11. shower-head: horizontal with a primo villan

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11. shower-head: horizontal with a primo villan

In this episode, I lie down with my housemate Rene. Rene is the most genuinely enthusiastic person I have ever known. When I first met him, I didn’t trust him. I thought, “Is this guy for real? Is he really this happy?” He is! It’s incredible.

“Their relationship existed before I was even a concept, right? So it’s like this whole thing that existed outside of my existence. And so, I can only imagine, based on how they— how my mother spoke about my father, what it was like when they first met. I’m pretty sure they were like, madly in love with each other, and it was like an intense, like, physical relationship that they had, and as their relationship developed, I think what happened was, my father became abusive — or in other words, he was probably always abusive, and was— and used coercion to like, have control over my mother. And I didn’t really see much of it, but there was always a lot of tension in the house when I was a child. And then I remember ha— this one morning, I got up. I must have been 8 or 9 years old — I think I was 9 years old, and I went to get cereal, ‘cause it was, that’s what I ate in the mornings on Saturdays. So I get a bowl and I remember sitting in my kitchen; I remember my father was in the living room watching TV. I don’t know where my sisters were. I’m in the kitchen and my mom’s in the kitchen and I tell her in like, just a really nasty voice, ‘Get me cereal.’ Like just really nasty, like imagine a 9 year-old boy just being really nasty. And she turned at me, she looked at me, she was like shocked, and I saw that she looked shocked and I remember feeling shocked, like I had like, ‘What happened? What’s wrong? What, what?’ And she comes to me, she says, ‘Sweetie, why did you talk to me the way that you talked to me?’ And so, I told her, ‘Well, I just talk to you the way that my father talks to you. The way Daddy talks to you.’ And … I remember that moment because, I thought she was mad at me and I didn’t understand why, and she very like gently and lovingly asked a question, and I just gave her my honest answer. And it was that moment that she realized that my father was actually not a healthy person for her children to be around. And she … I don’t know what happened after that, but, essentially, she kicked him out, and we moved somewhere else. And yeah and, that happened, and that was probably, one of the most bravest things that a person can do, because if you imagine being, I don’t know, 28, and you don’t have a lot of money, you’ve got three kids, and your other partner who helps support the household pays most of the bills, you realize is not a good person, and there’s no one else to help you and you just, you figure out how to make it happen on your own. And you’re responsible for three other lives.”

– Rene

“I’m finally looking at that and realizing how I recreated that— how, my mother’s grasping and my father’s coldness led (he wasn’t cold towards me, but he was cold towards my mother) led to me seeking out unavailable men of all flavors and stripes, of, of all kinds. Men who were unavailable for all kinds of different reasons — workaholics, or, men who were polyamorous and would never, never consider a different kind of relationship structure and I wasn’t sure that that’s what I wanted, men who were pining for a lost love and weren’t really open to me, all different kinds of unavailable men. Men who lived across the country, men who lived across the seas! Oh my! But I’m, I’m glad that I’m really starting to take a look at it. It kind of reminds me of Brene Brown’s talk where she says, she discovers that these ‘wholehearted people,’ what they have in common is vulnerability, so she goes to her therapist and she says, ‘Ok, all right, it’s time to deal with my vulnerability, but nothing about my family, ok?’ And that’s, that’s the root.”

– Lila

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Welcome back to horizontal with lila, the podcast about intimacy (sex, love, and relationships of all kinds) that’s entirely recorded while lying down. Many episodes (like this one), are recorded at Hacienda Villa, my home, a sex-positive intentional community in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

In this episode, I lie down with my housemate Rene.

Rene is the most genuinely enthusiastic person I have ever known. When I first met him, I didn’t quite trust him. I thought, “Is this guy for real? Is he really this happy?” He is! It’s incredible.

In response to his tendency to fold other people’s laundry, I coined the in-house hashtag PRIMOVILLAN (#primovillan), and started regularly asking myself, What would Rene do? The question was like a lovingkindness tune-up for me.

Rene is quite a hunky fellow, and often genderfluid in the way he dresses [see visual aid], rocking skirts and shiny little short-shorts in the same way he rocks a bow tie and a sport coat. He’s the housemate who looks better in your clothes than you do!

Rene and his 8-pack can be seen pole-dancing at the House of Yes, often on Pole Play Wednesdays — he actually defies gravity while Horizontal!

You can follow his pole journey on Instagram @The_Renesance, which is a nickname that I made up for him. I’m pretty proud of that.

In this part of our episode, we talk about our parent’s relationships, divorces, oral sex in the shower, compartmentalizing emotions, and Rene’s nearly unbelievable cheerfulness.

You’re invited … won’t you … come lie down with us?

The second half of this episode has been released separately, by popular demand.

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Links to Things:

The House of Yes, a performance art party venue in Bushwick, Brooklyn

@The_Renesance, Rene’s pole-dancing Instagram

The Rowe Center, a retreat space and nexus of community

Stephen Jenkinson, the leader of the Orphan Wisdom School

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Show Notes (feel free to share quotes/resources on social media, and please link to my iTunes, this website, or my Patreon!):

iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/horizontal-with-lila/id1238031115&ls=1

website link: https://horizontalwithlila.com/

Patreon link (the crowdsourcing of patronage!): https://www.patreon.com/horizontalwithlila

[3:05]  How did Rene come to live at the Villa?

[6:37]  Rene on Latin culture, home, and family.

[8:44]  What was the relationship like between Rene’s parents?

[12:31]  Rene and I express our appreciation for his mother.

[12:48]  How Rene’s mother taught her children about responsibility.

[14:38]  Why did teenaged Rene swear off relationships?

Rene:  For a long time I was resigned about relationships, because the only male figure that I really had was my father and he was a bad guy. You know, my mother never spoke ill of him in front of us. She would always say, ‘Oh, you know, he loves you. We’re just like, not living together. But I saw that he— I saw that he never came around, you know, he never called us for our birthdays, he didn’t give my mom any money, I saw that; I was old enough to understand these basic concepts, and, and, and, and so in my mind, that was not a good person, and so I didn’t want to be in relationship, because I didn’t— I, I was a man. And that means I would be the bad guy. So I was like, not interested, at all.

[17:00]  How did Lila’s parents meet? What was the relationship between them like?

[18:50]  What is Lila’s theory about why her parent’s marriage didn’t work?

[19:51]  Lila’s mother’s illness when Lila was 7, 8, and 9.

[20:45]

Lila:  I think that my mother was always trying to get my father to fill the emptiness inside her, and he, couldn’t do that, and even was protective of what he did have to offer, and so I think she felt starved for affection and attention.

[21:23]  Does Lila’s father think of her mother as codependent? What does he call her?

[23:49]  How Lila has recreated the dynamics in her parent’s relationship.

[25:45]  What Lila’s love language has to do with her father. The resentment that Lila is still carrying.

[27:26]  Why Rene so highly values showing up and being true to one’s word.

[30:02]  Rene’s first sex talk. With hand gestures. (It’s pretty great.)

[33:07]  The way Rene’s mother spoke of romantic relationships.

[35:13]  Sex ed in the New York City school system.

[36:24]  How did Rene learn about his penis as an instrument of pleasure?

[37:33]

Rene:  I would climax, but I wouldn’t ejaculate, right, and that felt really great. […] It was like coming, but without the mess. […] It was, if I were to describe it. It was like imagine … golden flakes sprinkling down your organ, your most pleasurable organ, right, going into your body, tiny little ripples of ecstasy, right, and they would just spread, from my hips, down my thighs, up my stomach, down my legs, past my knees, up into my chest, out into my arms, right, and finally like reaching my head and exploding.

[39:40]  Rene’s experience in the shower at his aunt’s place … shower-head.

[40:47]  On oral sex in the shower.

[42:15]  What changed Rene’s mind about romantic relationships? (On compartmentalizing.)

Rene:  I was 25 and, I fell in love for the first time. Let’s call her D.C.V. … so D.C.V., she helped me realize that I was putting all of my emotions in these compartments, and I had a whole house built, where each room had different emotions. I would get angry, and I would go ahead and put that in, you know the dresser in the master bedroom, or, I’d get really upset, when people bring up fatherhood, and that would go, into a chest in the basement, or … I’d get really excited about something, and I’d go ahead and put that, you know, in the side table in the foyer. Um, and I had all of these little compartments where everything belonged and everything was neat, but I wasn’t being self-expressed with who I was, and everything was just divided within me, and it was like this little, all my emotions were perfectly placed, into these little boxes, and I wasn’t really like, living. I wasn’t really feeling the world, or my experience of the world and so falling in love with D.C.V. really opened that up for me and helped me kind of unlock those dressers and drawers and boxes and really allowed me to lay everything out, take a look at it, and deal with my issues.

[44:40]  How Rene first considered the idea of something akin to polyamory.

[48:40]  Rene on jealousy.

[49:15]  How does Rene come by his astonishing cheerfulness?

[49:53]  The counter-intuitive thing that Lila did to be noticed, as a teenager.

[51:12]  Rene’s gratitude practice.

[54:00]  Lila’s gratitude practice. The weekend seminar she attended at the Rowe Center with Stephen Jenkinson about grief and dying. [Also see episode 19a. my heart is broken may it never heal: horizontal with matthew stillman, a devoted student of Stephen’s.]

Lila:  His whole work is an extremely poetic rendering of how we can carry — these are his words — how we can carry what knowing we’re going to die does to us every day. […] It’s what being aware of our mortality — how that changes our behavior and our outlook. For instance, today, I have often some tension with my mother and […]. I often have— my mind wanders when we’re speaking and I don’t always give her my full attention, and today, I wanted to get in touch with her earlier to tell her I was going to call her a little bit later than our regular time, and I couldn’t get in touch with her, and usually she’s home at that time, and I was already triaging because, the last time I couldn’t get in touch with her at a time when we had set, she was on the floor, incapacitated, and the door had to be broken down so that she could be brought to the hospital … and just the thought of her mortality — my mother is older, my mother is now 75, and when I thought, ‘Wow, she could really, she could, she could die today, she could, she could be gone today, and then I connected with her through FaceTime, and I was like, ‘Mom, hiii,’ you know, and I had a very different, warm response to her, right, and the same thing happens for myself when I recognize my mortal-ness. When I came back from that seminar, which was about probably a year and a half ago now, one of the things that he said that really stuck with me was how people wake up in the morning kind of like cursing the day, and that’s something that I would do, because, as you might be aware, I am not a morning person. And I would wake up being like, ‘Fuck, ughhhhh, I’m awake, fawwwk, I don’t wanna be awake, I want more sleep, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’ And I realized what an absurd way that was to enter my day, if I would like to cultivate happiness in my life. And so now, I wake up, and even if it’s earlier than I want to, even if my first conscious thought is, ‘Shit!’ At— right after that, I go [big intake of breath] and I stretch out my arms and legs and I go, ‘ALIVE! ALIVE! THANK YOU THANK YOU Thank you for this healthy body, thank you for the sunlight streaming through my curtains, thank you for this day, I’m alive, I’m alive.’ Because truly I always want more life. I always want another day. Even at the moment where I— when I was thirteen or something held a knife to my … […] my wrist. I still couldn’t conceive of really not wanting another day. And that gratitude practice has shifted the timbre of my days.” – Lila

 

11. shower-head: horizontal with a primo villan

In this episode, I lie down with my housemate Rene. Rene is the most genuinely enthusiastic person I have ever known. When I first met him, I didn’t trust him. I thought, “Is this guy for real? Is he really this happy?” He is! It’s incredible.