A night when, wakeful from minor physical discomforts, I think of different paths, different ways my life might have gone.
I’ve done this before of course – as someone who spent a lot of time reading science fiction and fantasy when I was younger, the idea is utterly familiar. The most important alternative path was the one I imagined some years ago, a timeline where AIDS didn’t change my life, where I found a reasonable creative career and a partner and a home, a timeline where I am living through a pleasantly busy later life in a less damaged San Francisco.
But this is a bit different: some of the slower surface of my life over the past couple of years, and the gradual and large-scale shifts in the depths, open up ideas of many paths: what are other selves I might have been?
This is in the midst of a blurry August, where I am neither one thing nor another – not quite well but no longer really ill, not exercising enough but getting out occasionally. A lot of the weather is dull and chilly, some of it verges on warm and pleasant… there is much less to do than in former years, as I let go of so many committees and jobs, and almost the only things on my calendar and lists are patients and writing.
Thinking what-ifs: and realizing it is interesting to generate some, and see where they go…
***
One is on an island, Bali or Hawaii, or better some place quieter, more out of the way. This follows some line of change that flowed through Hong Kong or Australia, or leapt direct from Los Angeles, or perhaps something changed earlier.
(I don’t, in this version, worry about HIV medications. Perhaps HIV isn’t a problem in this timeline.)
I’m casually dressed, thinner of course. Days float by; I have work, but not much. There is a small, sunny, rather shabby apartment; some books, though most of the books I’ve lugged around for the past forty-five years are not here. I don’t know where they went, it doesn’t seem important in this line.
I avoid contact with family, old friends: there isn’t anything like Facebook in my life. There wasn’t any real loss, but at some point, I just couldn’t explain what I was doing or why; we all made less sense to each other, and I dropped out of their sight, they out of mine.
Days and time float. Working in a shop or a bar, I’m a good enough worker; things aren’t expensive, some of my food comes at a discount from the shop. We sit and talk at times, sitting outside; or I stay home and read when it rains.
The reach and content of my thoughts are vastly different in this version… less self-examination; a mostly calm tendency to look at what I see – island, sand, sea, town, people who seem a bit abstracted, or a bit stoned…
***
Or Vancouver. The perfect job offer that went wrong in the mid-1990s did not, in this timeline, go wrong, and I teach in the music department at UBC. A beautiful city, a kinder politic, an overworked but civilized department – a lively gay community – I probably still wouldn’t have had the cautious sense to get a permanent home before prices skyrocketed, but perhaps a relationship or two that might have faded away on relatively friendly terms would leave me living in something not too small that couldn’t be taken away. Because I had fewer crashes and losses once I’d gotten into academe, I am steadier, more conscientious, hard-working – there is too much work, but I do it; my life is busy with institutional and personal incident.
And so there is less self-examination, less time to fall into pasts and futures. This life is productive, if a bit blurred – I haven’t had so much time to spend looking at time and meaning, but the materials of academic life, of a more civilized bourgeois and gay social life, are present to me, with less of a sense that they could be taken away at any time. The existential background is not so clear, but that is all right – I am busier, better at taking care of others and myself… if perhaps a little bit at sea with larger things…
***
There must be a timeline where I stay in Los Angeles, having fallen away from UCLA without finishing any degree; it is a kind of floating haze.
Am I still in the three-bedroom apartment near Melrose? Perhaps, and it is shabby but not a terrible place to live; perhaps it is less dusty than it was in my last years there. Though rents have soared, I have somehow managed to stay where I was. I have roommates, and that is steadying, or chaotic, depending on how their lives change or stall.
Work is mildly tiresome, bank jobs are meaningless, I am still not good at getting up in the mornings; or perhaps I did a bit better than the banks, like the last office manager job in the architect’s office. I move through jobs, buy groceries, don’t talk much about the academic work I don’t do any more. I sometimes have to get away from overdoing drugs, which are not wonderful but an occasional distraction; as I’m older I can’t experiment and still get to work in the morning.
A life that is a bit flat, but not awful; I get along, I pay the utilities, I go to bars on weekends…
***
Perhaps there is a version where I end up in Germany, probably in the 90s. I could apply for citizenship in the midst of the growth of the EU; and would I be in a minor role in academia, or what other life? Some possible choices and vocations are similar to others here. I am foreign, and American, so considered a bit annoying but also a bit interesting. And the bread and cheese are so much better….
***
Can I imagine who I would have been if I had landed in New Orleans?
When I was there it was surprising how quickly I fell into the richly chaotic hot afternoons, the food and old shops, and drinking in the gay bar among wild guys who didn’t seem to have the shadow of a thought about whether they should be doing something else somewhere.
I would have another shop or bar job I suppose, perhaps if I’m lucky a bookstore job and a shabby but comfortable couple of rooms above a restaurant. In this life I drink more than in the others, though still not constantly, and drugs are no big deal; my sense of time is at the other end of human possibility from my Zürich training, and indeed is not so much a sense of time as a sense of breathing, of walking, of leaning over the bar to grab a bottle. This I is more casual about people, though he moves cautiously around those who seem really dangerous (as does the one in Berlin, in east LA, though the versions of dangerous people around the Quarter are less aggressive but more deeply crazy).
Entertaining, chaotic, casually sloppy. And I know a lot more jazz.
***
(I can see that I am allowing each of these lines of development to follow relatively predictable paths – which has that narrowness I despised in academic colleagues who couldn’t imagine that a famous composer could be queer or unusual in some other way: there are always those who simply can’t understand that people live very, very different lives. And here I am positing versions of myself who don’t, say, have a stroke, or travel to Zürich while teaching in northern England, to launch a third career as a Jungian analyst – which is weird by any manner of judgment…)
***
M. has told me that he thinks New York would have been bad for me: though when he said that I sensed a wish on his part to close a door that might only cause pain, as he might think that imagining other lifetimes is not good for me, it has too much painful yearning in it from his point of view. But if I’d gone to New York rather than San Francisco in the late 70s, I might be more intricately linked with the dense world of Village creativity… and writing, publishing; performing; the involvement with music would have shifted easily over to more fluid performance, towards things I’m better at – voice, stage, moving among skills rather than honing one of them.
Versions of this life are divided by: do I end up connected to someone or something productive and alive – a theater company, an artist with a group – or bitterly irritable, at the edge of things, another frustrated Village nobody full of stories of might-have-beens? Do I make it on my own, or am I too restless and unfinished in too many things – the scripts, the notes, the ideas…
I think at some point I do manage to make, to do real work. Not a lot, not terribly important, but enough to blend into a community, to frequently work with others, stage work, writing, performance art…
Of course, I’d also be in the midst of AIDS in its New York manifestation. There was more anger, more politics than in San Francisco, and that overly familiar conviction that the New York story is the most important one anywhere (even San Francisco itself means little to me in this lifetime, I can’t imagine living there, and the Pacific half of the world is covered in a distant, foreign haze; while Europe is just Europe, another kind of ‘over there,’ a place one hears about all the time but rarely sees). Some entanglement in HIV support groups, more than political ones, and I am also one of those who have lived longer than expected, who talk about it endlessly… I am another ‘old soldier’ in this one… an also-ran; but busier.
As for emotions, this one is more rigid, angrier, more judgmental. He is not great with people, though he talks to them… he talks a great deal, in fact, and is funnier or sharper than kind.
Assuming other aspects of the timeline conform to this one, my sister also lives in New York. I probably argue with her occasionally and am not as consistent as I should be about seeing her and her family, except perhaps on holidays. Of course she, with her husband and son, are all a bit different in that timeline, having connected and molded each other a bit more than in this one, partly because of my zigzagging intermittent presence adjacent to their lives…
***
And, to see the exercise come full circle: how does this particular lifetime, the one I am in now, the one that winds through SF-LA-SF-Berlin-Hong Kong-Adelaide-Newcastle, appear to all those other selves?...
It may look too quiet, far from things and rather sad – though they would all look surprised at the choice in this timeline to become a psychoanalyst, wondering: what is that like, it’s unexpectedly interesting, if of course rather weird… a Jungian, really? Why did you choose that?
The timelines who follow alongside this one through the late 80s will see how I got here, because of the work with M. in Los Angeles; but it will still seem a bit peculiar. Peculiar, but real: it is obviously a real life, a real vocation – you wouldn’t be able to do it on the side… they would all wonder: what is that guy like? He seems lonely, but his eyes are a bit different, as though he looks at more things at once…
And some of them also engage in this exercise, of imagining other paths. The Vancouver academic finds it interesting, but also rather distasteful – why would you imagine ending up in places where you aren’t taken care of, places that aren’t so beautiful, places where you might not even know where your health care is coming from? He’s glad he became a Canadian citizen in the late noughties, glad of his friends and projects.
For the New Yorker this is all material for a performance piece, a play, a small-press series of vignettes. For him the other selves all seem to live in backwaters, but at least they have unusual stories. He realizes that he can turn their images into something, an essay or a more experimental piece: perhaps there is a theme, perhaps he can pull it together in the final paragraphs, something about the search for, no, perhaps a reflection of the current malaise of, or maybe…
And the guy who lives at the beach… he has bought a lined pad at the five and ten; there are already several notebooks, with fading or blotchy covers, on shelves next to what books he has, and this one will eventually join them. He writes notes on some of the other selves, but then feels a bit overwhelmed at the busy, crowded cities where they live, their anxieties that he doesn’t want to know much about. He puts down the pad on a shelf where he will ignore it for some weeks; picks up a beer and walks outside and down to the beaten-up wood chairs that face the sea; and watches another sunset, with images from these other lives floating and fading into the haze of the sky….
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