February 2000. I remember this month, this year. My first boyfriend calling me. I always call him my "first" boyfriend. I haven't had a second. "I'm coming up, tonight." He sounded concerned. He put our other friend on the phone. He was coming, too. And a third friend, his roommate, Lisa, our den-mother/lover of the gays. I said to my roommate, "Something's up." She said, "It's just silly boys having fun." I wanted to believe her. She was a resident, doing a rotation at St. Vincent's in the HIV/AIDS wing. My next door neighbor was a doctor too, she worked at an AIDS service organization in San Francisco. Me, I'm gay, and have been petrified of HIV since I was 12 years old.
I went back to work -- the late shift at the TV Station, creating graphics for a shitty local newscast - we routinely misreported deaths and boasted a news team of several of the ugliest people assembled in the history of television production. Our weatherman was often mistaken for a dwarf -- something about the distance between his eyes (too wide) and his arms (too short)that fooled people. He could get a finger up to the knuckle into his nose. He never knew I was looking.
All shift I wondered who was right, me or my roommate. The week prior, my boyfriend had won a magazine cover model contest at The Web, a gay bar/dance club that caters to Asian gay boys and the men who appreciate them. The magazine shoot was in a week. Exciting and silly. On the phone that same week he said, "Everything is so perfect right now. There's you, and I got a full-time job and I won the contest..but I don't know." I heard regret. "It sounds like you're expecting the bottom to drop out." I remember saying that. And it did. I've never thought it was just coincidence that he knew the bottom was crumbling. Sometimes I think it's why I was there -- to slap cement between the cracks that threatened to destroy any semblance of the "okay" he'd worked so hard to achieve.
My shift ended and I met my friends and boyfriend at the Metro North, a stones throw from my apartment in Hastings-on-Hudson. It's snowing. I make tea. My boyfriend asks to see me alone and we step into my bedroom. I painted it a luscious periwinkle. Even the ceiling. It's gorgeous. Everybody says so. It's like we're under water, always. Swimming, floating. Losing ourselves beneath the surface, trapped in beauty.
"I had a test."
He had a test. A test. The test.
"And the results were not good. "
It was his second test that week. The first was inconclusive. When you test positive they do another test to make sure it wasn't a false positive. That sometimes happens. He found out it was a positive positive earlier that night. He screamed at the woman who gave him the news.
We sat for a while. Silent. Motionless. What do you say? Sorry never works. We stood up. We played Fiona Apple, "...hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
Cuz I know Im a mess he don't wanna clean up, I got to fold cuz these hands are too shaky to hold, hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love.."
And we swayed in each other's arms, cried. He thought it was a parting dance. It wasn't.
Silence.
Bu-bump.
Silence.
Bu-bump.
Hearts beating.
Me: "What are you going to do?"
Him: "I can jump off a bridge. Or I can fight."
I think about the HIV test I'll set up first thing in the morning. I'm fucking scared. He's looking out the window. I lived along the Hudson River at the midpoint between The George Washington Bridge and The Tappan Zee. The midpoint between oblivion and hope. Always, then. For him, always now.
We start to drown in the blue of the room. Blue. Real blue. Deep. It's snowing. Blue room. White snow. I drive them home to 15th Street. White blankets under smoldering metal. Tires crunching down leaving covered tracks as we fade into an oblivion. We'll fade in and out for some time. For some years. I hoped I'd find my way back.
February 2008. This month, 8 years later, stepping off the 7 train, I cried again, harder than the first night. I step into an alley. I'm close to home but I can't imagine trying to walk triumphantly into my building with tears staining my face. My stride might say, "I wasn't crying," but every thing else about me would belie that, make me a liar. I imagine the entire building staring at me until I scream, "It's about my ex-boyfriend, I don't want him to get AIDS. Fuck you. Do you even get wishing for that to never happen? Do you even know what he's been through?" Of course, there's nobody to say this to, but the imaginary peanut gallery in my head. I think about him and about what he has survived. What we survived when we made a go at it. There's bravery and hope in all of this. There was then, there is now. And even though I didn't know it then, in those early weeks of our relationship, there was love. Ugly, brutal. Unresolved. And it was love.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
A Meditation on Love and Poo
I recently had a birthday and for the first time in a long time, I felt the age I turned. For a very long time I've felt like a kid masquerading in an adults body -- I could fake my grown up status but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and cosmically (don't groan) I wasn't there yet. Age gives perspective on the life patterns we develop and often need to desperately change so we're not mired in our own self perpetuating bullshit. This past year I got sick enough of my shit to try to change what I thought needed fixing -- shutting down when the emotional stuff gets tough, refraining from saying what I'm feeling when I'm feeling it and then building huge resentments later, and my favorite, having sex with people who only like me, rather than people I like and could ultimately love.
Love is becoming defined as the time I can spend with a person in total silence. I ask the question, how do I want someone in my space? When all the talk, sex, neurosis and anxiety about whether you'll love me tomorrow and planning a life together dies down, what's left? Can I imagine the person I might love taking a shit and not throwing up a little? Yes, it boils down to poo. I used poo as a criteria for getting a dog -- if the animal's poo was bigger than mine, I wasn't getting it. Thankfully, I mostly deal with tootsie rolls from my little guy --unless he's had a big Italian meal the night before. With men, it's not about the size of their poo, but If I can even imagine them taking one. Actually, it should be called giving a poo, since one deposits it. I really wouldn't want to take one.
I've had two men in my life with whom I did not care if they pooed in my toilet. One was my ex, the other was a man I dated in 2006 and 2007. My ex and I were so comfortable in our bathroom habits that we could poop while the other was in the shower. Then we'd rate it and say things like, "Well that was marinating just a little too long." The man I dated this summer and the summe before took a poo in my apartment on our very first date. He pooed for what seemed like an eternity. He's a singer by trade and he made work out of his bathroom time. He managed to sing, hum, whistle, make origami swans and a small foot rest when he was occupying my bathroom. I sat in the living room/bedroom/foyer of my new studio apartment and listened and laughed as he went through his canon of songs. Later, after he left, I noticed he was kind enough to open the window and air the place out. This is a thoughtful man. Our relationship has evolved into a "good old friends" status, despite only knowing each other a couple of years. I'm convinced we've been able to maintain a friendship despite ending our romance because of my early comfort with his bathroom habits. I was comfortable with the idea he could poo and could see myself loving him for it.
This is how I define love -- if I can imagine you pooping, we might be cooking with fire. Other times, I've imagined devil spawn coming out the asses of men I was dating. This is usually not a good sign. Of course, it's not my only definition of love, but it's the best one I'm working with currently.
When I was a teenager I had a friend named Sandra. I loved Sandra. We had many moments of hysterical laughter at our best-friend Joy's house. I also loved Joy. Sandra's moments of laughter often stemmed from three things; 1) Her complete and utter obsession with her boyfriend Andy, whom she accused of "ralavantering" instead of "galavanting" around town; 2) The fact that her Italian immigrant father shot the telephone with a handgun because he couldn't figure out how to use the answering machine and 3) that Sandra was capable of pooing lariat lenght poops that required Guinness book type documentation. Long poops from a small pretty girl always made us crack up. I loved every minute of the insanity and hillarity.
Poop is pretty creative when you think of it -- it's the one thing that as toddlers we become aware we can make ourselves. It's one of our first creative endeavours. For anyone who's ever taken a ceramics class or rolled play-dough in your hands or known the joy of playing in mud, you get it. When I was two I spread my poo on the wall of my bedroom. My parents took pictures of the wall and then me in the bath tub getting cleaned up. For years I was the family joke. And I resented it. I'm almost middle aged and I haven't lived it down. Although, I've always loved that, despite being the family joke, my parents had to not only clean me, but an entire wall of baby food poo. Early rebellion.
Lately, I've seen the photos as an act of love. My mother labeled it "Tommy's first artwork," foreshadowing a life-long love of drawing and painting. For all the scat pervs out there ( I say it with love) you might also understand your poo loving freaky-deek acts and longings differently, maybe you've got a photo like mine in a baby album, too. For me, I'm going to listen to the explicit and implicit in this message. Sure it's about poo. But its much more. It about loving a person even when they're sitting on an ass cauldron in my bathroom. I do know that the next guy I'm looking for is going to have to measure up to this poo ideal. I won't settle for less. I may hold our first date in my bathroom, just in case.
Love is becoming defined as the time I can spend with a person in total silence. I ask the question, how do I want someone in my space? When all the talk, sex, neurosis and anxiety about whether you'll love me tomorrow and planning a life together dies down, what's left? Can I imagine the person I might love taking a shit and not throwing up a little? Yes, it boils down to poo. I used poo as a criteria for getting a dog -- if the animal's poo was bigger than mine, I wasn't getting it. Thankfully, I mostly deal with tootsie rolls from my little guy --unless he's had a big Italian meal the night before. With men, it's not about the size of their poo, but If I can even imagine them taking one. Actually, it should be called giving a poo, since one deposits it. I really wouldn't want to take one.
I've had two men in my life with whom I did not care if they pooed in my toilet. One was my ex, the other was a man I dated in 2006 and 2007. My ex and I were so comfortable in our bathroom habits that we could poop while the other was in the shower. Then we'd rate it and say things like, "Well that was marinating just a little too long." The man I dated this summer and the summe before took a poo in my apartment on our very first date. He pooed for what seemed like an eternity. He's a singer by trade and he made work out of his bathroom time. He managed to sing, hum, whistle, make origami swans and a small foot rest when he was occupying my bathroom. I sat in the living room/bedroom/foyer of my new studio apartment and listened and laughed as he went through his canon of songs. Later, after he left, I noticed he was kind enough to open the window and air the place out. This is a thoughtful man. Our relationship has evolved into a "good old friends" status, despite only knowing each other a couple of years. I'm convinced we've been able to maintain a friendship despite ending our romance because of my early comfort with his bathroom habits. I was comfortable with the idea he could poo and could see myself loving him for it.
This is how I define love -- if I can imagine you pooping, we might be cooking with fire. Other times, I've imagined devil spawn coming out the asses of men I was dating. This is usually not a good sign. Of course, it's not my only definition of love, but it's the best one I'm working with currently.
When I was a teenager I had a friend named Sandra. I loved Sandra. We had many moments of hysterical laughter at our best-friend Joy's house. I also loved Joy. Sandra's moments of laughter often stemmed from three things; 1) Her complete and utter obsession with her boyfriend Andy, whom she accused of "ralavantering" instead of "galavanting" around town; 2) The fact that her Italian immigrant father shot the telephone with a handgun because he couldn't figure out how to use the answering machine and 3) that Sandra was capable of pooing lariat lenght poops that required Guinness book type documentation. Long poops from a small pretty girl always made us crack up. I loved every minute of the insanity and hillarity.
Poop is pretty creative when you think of it -- it's the one thing that as toddlers we become aware we can make ourselves. It's one of our first creative endeavours. For anyone who's ever taken a ceramics class or rolled play-dough in your hands or known the joy of playing in mud, you get it. When I was two I spread my poo on the wall of my bedroom. My parents took pictures of the wall and then me in the bath tub getting cleaned up. For years I was the family joke. And I resented it. I'm almost middle aged and I haven't lived it down. Although, I've always loved that, despite being the family joke, my parents had to not only clean me, but an entire wall of baby food poo. Early rebellion.
Lately, I've seen the photos as an act of love. My mother labeled it "Tommy's first artwork," foreshadowing a life-long love of drawing and painting. For all the scat pervs out there ( I say it with love) you might also understand your poo loving freaky-deek acts and longings differently, maybe you've got a photo like mine in a baby album, too. For me, I'm going to listen to the explicit and implicit in this message. Sure it's about poo. But its much more. It about loving a person even when they're sitting on an ass cauldron in my bathroom. I do know that the next guy I'm looking for is going to have to measure up to this poo ideal. I won't settle for less. I may hold our first date in my bathroom, just in case.
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