I chopped down my “mi amor” rhododendron this week. I had neglected it over the past few years, letting it get leggy, and in an enthusiastic orgy of pruning, overtrimmed my beloved shrub the day before the big heat wave and the day after my neighbors chopped down the yew that had provided shelter for the past 10 years. Thus exposed, with so little greenery, it shriveled up and died. So I replaced it, my “mi amor.”
My love for #8 shrivels up and dies on a weekly basis, to be supplanted with new enthusiasm and hope in a manic cycle of betrayal and redemption. No, we are not right for each other. Yes, that makes him harder to let go of.
I’ll get back to that in a minute…
We saw Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw the other night at Theater Rhino. The play’s a witty and surreal farce, maddeningly brilliant writing that’s acidic, nonsensical and hilarious. The previous week we saw Joan Rivers, who skewered everybody. It seemed at times like I was in an alternate San Francisco, with everyone laughing at these incredibly racist jokes. In a way, it was refreshing to see everyone laughing at themselves, no political correctness to distinguish us from each other or eliminate as subject matter. She’s really getting older, but her schtick is very well-suited to her declining memory. She does a lot of “Oh come on!”s and “What was I saying?”s just pointing and yelling at the audience, working us into a frothing frenzy, saying nothing really, while grasping for the lost narrative or punch line, which never slips too far away as she makes finding it such a complete hoot.
“Grab and take, grab and take!” she urged the audience, encouraging us to take opportunities presented to us like snuggling with Michael Jackson and then getting paid $35 million.
Back to #8–mi amor. I talked with him Thursday night, about his future, telling him that he was going to end up with a 28 year old boyfriend who was completely subservient to him and his simple needs happy to push him around in his wheelchair which he’d surely end up in if he continued with his current diet and complete lack of physical activity but that when that kid hit 40 he was going to start resenting the fact that all the energy had been directed towards #8 all these years and starving to feel loved to be touched instead of always touching he was going to abandon #8 in his wheelchair disgusted with himself that he had wasted all these years waiting for something that came so easy for him and that he couldn’t fathom being so absent from this man that he had taken such care of this man who only cared about being cared about but that he just had to accept but couldn’t live with for another second and he’d die alone alone in his wheelchair mooing pathetically like Sister George until he eventually keeled over and the curtain finally closed on his pathetic love life.
Did I go too far?
Following my prediction, he seemed enthused by a new desire to please. I told him that our desire to be in a relationship seemed to be blinding us to the facts that we have nothing in common and are sexually and intellectually incompatible. BC–well, BC, Dean and everybody else–thinks that I get stuck in fix-it mode, unable to leave an unfinished project. Here’s this guy that I’m attracted to who is closed down but wants to be open. Great. He wants something that I want, so, determined to open him up, I stick around and gently pry at the doors. Well, what I’m seeing is that if you’ve been an emotional and physical black hole all your life, sucking in everything around but not letting even light escape, you’re not going to open up very easily. Like, the laws of physics are constant, right? So we really bonded in a more complete way for the night, but by morning, he was back on his back pulling me this way and that across his vast furry landscape, while tumblin’ tumbleweeds bounced silently across my barren prospects.
In most screwball comedies, there’s a conflict between the headlining stars that propels the action, each scene comically keeping our hero and heroine far apart or at each other’s throats, until that last scene where they end up in each other’s arms, the music soars, they kiss, “The End.”