I will soon write of April 2021 -- and how I lived and almost died. That is dramatic, but the spoiler alert is that I got COVID and so did many of my peers but I am the only one who, to my knowledge, was actually sick. And I was already technically sick before that, because I went on FMLA leave at my job for bipolar disorder. The joy of mental health treatment in America is that I was deemed mentally ill enough to have my job protected for a month, but not mentally ill enough to be compensated for it.
It went well.
I went to The Saloon tonight because I left my coat there on Friday. I was not planning to go The Saloon on Friday, either. I met up with my friend Randall at The Eagle because his friends were taking too long and because I had a bad day at work, I had decided I was going to go to Mystic. Thankfully, I chose a different negative coping skill and met up with Randall instead, where we were reunited with our friend Malcolm, who is an improv and writer genius in the city. There was also a nice man who insisted on buying our drinks and was very nice. I was self-conscious because I was scruffy. However, i wasn't too worried about my appearance because it was The Eagle and The Eagle closes at 11.
I'm going to be at The Saloon in an hour, said my text from Ron.
Ron is my friend who lives in California and looks like an Abercrombie & Fitch bag from 2004. I think of us as good friends, and when we interact one-on-one, I am not particularly nervous. But in a group or club setting I feel weird about it, because he is my friend who can't help it that he is offensively attractive, and I have feelings about feelings. But I didn't even know he was in town!
Randall, our friend Miguel, and the man who insisted on buying our drinks and cover (who was very nice and told me to stop being jittery) went to The Saloon, and Ron didn't get there until 12:15 A.M. and he did not have a shirt on and I jumped in his arms and it was lovely even though an old man next to me quipped "Quit drooling", and I felt self-conscious but also upset. The only reason I know Ron is because of the gig I got at the Gay '90s in which I narrated tacky gay porn in a bar that was attached to the men's bathroom. And the only reason I got that gig, which is one of the rare gigs I have ever had that required a 1099, is because I was ostensibly talented and could draw people to a venue.
This was all supposed to be in a later blog that I actually work on. I am supposed to be talking about 3 A.M.
Because I had gone to The Saloon on Friday, I had lost my coat. It was not expensive or fancy but it was a spring jacket! I did not go The Saloon on Saturday because I had a Truly Citrus at Chuck and Raymond's house and it turns out that stuff causes an allergic reaction, and I was not about to show up at The Saloon after four Zyrtecs and two Benadryls.
But I went tonight, and I was relieved that tonight was low-key than Friday and Saturday. (Friday was bumpin, and I heard Saturday was even busier! People have been pent-up like crazy!). Nothing eventful happened other than I found my coat, hung out with my friends like Lee and Carl, and my coat was recovered.
Lee lives in a high-rise on Marquette, and Carl lives a block away. We walked to Lee's place and I walked home, which I was fine with because I had just bought $19.97 headphones from Target, which are different than the $200 Airbuds my mother bought me and told me to never leave the apartment while carrying them. I walked by Nicollet and Marquette and saw the clock almost reading 3 A.M. on the dot.
I am overkilling the point, I guess, that I was born at 3 A.M., precisely, on July 15th, when I was supposed to be born on August 23rd. It is the only time I was very early for anything. (BA DA BUM BUM CHING) Also, me?? A Virgo??? I do find it fascinating that as an adult I would be close friends with someone born on August 22, but bygones.
My mother was studying for her nursing boards at The Radisson in St. Paul that night. I had my prom there and she shared that her water broke there. She was "twice as big" as she should have been but said she just couldn't resist Dairy Queen.
Anyway, her water broke at midnight. Her friend Sara rushed her to the hospital and my father raced there. I was born at 3 A.M., on the dot. I thought I knew everything about this story there was to tell, but it was only last year that my mother casually shared, "They grabbed you right away. They wouldn't let me hold you." I will never know what it is to give birth, and I can't imagine the panic she must have felt, delivering a child a month and two weeks early with no explanation.
I was 4 pounds and 6 ounces. The placenta never came out. The doctors whispered to each other. Then, according to the family lore, they looked at my mother and one of them said, "Okay, Mrs. Emmert. We figured it out. There's another baby in there."
And according to my mother, a large nurse pinned her down and screamed "PUSH!" in her face, because I can only assume that giving birth is not something you want to repeat all over again, but she did. My twin brother was born, only three ounces heavier than me, at 3:19 A.M.
My Uncle Mark was living at home when this happened. He says he remembers Grandma Shirley, who was only 49 at the time, answering the phone at 5:30 in the morning. "Twins?" he remembers her responding on the phone call. "Twins????"
She drove from Blaine to Osseo to pick up my Grandma Jeanne, and famously forgot the gas cap at the gas station.
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| Dane and me with Shirley's mother, Great-Grandma Julia. She lived to be 103 and was very superstitious. To this day, I will not wear socks to bed or open umbrellas indoors. |
It is vain of me to speak of my birth as if it was a stupendous event. It's not like my birth was like The Star.
I am a chronic night owl. Seeing 3 A.M. on a clock, majestically in the heart of downtown, on the heels of another Mother's Day in which I could not afford to buy my mother a nice gift, caused uncomfortable reflection. I could only think of the mother who has been subsidizing much of my life because of my own poor decisions and unwillingness to correct them, the mother whom I resented and blamed for all of my academic failures, the mother who was too overwhelmed with dealing with the imminent death of her untreated mentally ill mother to adequately be the mother her untreated mentally ill son needed at 20 years old, the mother who faced a horrifying situation at 3 A.M. when she was not even a full eight months pregnant and pushed anyway.
