but whatever time release formulation they use in these causes them to kick in very slowly. I still wasn’t feeling anything by the time my walk brought me near the Zona Norte trap house so I popped in for a much cheaper bag of “China White”. My ritual was to stop at one of the block’s corner stores for a single peso suelto, or loose cigarette, and light in on the way out the door.
With the first drag everything hit me at once and it took considerable effort to drag myself to the fish taco stand that was the afternoon’s designated meetup. It’s amazing that the walk over there didn’t bring me into contact with one of the pickup trucks the police use to gather drunks, “loiterers” and other public nuisances but that’s a question of good and bad luck. We don’t have an exact analogue in any of the US cities I’ve lived in so imagine a dog catcher for unsavory humans.
Once standing and smoking outside the spot I could barely speak or stand and I know it caused a lot of close friends considerable anxiety. Add it to the list of things I would do differently if given another chance over the course of the weekend. Either of the things I’d taken would have been alright on their own but in combination they hit a spot higher than the one I’d been aiming at. If I hadn’t needed to force myself to walk, stand and move around it even could have been dangerous.
The show that night was in a gothic pool hall off Revolución called La Cupola del Vampiro. The combination of a stripper pole and a rubber mask of Pinhead from the Hellraiser films make this place my favorite out of all the ones I did shows at while living in Tijuana. I was playing as Bleak End, Barkev was doing Bernard Herman and then Daby as Charmaine’s Names and a noise kid called Tyr Alexander filled out the night. If I’ve forgotten anyone I do apologize.
Things have shifted since then but at the time me and LaPorsha got married it felt especially iconoclastic. Marriage seemed to go against all the values championed by the subcultural communities we belonged to and while we did it for very traditional reasons I savored the ways in which it felt transgressive. In this spirit I programmed a stark and simple beat on my drum machine and wrote a quick song I never recorded called Wedlock:
I’m in wedlock, She’s in wedlock,
Throw away the key!
I’m gonna have to deal with her,
She’ll have to deal with me!
Tie the knot, Cut the thread!
Bury me in this conjugal bed!
I’m dead! I’m wed!
WEDLOCK!
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 