Billie Don't Be a Hero

First he showed me how to do it. He sat down with the animal in his lap. “Hold his legs firm, up and behind his ears, pinned together in both hands so you’ve got a good grip on all four” he said. Your turn. My job was to sit on a hay bale and brace myself against the wall of the barn and hold tight. Jethro was first. I gripped his feet in my fingers while I whispered reassurance, in English, in his ear. Jethro doesn’t speak English. Jethro is a goat. The vet pulled on his rubber gloves and took another step in our direction. He was a twenty two year old grad student moving stealthily in my direction, Luke Skywalker style, lightsaber drawn. The razor in his hand was the kind you'd see at the barber shop, long, ominous and glinting in the sun. Like in a Western. I noticed a familiar thin line of perspiration break through on his nubile upper lip area. Like a hot flash. This was new to him too. The act itself was over in an instant. Flick. Suddenly and forever, Jethro was a billy goat buck no more, he was now a Wether.

A gelding is a castrated stallion. A steer is a castrated bull. A wether is a castrated billy goat. Today I was making the wethers. I gently put Jethro down and as he pranced off toward the grass, quickly and away from the vet, I lined up the next little Billy, a LaMancha named Clyde. I repeated the posture, pinching Clyde’s little legs up in the air. But, the instant the vet bent forward to inspect the donuts, Clyde threw his little head back into my shoulder, eyeballs bowling backward into his brain so that only the whites showed. He let out a snort that was so high in pitch that the transformer on the electricity pole nearby sizzled and then, he passed out cold. Like an alter boy on a hot Sunday. This tiny little limp eunuch folded inside out in my arms, hiding out in the nothingness of his mind while the vet washed his hands. Mazel tov.

I had met him at the gym, this vet-in-training, Me-v. It was 10 o’clock PM and we were the only two people on the treadmills, running to nowhere, checking each other out. He was in much better shape than me, bigorexia shape. He immediately started offering me tips on the Precor because all gay men know that you get more for your glutes when you stomp in reverse. He became my first friend in town. And, I became his beard. Me-v was hiding out. He was an unknown here. He was a vet tech in a town with more animals than people. The big money farmers and ranchers in these parts could never know he was gay, or else. These rural farmlands belonged to the 2nd A-rights and Me-v would not be able to feel safe showing up in his elbow length nitrile gloves nor relax into his work while side by side with the 'conservative' landowners or the machismo illegals who did all the dirty work. (his words)

If rumors leaked out about his gayness, his practice would fire him, Grade-A-Guaranteed. People had enough to worry about with Y2K thank you very much without Brokeback narratives swirling around the milk tank. With me as a sidekick, however, he was free to be himself. It was hard for me to see how anyone could mistake him for a straight guy. But, then again, I was using my queer eye to look which, was about as useful as using cheap sunglasses to cure all the self imposed blindness flourishing around gender issues here in the wilds of lower, slower, rural middle class.

I was single, with a big tv, a fridge full of ice cream and I didn't have any real friends in town. He liked that about me, Me-v, that, my change purse and my big city LA-ness that I was trying to cover up as hard as he was trying to hide his LGBTQness. To Me-v, I expressed an inclusivity not typically found in the fields or the Rivertown feed store. My jedi training was appealing to him, my young medically trained counting crow, all the more because he was so outnumbered here in California and everywhere else. It was more Torch Song Trilogy than Graduate the way he clung to me for companionship, but I was no Anne Bancroft in either case. Me-v was a sassy local to sit up late with, a bone fide girlie guy with whom to gossip and trade trial homestead cheeses and trade won wines, a CW channel late night partner to pantomime Tyra Banks snaps around my 3 acre bog. It rained a lot back then, my wellingtons and my own personal vet both had panache and purpose then, before the drought.

The 80s and 90s were not good to these parts. The Farm-Aid singers tried to warn us, Bob-Bonnie-Roy-Tom-John-Willie et all. Country music did not have a monopoly on this concern, but they were among the first to cry out that rural America was on a downslide. The future conspired to split our attention though, the oughts overflowed with worry between Al-Queada, 9-11, Iraq, a new Pope and that Fe-Nom-Katrina. I fixed up all the fencing and made about 100 dump runs in rented U-hauls throwing away piles of dead wood and detritus in those first few months. I worked hard at reclamation. Like FEMA hard.

I first found out about goats at the intersection of Nowhere in particular and Rose Avenue in Los Angeles, in the back, behind the bus stop, Public Storage adjacent. I heard about this place at the grocery store, Erehwon. It was there that I waited in line for a miracle of hope with cancer patients and pregnant ladies who were looking for something bigger than happiness too. There, on the street, I joined a tribe of women and men seeking divination through nutrition and found it with goat’s milk. Two years later, when my very first “livestock” arrived, bouncing around in the back of a pick up truck, suspiciously untethered, I sensed my learning curve was going to steepen here in this cow town. One sad and lonely Nubian dairy goat stumbled off the tall side of the truck and into the waiting room of my new life. The delivery included some rather mixed up bi-lingual con artistry. Uno where there should have been, Tres. I believe the delivery man was what the trade calls a “goat rustler”. In other words, I think maybe he had stolen the goat. She held the empty gaze of a female who had been retrieved for a bounty, somewhere, far away from the long arm of the law. In any case, animal husbandry was not his first language. And my rudimentary Spanish did not help us to negotiate. "Tres Chivas?" I tried to sound nice. He glared right through my pretense of nice- white-lady-accent. Frustrated, I offered a bridge with; "Mi espanol es defecto? lo siento. Måas chivas?" I asked again, less politely. "Dos mas chivas?" I implored while puffing myself up readying for banking warfare. He stared at me harder and murmured something that sounded like "reparado beech, tooooo hundrid dollars". Then, he got angry in the face. His very dirty hands unsnapped the bowie knife from his belt and he pointed with it to a missing portion of the goat's ear. He pointed to the wound, the gap where a number tag, her "ID" should have been. Where that trickle of blood I was working so hard to ignore was coming from. I shuffled him one hundred and fifty dollars in cash, as a generous compromise, because after all, there were supposed to have been three goats. It was only a fifty buck short, but the sight of all that dripping blood and his constant fingering of the long handled knife had altered my ability to properly Carrie the situation. In spite of her freshly made deformation though, she was young and promising in her confirmation and would soon forget the day. I hoped. She shook her head and blood splattered across my face and all over the side of my freshly painted “barn” with a flourish of Slo.Graffiti in crime scene red ink. I had a goat with painting skills, who, missing a large portion of her ear, practically named herself. Van Goat. Aka Vanny if you’re nasty. I had begun a menagerie with one cat, one horse and one goat, the holy trinity of new Me.

If you’re not familiar with goat singing it sounds a little bit like an old timey buggy horn, the copper twisted kind that use big red rubber balls that were paired with the really tall tricycles in old timey parades. The kind of portable tuba that pushes air through a metal knot so hard it fahrts out the Sherwood forest ringtone on the autobahn to hell. Pointless. Ubiquitous. Vanny was fire when it came to making pointless, loud, continuous, irritating sounds.

She did not forget. Baaaaahhhhech! She was my wake up call in the morning. She was my memory sound of ambulatory, crime fighting city street noise. Baaaaahhhhech! She was a torch lighting up the countryside helping me to transition by drawing out my lonely with her sad, sad moans of alones, channeling Ramones. Baaaaahhhhech! I want to be sedated. Maybe it wasn't pointless, my God, what had I done? Or, maybe Me-v was right and she was in heat and just needed a Billy to hear her bleat. In any case, it was suggested that I buy her a mirror for some comfort until I could find more goats for sale. Legit for sale. I found a large rectangular mirror at recycle town and managed to affix it to the western most side of the barn, just under the homage to Jackson Pollack’s Mural On Indian Red Ground by Vanny. The mirror was for Vanny to be able to transport herself to Tehran for just a little, to visit the Pollack and to give me a break.

I was not lucky. The mirror only operattasized the singing. Staring into her own eyes, she sang all day, she sang all-night-long. Looking back at the memes I made of Vanny singing to herself in that mirror is a an ominous soundtrack that got stuck on repeat. Be your own best friend. Be your own best friend. Be your own best friend. This was the default setting for my back to the land-ing mantra. The chant swooshed over me blanketing my circadian rhythms, I didn’t need sleep. I didn't need comforting of any kind.The blood in me started moving differently, like a river cutting at the banks to make a wider path forward. Maybe I'm a Katrina. I am a hurricane. I am not lonely. I am my own best friend. At least that’s what I told the girl in my mirror. The river was a pyre flooding out of me across county lines down a dusty country road at full speed, no hands on the wheel. The currents were so forceful, they could not be interrupted or reversed, not even by patterned thinking about the expiration date of my decisions. I was thirty-three and unmarried, the sell by date on my ear tag was fast approaching. But, instead, I found reflection telling me it was time to try on the natural food industry and give my wellies some utility.

Thirty-three is known as the magic Jesus year. Reinvention. Jesus was a fearless entrepreneur. I found emotional rescue in the spiritual, political and intellectual revolution that was seeded in that Venice beach parking lot. It didn’t work on me at the time, the Jesus magic, in spite of sharing a birthday with him. I didn’t get a good relationship with his maker, the Great Mystery of Life, either, until later. I never thought of my December 25th blessing as anything much more than an excuse for everyone to get a free pass to forget my birthday and pretend that they would make it up to me in July. (Note: that has never happened, not once). But, if Jesus’ sell by date was at 33, what the hell is mine? Is all this extra time, practice, purgatory or grace? Who’s holding the stopwatch? Five, five, five for my lonely and six, six, six for my sorrow and seven, seven, n’n’n’no tomorrow….

Fire extinguishers expire after 3,652 days, chicken eggs after 21 days, goat testicles last 14 days in a rubberband before they simply fall off and a human baby in the womb apparently is only real after 105 days, according to the US Supreme Court. My sell by date, mine and mostly for those of us who don’t go under the knife or locust injections to prevent crystallization, my tag says I’d be past my freshness after 14,600 days (40 yrs, give or take). But expiration dates are deep fakes. And, I’ve never seen a commercial extolling the benefits of choosing a brand name feminism for playing beat the clock that wasn’t a beauty product or a memory hole cork. Tapping into the real feminine force is an eternally appropriate application for everyone and yet, it's not even a meme, yet. I guess it's a secret, that ferryboat to Erehwon by way of the river. Surely there is treasure there. I have had the directions handed down to me from my own Mother, a codex overcomplicated by too many shortcuts. Signs for the longer, windier, emotional route canal that might be the actual yellow brick road is usually hidden at the intersection of a strong will and the emasculation of man. Accidental tourists need not apply, the journey is hard.

I don’t need to castrate anyone to improve my feminism. It’s just that it's sooo easy. The flick of a wrist and a tiny pinch of gold and suddenly I’m a mohel slashing the manhood of someone I should want to protect. Billie don’t be a hero…there are more ways to fun without all that competition. Game. Set. Match. I’m always feeling bad about my own masculine energy or trying to deny it in some man I'm working or playing with. I can’t say why this feels like my fault, but I see it on tv. Like a mirror. I see a denial of the masculine in all the tv commercials now, which means it’s true. Men doing the laundry all wrong. Ah-hem. Of course they do. It's ok if we see it but we don't need to advertise it. All the shaming is leading us to unintended outcomes. For example, War. Young men are only given two or three roads to travel while we take the rivers and the ocean. I'm not proud of that. And, I don’t want to fight. My little goats might not have needed their pheromones removed, they likely had not appreciated that I was playing God, denying the wildness. I could have been wrong. Me-v wanted to euthanize them. He didn't really want to waste meds on non-producing animals. He tried to explain. He played God when he didn’t need to. Me-v hit his expiration date with me sooner than expected. My goat tribe were not pedigreed, they were all rescues. If had they stayed on the dairy they would have been culled for not being strong girls. I have sinned by what I have done and by what I have left undone. I hope Me-v made up with his Mother.

When I was a little girl, I didn’t know any gay people. I never even saw one on tv. The only mention of gayness anywhere was church, church and later in high school, on field trips looking at Greek antiquities on pottery, in museums, accompanied by a soundtrack of snickers, mostly from the boys. Gender roles were basic. I had my suspicions that there was more to the story but I did not ask. My upbringing was more turn up the music than meet the hard question with hard truths. During the ephiphany, my Dad would set up his old reel to reel and play recordings of Christmas choirs singing hymns like “In the Bleak Midwinter”. The Sistine Chapel Choir sounded like a girls choir but actually it was the Castrati, the Catholic boys who were castrated to keep their voices at a high falsetto soprano pitch. The Popes wouldn’t let women or girls perform in church. So, naturally, castrating talented boys was the oblvious solution. Joy to the world.

Like so many other holds barred, we messed up our masculine out of fear of the feminine. Some of the youngest among us are sorting through the fluidity of our yin and yang now. They. I don’t feel called to change my pronouns but I do fancy myself an inside out feminist who doesn’t need to dim the masculine to turn up the volume on the fierce. I am growing into a sense that it’s ok to be disappointed by men and also ok enough to say that it is just better not to show it. The servant of the servants is the Pope. Maybe I will understand why God wants me to be a feminist when the Pope is finally a woman or a gay man. Maybe, hopefully before someone makes Pontifs8 in Vegas. Can I get a producer credit? Eight, eight, I forget was eight was for, but nine, nine, nine for the lost gods. Can I get a gAmen?

I like being a maker. And, I enjoy being a destroyer. I have become both nurturer and believer. I am the river and the banks. I move with the tides instead of against them, most of the time. Give and take, ebb and flow, erode and release, damm and evaporate… milk and mother part for a time but come together in the end. We need each other to grow. She, he, us, them...all ten. Ten, ten, ten, ten is for everything, everything, EVERYTING! No expiration dates are required on finding the way to the starting line, well, maybe sooner than now because, you know, climate. #Wearethewethers