In the summer of 1990, I happened to be in my mother's line of sight when I happened to have one of my dizzy spells, which happen sometimes when I get up too fast. It was a particularly bad one: I didn't just lose my vision for a moment and clutch at a nearby wall for balance, as usual, but actually spasmed for several seconds as my body tried to hold itself erect without my brain's help, and then fell abruptly, with no visible attempt to break that fall, as I lost equilibrium.
I cannot imagine how frightening that must have been for a mother to see.
She freaked and refused my word that really, this was nothing, just tremendously low blood pressure not getting juice to my brain when I get up quickly after a period of inactivity. She insisted that I consult her doctor. I had no medical insurance at that point and insisted in turn that if she wanted me to go she could pay for it. Isn't that a beautiful example of mother-daughter relations? It was so typical too.
I went, and it was the single most thorough examination I have ever had. Not that he did bloodwork or anything--he flipped my eyelid back briefly and dismissed my mother's concerns of anemia--but I felt like he was there, listening, assessing, more than any doctor I have had since. And oh, that's right, the summer of 1990 was the first I spent under my mother's roof without benefit of four-footed meat. The other thing she didn't believe me about but accepted grudgingly when I repeated the doctor's assurance on, was that chicken and fish and dairy would supply all my protein needs. Her initial fears were that I was pregnant or that not eating meat had rendered me rickety.* The doctor agreed with me, though he put it in medical terms, about the low blood pressure thing.
* That was a mathematical "or," which contains the ugly "and/or," so that sentence is grammatically correct. I hope.
Anyway. It's kind of a cool feeling, my faintiness. Although I've been clutching walls for years now, not every time I stand up but several times a week, I was never able to duplicate the way-cool sensation of that summer afternoon--until this morning.
I threw myself out of bed, grabbed my water glass, and headed for the bathroom. Three steps away from the bed, I started shaking or spasming. I made enough noise hitting the wall, dropping the plastic cup, and eventually thumping to the floor that RDC noticed from under his pillows. In a moment, when my blood caught up with my brain, I could respond.
This makes rescuing Blake from his nightmares interesting. I hurl myself out of bed towards him, fifteen feet away, as quickly as I can, hitting the lightswitch on the way; but sometimes I compound his fright with the noise of my full weight dropping to the floor amidst the covers I'm pulling off to show him that there are no dragons. Eventually I'm going to have to modify that response or I'll break my hip.
"Ben-Hur" is a featured movie in "The Celluloid Closet" and no surprise. I just found out Gore Vidal wrote part of the screenplay. I just looked that up because I'm reading Ben-Hur courtesy Project Gutenberg, and there's no homosexuality written into the movie, OMFB. It's all there in the book. When Judah and "the Messala" have their falling out: "Messala offered him his hand; the Jew walked on through the gateway. When he was gone, the Roman was silent awhile; then he, too, passed through, saying to himself, with a toss of the head, 'Be it so. Eros is dead, Mars reigns!'" (chapter II)
Gentle men are not all homosexual, but this is certainly part of a body of evidence: "The thoughtful reader of these pages has ere this discerned enough to know that the young Jew in disposition was gentle even to womanliness--a result that seldom fails the habit of loving and being loved" (chapter VI).