Night Report: Psychedelic Pseudo-Summer

Mirages mesmerize, rum and cognac... on a weekend partying with my parents

My brother and I walked into the local club and everyone stared. I’m used to it now but he was excited by the effect of our resonating presence. I stood out like a sore thumb, wearing all black and walking with my chin high. My bracelets caught and held the light. Our gaze had gravity: crowds parted before I had a chance to say “excuse me”. Married women shamelessly approached and offered their numbers. Though we’re seven years apart he was proud to call me twin, and in a way he was right, the both of us being Geminis, both heirs to an ancient line of obsidian power. And the duplicitious sun in our prime, exuberating the four of us. I see here now what J. told me last week, that I must have really been a royal in a past life, I walk with an invisible crown on my head and easily accept the pleasures of life in a way that inspires others to provide for me.

But especially here, when I go back, I feel the invisible boundary of exile separating me from everything and everyone.

To understand the South you have to understand the heat. I return a few times a year like a prodigal son, gloriously celebrated, catered to, my attention relentlessly requested. And no matter the season the heat is an ever-present antagonistic force syphoning the life out of us, driving most inside their couches, their cars, their caves. Mirages mesmerize, rum and cognac and other island liquors are abundant and cheap. It’s already a psychedelic pseudo-summer here in the swamps of Savannah. Extra UV-resistant sunglasses and farmer’s tans, shorts past the knee and ankle socks, and sweat, oh God the sweat, it’s everywhere no matter what you do. Hop in the car and you sweat, step out and you sweat, step out for a smoke and you sweat like a slave! And so like a desert people most (of those who care) drench themselves in fragrances, usually cheaply acquired, of the basics: floral notes, Dior Sauvage and Gucci Guilty, heavy woody smells which are more for attracting than masking. Pheremones hang plenty. Where there is heat there is great thirst, a yearning which brings out laser beams of lust from eyes.

Even with our parents present. That only heightens our spotlight. Bystanders respect the boundaries of our space like we’ve bought a bottle. A militia forms: young men wearing chains and tucked Glocks gather around us, sensing a locus of pure power, they dap up my brother and nod respectfully to me and field away all the women presenting themselves to us on a platter. Also we notice the jealous ones in attendance, incensed by our effortless and effective airs, who pull their women closer, who are eager to flash their money, their designer brands. The men literally bark out fraternity chants, the women line dance to old Ciara and Cassie songs. I find it all so interesting and humorous, I can’t help bursting out into laughter watching it all go down, and my brother and father join in, though I know for them the glee comes from having us all in the same space, a magnificence that felt for so many years like a long-off dream.

I always go out with my parents when I return. It’s an experience… on one hand I’m neutered (which I don’t mind, here, for various reasons). Even when they dance together, hips held by hands, chin on forehead, grins and gold glistening — their eyes are on me. Surveilled. I can tell they’ve been observing me for years, hearing as they do of my tales from the Big City. Am I really as prolific as I make myself seem? As comfortable as one with my habits should be? I like to be observed and around them, for some reason, I like to hide the extent of my true power. I’m not sure yet why I prefer an air of mystery. When my brother and I were out he urged me to bring all my chains out of my shirt, to stun the locals who like to walk around with their blinding diamonds and their long links, and he didn’t understand why I prefer to be subdued here. I already stand out as it is, I told him, there’s no way to hide the bangles singing around my wrists and my knuckles decorated with gold and gemstones.

My mother smiles and nods in approval of my subdued approach. It makes me double think it. I try to diverge from her sometimes out of spite. She’s a beautiful monster who gets whatever she wants and lets no one interfere with her goals. She's calmer now near menopause but she used to be harsh and severe, even cruel. Somehow, she never sweats. I’m the only one that has the balls to stand up to her, she told me herself, and for that she respects me. She saw herself in me long before I did, or long before I was valiant enough to admit it, and it bothered me — I swore to never be as uncompromising as her, as stuck-up and unusual. But now! Now the metamorphosis is irreversible, and she’s proud of my resolute nature, my adamant attachment to my ambitions. She wants me to return home, spend six months recovering my finances, reconnecting with cousins getting older, supporting my brother. It’s a good plan and we both know it. But I don’t want it.

I’ve told her this again and again and she never gives up because, truthfully, I’m still nothing compared to her. Not yet. She’s got all the power wherever we go. What she says is what happens and no one questions it. The enthralling power of <possession> which I’ve written about before, she’s got it and knows it. It's an ancient ancestral allure. All it takes is a smile and people bend over backwards to twist the rules for her. Conversations quiet when she’s near. When there’s leading to do, everyone defers to her, looks in her direction and waits for her judgment. My father’s been her thrall for as long as I can remember, and only occasionally do I catch him admitting how frustrating this is for him. To be ruled. It’s true that I’m the only one who refuses it, that’s what drove me away from the home in the first place — she tried to rule me and I wouldn’t have it.

I’ve been going back and forth about what this piece should be: an examination of personal power and how it affects relationships? A thinkpiece analyzing Southern nightlife? A parallelism of my mother and I? Only as I got to writing this down did I realize that I can’t separate them because they’re all related and one can’t understand my perspective on one without knowing the layers of all the others.

For it is my mother’s noble but powerful nature which we have all inherited thatleads us to wield our strength sheathed behind our backs, allowing others to imagine they have hold over us. We go out and watch the world react but we do nothing about it. Sympathetically we hold our wrists out to be handcuffed when we find a compatible container, only to complain about how uncomfortable our bonds are. We give away our essence and bemoan the cramping of a victim’s bottomless pit. But we can escape at any point, can’t we?

It’s the changing which we shy away from, the destruction of the known world which must be wrought if we’re to ever experience a new one.

If you’re not ferocious enough, time will eat you up and not spit you out — you’ll be trapped there in the digestion chambers of the temporal intestines, being broken down smaller and smaller until you disappear.

I keep watching my aunt R. age but not change. And I see this as a potential final form of this way of being we’ve inherited. She is married and unhappy but does not leave — because she loves my uncle? Because love involves suffering, and devotion, and dedication to a commitment… right? I’m of split mind, because I also believe that to hold on too long to a failed ideal or duty is to go down with the ship. Regardless. She believes time has been unkind to her and it’s too late to seek someone thrilling when she has someone safe, stable, and caring. She laughs, she gets drunk, but she doesn’t even have the gumption to resist my mother, her younger sister. She goes out every chance she gets and sits on her hands, maybe swings her hips a little when she gets tipsy, but I watch her eyes: they wander. In the dark she bites her lower lip. There’s never any compatible candidates for her to go for, but if there was, would she? She loves to look up to a man and imagine — I couldn’t say. But I can see.

Every woman in my family is partnered and few of them are happy. It’s the norm to settle down even if it means returning to an old ex, a worn-out path with a known destination in a ditch. At every step of the way in my journey one of them (cousin or auntie) have taken me aside and confessed: Though they fear for me and my relentless foray into the unknown, they’re proud of my bravery and envious of my resilient zeal.

But they'd never take the plunge and seek the world as I do. Is it the Southern sluggishness? that bounds us — the tacit, the hot and unwieldly contentment? I mention being in Lisbon last year and everyone oos and ahhs, they straight up don't believe me when I say the flight there was cheaper than a flight from New York to Miami. I had to leave and I have to live this way because I’m different, I guess, I get frustrated and moody being stuck somewhere with no way out, being confined by county lines, even approaching the thought that a life like this is — good enough.

Another way is possible. Abundance can be ours. I want to tell the DJ they can play something other than rap. I want to tell the men they can be soft and quiet if they want to. I want my people to stop driving everywhere, to demand functional public transportation, to drink water! Some families have been here for generations, doing the same things over and over and over, again and again — but doesn't anyone want to birth a new line, write a new story?

My brother is a father now. Each night when we return home and he and I go out to smoke and wander around, he vents to me about his frustrations with his baby’s mother, her lack of ambition, her emotional dependence on him, and her inability to communicate calmly and effectively. (I had to break it to him that love is not enough to make a relationship work.) And it happened again: I told him to take note of how women become their mothers and I realized I was talking to myself. Only I don’t mean any women in my life, I mean myself. Destined gender homunculus: I already am who I’m becoming, my mother and my father, but mostly her. She and her heavy presence, she and her social power. Like a true heir to a despot I’m both vilified and energized by the shoes I have no choice but to fill.

It started and continues where it all began, the nightlife, where my parents first met. The formula was typical: they saw each other, they liked each other, my dad made a move, my mom tested him by requiring a financial investment before yielding further attention. I’m breaking the rules already with my routine: most of the time I go out only to be seen, socially validated, sure, like I’m gathering abstract energy to bolster my own brawn. In my understanding of an ideal connection, I realize as I teach my brother, there’s a mutual need which draws two people together. There’s no need to jump over hoops or prove one’s worth or beg for reciprocation. There are simply two satellites orbiting, drawing closer, and the prophesied collision should be explosive, irreconcilable. It’ll be impossible to be detached; why would you want to be? I know it’s a fantasy world but the fusion of two godly individuals at around the same level of power is an experience that transcends the rules of reality, it obliterates time and warps space.

It takes moments for the revolution to happen. And the change which follows lasts for years. The earth holds its breath and never lets it go.

The heat draws me to the water. The retreating moon reminds me that my birthday is approaching. My Saturn return has begun. Great cosmic forces are in motion above our heads and maybe part of why I resist the call of the South, it's mysterious hazy brightness, my mother's duchy, is because I have to see the stars for myself. Reflected in Aegean pools and starstruck lover's eyes. The Northern lights don't shine down here. And maybe I'll return for good one day, after my body begins to break down, with my own family orbiting me like moons.

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