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First Person
Nepali Organizer Visits VT CARES
First Person:
The Quasi-Vermonter
Views Life from Outside the Bottle
by
E. J. Haley
Okay,
alright... I admit it; I’m not a native Vermonter. Heck, I don’t
even live in Vermont. Let me just come clean about that right from the
start.
But before all you uppity Vermonters
go pouncing on my non Vermont-ness, seeing it as an ineligibility to write
for a Vermont newspaper, would it help if I said I’ve always wanted
to live in Vermont?
Would it help if I told you I live right
next to Vermont? No really, I do. Just over the border in New York from
Wells and Pawlet.
Ah but... alas, so close, and yet so far.
From where I am I can but stare longingly up the eastbound direction of
East Main Street (Route 149) in Granville and wish I lived just 100 or
so yards father up the street.
What’s to explain this burning
desire to live among you? Well, statistics show that 60 percent of all
gay New Yorkers who travel to Vermont decide they want to live there.
Conversely, 60 percent of gay Vermonters just want them to go home.
But I’m not discouraged. That’s
not a real fact, by the way, just something I invented whilst immersed
in my own, colorful reality. The real statistic is probably closer to
like... I don’t know, 80 percent?
My only real hope here is that you
will accept me as an aspiring gay Vermonter, a “quasi-Vermonter,”
if you will, and allow me the creative license to write as if I lived
among you, looking down my nose with the best of you at the rest of the
pitiful New Yorkers who only wish they could afford the property taxes
in Vermont.
By my own sheer creative license -
or obtuse dementia - I choose to envision the borders of Vermont as extending
to surround my little piece of Granville, New York.
Mind you, the desire to establish myself
as a Vermonter through whatever denial and pretense seems to work for
me should not be taken as an outright rejection of living among New Yorkers.
I don’t mind New Yorkers … some of my best friends are New
Yorkers. I just don’t want them trying to convert me or push their
New Yorkish ways on me, you know?
I quit drinking about a month
ago - honest, your honor - and launched myself, or rather was launched
involuntarily, into a fitness regime consisting of walking just about
everywhere I go now, combined with a healthy dose of self-assurance that
13 pots or so of coffee a day is an adequate, however insatiable substitute
for the liverstrafing elixirs that were not so long ago my therapists.
Perhaps you’ve heard of them, Doctors Jim Beam and Stoli?
Encouraged by my surprising,
initial success, having dropped eight pounds in just a week, I psyched
myself up to undertake a whole new, healthier lifestyle.
Oh sure, I brought the running
shoes out of the closet - by the way, I didn’t set out with the
intention for that to be punny - bought some new workout digs, and even
pulled out the old “Power 90” workout DVDs I poured $80 into
three or four years ago and never used. Oh yeah, hell of a good investment,
that. I mean the hardest part of that workout was getting off the couch
to check the mail!
So I figured I’d give diet and
exercise another shot. What the hell, I’ve got DVDs and some fancy
new workout clothes, right? No sweat, I’ll turn my sudden interest
in sobriety into an excuse to get thin and get healthy.
So there I was, all psyched up, setting
out to enjoy life with a view from outside the bottle. A couple of days
into it, after a particularly ambitious workout - an hour-long jog and
then a 30-minute cardio routine, I woke up the next morning to discover,
“Oh holy everluvin’ crap! This exercise stuff hurts!”
I’m here to tell ‘ya, my whole body ached as if I’d
been beaten by a horny gorilla!”
...I don’t know where that metaphor
came from, by the way... It’s late dangit! To add insult quite literally
to injury, while I was joyfully pursuing the serendipity of my newfound
sobriety, by contrast I came to realize that almost all the people I know
in town really aren’t as interesting as they seemed when I was drinking.
Man, I have got to make some new friends!
On a more serious note, the
road to recovery, while challenging and certainly an exercise both of
faith and of determination, has not been the challenge for me that I know
it has been or continues to be for others in the gay community.
I have had the fortunate advantage
of gracious support from loved ones, and strong, spiritual conviction
to be better and stronger than my addiction.
The facts after all do show, and not
at all arguably, that the rate of alcohol and substance abuse is substantially
higher among lesbians and gay men than in the general population.
This statistic alone is, forgive me
the irony, a sobering one. For me, this raises the unsettling question
of attribution. To what do I credit my addictive behavior? To the demons
in my head along with the 30 cubic tons of emotional baggage and sexual
identity I seem to have - somewhere back along the genetic railroad -
inherited from my birth parents? Or to the demons on my thighs whose presence
so inflamed my vanity after coming out of the closet at 22 years old that
I ran headlong into superficiality, escapism and denial?
Well who knows, really? My therapists
- the real ones - would probably tell me that maybe it’s best not
to burden myself with those questions, at least for now.
But there is one thing I have discovered
along this journey; clarity of mind and respectability is by far a better
elixir than booze.
And as for my weight-loss progress,
well, I’ll have to get back to you on that. Right now there’s
another pot of coffee and a heaping plate of lasagna calling my name.
Hey... I’ll burn it off later... Like, you know, next week.
E.J. Haley is an artist and a writer living just over the border from
Wells, Vermont in nearby Granville, New York. To send comments and feedback
on this column to the author, write to
ej.haley@yahoo.com