Luke Ford

I have my needs too but they’re specific. Female need seems so diffuse. You can’t get your hands on it. When you think she just wants a Slurpee, you find out she really needs all sorts of things you can’t provide.

Normally, I like it when my girlfriend natters on and on. Every girl I’ve had has talked more than I have when we’re alone. That’s great until she demands that I respond.

What do I say when I can’t validate her? Her girlfriends do that. “Oh, sister, you’re so brave. You’re a hero for going to HR about your boss.”

And I’m thinking, your story of persecution doesn’t ring true. If you put up with it for years as you said, then you’re partially responsible. We train people on how to treat us. If you let your boss abuse you, then that’s your fault that you didn’t have the dignity to stand up for yourself when the abuse first happened.

I don’t want to say this but she forces it out of me and then she gets mad and there are no more good times.

Mark Kramer got in touch with me after I was interviewed by the Village Voice in 1999. For the next year or so, he was a regular contributor to my website. I’d pay him about $30 a story.

I couldn’t really afford to pay this, but he was so enthusiastic about my site and so eager to be published there (most other outlets were now shut to him), I couldn’t say no.

After about 18 months, he felt like I owed him more money for his contributions and we stopped talking regularly.

Mark was like a big brother to me. He was full of encouragement for my efforts and did everything he could to help me and to connect me, but I was always a bit reticent with him. He scared me. He didn’t seem fully in touch with reality and I knew the havoc he would wreak. I felt scared publishing Mark Kramer. I didn’t fully trust him.

I couldn’t completely say no to Mark because he was so kind to me and his own publishing history was far more distinguished than my own. We developed many writer-friends in common, people he put me in touch with such as Josh Alan Friedman. Mark got me interviewed by Anthony Haden Guest for British GQ magazine.

Mark was not an easy person to have in your life. He was particularly loathed by a friend of mine, the late David Aaron Clark (dead at 49 of a heart attack in 2009), who wanted nothing to do with Mark, even when Mark was ready to apologize for provoking him to a fight in New York circa 1995.

The Mark Kramer I knew was convinced that the world was out to get him. He seemed to be using drugs and appeared to be locked in to a downward spiral.

Mark loved my Jewish conversion and always threw in some Yiddish when we spoke. He seemed to have no connection to traditional Judaism and many of the topics he wrote on were dark and death-oriented (such as porn, body piercing, tattoos and the like).

A few times over the years, Mark apologized for blowing up at me and we had a wary rapprochmont. I’m not sure if I let him back into my life for the love of his friendship or out of fear of the damage he would wreak if he felt rejected.

I put a freelance writer friend (Kate Cote) in touch with Mark once for a story about a couple who committed suicide and set their WordPress blogs to post after their death and Mark was convinced for years that I had done this as part of some evil plot against him. Eventually, he apologized for his paranoia. He said he had been smoking too much dope.

Mark went after websites that I had owned and sold and hounded them to remove the writings he had sold to me. I replied to one such site owner in 2010: “Oy vey! He’s a complicated person… Use your best judgment. If you feel like it will make your life easier to comply with his wishes, then do that… I leave it up to you.”

I found out today that last July 18, after a long bout of depression followed by months of mania, he took his own life.

For every person who misses him, I’m sure there’s somebody who’s glad that Mark is no longer around to hound him.

I was lucky enough to primarily experience the best of Mark Kramer. He loved me and would do anything for me. I was not nearly so generous with him. I always kept him at arm’s length while never doing anything to sever relations entirely.

Here’s the last thing I remember from Mark. He posted this to Facebook on March 22, 2011 with the message, “Please kill me.”

I saw it and winced and determined to stay far away from him. I lived so close to the edge myself that I didn’t want to get tangled up with those leaning over the precipice.

On his birthday last December, I posted “Happy birthday!” to his Facebook wall. I didn’t realize he had been dead nearly six months.

Mark and I never met in person but we have five Facebook friends in common — Kate Coe, Iain Bruce, Mark Ebner, Adam Parfrey, and Lars Guillen-Creed.

I know a ton of people who deliberately walk on the edge of life as Mark did. I keep them all at arm’s length. I see them as drowning and I refuse to jump in to rescue them out of fear that they will take me down with them. On occasion, I help moderately, pointing out resources for recovery.

I must know so many because they recognize themselves in me. That scares me and I refuse to get close.

Here is Mark’s last published story.

Poet Lee Williams writes:

Mark Kramer was an uncompromising writer with an integrity all his own. Like his cousin, the artist Lee Lozano, who during the height of the feminist era, chose not to speak to women, Mark was a refusenik. He chose to do only what made meaning to him, whether playing the guitar for days on end, selling books he found within walking distance of his apartment on his online High Line Books, or collaborating with his partner, lighting designer Leni Schwendinger on light projects; their “Vacant Lots of Love” will be part of an upcoming book on New York community spaces.

It meant a lot to Mark to be part of Westbeth, and it is sad and ironic that this community, with its festering artistic preciousness, did him in, as his outwardness and perception eclipsed self-serving entitlement. Ultimately, his biochemical demons were too persistent to overcome and the perception and uplift he gave to others he was unable to give to himself.

I, like others, will miss him terribly — his lurid, lyrical extravagance, his broad sociopolitical, historical, emotional layerings, and most of all, his ever-present generosity. Mark often lost his phone but he always had my number.

I write frequently about social status — I feel keenly that I don’t have enough — and people keep asking me what I mean by “social status”. America is supposedly a classless society. What do I mean by terms like “loser”?

Let me tell you from experience:

A loser shows up to Shabbat meals at shul that he can’t pay for.

A loser latches on to people who don’t want to be latched on to.

A loser sends out more friend requests than he receives.

A loser targets high status people for friend requests hoping that a Facebook connection will somehow lift his own status.

A loser gropes women without their permission.

A loser gets thrown out of places.

A loser tries to get close to rabbis knowing that as soon they find out who he is, they will boot him.

A loser can’t find friends his own age because they’re all married with children and mortgages.

A loser joins cults because he longs for acceptance.

A loser gets taken in by pyramid schemes.

A loser watches an hour of pornography a day.

A loser consults a psychic when he loses his acquaintanceship with Dennis Prager.

A loser walks into a crowded room and no one wants to talk to him.

A loser flunks out two days prior to his scheduled graduation because of an inappropriate blog post.

A loser says “Gut Shabbos” to people who say nothing in return and avoid his gaze.

A loser gets a girlfriend and then finds for years that he can think about little else. His life is that empty of human connection. “You don’t have any friends, do you?” she says.

A loser develops a best friend for a few months who then says upon his expulsion from the shul, “Let me tell you about the feeling in this house — I don’t trust you, my wife hates you, my kids fear you.”

Late one Friday afternoon in June 1988, I was 22, I picked up Student of the Year awards in Communications and Political Science (shared) at Sierra Community College.

A couple of hundred people showed up, including my step-mom.

My teachers said nice things about me. My Literature professor Ray Oliva said I was supposed to get the award for English. My Poli-Sci prof Larry Wight said this was a two-year award.

I’d been knocking around the school for three years, simultaneously working construction and radio news at KAHI/KHYL. The past six months, I’d finally gotten serious, and achieved straight As for the first time in my life and been accepted into UCLA to major in Economics.

I was looking forward to university. I had $25,000 in the bank. I had clear direction — I was going to be an economist. Daily journalism was shallow when compared with the depth of academic work, publishing papers and books and lecturing to adoring co-eds.

Only one thing was wrong — I was sick. For the past four months, I had walked around feeling like I had the flu. It only varied in intensity. It was like a case of mono that never went away. Nobody knew what was wrong. Nobody had a diagnosis or a prognosis. Nobody could tell you what to do.

About a year later you’d get the waste paper basket diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and that solved little. There was no known cause and no known cure. Rest seemed to help. Most people got better after a year.

When the ceremony was over, your step-mother wanted photos. She had you stand in front of the fountain.

This is your favorite picture of you.

Whenever you’re frightened, you still clasp yourself in this same way, arms folded across my chest, hands holding on for dear life, the hair “business in the front and party in the back.”

It was almost the Sabbath but you weren’t worried because you were no longer under law, but under grace.

I think your thoughts went as follows: This was supposed to be an evening of triumph for me and I just feel scared. What’s ahead? How can I make it through university weak like this? What went wrong? I drove myself too hard and I cracked up and now I’m the walking wounded.

You knew there would be many triumphs ahead if you could just get on. What you didn’t know was that no matter how many times you were feted, your life would always careen from crisis to crisis. Sexual exploits and media recognition and sterling speeches would ground you temporarily but the attention would fade and you’d be left starving.

You were never very good at the day-to-day work of developing relationships and building community. Instead you preoccupied yourself with the search for such gigantic achievement, such big fame, that it would fill the hole in your soul.

Now you know there is no achievement big enough to fill that hole. No award matters. No cover story. No quantity of women will sate you. There’s no religion high enough and no pornography low enough.

You stood in front of the fountain that evening with the setting sun kissing you goodnight and for all you knew, that’d be all she wrote.

You’d spend much of the next six years in bed, and the two decades after that hobbled. You didn’t know then that you’d never again run marathons. You’d never again pull off 1200 push-ups and 120 pull-ups in 40 minutes.

You had no friends with you that evening. You hadn’t bothered to accumulate any over the past few years. You’d just been very busy. Busy reading and busy working. You’d had no sex, no requited love. At 22, you were still a virgin. You figured good things would come once you had success.

Son, your pain and confusion, your fear and trepidation, they will be with you always. Other people will have friends and spouses and lovers. You will have your keyboard and your evenings in the sun and they will be your solace for your failure to connect normally with others.

Looking at the picture more closely, looking in your eyes, I see that everything that you felt sure of — namely, yourself — is broken. You don’t believe in God and you can no longer believe in yourself. And aside from your parents, who have to, nobody much believes in, is invested in, in you. Sure, they’ll give you awards, but nobody has elected to share your lot in life.

It was hot that evening. You liked standing near the fountain. And as your mother took that photo, you longed for the girl who wasn’t there, the one who nearly passed out from the fumes in your VW Bug whenever it turned a corner, the nice Seventh-Day Adventist girl at Pacific Union College, the one who would go on to marry a Jewish psychiatrist.

With the exception of my best friend, the Lakewood Rav, my favorite poster in Torah Talks over the past two years has been “Garden Fun.”

From her sensitive perceptive remarks and thoughtful little gifts, I could tell she was a woman. Sometimes we chatted privately. She never got sexual with me to my disappointment. Later, she said she was married.

So I kept things on a holy plane. I loved her writing in the chat room and often rhapsodized about how I wanted to marry a woman just like her.

Now I realize that this poster is a male friend of mine on Facebook who I’ve never met. This guy on Facebook often did the same sensitive kind things for me that the chat room poster did but I never thought twice about him because I assumed he had a penis (and I assumed by his understated kindness that he was a Christian) while she was the embodiment of womanhood (who said she was a secular Jew).

Now I still want a woman like this poster, but one without a penis.

I was convinced she was a woman because she was always appropriate, she was never arrogant or showing off, and she was always thoughtful and wise and considerate. What straight guy is like that?

I’m so glad she/he never lured me into cybersex.

Now that I’ve outed my favorite poster, the chat room will turn into a barnyard brawl and no decent woman will come within a mile of it.

Hank Rose emails:

Luke:

If your personality still ruins your chances for love
and contentment, your self deprecating woe is me
shtick is the journalism of the passive agressive
malcontent. It attracts web heads who get off on
witnessing literary accidents of isolated bloggers who
insulate themselves from real life by living through
their media persona when social reality eludes them.

You still have the classic air sign affliction. You live
in your head in a world of ideas, thoughts, words
and lack of action. You ego trades on what fame
you have but you exchanged a X forum of 100%
for a moral audience of 1%. Yet this hasn’t secured
you happiness in middle age, because too much
honesty about who you are alienates you from
those in whose graces you wish to be accepted.

The blessings of wisdom, love and appreciation
for the simple things in life are lost on what loveless
loners cannot grasp. Which is that one cannot live
through idiot boxes, sound bites and printed words
alone. Without human touch and contact, there is no
real living. Only the media babysitting of electronics
and keyboard vanity for actual flesh and blood union.

Cerebral materialist idealism sentiment is not what
gets us into the next world. LOVE IS. You can’t have
physical orgasms or emotional goosebumps with
words. They are your living, not your loving. Stop
being afraid of life and therputing your fears with
your blog. Go out and meet someone without words
getting in the way. For someone who lives by the
word, too much thought and verbiage is the enemy
of action. Air signs need to realize this or go crazy.

There, I just saved you a session with your shrink!

So Sincerely,

The Artist Formerly Blown As
Survivor of Blowbiz

PS Learning to readjust or temper love’s
failures boils down to letting go
of perfectionism in one’s social
dealings. And I stopped being a
perfectionist when my mother left
when I was two. If I wound up in
porn because of it, then my amorous
abilities helped make the transition
from lust to love and real caring
when I lost my dad. It’s funny how
being in touch with your mortality
makes you let go of angst, grow up
and realize`what matters in life.

There were women I could lust after
or talk well with. But they weren’t
ladies I could share my life with. I
found out what I wanted in a woman most
was a good heart combined with a sweet
innocence. Intellectual pursuits tend
to lead to argument and stress. For the
smarter one is, the more one is prone
to depression or trouble. So I picked a
polar opposite happy go lucky female to
compliment my wise ass air sign head case.

I couldn’t have given up porn and wound
up with someone of similar lost innocence.
When opposites attract, a lady with a
childlike innocence will love you for who
you are without judgment. So find your
Eve before she bites into the apple of
knowledge. Instead, be that apple and she
will respect you for teaching her the ways
of the world. And by the time she matures
to a more adult mindset, she will belong
to you and the power of love will supercede
all mutual flaws and human imperfections.