An Interview I Did With NYTheater.com

What an amazing thing it’s been for me, performing my one-man play and receiving so much love in return.  Have I got a lot of money right now in my life?  No.  But perhaps it’s true what the author said, that “an artist is never poor”.   I don’t feel poor when I’m onstage telling my stories and connecting with you guys out there.  The play has been extended.  If you’re in NYC February 22nd, come on down to the Duplex at 61 Christopher Street and check out the show (9:30 pm).  In the meantime, here’s an interview I did with NYTheater.com that came out a couple of days ago.  -J.D.  Keep on rantin’.

Who is more important in the theater: the actor, the playwright, or the director?
Actually, I would submit that the Usher is the most important person. Last thing any writer, director or actor wants is some disgruntled audience member put in the wrong seat. Next to Usher, I would have to say Playwright. He or she is the one who first has the daunting task of putting chaos into order. I think the actor and director’s job is getting inside that writer’s head, figuring out how to make that writer’s vision, worldview, order, truth – come to shimmering life up there on that stage – correctly.

Is there a particular moment in this show that you really love or look forward to? Without giving away surprises, what happens in that moment and why does it jazz you?
I look forward to what is actually a painful moment in the play – the scene where I get a phone call from my ex-lover who’s calling to tell me he has AIDS and that I better get tested. The reason I look forward to that scene… is that I am conscious there’s a slew of guys in the audience who got that phone call too, and this is what we do in theater, right? We communicate specific moments like that, and then the audience realizes “Wow, I’ve been there, too and I’ve forgotten about it” and then we all get to face it and remember it together. And it’s not just the guys. It’s everyone. Everyone’s gotten that phone call that suddenly turns the world upside down and we have to deal with it whether we like it or not. I feel like that’s the moment when the audience is one, as it were, and you live for moments like that onstage. Then, one second after that, the audience meets Patrick, based on a waiter I worked with who used to take drugs and then vogue as he took food orders, and he’s just so damn funny. That’s when the audience gets to exhale and laugh and it’s fantastic.

Which “S” word best describes your show: SMOOTH, SEXY, SMART, SURPRISING?
So exhausting. Does that count? But exhausting in the best kind of way. So exhausting because I’ve played almost 20 roles, many of whom are physical dynamos, but each night the audience connects so much to the story and the characters so yeah, it’s the best kind of exhausting. I guess Sexy, too. One of the characters gets really drunk and moons the audience and one guy wrote me and said “I got horny when you did that.” Ha! It’s funny because I never think that it’s me mooning the audience. It’s the character doing it, not me.

Can theater bring about societal change? Why or why not?
God, I hope so. I know it can bring individual change, and isn’t that the start of societal change? I have been changed by theater. I remember I saw a play once and I cried so hard at the end that a complete stranger next to me just grabbed my thigh tightly and knowingly. Yup, she clenched my thigh! She knew I was moved because she was too. It sounds funny, right? Like, was she making a sexual advance? No. She was bracing me because she knew I was losing it. And I thought – wow, two total strangers holding each other in the dark because we’re so moved by what we are seeing. That, right there, is society changing from “we’re all strangers” to “we are not all strangers”. I think the problem with society is that we all believe there’s a society out there, when there’s really just a bunch of people all trying to find their way in the dark. We can be lights for each other, guiding the way.

Not as Cute as Picture

Friends and Readers, 

If you’re in New York next weekend, please come check out my one-man show, “Not as Cute as Picture”.  The show was nominated for a GLAAD-Media Award, and it’s just me onstage telling stories about a time in my life when I gave up a good job to go for a dream.  Here’s what the Washington Post said about my play: “It doesn’t seem like a one-man show, as Cerna brings to life some 20 people who crossed his path during his 29th year. An intensely physical, high-energy performance, “Not as Cute as Picture” is a candid, sometimes stinging and usually very funny journey of a gay man…” One week from tonight! Two nights only! Fri Jan 11th and Sat Jan 12th at The Duplex. 9:30 p.m.

Direct link to reservations:  

Friday, January 11, 2013 @ 9:30 p.m.

http://www.theduplex.com/webcalendar/view_entry.php?id=6982&date=20130111

Saturday, January 12, 2012 @ 9:30 p.m.

http://www.theduplex.com/webcalendar/view_entry.php?id=6983&date=20130112

 

 

 

GOODBYE, MR CHIPS

The producer of one of the most successful television shows of the 1970’s had a secret to share, and that secret was never safe with me.  

Rod (not his real name but close enough) loved to talk about the show he created and produced about two highway patrol cops in California.  I might get in trouble if I mention the name of the show.  What are those crispy things that go so well with Salsa called again?  Nachos?

I met Rod at party in the Hollywood Hills, when I was trying to be an actor out there.  He asked me if I was “for hire” and he didn’t mean to clean his house.  Like many aging gay men in Hollywood, Rod believed that his stockpiles of cash could buy him the gay adolescence he never got to have back in the 1950’s. Rod bought boys and Rod bought toys and Rod relished regaling with me his stories of erotic adventure.  Once a pornographer buddy of Rod’s used Rod’s swimming pool to shoot the background footage for the opening credits of his latest movie.  Porno actors floated by on floats in Rod’s pool, their erections at full mast.  Rod was so excited because he got to be one of the erections.  “They’re using my cock in the porno!” I remember him saying.  He was very proud of that.

Rod liked me because I did my best to be real with Rod.  I liked seeing if I could excavate the man behind the ego who paid extra money to have his zip code changed to 90210 (it was a status thing) and who also paid the phone company a handsome sum to have his phone number spell out his name. 

When I finally left Los Angeles — like a refugee — and landed down in Miami, Rod would visit me.  That’s because his frail parents, both sick and dying, clung on to life down there like barnacles.  Whenever Rod came to Florida, he left his bigger-than-life Hollywood persona in baggage claim.  In Florida, Rod mellowed and softened.  I figured it had something to do with being around his parents and caring for them.  

One night after dinner in Miami he told me how he fell in love once.  With a priest.

Another night, with his pipe in his mouth, Rod started talking about his show, the one whose name will go unmentioned here in this blog.

But what are those chocolate things in those cookies that go so well with milk?

Rod opened up to me, almost confessed to me, as if I myself were a priest.  He told me about the star of his show, and how in almost no time at all this star became a sex symbol of mammoth proportion.  But there was a problem.  His star wasn’t exactly…

well, he wasn’t exactly straight.

So Rod told me, as he puffed on his pipe and drove his father’s Cadillac, how he and his business manager huddled together and made a decision.  They decided to ask a waitress who served them often in their eatery of choice if she would marry the star of Rod’s show.  Just like that.  Rod said that he and his biz manager agreed to pay the waitress a very large amount of money to marry the star of Rod’s show.  Then they would pay her a very large sum to divorce the star, leave Los Angeles, and never return to Los Angeles again.  Rod said that the waitress agreed.  Rod looked at me and said, “Wouldn’t you?”  The divorce became very messy and very public, securing loads of press.  That, Rod said, they made sure of — that the divorce was very public.  That way the marriage was public.  

His star had been married.  His star was straight.  Marriage to a member of the opposite sex = heterosexuality.

And that’s what they had to make sure of, that there was no doubt whatsoever that the sex symbol star of their show didn’t have a gay bone in his body.  Not an ounce of gayness anywhere.  

Hollywood insider that he was, Rod told me that “arranged marriages happen every day in Hollywood” and I believed him though I hated to.  Mimi, Nicole and Katie.  Could those women have been package deals too for you know who?  Public marriage, 3-5 year commitment, public divorce?  

Who was it that said “we are all as sick as our secrets”?  Whoever said it must have spent some time in Hollywood.

I asked Rod how the star of his show felt about marrying someone he did not love in order to further his career.  His response?  “He’s getting lots of work in South America these days”.  

That’s good.  Work is good.  I like truth too.

 

-JD Cerna is a GLAAD-Media Award nominated Writer/Performer.  His one-man play, “Not as Cute as Picture” was called “a triumphant cry of victory” by The Washington Post   johncerna@yahoo.com

 

MAKE TEXT, NOT LOVE

 

A good friend recently admitted to me that his last “relationship” was “95 percent texting”.

95 percent of his communication with the guy he was dating was in the form of texting each other on the phone.

Thts fkd up.

I get it about texting.

Texting offers us the opportunity to toss out unfiltered and immediate messages of affection, sex and love, as well as communicating that ill be 5 mins late.

Thts cool.

The problem I’m seein’ is that the scales are tipping in favor of more texting, less talking, and that’s why there’s a whole lotta fkd up relationships out there.

I’ve already suffered fights that didn’t have to happen because I simply misread a text that my lover had sent me.

In another case, I got in a bad fight with a good friend because we made all our plans via text.  One of us just read the text wrong, thought I WAS coming for dinner, when in fact I was saying I don’t think I COULD come for dinner.  He bought a whole extra chicken for chrissakes.  I flt lyk 2tal sht.

We want to text because if we text, we can skip out all the other stuff that we might have to talk about.  But there is a way around this.  That’s to call on the phone and say “Hey, I only have like a minute right now but I wanted to confirm that you knew I wasn’t coming for dinner so please don’t get an extra chicken, okay?  Okay cool.  I’m sorry I can’t talk more now, I gotta run but I wanted to say it in person instead of texting because texting can fuck things UP!”

And if the best you can do is text, then at least spell out the word YOU when writing I love you.  I am a YOU, not a U, thank YOU very much.

Walk down the avenue.  There’s another one, and another one, walking and texting, walking and texting.  The other day one came right at me.

I’m loath to admit this.  I’m a grown man; I let a twenty-something girl collide right into me on Fifth Avenue.

I just couldn’t take it anymore, the walking and the texting.  The texter-walkers have this selfish attitude, you see.  It goes like this:  IM BZZY AND IN A RSH.  I CNT STP AND TXT.  U R LKNG WHR UR GNG SO JUST WATCH OUT FOR ME, K?”

She was texting as she was walking and the only place she was looking was down. She was directly in my trajectory, coming from the south.  I came from the north.  At first, the impulse was normal — just veer out of her way, John (how I’ve negotiated all the other Texter-Walkers in this city).  Get out of THEIR way, John, so you don’t ram into THEM.

But, for some reason, as she text-walked towards me, a message texted out of my brain that went “ENUF, JOHN. U SHLD NOT HAVE 2 WTCH WHR YR GOIN, JOHN. SHE IS THE 1 WHO SHLD WTCH WHR SHE IS GOING.  IF SHE WONT WTCH WHR SHE IS GOING THEN…”

I’m 175 pounds. I train every other day in a gym.  Texter Walker probably vomits after she eats.  It was like hitting an innocent bird.

Had I taught her a lesson?  In my delusional mind (the one that does way too much of the thinking these days), I decided that yes she had.

The worst is when I do it myself.  My boyfriend, if he’s with me, loves to let me know:  “You’re texting and walking, Hypocrite.”

Now that I had crossed the line and allowed one texter-walker to ram into me, I was eager to see if my intrepidity could withstand bigger beasts. If all I was going to do was let the female birds ram into me, then I was a yellow-belly.  I had to let all the stupid animals of the New York City jungle ram into me, too.

My next collision occurred on Seventh Avenue, across from Madison Square Garden.  This texter-walker was a big man, about six-foot-five.  He may as well have been a basketball player; might have been playing that night in the Garden.

WHAM.

That hurt.  My shoulder really hurt after that.

Directly after the crash (I did not look back, I never do), I panicked.  What if he were to, in direct retaliation, turn around and push me back – hard – right onto the asphalt?  I quickened my pace, shot a glance behind me.  He was fifty feet away now (phew), oblivious, still walking, still texting, texting, walking, texting, walking, texting, walking.

Did he care?

Sigh.

What about you?  Hey, are you reading this on your phone?  At the same time are you tromping up the avenue, not looking where you’re going ‘cause your head is stuck in your phone like a bird sticking its head in the dirt to catch a worm?!  Well, I gotta tell ya.  If you’re headed for me, this old-school WATCHER WALKER (who stops and pulls over to the side if he needs to read or write a text MOST of the time)…

Well, you just better watch out, see.

This WATCHER WALKER will NOT veer out of your way…

Oh no he will not!

UNLSS HE WRRIES HE MGHTGET KLLD.  THIS IS NEW YRK AFTR ALL.

-JD Cerna is a GLAAD-Media Award Nominated Writer and Performer.  His play, “Not as Cute as Picture” was called “a triumphant cry of victory” by The Washington Post

Can’t F**k the 9-11 Away

I arrived in Manhattan on September 10 2001 to shoot an author.  Not with a gun.  With a camera.  The author’s name was Amy and I was going to be directing a shoot in her apartment in Soho.  I was very excited about it.

I was also excited to be home for a couple of days.  I was living and working in D.C. but New York was my home.

Amy’s publicist Ellen instructed me, “Make shaw you only shoot in Amy’s apawtment!  Amy is aGAWra-phobic!  She nevva leaves her apawtment!”

Early the next morning, on September 11th, I climbed a Stairmaster in my hotel’s fitness center, mentally preparing to shoot an agorophobic author.  Through the gym’s window, I saw black smoke vandalizing a brilliant blue morning sky.

A woman on the other Stairmaster was looking at the news playing on her little television monitor.  She said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.  I ran back to my hotel room and called my parents.  I told them it was “the Hindenburg of the 21st century”.

Ellen called me in the hotel.  “We’re undah attack, John!  The shoot’s been cansult.”

I ran to Fifth Avenue to get a better view of the tragedy, still dressed in my gym sweats.  As I ran, I realized that many of the people I passed had no idea what was going on just thirty blocks to the south.  In Midtown, people hurried to work, stuffing bagels in their mouths.  Downtown, people threw themselves out of windows to their deaths.

The second tower fell as soon I reached Fifth and 23rd.  As the steel twisted and tumbled through empty space, it shot back a reflection of the sun.  For the first time in history, every New Yorker – gay, straight, white, rich, poor, Black, Latin and so on…

was doing the same exact thing at the same exact time.  Looking up at the end of the world.

Many of our heads turned to the Empire State.  We thought that building was going to be next.  To my left, a tall woman dressed in New York chic shook and shook until tears erupted from her elegant face.  I wanted to hold her but I was afraid that she would be afraid of me.  Nobody knew yet who the bad guys were.

I ran to the Foundling Hospital on 16th and 6th, where my doll-faced friend George works with sick children.  George is an atheist, loves everything absurd, loves underground theater and angry art.  He owns no pets, he owns no plants. He curses, he drinks, he smokes and he wanted to launch an online magazine once and call it “Cranky Fag”.  You won’t see George cry, not ever.  He once said to me, “I can’t cry.  I don’t know why.”

When I reached George I told him, “They’re gone, both towers.”  That’s when I realized that when I was a little boy, sprouting into a teenager, the twin towers were sprouting at the same time.  I remember seeing the towers grow, week by week, like plants.  When they were finally finished I was about thirteen years old.

I hugged George and I cried but he didn’t.  George, with his bare blue eyes, had seen the second plane hit on his way to work.

I ran back to my hotel as jets shot their way over Manhattan and sirens blared like human screams.  I met up with my director of photography, Afshin, in the hotel lobby.  Afshin’s origins are Middle Eastern.  I told him to go back to his hotel room and never leave.

I went back to my hotel room and wondered if sex would help.  I had just witnessed a massacre.  I ached from contemplating all that I had seen, all that was happening.  I wanted to escape.  I called one of those phone sex lines and listened to guys leave messages about their body parts and what they wanted to do with them.  As it turned out, there were others who wanted to fuck the pain away too.

But how many people were still alive under that twisted metal, screaming for someone to rescue them?  How many people were shattered at this moment, knowing their loved ones had been trapped inside one of those towers?

Later I met George at one of the only open bars in Chelsea.  We drank hard and fast until we were obliterated.  Floating over the bar the television played images of people searching for their loved ones, their bodies covered in photographs.  At one point, George looked at me and said, “Armageddon any?  Armagettin’ any?”

We closed the bar and stumbled into an all-night deli.  A wiry man from Dublin was shaking next to the soda section.  I asked him if he was alright.  He said he had just been “down there” to volunteer.  He was not alright.  He said there were “baskets” for the “different body parts”.  I put my hands on his shoulders and told him he was going to be okay, though I really had no idea if he would ever wake up from the nightmare he had seen.

I walked George back to his Chelsea apartment, the streets now lined with tanks and military personnel.  It reminded me of when they were shooting “Godzilla” in Manhattan just a couple of years before.  If only it were a movie.  If only this binge could last forever.  If only sex could make it go away.  Go away, go away.

But it wasn’t going away.

I couldn’t go away, I couldn’t leave.  I wanted to be in my hometown. I wanted to stay.  And anyway, there were so many bomb threats at Penn Station there was no way I could leave.

George biked to the piers, where Army people and volunteers zigzagged around him.  George brought whatever he could from his apartment, to donate.  He spotted a billboard with photographs of the missing.

A missing guy, our age, who had been working in the Trade Center was described, partly, this way: “Has tattoo on left buttcheek.  Possibly “Tweety”.  Please call…”

Possibly Tweety.  They knew the guy had a tattoo on his ass.  They knew it was a Warner Brothers character.  Possibly Tweety.  George threw his head back and laughed.  He lit his American Spirit cigarette and smoked it under a smoldering sky bereft of two mighty towers.

They say the towers buckled before they fell, and as they came tumbling down the people of the world said in unison, “Oh my God”.

George buckled too, his fingers clutching his American Spirit, his eyes welling with tears.

And then George wept.

-J.D. Cerna is a GLAAD-Media Award nominated Writer/Performer.  His play, “Not as Cute as Picture”, was called “a triumphant cry of victory” by the Washington Post.

Of Frozen Fish and Foolishness

 It all began in the frozen fish section of Trader Joe’s, where nothing usually begins.

But it began there, when I was looking for those frozen french fries I like so much.

“Don’t you love the frozen fish here?” asked a yellow-haired man to my right.  I was a bit startled.  Nobody had ever flirted with me in the frozen fish section before.

“No fish or fungus,” I politely replied, still searching for my french fries.  “Just lookin’ for the french fries.”  I realized they were out of my french fries and immediately sunk into a depression considering a week without my french fries.

”So you don’t like fish and chips then?” asked the yellow-haired man as he smiled.  He was persistent for sure and he was nice enough.  I just wasn’t interested in flirting.  I really just wanted my french fries.

“Oh I love fish and chips,” I said, “as long as there’s no fish.”  The yellow-haired man laughed a tremendous and disproportionate laugh that almost made the frozen shrimp thaw.  Then I excused myself.

And that was the end of that.

Or so I thought.

Three days later I was having lunch in an outdoor cafe with my buddy Jeff.  I had just attacked my hair with blonde highlights  and I felt very sexy, young and blonde.  I was getting checked out by a brunette eating lunch with his friend.  I concluded that my blonde highlights were well worth the money now that I was getting checked out by someone who I considered attractive.

Jeff said, “Go and talk to him! He’s checking you out!”

I followed my buddy’s advice and walked right over to the two  guys but when I got to the table I worried, ‘What if they’re on a date?‘  So I point-blank asked them, “Are you guys on a date?  Or are you a couple?  ‘Cause if you are, I’m barking up the wrong tree and I apologize.”  It was extremely bullish of me to ask such a thing of two strangers, but my new blonde hair was turning me into a monster who knows that you’ll never get anything in life unless you just step up to the plate and ask for it.

The brunette answered, “Nope, we’re not on a date.”

But the other one frowned, looked at the brunette and said, “Uh…yeah we are on a date.”

Oh boy.

These guys were on a date, but the one guy who had been checking me out did not get the memo that it was a date they were on.  

I excused myself.

“I feel like such an asshole,” I told Jeff.  “I have no idea how to pick up men.  How will I ever–”

“Shut up,” Jeff tells me.  “You’re an asshole, but you’re my asshole and I love you.  And anyway, they should have figured out whether they were on a date or not before they went to lunch!”

It’s good to have friends like Jeff.  Friends like Jeff are right.

Later that week I picked up a copy of the local gay rag and flipped to the “Glances” section.  The Glances Section is the place where people can write things like “Saw you on the A train this morning.  You were wearing khakis and reading Catcher in the Rye, you were checking me out, I was wearing white pumps”, that kind of thing.   So I journeyed to the Glances section to see if perhaps the brunette who had no idea whether he was on a date or not might have thought to put a “Glances” ad saying something like “You: fake blonde hair guy.  Approached me when I was not on date with guy who thought we were on date.  You’re an asshole, but I’d love to see you again.”

There was no such ad.  But there was an ad which caught me by surprise.  It read: “Fish section.  You love fish and chips, ‘as long as there’s no fish’.  Me: yellowish-blonde hair.  Can we go for a drive in your Mustang?”

Oh my God!  It was the fish section guy!  He watched me pull away in my Mustang?!  Wacky!  I was checking the “Glances” section for someone I had been thinking about…

and received a Glances ad by someone I never gave another thought about.

I decided not to respond to the fish section guy.  I felt a little bad not responding, but the truth is I wasn’t interested, so I felt it best to just…

not respond.

Some nights later, I let myself get dragged to a smoky, leathery bar on the “bad” side of town.  My friend Doug took me there.  I told Doug all about the Glances ad from the fish section guy. I told everyone about the Glances ad from the fish section guy.

Later that night in the bar, after one too many beers, I ended up making out with a guy who absolutely stunk because he had just worked a ten-hour shift busing tables at a Tony Roma’s House of Ribs.  He hadn’t showered after.  He told me this.  It’s why he stank.  The kissing was hot but I had to make sure I didn’t breathe as I kissed.  When Doug and I left, Doug teased me about my make-out session.  I told Doug how the guy stank like half-eaten ribs mixed with thrown-up barbeque sauce.  Doug said, “Yeah and now you smell the same way” and sure enough, Doug’s car smelled like a Tony Roma’s dumpster for days after.

A couple of days later I made my way to Trader Joe’s again, to see if my frozen french fries had made their way into the fish section.  When I got back to my Mustang, there was a note inside the car, written on the back of a food receipt. It read:  “Why didn’t you respond to my Glances ad?!  I saw you at the bar making out with that smelly guy!  Why can’t I be your smelly guy?!  I think it would have been nice to respond to my ad, you know!  Geez!”

What?!!

I happened to be with my friend Vicky when I saw the note.  Vicky is from Staten Island New York.  She freaked out in a really Staten Island-y way. “This guy is stalking you, Cerna!”  

“No,” I told Vicky, “it has to be a joke.”

But if it wasn’t a joke, then the fish section guy really was stalking me.  So I asked every single one of my friends, “Did you leave a note in my car pretending to be the fish section guy from the Glances ad?”  All my friends swore up and down that they did not leave the note in my car, which meant of course…

that the fish section guy really did leave that note in my car.

So I responded to the fish section guy.  I noted his “Glances” personal ad box number and responded that way, telling him I’m just not interested and please don’t leave any more notes in my car if he ever saw me at Trader Joe’s again.  I expressed to him that that was just plain “weird”.  

One day later, the fish section guy wrote me back.

“WHAT?” he wrote. “I didn’t leave you a note!!  What, do you think I’m stalking you??  I have no idea what ‘smelly guy’ you are referring to! I have NO IDEA what you’re talking about.  I never left you any kind of note!!”

Later that day, I told Doug about the note I wrote to the fish section guy.  Doug buried his head in his hands.  Doug moaned.

Uh oh.

“Oh my God,” Doug groaned.  “I left you the note, J.D.  It was a joke!”

Oh fuck!  “But I asked you if you had left the note, Doug!!”

“I know you did,” Doug said, “but it was a joke, J.D.  I couldn’t tell you I left the note, then it’s not a joke anymore!”

Oh no!

I IMMEDIATELY wrote the fish section guy again, informing him that my stupid friend Doug, who had accompanied me to a leather bar and who witnessed me make out with a smelly guy, left me that note in my car as a joke.  I apologized profusely, but after I sent the note to fish section guy, I felt like a complete and utter asshole because…

not only was I rejecting the fish section guy a second time but now I told him that he was the subject of a joke!  And sure enough, the fish section guy wrote me back. “That’s the last time I ever look for love with a personal ad again.”

I single-handedly aborted this lonely yellow-haired man’s modern search for love.  This is how I felt.

And to this day, I still feel it, as stupid as that seems.  

I almost want to find the fish section guy and go on a date with him and tell him I love him just to say I’m sorry.

But you can’t do that in life.

You can only navigate as best you can all the stupid things you do, all the dumb mistakes you make, and all the dopey practical jokes your friends play…

as best you can. 

And if I ever feel “trapped” in my current relationship, I will remember the days when I embarrassed myself in front of confused people who might have been/might not have been on a date, made out with stinky men in leather bars, and humiliated innocent men searching for love…

and fish.

 

 

-JD Cerna

 

I Am The Naked Unemployed Cowboy

Howdy partner.  Welcome to the Wild West of Unemployment.

You get to go to the movies in the middle of the day.  Yee haw.  It’s cheaper, ya know.  And there’s nobody there.  Because everyone else is workin’.

You go see a movie to escape, of course.  It sure is nice to escape.  But when the credits roll you think, ‘All those people are workin’ except me.’

You realize those are not the thoughts you want to have when you are at the movies, partner, but this is new.  This never happened before.  Something in your mind opened up to let these thoughts in.

You begin to think, well I could have been at that movie theater in Aurora and I’m not.

So I’m lucky.  I’m lucky.  I have a roof over my head, even though it’s not the roof I once had, the one I loved to be under.  I had to give up that roof and everything under it.  But I have someone who loves me.  If I was alone it would be so much worse.  And then you allow yourself to feel the feelings of nervousness that you have no health insurance.  Otherwise, if you don’t allow yourself to feel the feelings, you’ll shame yourself or you’ll try to ignore the feelings or you’ll try to drink them away or drug them away and that doesn’t last anyway.

You work hard on your mind to make it concentrate on this day only.  You do not push forward to the day your Unemployment Benefits end.   You can’t believe that you are actually on an Emergency Tier of Unemployment Benefits.  You look back on your life and you realize you were only on Unemployment twice in your life, and it never ever had to last this long. You look at the homeless person on the street in a different way than you used to.  You think, why not me?  And if so, perhaps it’s God’s plan.  If it’s God’s plan for me to end up on the street, I will deal with it.  God doesn’t give anything to anyone He doesn’t think they can handle.

Right?

You embrace the silky smoothness of a long summer’s night with your lover even as the fault lines of uncertainty threaten to undermine every ounce of present peace.  And you let yourself laugh…but some nights it’s not funny.  It’s just not funny at all.  It’s just not funny that the man who told you “We’ll be letting you go” received a bonus of 130,000 dollars just a couple of months ago, which is a lot more than what your yearly salary was.  And because it doesn’t make sense, why the person who let you go got a bonus like that on top of his regular salary, it becomes harder to make jokes about it.  Much harder.

When your lover says goodbye and leaves for his food service job, it’s difficult not to feel ashamed.  Why aren’t I going to a food service job?  Oh right.  I can’t wait tables for shit.  I’m terrible.  So you go out and ask if anyone needs bartenders.  And they don’t.  And people say “You’ll find a survival job” but they won’t tell you what that survival job is.  What does it look like?  So you try to think of it on your own.  “I could be a real estate agent” you think, and then you balk at the cost of getting a license, and then your friend tells you you don’t make crap in the beginning.  And you fear that while you’re showing people who have jobs their new future home…

that you will resent them and then that will affect your sales.  You think, “I could be a UPS driver” and then you find out you have to take a train to a bus to go pick up the delivery truck, and you think that sounds like a pain in the ass, and your mind goes immediately to the office you once had, the one you earned, the one you paid your dues to get, and you think “Really? I’m going to drive a fucking UPS truck?”  And so then your mind goes back to, “Okay, okay, maybe I’ll find a job in my field before my unemployment runs out”.

Maybe.

Maybe that company will respond to your resume posting.

Maybe that, maybe this

maybe maybe maybe

You exist on maybes as if they were nutritional supplements taken by astronauts floating in space.

The maybes feed you and fuel you.

You think “I’ll be an actor again” even though you never really were an actor, you just were always surviving and auditioning and bartending and auditioning and sometimes you got work and the money didn’t last and you gave up acting and you got this amazing job that only lasted four years because you got laid off.

But you go to auditions anyway.

You go to auditions and sign up on the “Non Equity” list and you wait and you wait and you go to the bathroom and when you get back to the waiting room the smug monitor person tells you that he called your name but you didn’t respond and that’s why you went from #26 on the audition waiting list to #78.  You tell him you were in the bathroom, you were taking a crap for chrissakes and he tells you what the rules are.  “You must be present in this waiting room when your name is called.”  So you get angry as hell but you don’t take it out on the monitor, you take it into the audition with you and it’s a good thing the monologue you chose to audition with is an angry one, because you give the performance of your life and the people auditioning you — each one — says “Wow, that was very nice.”

And you feel elated when you leave, and then you hear nothing from those people ever again.

But you think, maybe this is why I got laid off from my real job with the real salary and the real benefits, to become an actor again.

But there is no “becoming” anything, not really, there’s really only waiting.  Waiting for whatever it is that will bring in income besides unemployment.

You used to go to an office and you don’t anymore.  There was no need for Maybes then.  The Maybes then were only small Maybes, like maybe I’ll have Italian tonight or maybe I’ll do takeout.

Here, in the Wild West of Unemployment, the big Maybes coexist with the smaller Maybes, and they sure have more weight.  Maybe someone will leave me money.  Maybe I’ll get that bartending job if one opens up.  Maybe the owner of that bar will finally call me because one of his bartenders dies.  Maybe I will get a job in my field before the Unemployment runs out.

But what if I don’t?

If Maybes are nutrition, the What-Ifs are the junk food.  What if I don’t find a job before my unemployment runs out?  What if I can’t pay my rent?  What if I get hit by a bus and I have to pay medical bills that I actually cannot pay?  You try to remember all it takes is one letter, the letter S, to change What If to What Is.  What is…

is right now.  And then you’re back to right now I have a roof over my head, right now I have someone who loves me…right now.

It will be that one person I know, he’ll put a word in for me.  He’ll know of something somewhere, something I’m right for.  He’ll put me in touch with her.  She knows.  It’s a good thing I ran into him.  Lucky me.  I have friends.  I have contacts.  I am “on Linkedin”.  I am networking.  I’m still “in a network”, aren’t I? Maybe I will get hit by a bus and win a lawsuit.

Here in the Wild West of Unemployment, you sometimes have to force yourself to get out of your apartment and do things, but those things cannot cost money because money has to be spent on critical expenses now. Critical.

You’re using words like critical when you used to use words like casual.

Before: Friday is casual day.  Now: Critical expenses day.

When you pray — if you pray — you ask for someone to simply want you.  “We want you to start on this day.”

You thank God for the gym. The gym is like church.  It offers solace, it offers sweat.

When people ask you what you’re doing with your weekend you smile softly as your stomach sinks. There are no weekends anymore because there are no workweeks.  But the one good thing about the weekends is this:  at least most people aren’t working either.  And so you don’t feel so alone on the weekends.  Everyone is like me on the weekends.  Not working.

And he’s got a job, and she’s got a job, and he’s got a job, and why don’t I?

And they have jobs, and she has a job, and he has a job, and why don’t I?

And this is what you feel, these crazy things, whether you are straight or gay or Black or white or whatever the hell you are.  Unemployment strips it all down, bares it all down.   Who the fuck cares about who marries who…

when I don’t have a JOB?

And then you hear about a march…and you go to the march…you are beckoned to go.

And there at the march you just take off all your clothes…

and you hold up a sign that says

I AM THE NAKED UNEMPLOYED COWBOY

I USED TO WEAR A SUIT NOW LOOK AT ME

LOSING MY HOME LOSING MY MEDICAL INSURANCE

CANT PLAY A GUITAR, DON’T KNOW HOW.

And then before you know it, hundreds and hundreds of people are taking your picture.  And you feel like someone.  You are being noticed and when you are unemployed you fight to be noticed.  But the truth is you are not someONE here at the march.  Here at the march, you are a man among many men,  a man among angry men.  And angry women too.

All crying and screaming and mad as hell and telling the police “You are like US” and meaning it

and you kind of leave your body and your mind is blown

by being so connected to people who are asking other people

to please

not forget us.

Don’t forget us.

We’re here.

We need help.

Ya hear?

-JD Cerna is a GLAAD-Media Award Writer and Performer.  His play “Not as Cute as Picture” was called “a triumphant cry of victory” by The Washington Post.

No Femmes Need Apply

Jamie was my childhood best friend.  We spent every single day together in our mutual hometown of Larchmont, playing our own made-up movies like “FartMonster Versus The World.”

My beloved friend and I were inseparable from fourth grade until the first year of high school.  Even then we’d play “FartMonster” every so often, just for old times sakes.

But one day in the late autumn of ninth grade, Jamie suddenly stopped speaking to me.

Even at the locker we both shared, Jamie wouldn’t utter a word.  I begged Jamie to say something — anything — but nothing came out of his mouth.  He wouldn’t even look me in the eye.  As if his brain had been operated on by aliens, Jamie refused to even acknowledge my presence. For weeks, as frost began to crisp the fallen leaves of Larchmont, I begged Jamie to speak to me, to say something, even the time of day.  What the hell had I done to deserve this silence?

Finally Jamie left a note in the locker we both shared.  Words scratched on a piece of notebook paper read, “John, I’m forbidden to be your friend. I can’t talk to you.  My father saw us playing the other day. He said you were ‘flittin’ around like a goddamn butterfly’.   Sorry.  Jamie.”

My fourteen-year-old body shaking, I held the note in my hand and felt a cavernous black hole open up inside me.  It might have been right at that moment that Winter stomped out Autumn, because everything in my young life froze and my horizon darkened way too early.  I was a boy, as Sir Elton John wrote, “too young to be singin’ the blues”.

I had never before cursed my “flittiness” but I cursed it now — with venom.  I was an effeminate boy.  And by the way, so was Jamie.  Big deal, right?  Yes.  For Jamie’s parents (who also happened to be Quakers), it was a very big deal.

Terrified of “the butterfly effect”,  Jamie’s parents moved their family to Maine in the hopes, I suppose, that their son would develop into a masculine, heterosexual lobster fisher.

My depression, in the meantime, had gotten so bad that I felt a desire to end my life. I didn’t do myself in, though, but for the burning ember of hope that one day I’d have a new best friend, another gay soul safely beside my own.

And today, thank God, I do.

But right now at least one adolescent boy is getting abused, tortured, neglected or ejected for exhibiting effeminate behavior.  He might not live to experience gay friendship in adulthood, because he might not live to adulthood. He might kill himself the way I did not. Gay adolescents who kill themselves are blinded by their self-hatred, the same self-hatred I felt when Jamie was taken from me by his parents.

If you go to any Gay Dating Site right now, it won’t take long before you will spot at least one personal ad that says “no femmes need respond”.  I humbly submit that when anyone in this so-called gay community of ours writes “no femmes” or “no sissies” in their personal ad (or anywhere else) that they are enabling the heartless actions of Jamie’s terrified parents.

If any one of us desires to have a friend or partner who is one-hundred percent masculine all of the live-long day and night, trust me there are other ways of conveying this desire.  To simply write “no femmes need apply” or “no sissies” is tasteless, discriminatory, and dangerous.  Dangerous because it lets the world-at-large know that effeminate men can and should be discarded, just as I was discarded way back when.

I don’t know when it was that I became more masculine, and I don’t know when it was that I became less effeminate.  And I don’t care.  I don’t care if I “queen out” and I don’t care if I’m the most butch man on the planet. Sometimes I’m both and one thing I know: my best friend doesn’t give a damn and neither should anybody else.

I found Jamie on Facebook recently.  We reconnected.  Jamie told me he that knows how painful that must have been for me, being cut from our friendship so abruptly at such a tender time in my life.  Jamie told me that things didn’t get much better in his family after that.  His mother, several years later, hung herself.  Wow.  I didn’t even bother to ask about his Dad.

Those of us who hurt the most, who don’t even know they are hurting, they are the ones who hurt us the most.  That is what I believe, and I guess it might be what Jesus meant when he said “Love your enemies”.  What He really might have been saying was, “Remember how much misery they’re in, and how what they really wanna do is hang themselves from a chandelier.”

-JD Cerna is a GLAAD-Media Award Nominated Writer/Performer.  His play, “Not as Cute as Picture” was called “a triumphant cry of victory” by The Washington Post.

 

Science is Gay and God

Yesterday my partner Nate and I took his 12-year old nephew to the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey.

The first exhibit we walked into was “Infection Collection!”  It was all about diseases.  You could sit in an airplane and take trips all around the world to find out where TB and AIDS was spreading.  That was fun.

Then we sat in on a dissection of a cow-eye.  Cow was dead already.  I mean, they didn’t kill it just to dissect its eye for us.  As the dissector lady cut out the cow’s eyeball, and peeled away the cornea and revealed the retina and the optic nerve and the pupil, I imagined all the things the cow ever saw during its lifetime would start projecting out in front of us, like images of grass and cars filled with kids screaming “MOO!”  That did not happen, but as this eye came apart before us I became awestruck and I don’t usually get awestruck before I’ve had lunch.

All the parts, the beautiful colors (there is a lot of color inside a dead cow’s eye), the intricacies, the complexities lay there before me and I asked myself ‘What went to so much trouble to create this?‘  Because someTHING created this, whatever that THING is, it decided that a cow should see and then went to all this trouble to create this incredibly complex, color-filled, intricate, delicate instrument of sight.

I was awestruck.

Then we had lunch.  In the cafeteria, my partner’s nephew told us how there are animals that can actually change their sex — by themselves. I did not know this. I thought you had to go to a hospital to do that or live in San Francisco.  He said, “Like, if there’s a whole bunch of girls and only one male, then some of the girls will change into male to balance it out”.

And then I became awestruck again.  Two awestrucknesses in one day.  I was hopeful there would be a third.

I must say the museum was quite successful in putting my mind in Science Head.  Even when I went to the bathroom after lunch, I pretended I was in an Exhibit called “Urination and Waste Disposal!” and I imagined huge diagrams of a bladder next to the stall.

Our next exhibit was called “Wonder Why?” and just the sign itself, all lit up with blinking colors, caused me to Wonder Why I Am Gay.  Was it a scientific necessity on the part of nature?  Like, maybe Nature thought the earth was filling up with people way too fast because it gave people this amazing thing called Fucking in order to make sure people would keep on comin’ and Nature didn’t want the Earth to fill up with people too fast because then there wouldn’t be enough space and food and stuff, and so Nature NEEDED to make people who did not fuck on purpose.  In other words, people who did NOT create other people. And because Nature’s nice (for the most part, I mean come on ever seen a rose?), it decided gay people should not miss out on the fun of fucking the way the straight people were not missing out on it.

And that made me think the Liberty Science Center’s next exhibit should be called “Fuckin’!  All of Nature’s Doin’ It!”   And in that exhibit, they could teach the museum guests my theory.

I wonder why so many people work hard to separate God from Science.  It just seems as easy as the block puzzle I could not figure out for the life of me in the “Wonder Why?” section. That God IS science.  God is the one behind that cow eye and that animal changing its sex and well, God is even behind all the Infection Collections so that God can see how we can use SCIENCE, the gift He gave us, to fight said infection collections.

When we got home, we made spaghetti and meatballs for Nate’s nephew and tried not to think about the dead cow-eye as we ate our meatballs.

Then we put on the Olympics Opening Ceremony.  And that’s when I had my third awesome awestruckness moment.  It happened during the March of Nations, as each country holds its flag and waves to the gazillions of people watching.  I said to Nate and his nephew, “Everyone’s smiling and marching and digging everyone else’s flags and why can’t it be this way?  We just play games all day and all night with each other instead of invading each other and bombing each other?”  Nate’s nephew was in full agreement.

I was awestruck by the possibility of world peace and Mass Acceptance, everyone accepting everyone else as they are.  Each of us with our little flags, like the snake with his tiny brown spots in the “Eat or Be Eaten!” exhibit.  There’s something about science that invites the idea of acceptance.  All things are as they should be.  All things are as they were intentionally designed.   The snakes, the cockroaches, the stars at night, the powerful wind, the sex-changing animals.

Even the inside of the dead eye of a cow.

-JD Cerna is a GLAAD-Award Nominated Writer/Performer.  His play “Not as Cute as Picture” was called “a triumphant cry of victory” by The Washington Post. He can be reached at johncerna@yahoo.com. 

 

Subway To Hell

 

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality” – Dante

The subway was hot as Hell, packed with people clutching to metal poles for their lives.  A little boy, not much taller than four-and-a-half feet, stood frozen about nine or eight feet from me.  He wore glasses and held a pile of presents as if it was a peace offering.  On his way to a birthday party, I figured.

“You better fuckin’ behave yourself or I am going to slam you against the wall so hard you won’t know what hit you.  You got that?”

Her body was hard and snaky.  Her face, lavishly rouged, was mean.  As she clutched the metal pole, she leaned into her little boy and proceeded to threaten him in front of everyone.

“You better fuckin’ be good at this party,” she snapped. “Cause if you ain’t, I will slam your head against the wall.”

In New York, the more aloof you are, the safer you are.   Alas, I had no Nano to block the snaky woman out because it had broken.

“I’m serious, you are going to hurt so much when I’m done with you.”

Her son looked straight ahead, like a soldier.  He might have been imagining his eyeglasses to be a force field that would block her out.  To say I felt sad for that little boy, well, that is an understatement.

“Did you hear me?” she hissed again.  “You better fuckin’ behave yourself!  It’s going to hurt if you don’t!”

As her rage ballooned, my fellow passengers pushed their brains up into their skulls and tuned it all out.  But I imagined myself leaning into her and whispering, “I am an undercover cop and I will haul you in if you don’t cut that crap out right now.”

But I’m not an undercover cop.

“You listening to me?” she said to him.  “You LISTENING?  Man, am I going to smash that face in. “

They say that victims of both verbal and physical abuse “transport” themselves out of their bodies.  Perhaps the boy’s soul was sitting on the other end of the train car now next to the homeless woman playing with her hair, a far less threatening figure than his very own mother.

“Don’t pretend not to listen to me.  You better be listening to me, you little piece of shit.”

His body stood stiff as wood, his one hand on the pole and the other on the presents. Why was every reasonable human being on this train ignoring this woman’s behavior towards her own son?  I knew why.  Because this “interaction” between mother and son was none of our business.  And what could any of us do, really?  Steal him away from her? I could have taken him home – I guess.  My apartment is small though. What if he’s allergic to my cat?

Perhaps that’s what Medusa wanted.  Someone to match her extreme behavior with something equally extreme.  Maybe she was just doing it to get attention.  Let it go.  Go faster, train.  I hope I better make my appointment in time.  What should I make for dinner tonight?

“I swear to God I’m gonna slam that head of yours against the wall if you act like a little shit at this party.  You hear me?  You understand me?!!”

She is not shutting up.  Man.  Was she all talk?  Did she carry out her threats?

I stayed neutral as possible as the train soared through space, as her volume increased though all the synapses in my cerebral cortex were telling me to step in.  Fuck it, pretend I’m a cop.  Demand to see her license and report her to New York Child Services.  Then comes the thought, ‘Someone else has gotta notice this and I’m sure that person will do something about it.’  In 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was brutally stabbed as thirty-eight of her neighbors watched and did nothing.  Why did they do nothing?  They either didn’t want to get involved or just assumed the “other” person would.

The train stopped and my feet automatically walked me off the train.  As the door closed, I saw the little boy’s face one last time.  The wrapping in his presents glistened, reflecting the fluorescent light of the train.  He held on to that pole with all his might the way he might hold on to his sanity later in life.  That is if he lived to see the rest of his life.  Seriously.  God knows what Medusa was capable of.

This morning I am still haunted by that little boy, the way he stared straight ahead, straight as the tie around his neck.

Stephen Sondheim wrote, “You move just a finger, say the slightest word, something’s bound to linger–be heard.”

What if I had taken some action but my meddling made things worse?  It’s a chance I’d be willing to take, if I was given the chance again.  I’ve come to believe that failure is not so much taking the chance and losing…

so much as it’s never taking the chance at all.

I believe heroes take the chance.  Their heroism is borne when the voice that says, “Don’t meddle” is willfully silenced.   That’s when the heroism begins, when the awareness that something is very wrong becomes crystal clear.  Then the Hero fans awareness like a flame until awareness explodes into action.

God, if You show me proof that my action could have made a difference, then I will have met my Hell.  And that kind of hell makes August 18^th in New York seem like a day free of heat.

What will you do when you meet that moral crisis, when it’s standing right in front of you?  What won’t you do?

-JD Cerna is a GLAAD-Nominated Writer/Performer and Playwright.  He can be reached at johncerna@yahoo.com