Stories with
their fingerprints
still on them.

Since the first time I heard various songs from Madonna Louise Ciccone’s freshman album, “Madonna,” I fell in love. She was speaking my thoughts, language, and experiences. Boys, dancing, being unapologetically herself (that last one took me a couple more decades to understand that as a queer, I must do!).

In 1989, Madonna released her fourth studio album, “Like a Prayer,” and videos accompanying its songs that MTV played on what seemed like a continuous loop to me. I stood in my parents’ master bedroom, gazing at those videos on a 14-inch, cathode-ray tube television.

The following year, my sister, Zeenat, a bunch of her friends from high school, and one of my friends, Amaya Goldberg, got tickets to Madonna’s much-ballyhooed, Blond Ambition tour. It was replete with classics from her first three albums and new material from “Like a Prayer.” We were in the nosebleed section, dancing merrily to the opening act: Technotronic.

During intermission, a tall, white man with a modified mullet haircut approached us. He wore a lanyard and name tag around his neck.

We stopped dancing as he said, “How would you guys like to be in second-row center?” We spoke no words, just screamed with joy as he led us down to the pit. My uncle Abbas and I saw Madonna’s rockumentary, “Truth or Dare,” a year later.

A man approached us as our noses bled, but didn’t interfere with the ecstatic time we were having. In Madonna’s own words, in “Truth or Dare,” she says to another behind-the-scenes fellow, Jay Whitney: “Please…give…Keith a new asshole! Because he’s in charge of my show.” Then she yells at her manager, Freddy DeMann, for arguing with this estimation. My mother’s strong-willed nature began my love of “bitchy” women. So the more petulant, demanding, and shameless Madonna behaved in “Truth or Dare,” the more I loved her.

Years later, when I saw “Keith” in “Truth or Dare,” I wondered if he was the man who escorted us to second-row center.

“They [the people in the front rows] were really having fun in the front tonight! I mean, that crowd was up!” DeMann said.

“The crowd was TOUGH. There were three rows of ASSHOLES looking like..like they weren’t they weren’t there to have a good time.” she says to DeMann on camera. She adds that she wanted those rows filled with people who were there to have a good time.

“Blond Ambition” resembled a meticulously choreographed Broadway play, expressing truths Madonna was one of the few people to speak at the time…through dance, the language of the body. This was no meek performer standing in front of a mic warbling mealymouthed lyrics about vapid topics.

Post-show, Madonna and fellow celebrities from whatever city she performed in “came backstage” just to hang out: Olivia Newton-John, Kevin Costner, and Warren Beatty (her paramour at the time), to name a few.

So that day in the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, she and her crew opened the show with a song that Madonna released on the previous year’s “Like a Prayer” album: “Express Yourself.” Without warning, the arena went dark. Zeenat, our friends, and I went speechless. Slowly, a bass drum began pounding, and her back-up dancers trudged across the stage in a live version of the video for the same song, an homage to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”.

All the backup dancers were beautiful, beautiful men. And I knew because my crotch said so! Soon, the refrain from an early single of hers, “Everybody,” played over loudspeakers: “Dance and sing/Get up and do your thing.” Smoke filled the stage. Niki Haris and Donna DeLory, her backup singers, came out. Avant-garde French Haute Couture designer and Madonna’s close friend, Jean-Paul Gaultier, designed all the costumes.

When Madonna, my idol for so many years, rose from behind the stage in Gaultier’s famous “cone bra,” the entire arena erupted in joy—and I was in spitting distance from Madonna herself. I did, too.

But I’d never, ever, before or since, felt a rush like that—a mixture of joy and overstimulation. I cried. Sobbed. Couldn’t breathe. When I told this to people in the next few days and weeks, they’d meet this statement with condescending giggles.

“Oh, that Akbi! So silly and easily swept up in tacky emotion!” The whole production—from Madonna, her backup singers, her backup dancers, the costumes, and the sets—was anything but “silly.” And I can’t explain why, but I knew the moment she appeared on stage, it was something to be celebrated that men attracted me. Many gay men shared similar experiences with me in the years to come.

That surge of self-affirming, almost painful, emotion began in my core. It widened in concentric circles throughout my body, in my arteries, and in those salty tears. I knew, for the first time since my first inklings that I was, as so many queer people say as adults, “different.”

I couldn’t or wouldn’t know how to describe that rush until years later. I was home.

Also in Music · Madonna ↗ · Watch Express Yourself from Blond Ambition ↗

2012 Super Bowl halftime show: Because it's just a fucking amazing performance!

Artist of the Year speech: It inspired me to “write the writing I wanted to write.” Her words about finding herself, writing the music she wanted to write, and believing in yourself stayed with me.

Read Madonna Made Me…ME!, my story of seeing Blond Ambition from the second row.

Also in Music:

• Like a Virgin — 1984 MTV VMAs — she shamelessly rolls around in her underwear, and I started shedding my shame about being queer because of it.
• Cherish — a beautifully directed Herb Ritts video full of Madonna’s joy in singing and dancing. I knew I could find that joy in dancing (not singing, lol) and in writing. Read Herb Ritts ↗
• Vogue — music video
• Express Yourself — Blond Ambition — because it’s just another fucking great performance!
• Vogue — 1990 MTV VMAs
• Holiday — Blond Ambition / Truth or Dare
• Sooner or Later — 1991 Academy Awards — another amazing fucking performance, and a hilarious pop-culture reference: “Talk to me, Gen. Schwarzkopf—tell me all about it! Whooooo!”
• I Feel So Free
• 2012 Super Bowl Halftime Show
• Artist of the Year speech
• Like a Prayer
• Madonna, Britney Spears & Christina Aguilera — the kisses were SO SCANDALOUS, but at that point in my queer journey I thought nothing of them. And it was another just fucking amazing performance!
• Music — during my coke days, it reminded me that the first high I experienced was dancing vigorously for three to four hours a night, three to four days a week. Those were my “halcyon days,” the best two and a half years of my life—because my body was meant to MOVE!
• Express Yourself — 1989 MTV VMAs — a harbinger of the amazing performances and the video of the same song to come. Germaine Greer once said Madonna wasn’t a good dancer. I was livid.

The first event I identified as deeply spiritual was almost dying.

I had been drinking essentially nonstop for two and a half years. One night, I discovered that alcohol solved all my problems, and I didn’t stop for even one second after that—sometimes waking from sleep to drink.

Then I began having horrible withdrawal episodes. The worst happened in September 1999, and it ended in a grand mal seizure.

I woke lying face-down on a pillow while my aunt Sughra stroked my hair.

“Do you know what happened?” she asked as I opened my eyes.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.

“You had a seizure.”

The paramedics came. In the strange euphoria I felt afterward, I was loose, limp, and happy to surrender control to these tough, take-charge people who were saving me.

The next morning, in the hospital, I looked out the window at steam rising from vents on the roof. I can still see that steam: thick, white, billowy, still.

I thought, This is your one shot at life. You can’t keep trying to kill yourself. Do what you want—now.

My doctor, Stephen Diener, came in to check on me. He was incredibly gentle and kind. Tall, blond, wearing glasses, experiencing male-pattern baldness, and Jewish—my dream man!

He told me I would have to eat things like applesauce and warm bread until my tongue healed from having bitten down on it so hard during the seizure. He also assured me it was normal for my entire body to be sore—and I mean head to toe. My muscles had undergone quite a workout as they convulsed for lack of alcohol, my constant sedative for two and a half years.

I was on Librium, the first-choice benzodiazepine for treating alcohol withdrawal, and it made me loopy. Everything anyone said sounded like wavy poetry—beautiful music.

Chester returned from the clink the next morning, looking exactly what you’d expect him to look like: skeletal, sweaty, paranoid. I had spent the night in my car, parked in their apartment parking lot. I felt unsafe those days with Jim and Gemma alone. I knew they both could tell I was no longer hiding my feelings for Chester.

He said something oddly cordial to the cop who dropped him off—he even smiled. Just as he was about to enter the apartment, I realized he hadn’t noticed me. I stuck my head out of the window of my 1990 gray Honda Accord.

“Chester! Hey! Is everything Ok?”

“Hey, Tootie. I guess you could say that. I need to find all the coke I hid in the apartment. I’ll call you later.”

“Chester—

“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck! What did you do with it. I know you. I can tell a story’s coming about how you thought you were doing the right thing…”

“I did!”

“Oh fuuuuuck! It’s worth $20k! And you had—"

“I got one of those big, plastic bins from my house, numbered each packet, stacked them in descending order in the bin, and hid it in a hole I dug in the back yard.”

“You what..?

He rushed over to me and embraced me. Something about the moment had the completeness with Chester I’d wanted for so long., as if only “Chester and Akbi” exist now. He picked me up and spun me around a couple of times.

And I thought, “What if I were wearing inexplicable nude hose, like Madame Shapiro—would that completeness still be a possibility?”

“I love you, Tootie! I love you!”

I choked up. He didn’t love me. And it wasn’t that he was lying, It’s that what most people called “love” didn’t exist in this world. For a minute I thought, who am I to say what love is..? My heart jumped as Jim and Gemma came out of the apartment.

“She worked really hard at hiding the stuff,” Jim said, Gemma gave an affirmative nod, exhaling cigarette smoke in my direction. I started crying. Then bawling.

“What?!?!?” I thought. Jim and Gemma are defending me?! I felt like I wanted them to be threatened by me, because then I felt like part of the “we’re all just seeing if we like dating each other” game. Normally, I felt like I was looking in at it, like a kid with his face up against a pet store window eyeing a puppy he longed for. I never felt like I was worthy enough to be part of the game. And being transgendered made it all the more complicated…and other-ish.

Chester looked at Jim and Gemma emitting one of his inquisitive laughs (a lot like Rich’s).

“No! No! Yes! Yes!” were the words, energized by cocaine, jumping around in my mind. I hated “maybe.” There were no maybes in Akbi world. I wanted everything to either be what it was or not be at all. I think this was all so emotional because everything was unclear until now. Chester couldn’t comfort me in front of Jim and Gemma. By “everything” I mean that Chester could love me. I had gone out of my way to do something very labor-intensive and thoughtful for him. He was probably just grateful for that, because he got very little respect from Jim and Gemma, despite being the sole breadwinner in their odd little household.

“Thank you, Tootie. Come in and we’ll do some while I bag it.”

I demurred, getting that sick feeling when the lights were about to come up at 1722, D’verse or any of the other clubs. I hated that feeling so much, I then did a 180, and agreed to go into the apartment with him. I wanted something—just one thing—to last forever. But it’s like we were running from club to club to the next, trying to make it last forever. But no one seemed as desperate as me. Everyone else seemed like they were just doing this because they could be around other queers and had nothing better to do. I was doing it because…do you have all day?

When the last club closed, I swear to you, if I had a shotgun I would blow my brains out. I was horrified at the thought of going back into the normal world, facing in a sideways kind of way, that I should be at least attempting to be a productive member of society with a job, a goal, a plan.

Chester and dug up the coke in the plastic bin. His eyes lit up as if he were opening a treasure box full of gold. He smiled and looked at me again. I felt like he might act like a straight dude for once and be like, “Tooootie—gimme a big hug!” But Chester acting straight was like the Pope acting Protestant.

“Come in, we’ll do some as we bag it,” he said.

I said I didn’t work for free. For some reason we both found this hilarious, even though I kind of didn’t know what I meant. It just came out in one of my rare moments of spontaneity. I started bawling, because I knew if I didn’t get in my car right then, I never would. But to say it out loud would be too much.

So, through the tears, I said: “Promise me you’ll never get a gun.”

Chester looked confused. I always had a fear that because he was a drug dealer, he’d eventually get a gun. But, again, that was something a hetero dude would do. Not Chester. gave me a salute drawing attention to the eyebrow ring that irked me and said, “Promise me you’ll never stop caring.”

I returned salute, a smile, and turned around so I wouldn’t see him go. I got in my car. I remembered that old, irritating saying, “Change is the only constant.”

I sat back down where that beam or 4x4 had been. I felt so annoyed that I was just always thinking about myself. I remembered how my mom would say, “You have to think about other people. That’s the point of life—doing things for other people.”

OK, no time like the present. I walked up to a crew member and said, “Hey…can I help in any way?” Oh my god—I’m such a loser! Yeah, I’m so sure this kid needs me to help build a set. He smiled and said that no, he was good.

“You want a beer?” he asked.

“No, thanks.” I really felt like crying. I need to call Dr. Temple tomorrow and like triple my Celexa dose! So I went inside Bruce’s place and sat down on the couch. It was dark and cold. Bruce came in to check on me.

Jenna convinces Chuck to get w me so he can have Jeff

“Is everything OK,” he asked.

“Totally! I was just getting really hot! God. These Maryland summers. I swear I’m moving to Alaska someday!” Bruce laughed, got a beer, and went back outside. I laid eyes on a little bookshelf of Bruce’s. Books—my saviors always. I went over and looked at some of Bruce’s books—biking, hiking, environmental activism. I pulled out a book on the best bike trails in Baltimore County. I loved that heavy paper stock it was printed on. And, of course I had to smell it. I loved the smell of books, old, new, and everything in between. Just then—of course, just then—two young hotties came in.

“Sorry, but books smell so good.” Stop apologizing for everything, I thought to myself. And as it happened sometimes in the cavernous freak show that was my mind, another voice countered: “You’re not actually apologizing, it’s just a figure of speech.”

The hottie smiled and one went to the bathroom while the other ran into the kitchen sink for some reason. He came back into the family room where I was turning this book around trying to follow the paths.

[P. 50 of All Memoir Stuff Combined 112023]

“So, do you bike a lot?”

“Me? Oh, well—I do love riding a bike. But I don’t do it a lot. And these trails are crazy!”

“They’re pretty tough.”

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t resist: “Maybe we should go sometime! Biking! Oh, wait—these are too advanced for me. Duh!” I rolled my eyes and smiled.

“You could do it. My name’s Andy, by the way.”

“Hi, I’m Akbar.” I smiled and shook his sweaty hand and suddenly felt like I was at a job interview. But I was the interviewer. I asked Andy how long he’d worked for Bruce. A couple months, it turned out.

“It was nice meeting you, Akbar,” said Andy.

You can come work with me anytime you want, handsome, I thought, “You too! And we’re going on one of these trails one day, you don’t have a choice,” I smiled.

“You got it,” he said and smiled.

His friend came out of the bathroom and looked like he thought this conversation was so not what he expected to find. Andy remembered they’d better go back to set-building. As they walked out Andy leaned into his friend and they laughed about something. This always happened. Were they laughing at me or just because I was unusual—which I didn’t mind when it was from a place of fascination and interest—or were they pleased because I was flirty—and petty? I went outside. The heat felt good, even though it was a muggy, Maryland summer. And we were at Bruce’s on the water in Dundalk. Extra muggy! As I was turning to go, Andy came back in with a mean, red swelling on his hand. Some double socket wrench driver doodad thing fell on it.

“Oh, my god! Sit down!” I ordered, and the grounding feeling of having something concrete to focus on, a problem to fix, a person to help (you were right, Mommy!) pleased me so much I almost smiled.

Andy sat down and I could tell he was in a lot of pain but trying not to show it.

I got a bag of frozen [peas] and two Advil out with bizarre alacrity, considering I didn’t know from Bruce’s kitchen. I put them down in front of Andy who was on the couch. I went back and got a glass of water. He took the two Advil. And I got back up to got a towel to wrap the bag of peas in.

“I’m not used to taking pills,” he said.

“Ha! Sorry it’s just that I take so many—prescribed! Andy, I’m from a family of doctors. And they all know that laughter is the best medicine. So…” I looked up to think. “One time on 90210 this girl was addicted to diet pills and Kelly goes, ‘Why can’t you just be whoever you’re gonna be without all these pills?’ We both laughed. “And once on ‘Roseanne’, Roseanne was on the phone and goes, “Hi, I’m Roseanne calling from the Magazine Discount House, and—yeah, well I’m not interested either but it’s my job.” Again, we both laughed. “AND once on ‘Golden Girls’ Rose was wondering why Blanche hadn’t been married in a white wedding dress, opting for red instead. Blanche goes, “Rose, it’s one thing to hear snickering when you walk down the aisle. But me in white—please! Even I couldn’t keep a straight face.’ “

“Do you feel any better, Andrew?”

“A little,” Andy said, and smiled.

“You’re a liar,” I smiled back.

“Maybe you should be a doctor too.”

“Or maybe I should do something else that I find uninteresting and gross! Just kidding. I want to be a writer.”

“What do you want to write?”

“You know, mostly non-fiction, I think, because that’s what I’m best at. So, like journalism, essays…and you know what I really would love to write? The dictionary!”

“Isn’t it already written?” Ok, you are the cutest, Andy.

“Well, yeah, but languages are dynamic and ever-changing. Lexicographers find out new stuff about words every day. OK, I’ve bored you enough.”

He didn’t say that I hadn’t bored him and that he loved talking to me, which was also pretty cute. He lifted the bag of peas to reveal a less-swollen hand. I imagined the Advil was kicking in too. I wished I could stay there and talk to him more. But I thought I should get home and get some homework done.

“Bruce, I’m gonna go. Bye, Rich! I have so much homework.” And I did. And I loved college and what I was studying: classical rhetoric. I loved doing my assignments and papers and worksheets. What are the three modes of persuasion? Ethos, logos, and pathos. What are the five disciplines of rhetoric? Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, Delivery. What are the six parts of the oration? Introduction, Statement of Fact, Narration, Proof/Confirmation, [Sometimes a Digression], Refutation, and Conclusion. Fuck sex. Fuck boys. Being a rhetoric nerd made me so happy.

At home my mom asked me how Bruce was.

“Good! I had fun!” I went upstairs and put sweats on, fired up the old MacIntosh –I don’t even know what model it was because it was so old. But, yay—I could work on an assignment, which was to analyze a piece of text of our choosing and write about how the author used tropes and figures of language to convey a point. That was my mentor’s, Professor Jeanne Fahnestock, specialty within the broad field of rhetoric. I picked a passage from an essay by Camille Paglia: “Kind of a Bitch: Why I Like Hillary Clinton.” Then? Old episodes of “Will & Grace” and “The Golden Girls”. Well, an episode of the latter had to be paired with my angel, Emily. I called her, and we had one of our marathon phone conversations. Three hours.

The next day I went to Border’s and bought a small, paperback “Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary”. Inside I wrote, “Smell here.”

I drove to Bruce’s house uninvited, though you never needed an invitation to Bruce’s. He just loved having people around.

I saw Andy outside standing by the set and couldn’t believe how fast the work was going.

“Andy! I got you something,” I said, holding the dictionary behind my back. I showed him the dictionary, and he looked truly dumbfounded. He did that super-sexy thing that guys in baseball caps in hot weather do a lot: take it off and like rub the top of their heads. Oh my god! Can you stop—FOR ONE SECOND—thinking about what hot guys do?

“Oh—cool!”

“Look at the inscription,” I said. He seemed like he wasn’t sure what that was, so I opened it for him. He laughed and actually did smell it.

“See?!” I asked.

“It does smell good.”

“Well…

“Ok…

“I still have homework I haven’t finished, and do you know how long it takes me to get home from here? 40 minutes! So, I better go.”

“Thanks for this,” he said, smacking the book against his bruised hand. “Ow! Jesus.”

“Andy, I never thought I’d say this: but be careful with that dictionary!”

I turned to go. As I walked in the crunchy gravel in front of Bruce’s house I felt a lightness I hadn’t felt in months. Yes, Andy was handsome and really had a cute, endearing personality, but I wasn’t in love with him. So our interaction felt totally angst-free. A friendship. I thought about how Rich was my good friend too, but all the other intense, incessant feelings I had for him made it difficult. Even just that brief thought of him made me a little breathless and scared, scared of the intensity, the impossibility, and the paradox that I could never “have” Rich, despite thatI still felt so strongly him. He, like everything, felt like it was always slipping away from me. If only I’d known then that the harder you grasp something—someone—the more likely you were too lose it.

Emily said to me during that marathon phone conversation above, “Honey, when you feel that strongly for someone, there has to be something there.” I was crying about Rich over the phone. And there was something there, yes! But I only knew to call it something. What was it, I still wasn’t sure and maybe never would be. But I thought, “It’s ours.” I imagined what would have been so painful for me just a moment before that: Rich with someone else. But if he were, I realized, that had nothing to do with our…something. It was sovereign and everlasting, I truly believed.

It was like lethologica, when a word is on the tip of your tongue but you can’t think of it. And I just wanted to…who the fuck knows what I wanted. This is why drugs and alcohol had always appealed to me: because they silenced the non-stop, self-indulgent, cyclical stream of consciousness barreling through my head at all times. “Rich,” I thought as I merged onto 695 back to my house, “It feels difficult, but that’s OK. Because I love you. You’re worth it to me. You’re my canary in the coalmine, my cat’s pajamas, my dog that won’t hunt, none of which made sense, of course. But it made me laugh. And in that moment, something shifted. I decided I’d stop punishing myself—and Rich!—and just be normal with him. I couldn’t make the love go away—and maybe I shouldn’t anyway—but I could stop hurting over it, especially if there were a chance my hurt would make Rich suffer in any way.

Many years later when I began to explore self-help and spirituality and even religion, I learned that when I felt something, I didn’t have to identify with it. It wasn’t me. And maybe being in love wasn’t about possessing someone but about appreciating them. And giving to them, even if that just meant allowing myself to breathe—because then he could breathe.

I did feel a quick pang of sadness because it felt like distance from Rich, and for almost a year now, all I’d wanted was to pull him closer. I realized the need to pull him closer was…holy shit: another addiction—THE addition. It’s ok. He’s still there. He’s still there. He’s still here. I thought to myself, placing a hand on my heart as if saluting the flag. I silently thanked Andy for reminding me of laughter, and discovery, and the joy of taking an interest in someone else and his happiness.