The Rocking Horse Winner, a short story by Kirby Sommers

New York City in 1966 was covered in smog. A dense mass of stagnant air containing dangerous levels of carbon monoxide and other pollutants hovered like a giant grey balloon ready to burst at any moment. It had begun long before it could be seen. Brian was 14 when he asked the owner of the liquor store on the corner of 87th Street and Third Avenue if he could make deliveries for them. He’d run away from home and at 14 when you’re a runaway, you’re already prey.

In one of his many letters to me Brian wrote,

“My dog I found when I lived on 77th-- at age 14. The doorman named him "Poo- chi". I moved out cause my father wouldn't let me keep him.

Twice in my life my mother expressed any emotion of any kind -- in the depths of my addiction she told me, ‘it's no wonder, you are just like your father’. I was a projection of her utter failure. She said it twice.

September 1947 is the date on picture of my father and my mother and grandmother at the Stork Club. It's one of those staged photos with the date stamped on it. He had just met her, I think. But the look on my grandmother's face in the photo is why I remember. Her steely look says – ‘you will not take my son’.

My conditioned story is written in a short story by DH Lawrence. It's called ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’. I read it in 8th grade and knew I was tied to that fate. I now have a picture up on my wall of me on a rocking horse at age 2. The caption I put on it was "Rethinking Karma". It's a story about scarcity and I am all about changing that.”

. . .

The short story ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’ is about a young middleclass woman who, although outwardly successful, feels she has “no luck”. She is haunted by a sense of failure. She feels her husband doesn’t make enough money. Her children, one son and two daughters can sense her anxiety. They even hear the house whispering “There must be more money”.

It is with this feeling of inadequacy that Brian comes into contact with the Catholic priests who sexually assault him at the age of 14. He made a liquor to them and they invited him into their inner sanctum. The small mansion attached next to the church where they lives. The first time Brian saw a priest without the majestic Roman costume of his predecessors was on that day. Instead of priests what he saw were a group of men wearing casual clothing, smoking, laughing and getting drunk. That is when the taunting, the touching, and where hell began for Brian.

. . .

Brian had a thing about churches. When we strolled down the streets of the city during the time he came over to see me we’d slip into several of them. Making out in confessionals behind the heavy burgundy drapes seemed exciting for me – I had no idea he was in actuality making a mockery of the church. It is important to note that recognition of facts do not always happen at the moment when they are first revealed. Sometimes it takes a while for the meaning behind an action to become clear. For Brian and myself we nearly destroyed each other because of our shared demons.

At some point during Brian’s 14th year he delivered liquor to the Hotel Chelsea when Andy Warhol was filming one of his movies. The ‘Chelsea’ was home to Arthur C. Clarke who wrote ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ during his time there. It was also home to the poet Allen Ginsberg. Arthur Miller wrote a short story, ‘The Chelsea Affect’ describing life there during the early 1960s. It was “the place” for artists, actors and anyone who was creative. It was also a place where drugs flowed like water and no one thought it odd to share with young teenage boys.

It was at The Chelsea where Brian met Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. Warhol was already a well-known name and everyone had already seen his Campbell’s soup and Coca-Cola bottles. He was popular but hated publicity. He was controversial but focused on the ordinary. He liked boys and men and let them know.

Andy Warhol liked to say that what makes America great is that rich consumers buy the same things as the poorest people. Warhol had a place he’d called ‘The Factory’ where you could bump into movie stars and people no one had ever heard before like Edie Sedgwick. Warhol kept the better-looking kids like Brian around – they were the ones who were sent on an endless end of errands and they were more than eye candy to the men who preferred sex with boys.

By now Brian become accustomed to long lingering looks and what they implied. The drugged-up crowd of hip young things introduced him to gay clubs and bath houses like the one at the Ansonia on the Upper West Side. Within a few months he was into drinking liquor, doing drugs and having sex. He saw himself as they saw him. An object. No different from the mass produced and mass consumed soup cans.

. . .

At 23 Edie Sedgwick appeared to 14-year-old Brian as the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He would discover, after falling in love with her that she was also the most unhappy woman he’d ever met. Warhol had made her famous she was dubbed by the media as an “It Girl”. Edie was as troubled as he was. That was the commonality they shared. She had walked in on her father when he was having sex with another woman. He became enraged, told her she hadn’t seen what she saw and then slapped her. But it didn’t end there. Her father summoned a doctor toto the house and pump her with tranquilizers. Edie was convinced she knew what she’d seen because her father had been molesting her since she was seven.

Brian didn’t know how to help her other than to be available to her. Edie was the first person he knew that had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She was still in mourning over the loss of her eldest brother, Robert, who died months earlier on New Year’s Eve when his motorcycle crashed into a city bus. And she confided in the pretty 14-year-old boy him how her father sent her off to a looney bin.

. . .

During the short time Brian and I spent together after re-connecting 30 years after our first meeting – he living in San Francisco and me living in New York – we exchanged love letters. He had no problem getting on a plane and arriving in New York so we could carve out some time together. But when we weren’t together we were writing. Hundreds of letters in the form of emails crossed the expanse of the United States and, at times, several continents.

One of my letters to him:

“The city’s soul is being cleansed. It is raining. Are you my 947? If you are, know that I have looked for you, searched for you, and had given up hope you were on this planet. During the course of my life and starting when I was little I’d have a really peculiar sense of time. Of perhaps having been born at the wrong time. Being in the wrong place timewise. Maybe it was a premonition that one day I’d meet my 947 and it wouldn’t be the right time.

The right time would be 30 years after the fact.

During our correspondence/communication/cosmic energy thing we’re doing – you said something at one point that this somehow helped you see your dad differently. I thought it strange at the time. I get it now. I get it because while we sit here, at least for me, and when I look at these words and let them weave through me and into my soul – I see we do travel back in time.

So that when you speak about the look on your grandmother’s face in that photo dated 1947 – I thought about the photo I have of my mother’s mother – my maternal grandmother – who has no expression whatsoever on her face – unless it is a look of resignation -- and whose youngest daughter was my mother.

I then think about the soul shattering blows we each received from our respective mothers. But now, instead of dwelling on those blows I look deeper into my mother’s own past. I never did that before. I realize now I was really harsh on her and was responsive – no thought behind my reactions – just reactions based on hurt, not logic. At least no effort on my part to decipher the whys of her. Not to say that as offspring we have a responsibility to see the whys of our parents – I do not believe we can do this when we are being shaped by them. But once they are gone, once their direct impact on us is stripped away – at that point – at this point – we have the resources to be able to look into their whys. If we can’t do that – we’d never move beyond the hurt.

My mother may not have been right. In fact, she wasn’t. But through you, I too, am getting a sense of her. What it must have been like to just survive – in her time. Primal instinct takes over in survival – you know this – you feel it when you express your feelings of being vulnerable as you travel alone through some really sketchy places – “strips a lot of things away”.

Then to have a moment like the one you had at the bar when you want to write our initials on the marble wall – had it not been for catching sight of the manager walking in you would have lost the moral compass society imposes on us and defaced the wall – which, btw, I love. I love. I love.

Falling in love is such a primal feeling. It’s been around forever. It is the most primal feeling we can have a humans.

Gosh….I am all over the place here. And this is what you do to me…I am all over the place.

So when I say I am a “dork” – I am. I will do whatever I want to do without any concern about what anyone thinks of me. I believe you do this as well. That is my definition of a dork. Someone who walks out of step with the rest of the world.

I walk to my beats. My beats are vastly different, so very different than anyone else I know. Except for you. In many ways my beats seem to be aligned with yours. I mean, really, 947, Poo-chi, and countless other things that we seem to do think about at the same time.

But I am veering off again….so let me stay on course here….at least with my previous thought….

So when we have these preconceived notions – like you with “The Rocking Horse Winner” – that’s so tragic. And me, my conditioned story used to be Edith Wharton’s ‘The House of Mirth’ – at some moment in time – the moment I read it maybe I was 17 or 18 -- I knew I was fated to be Lily Bart.

And when I found myself in a glorified world with the rich and famous -- wearing pearls and furs – when I found myself in that world – I knew Lily Bart was lurking somewhere in my shadow. Something, something was going to get me. I was going to slip through the fabric of a society imposed on myself by myself and die.

We are such romantics – you and I -- to tie our souls to the souls of such doomed fictional characters.

Only people with imagination and spunk, I am sure, can do this. And only people who have developed strong survival skills can escape these preconceived notions of poetic tragedy.

In my case, I took control of my fate in many steps. Many steps. One of the most obvious (to me) and the one that tied me to Lily Bart (for the last time) was just before I decided to leave California. I met and became engaged to the man who used to own Cartier. He was 67 and when he proposed he sat me down and told me he had suffered from prostate cancer, and while cured, he could no longer have sex.

He went on to assure me that he would/could provide me with a wonderful life. That we were intellectually well suited. That we made good companions. We would travel the world and I would never need or want for anything.

As far as I was concerned, at that moment in time, sex was overrated and because he physically could not have sex – he was, for my needs, perfect. Of course, he did not know, nor did I tell him that his biggest flaw (in his eyes) was for me the biggest attraction.

He gave me a Rolls Royce and we started looking for a home. And really, a home is an understated term. We were looking at mansions.

One day he calls me and tells me he is at a doctor’s office. He then excitedly explains that there is a new pill that will soon be on the market and that his doctor has given it to him first. He will be home in 15 minutes and we can have sex!

I froze. I think I was 42 or 43 and I could not fathom having him touch me in that way. I quickly gave him back the car and decided I was done in LA and I’d rather be alone in my tiny apartment in the city than be unhappy with a man. That was the end of my Lily Bart obsession.

So am happy to see your words: “all about changing that” – and if you are – you might want to reconsider the photo of you at 2 on the rocking horse and maybe put it somewhere else.

I miss you in a way that I can’t even explain.

If I feel like this now, I thought earlier today, while walking in the rain – I wondered “how will I feel after he has kissed me?” How will I feel after I know what your kisses feel like and you are not here? What will that longing do to me?

I have to go.

You are my sun. And yes, the sun has risen.

Kirby”

. . .

And, then this one from him in response to my letter:

“Find my mind. I miss you now. Everything changes – if in 36 days I have been moved this far –to a place where I have not been in 63 years. I can’t say how I will miss you after I have kissed you. I want to know because like THIS I could never Kirby – I woke a while ago. I slept 16 hours. First thought was – I am going to New York. That was a conscious report from mind to body. I was really happy about it and my mind’s voice didn’t have to say your name or “I’m going to see Kirby.” My self knew why I was happy. I now know what that untold, unreported feeling is. For me, now it’s part of being in love with you. I don’t have to self-report – my limbic response includes this feeling – it’s truth like in my body. Never known to me before.

Yesterday was a Chet Baker kind of day for me. Dreamlike trumpets tried to sort out the whys –this soft monsoon washing India away. Thinking about you. Lotsa Chet – “each day is valentine’s day…

I said you change me.

Earlier in the day I just started looking at our emails –I think it’s a way to spend time with you. Like just lying in bed talking to you or sitting on the couch just talking – you know, not trying to do anything except find ourselves giggle a little …find my mind. I am missing the second week of emails cause of server problems form July 8 to July 16th – and I could tell how we had grown during that week by the mail before and after. That gap – made me think of how I am reconsidering my self – in this our love. Taking a look at it all and not necessarily trying to change those things but re-mean them. Cause if I have never really been in love --felt like this – then it’s worth maybe looking at things again. Lily Bart – I get it. Leaving LA and Lily so understood.

We can’t be that way and be in love like this –because we know too much now. I am going to a place called Ankar Wat in Cambodia – I have been there many times and I am simply moved by it – for me, well it’s too long a story. Maybe I am just a romantic. You are too so you know what I mean – what places like that can do for you. I am shape shifting and that is part of THIS. I thought about my mother and how I hold all that and what we talked about on the phone. We talked about the divine feminine and my getting close to that. So I decided to write my mother a letter just about our lives together and telling her how I am now and how what that I understand what she did and wanted to own my part of the relationship. Doesn’t have to be a long letter just a true letter. I’ll take it to Ankar Wat just want to read it to her from a place on the planet where I am totally open.

After I start thinking about this and reading your email I went downstairs and there’s this parade --- it’s small. And there is this huge temple down the street and there are many people there. It’s a holiday here. I said what’s up? They say ‘It’s ground day’. I think just another reason for these people to have a party.

What do you do on ground day, I ask --- ‘have party for Mother’ they say. You know celebrate the ground – earth, mother -- you know white boy – they say to me. Funny how I was just writing that letter – funny how you talked about your mother and about leaving Lily in LA. How do we become? By being willing.

It’s like most of the time I feel like everyone is riding south on their horses and I am on foot walking north. I don’t care – I get a better look that way even if my feet hurt. I thought I might have imagined what being in love actually would feel like. I want to be with you.

Sun is up – it’s shining on THIS.

Brian

. . .

Brian managed to get himself sober. Just before he turned 18 he married a slightly older woman when she became pregnant with his daughter. His daughter was born in 1971 at the same time that Edie Sedgwick died. Brian firmly believed Edie had been re-born and inhabited his daughter’s body. If she reincarnated then the second time around was a repeat because his daughter also died of an overdose at a young age. Brian buried her near Edie in Santa Barbara.

Our pain, I realize, is not always concealed from those we love or from those who love us. And, the saying “you hurt those that love you the most” is in many cases true.

Even when we have no idea this is what we’re doing.

He was damaged sexually. By the time we connected he’d had all sorts of sex with all sorts of partners and as sophisticated as I am I didn’t understand that the 14- year-old boy who had been sexually abused by the priests and the people surrounding Andy Warhol was the person who tried to love me.

. . .

Even when it was over we still wrote letters. This is the last one I sent him because as fate would have it the man I was dating had taken me to the restaurant located on the ground level of the Chelsea Hotel.

. . .

“That night, at the old El Quijote, at The Chelsea I got sick.

I caught the flu or at least that is how it began. It’s morphed into so many things for about one month now. Mostly it has just been eating away at my energy. So that I haven’t been able to do much.

And it’s made me think I am going to die.

Which is weird because I never ever used to think I am going to die. Ever. And even now it feels strange to write this.

But the “I’m going to die” sensation has been with me since that night. And every time I feel myself getting better, lighter, healthier something happens and I am dragged down again. It is like I am fighting for my life. With all my might I am fighting to stay alive.

Something else happened that is a coincidence and weird and you know I am living weird right now. My sister, Mara, had an almost fatal car accident at the very same time. A car jammed into her BMW multiple times, then flipped over, and landed backwards on the hood of her car.

So we are both going through something weird at the same time. And she, too, somehow seems to think she is going to die.

It’s really something neither one of us has felt before. But there are moments it feels very close like I can almost touch it. I pull away from it but it’s there, you know. Like it would be too easy to go over and rest.

Steven, the guy who took me to the restaurant that day had the flu or he thought he was better, but maybe wasn’t and it seems I got it. He’s a doctor and I got really upset at him (you know how I can be when someone hurts me). But he’s been checking in and is alarmed and I finally acquiesced and am going to let him take me to another doctor tomorrow for some blood work to see if I am now anemic which would explain the lack of energy or show whatever else is attacking me.

So, of course I feel I somehow got cursed at The Chelsea because of your energy or whatever the leopard spotted energy is or was.

Last night I watched the Diane Lane clip from Unfaithful and I looked at some of your photos. It dawned on me when I looked at the pic I took of you with your back turned that for some reason I hadn’t really realized your hair was white.

I mean I know it was but it didn’t register until last night.

In my mind’s eye when I looked at you either in person when we were together or through our photos I saw you as you looked when we knew each other at the Fisk building. And your hair was a dark brown with golden streaks. Until last night that is how I saw you — again, even though on an intellectual level I knew your hair had changed but somehow I didn’t really *see* it before.

It was odd to see it last night.

I saw you from a different angle at a different time and I could sense there has been a change from the boy I knew and the man you are today.

I don’t know why it took so long for me to see it.

And in my mind’s ear I heard some of the stuff you said to me and it sank into me in a different way. It was a little heavier. A little lighter. A lot different than how it sank into me the first time you said some things to me.

And so last night I decided I was going to write you — even if I never hear back from you — I am going to write you.

You are the only person in my life I have ever opened up to.

I did that with you.

On paper.

In our emails.

And I cannot do this with anyone else.

Somehow if you get this email, and I hope you do, I know you will understand.

In my mind I think of you somewhere in India putting your life back together and finding closure to the 14-year-old boy who didn’t know how to deal with what was happening to him. Know I will always love you.”

. . .

In the end, I learned that it is certainly possible to appear as a product of mass production not too different from the work of Andy Warhol; and that the soul, like the boy in D.H. Lawrence’s story ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’ one could easily die trying.