Kid with a guitar
I just watched an Instagram video that caught me by surprise. A 16-year-old boy in the UK, Todd Crozier, sitting in his room playing his acoustic guitar and singing a song with a gentle depth that reminded me of a young Tracy Chapman.
More, he reminded me of a young me.
Innocent. Big expressive eyes. Long eyelashes. Effortlessly talented. Completely oblivious to his charm. Tapping into the very soul of creation in a way that can only be described as angelic. He's having a moment. He's a direct portal to the divine.
I shared the video in text with my sleeping partner, Celia, with the message:
This kid reminds me of my younger self.
I'm sorry you didn't know me then.
I was a beautiful soul.
Now look, man. I'm 55-years-old, battle-scarred as fuck, and I don't walk around nurturing emo feelings. I'm a stoical dude who has made it this far in life by fighting, always fighting, against anything and everything that has tried to break my spirit.
If I stand up right now and look in the mirror on the wall behind me, I'll tell you what I'll see there. I've spent my life drawing this face, and I know it quite well; still, it has been many years since my last self portrait. Hold on, actually. I'm going to literally look at my reflection, just so the report is accurate.
Okay, so yeah. A strong Italian face. Bald head. Wise, alert, slightly tired hazel eyes. A greying salt-and-pepper goatee that was once a rich reddish brown. A big crooked nose, leaned to the left side of my face from being punched over the years.
There is somehow still kindness in my face, but there's also a shadow of my darker self, peering out from the recesses of my psyche like a sabertooth tiger. It's silent, watching, and mostly nonthreatening, but its energy says "DON'T" to anyone looking to find a way to sneak in uninvited.
Wide shoulders. Strong neck. Sharp eyebrows. The gaze, while softer, is still bright and piercing. It's a stare that has maintained its intensity all these years, yet now reads more like a brilliant sunset than a flashing electrical storm. But mostly, there is no denying the masculinity of this person framed in the mirror.
Venus as a boy
I have a son who turns 16 this coming Thursday, July 30th. Bennett Procopio was born with achondroplasia dwarfism and level three autism. Further, he is a Leo with bright red hair and freckles, and warm brown eyes that look like a sunlit cup of tea when the light hits them just right.
As this kid's father, I have taken the role of cosmic guardian. I'm a giant dragon that he can ride around on, literally, as he is still able to sit on my shoulders, even at 120+ pounds. All those years of powerlifting in my 30s and 40s are still paying dividends. When my son is with me, he knows he is safe. Dad can do anything. Fix anything. Handle any situation. I'm his bodyguard, his battering ram, his opener-of-doors, and his giant key to the kingdom. And to be clear, the world is Bennett's kingdom.
Unfortunately, I never had this. I'm going to be vulnerable here and just say it like it is. I was violently abused by both of my parents, by people they knew, by strangers. My abuse was extremely physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual. My childhood was Hell, and it continued into my adolescence.
I became a fighter. A manipulator. A womanizer. A drunk. A liar. A thief. A conman. I ran around through life determined not to ever be anyone's victim again, and to say that I overcompensated for my abuse is a grave understatement. I thought nothing of cutting people's faces, throats, mutilating them, doing anything I wanted in my dark rage against life itself. And so of course I ended up in places like foster homes, juvenile hall, jail, homeless, etc.
But.
For a very short period, somewhere between 13-years-old and my early 20s, I was something innocent, beautiful, and divinely connected. When I wrote poetry, people were amazed at its depth. When I drew portraits, people cried as though they were witnessing the unveiling of the Shroud of Turin. I was a magnet. A flower that attracts honeybees. A pure light that lived only in the moment, and lived so fully and completely that every moment felt like a dream.
Unfortunately that spell didn't last. The hellhounds were on my trail. Chaos hunted me down and thrashed me at every opportunity. I was too tired to live, too strong to die, and so I became a reckless mess just crashing through life, running from something, looking for something, sad, lost, desperate, and unfathomably alone.
Like the kind of alone you'd feel on Mars, looking at Earth, knowing you'll never be able to find a way back in your lifetime.
And so there I was in New Orleans, running. I'm in Cafe Brasil on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny. It's 1993, I'm 23-years-old. There's no one in there during the day but the bartender, an attractive blonde girl with bright blue eyes named Kelly. The song Venus as a Boy by Björk started playing, and I just sat and listened until I realized I had tears running down my face.
I had never thought of myself as gay, trans, bi, any of that. I liked women. But also, I knew I wasn't your typical bro. I was..... something. There was a sensitivity there. A depth. Something had been unlocked, like a serotinous pinecone that only opens in the extreme heat of a forest fire. And once it happens, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. So was I a girl in a boy's body? No. I was definitely all boy. But I had connected with beauty in a way that was.... transcendent.
So I sat in there with my back to the bartender (it was a huge space) with uncontrollable tears pouring out of my eyes, and a giant hole in my chest. I was just a big baby who needed nurturing so badly, but instead it was fucking fight fight fight, grind grind grind.
And yeah. I wept, and mourned the loss of my own innocence.
Man the fuck up, faggot
That's the voice in my head that haunts me when I allow myself to indulge these feelings. It's the voice of my Italian father, who was a gangster. It's the voice of all the Black dudes I grew up with in Philly in the 70s and 80s. It's the voice of every badass little dude fighting his way through his own shit, trying not to be a pussy, and getting all of his masculinity lessons from alpha warriors who will punch you dead in your weepy little bitch face to try to toughen you up, because in the jungle cowards get fucked, killed, and eaten. Period.
Dennis Procopio, self portrait, 1996 -- Conté crayon on Canson paper, 16"x20"
The picture above is a self portrait drawn with Conté crayon on toned paper, which unfortunately got water damaged.... hence the crappy resolution. But you get the idea. This was me in 1996, at 26 years old. There is no Venus. There is no boy. This guy is Jack the Ripper, and he doesn't give a fuck. Hide your girlfriend, and protect your neck.
What's funny is that now, looking back at this version of myself, I see so much of my father, Tony Procopio. My dad was Philly and Vegas, coke and guns, broads and casinos, violence and mayhem. He prided himself on the fact that people considered him the devil, even in our family. He was a narcissistic sociopath, and you really did NOT want to be on this guy's bad side. If he wanted to, he could get to you.
And I hated him. The last thing in the world I ever wanted to become, just like so many other men, was a version of my father. And yet here's this picture, clearly illustrating the monster that I became. Hurt, troubled, rebellious, rageful.
There's obviously tension between these two images. On one hand, the almost androgynous young male, so uncomfortably handsome that he could easily be described as pretty. There's something in me that wants to attack this kind of person. I admit it. Break his nose. Wipe the smug smirk off his face. Make him chop and carry wood until he has splinters and blisters. Make him hunt and kill his own food, and drink the warm blood out of a tin can as a rite of passage.
I feel this come out of me when I see trans anything. I mean, I know all the politically correct stuff to say, I have the lexicon down, and I can codeswitch like a chameleon if I have to. So if, for instance, someone is on my podcast sharing liberal views on LGBTQ+ perspectives, I'll use terms like "nonbinary", "gender fluid", "Heteronormative", and so on, to make them feel safe and respected. But if I see a dude wearing makeup, high heels, painted nails, and talking with an affected lisp, something in me admittedly wants to delete that person from my world by any means necessary.
On the other hand, am I being completely honest when I present as this alpha bro who lifts weights, rides motorcycles, wheels in the desert in an off road rig, has an old pickup truck, goes hiking and fishing, watches MMA, smokes cigars, and hangs out with dude-bros who range from right-leaning moderates to unapologetic conservatives?
Like okay, these guys are fine to hang out with..... but are we just going to gloss over the fact that I went to art school in NYC? That I was a street musician in New Orleans? That I was an open-mic poet who did some seriously avant-garde stuff in my day? That I used to prefer shooting pool in gay bars in the French Quarter because I knew I wouldn't get into a fight over the game with some competitive dickhead? Or that in college all my friends were "blue-haired liberals", because I was a freaking artist?
And do I want to communicate to my little autistic ginger dwarf kid that it's not okay for him to like Dora the Explorer, or Shimmer and Shine? That no, he can't have a pink balloon, because pink is for girls? That he can't allow himself to be beautiful, like this guitar kid (who started this all, little mother fucker) because Daddy is a toxic homophobe? A macho asshole? A patriarchal dickhead?
Soul
This all started with a kid and his guitar who made me feel something. And for the first minute of him playing, it was a coin toss for me if he was an effeminate boy, a tomboyish girl, or.... something else. Considering that either way this was clearly a kid, the question becomes, why did it matter? Was I uncomfortable that a boy made me cry? Was I hoping it was a girl so I could feel safe having feelings of adoration? What was happening there?
As an artist, I think I actually do understand. It begins with my identity. We say things like, "I am a man. I am a father. I am a husband. I am Italian American. I am 55 years old. I am a life coach for men." These are statements constantly running in the background, reinforcing our local identity. And sure, another viewer is running a script that reminds her, "I am a woman. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am Irish. I am 37 years old. I am a neuroscientist."
And in the moment that Todd starts playing his guitar and singing with the gentle spirit of a big brother singing his little sister a lullaby, his big eyes a window into the depth of the song's message, a feeling of nostalgia creeping into your soul before you understand what's happening.... that's a moment of transcendence. And really, that's what art does. It gives us moments of clarity, where the script stops running in the background like a machine hum, and the space it creates is deafening. It's the awareness that the spirit in all of us — the boy, the girl, the dad, the mom, the tough guy, the effeminate guy — is all that really matters about us.
And it's disconcerting precisely because we relate to it without needing to call back to our modifiers. Grandma in New Orleans, university athlete in Berlin, software engineer in Norway, BJJ purple belt in San Diego.... an artist truly having a moment of transcendence lifts us all up and out of our avatar, and reminds us of what we really are. Connected. We are all, truly connected. And we call that connection by many names, but for the sake of simplicity let's just call it soul. Because the soul of all creation is precisely the sparkling string that connects us all like prayer beads, our hearts a galaxy of stars and suns. And when we feel a sympathetic resonance played on these strings that moves us all at once, up and out of the dream of our descriptors and into the lightness of pure being, it's both a miracle and a reminder of who we really are, and what home really is.
So my message to you, my male reader, is to make space for this kind of love, peace, and beauty in your heart, even if it forces you to battle your dark side. We have been hardened by war. Roughened by harsh winds and icy waters. Pulled to the ground by the relentless tug of gravity on our heavy, tired bodies. We're gritty, embittered warriors content to embrace stoicism through the perpetual winter that is this long and weary life. But still, within you, is the one virtue that lives like a torch in the chamber of your heart, and that is your divine spark.
When something activates it, don't trust the voices that tell you to hunt that thing down and kill it. To draw the shade. To hide in darkness. To rally like a mob of soulless zombies toward anything happy and alive with the intent to cause it suffering and pain.
Let it live. And let it remind you that you are alive.
Because whether it's uncomfortable for you or not, your truth is that you were once a boy. And in a way, you are still fathering that sweet, innocent child.
