Institutions (06.10.2014)

Year 1: The Party

1. Introduction to the party.

 It started as a joke. I remember it clearly. Hamburg in December tends to be very cold. So anything involving shared alcohol and socialization is welcomed. It was New Year’s Eve and I had no date, so I decided to create around me a group of people to chat away the year. My friend’s flat was close to Beatles-Platz. It was a big place with tall windows facing Reeperbahn (Hamburg’s the red-light district). Around twenty people were mingling. So I put myself in the middle of the group proclaiming: “I’ve found the solution to all political problems in the world!” I had everyone’s attention. The next sentence had to be clever, deep and also engaging. “This huge apathy that most of the people suffer must not be fought, but embraced.” Silence. “Is that your solution?” someone eventually asked. “Of course not.” I said, “It’s just the first step. After admitting that most of us don’t give a shit about politics and we would probably never care about it, then and only then we can go on to the second step.” “What’s that?” asked someone already buying my idea before hearing it. “We must give all the political power to the gay community.” The silence in the room was sudden. I immediately thought it was due to the presence of Florian Schmidt, an openly gay member of Die Linke (the left party in Germany). He was staring at me. Everyone was waiting for his reaction, and he was waiting for mine. “You could be the leader, Florian!” I proclaimed almost shouting. A few hours and many beers later Florian promised me to write a draft of the proposal. In exchange I promised to subscribe to Die Linke and help him. Three months later we were both co-signing what we decided to call the Pink Law.  

2. The dark times come with black lists.

 July was confusing for all of us, but specially for me. The Pink Movement – as they started calling the activation of the Pink Law – was born in a broken regime. The Pink Law forces all political participants involved in the creation of new politics and legislations to be openly gay. In my mind nothing important nor transcendental could come from this, just a little jump in politics involvement from the gay community. And since I was one of the two co-writer of the law, me not being gay was an on-going controversy in both side of the matter. Any word that came out of my mouth was recorded and and maliciously interpreted, to the point that I decided to stop talking. Every interview seemed to be a hunting exercise to “catch me in the act” and to accuse me of homophobia, destructing the momentum that the law was finding. Away from the spotlight I tried to focus on the little details that I called the collateral loopholes in the law. There were already rumors about black lists of politicians that were secretly bisexual but openly gay, just to have access to this new source of power. Suddenly everyone was talking about politics. The gay community was actively presenting new laws and policy changes every day. And the politically active none-gay community was also involved in a surprising collaborative manner. When the Pink Law was passed as one of the first all-states European Law in Brussels that September there was nothing else I could do, except to escape. The Pink Law was about to pass in the United States of America, so I decided to go to Washington D.C. to visit some friends. Officially I was following the viral growth of the law, but I was secretly planning to escape the party and politics to go back to my hometown, a small Mexican city, close to the Arizona border, called Simpleza.  

3. Tension is the state of being stretched tight.

 In the old country, as I like to call Mexico, an ocean away from Die Linke, things seemed simpler. Skipping the Empire itself that the US constitutes, Mexico and the rest of Latin America remain in an eternal 20th Century. After flying to Arizona I took a bus to cross the border. Further south time seems to stay still. In a short amount of hours I was there, crossing the sign that welcomes everyone to Simpleza. At first I wandered off for hours in the small city, observing all the details that I’d found new. Nothing had properly changed after the Pink Law in my hometown, I noticed. No one is a prophet in his own land. And also everything arrives late to Simpleza, especially progress. My old house was still there. It felt the same as years before, when I thought I’d left it for good. I’ve read novels and I’ve watched movies about people going back home after years abroad. Pure fiction. I’d often had the fantasy of arriving back unannounced, taking a taxi to the city; getting coffee with milk in a typical “Cafetería” close to the main square and then taking the perpetually late bus to get to my neighbourhood. The fantasy always ended there. With me sitting in the bus, realizing I was returning to that old place I used to hate, but with an adult sobriety; staring from above the daily suffering of living in such an awful town. I would be above it all because in those fantasies I was always married with children, living in Europe, and happy. Also I remember that in my fantasies I was always working in Europe as an astronaut.  

Year 2: The casket

1. Introduction to the tyranny.

 Traditionally in the Western world it was the village carpenter who made the caskets, when needed. He was also in charge of managing the whole funeral. Therefore the design and workmanship of old caskets would typically reflect the skills of that individual carpenter, always regarding to the available materials at that particular time. In recent centuries, caskets became an obligation to attend to. And with that the cheapest, thinnest possible pinewood ended up being the most common and popular choice. It was only recently that steel coffins appeared on the scene. Nowadays the process of buying a casket can start in the most unexpected of places. I went, following the doctor’s suggestion, to CostCo, the big supermarket chain where anything can be bought. Its slogan (“Simplifying home and life”) falls short regarding death. Even its mission statement (“To continually provide our members with quality goods and services at the lowest possible prices.”) should be updated adding at the end the phrase “… and beyond life”. It’d been a couple of years since CostCo crossed the southern border and installed a gigantic mall outside Simpleza. Most small markets were dying anyway, since people in town had started to buy most things online. Only specialized stores had survived close to the main square: one of many details that I'd noticed during my year back in Simpleza. In modern times everything seems to be mass-produced. And apparently caskets are not the exception. For less than a thousand US dollars one can buy a standard steel casket.  

2. Tyranny comes with tyrants.

 The employee asked me to describe the disease’s body composition. Only at that point it stroke me that my father, after almost a year of hosting me in my old house - “My” old house, he’d correct me every time he overheard me talking in the phone - had died while watching TV on New Year’s Eve. I was watching with him, thinking about how two year previous to that night I had started the biggest political movement of the new century. I didn’t notice that he was dead until the morning after. When I woke up I heard the TV on. I went to the bathroom and then I noticed the feet of my father, aiming to the screen, exactly as I saw them when I went to sleep the night before. My father never allowed me to pick anything when we used to go shopping together. I remember trying to sneak things under his omnipresent radar to eventually fail arriving to the cash register. I was a kid. I thought that if I tried hard enough I would con my father into getting me something that I really really wanted. His policy was pragmatic: “We don’t buy things we want, son. We buy things we need.”  

3. Tyranny is a state under a cruel and oppressive government.

 My little brother was called Roberto, but he asked everyone to call him Bobby. Since he’d read about Robert Kennedy he was extremely proud of being related by name to that historical figure. My father hit him only once in front of me. I remember it very clearly, because it was short after I arrived back to Simpleza. It was July and we were all living together in the old house. I heard someone shouting and whining. I wasn’t sure if it was only one person or maybe two people, so I walked outside to the front yard. My first surprise was that there were not two but three in the scene: My brother, Bobby, was whining; my father, stoic and silent, was hitting him senseless; and a third man, unknown to me but strikingly similar to Robert Kennedy, was shouting to my father to stop. I guess now that it all made sense then. At that point I remembered all my father’s homophonic commentaries, maybe the main reason for the Pink Law. But I also understood something that I didn’t really think before that scene: My brother was gay. In September we buried Bobby: Suicide by overdose. My father forced me to go with him to his old carpenter friend and we made together with help from his friend the casket for my brother. To build the eternal resting place of my secretly gay brother broke me more than anything in my life. There were not enough Pink Laws in the world to helped me with the pain.  

Year 3: The call

1. Introduction to closure.

 It’s been good for me to write everything about those two years. This last year has been great. I guess the myth is true: When love arrives the clarity that comes with it helps to sort the past, because all things must pass; because all things must end. To write about those two years had helped me understand my behaviour during the whole process. After reliving Bobby’s death it makes so much sense for me to intuitively buy the standard steel casket for my father in CostCo, “Simplifying home and life”. The interview and the article felt like a good closure. A profile piece for The New Yorker Magazine: The life of the straight man that has done more for the gay community. And my own personal journey in form of an article written by me: “Through the looking glass of the Pink Law.” The deeply disturbing family affair probably helped to put my article and the profile in the magazine. Both were published in the first week of December. Two years have passed after the Pink Law in America. Almost one year after my father’s death. I am in love and feeling I can start fresh. Barbara, a social activist eradicated in New York after Venezuela Civil War, has helped me to become a consultant. And in the process she had helped me also in a deeper way. They’ve been the best three months of my life. The Pink Law modified politics in a way no one really ever expected. And now all around the world new parties come out every day, focused on the potential Pink Global Government. Our strategy, as I explained in my article, is to make policies to be dealt “properly”. We loved the context of it all and the term, Barbara explained to the interviewer. At first I thought we should have said “accurately”, but soon enough I noticed what Barbara meant. The people looking up to us are waiting for something more definitive and extreme. To proclaim our cause the “proper” one gave us all the accreditations that this generation needed from us. The next generations will believe it, because they will be born in it. The next step is to reconstruct the banking system worldwide. Up to this point the new policies are holding and restricting many of the old risky bank costums, but a complete reconstruction is needed, if we wanted to allow “proper” (there’s that word again) growth to the future generations. The idea is old, much older than any of us. But finally with “proper” management the sky is the limit and there’s a hopeful horizon in sight.  

2. Closure comes with time.

 I thought she knew. But it was after the last meeting with The New Yorker’s interviewer that she stopped me and asked me about the message. She might have overheard me saying to the reporter that the first day of this year, I found a lost call in my phone. It was my father’s number. Probably the last call he ever tried to make. Recorded at 1 AM it ensured me that he was alive when I told him goodnight before going to bed that night. “What did the voice message said?” the reporter asked. “I’ve never heard it. It has helped me to keep on going.” The reporter was very happy with my explanation, but Barbara needed more. I told her how my father had become in my mind the old world itself; the symbol of everything that is still wrong. My new and strong commitment to the Pink Global Government to try to solve the problems of the world is strictly based on my anger for him. Her eyes wetted. I thought she felt part of my new life and was moved to tears, but it was something else. While crying she admitted that she had deleted the message. She was planning a surprise trip for us during the Christmas break and in doing so, she had had stolen my phone. I refuse to change my German telephone number, even after living a year in Mexico and almost another year in New York. She had had erased all, even the voice messages. She didn’t know. She was devastated. And I was shocked, but for the wrong reasons. I didn’t care about not being able to listen to the message. That was a bigger shock than the “sad” news of her deleting it. Barbara was helping me, even with her mistakes.  

3. Closure is the process of closing something, especially an institution.

 It is New Year’s Eve again. Three years have gone by. It’s the perfect start for a new era. I am proposing to Barbara tonight. I have it all planned. She comes into the room with a huge smile. I want to tell her now, but I can’t. It’s so incredible to love someone like this. She’s the cause and the objective of my love. I’m desperate to ask her now to marry me, but I can’t. And I’m so happy about it that I want to tell her, even though it would spoil the surprise. I want to share everything with her. I’m finally detached from the shadow of my father. She gives me the phone. Her smile is enormous. I write this sentence and then I take the phone...

 (… ehm. I speak English, ok? I know you like English more, son. I want you to know that I loved your brother… Very much… I don’t care he was gay. I don’t. I love Bobby. I am proud of him... I am not like you... I don’t know how to say what I feel. We do what we need, not what we want. It was never about him, it was always about you. I hope you learn. I hope you understand that we are all equals. I wish you would stop imposing... Stop segregating... Stop your anger...)