Tales of Post-Twinkie Ennui
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Emily and the boys took me to Nick’s Cove in Marshall, for a birthday lunch–the first of my birthday week activities. The food was delectable, the oysters succulent, and our server a thrilling caricature of the gay waiter. I half expected a laugh track after each of his booming bons-mots. He picked lint off of my sleeveless sweater. We took a small hike through Point Reyes afterwards, to walk off our oyster bellies.
On to the next event…
My friend, Big Dave in Australia just died. He was very big. Big hearted, big jolly pink cheeks… Big Chrissy and I visited him and Little Dave a few years back. I remember driving around Sydney and Big Dave pointing out all the “famous beats,” or public places where he had had sex. “What’s the largest number of guys you’ve had sex with at any one time?”
Stunned, I could only think of my tragic affair with D, of excitedly coupling with Bob a few hours after being so masterfully manipulated by D’s powers of arousal, of how I’d hurt Bob… “2,” I said with a tear in my eye.
“I had 13 blokes in one night,” he said, “13.”
He wore his excess weight like a tight little black dress, I was in awe of his sexual radiance and allure. When he and Little Dave came to town, it was like a carnal cyclone hit the city, everyone in their path devoured by the venereal tempest. Big Dave would take us to some fabulous old church, or an old Masonic temple hall and play Bach on their pipe organs, a private concert just for us. He loved the Queen and the idea of monarchy, and often referred to us (in the States) as turncoats. I loved him, and his big spirit. Bye bye Big Dave.
Dean Smith’s opening was Thursday night. Bob and I went together and met up with Nick, whose opening Bob had been to earlier. They both were still glowing, Bob all pink and giggly. Dean’s work is really amazing. His hand is so present but in a way that’s about it seeming not present at all. The work itself contains forms and spaces that are rendered in a way to confound resolution. It’s frustrating and beautiful, harmonious and disjunct.
Emily and I went to see Godard’s Made in USA tonight at the Castro. The film was exhilarating. Exhilaratingly frustrating and beautiful, harmonious and disjunct. At times the narrative seemed almost within reach, but then we’d be assaulted by a blaring soundtrack or recorded message, or an absurd political digression, or an emphatic political digression, or Marianne Faithfull tenderly singing As Tears Go By, or a whimsical Hollywood pastiche. Godard reimagines cinema by utilizing its language, alternately seducing us and punching us in the face with his many manifestos and domination of the medium’s clichés and vocabulary. The truth must not be known. If you finish your novel, everyone will know it, for poetry is truth.
Emily relocated her book group to my house last night, so I was finally able to attend. We discussed a recent issue of Cabinet devoted to the theme of shame. Most of the discussion centered around shame and guilt; the distinction between the two, their manifestations, depictions and expressions. I was eager to talk about nudity and shame, but Emily kept steering us to the death of capitalism. Like she always does.
My Foreign Correspondent and I have become quite entranced with each other. We have yet to meet, as he’s still on another continent, but of the nearly 7 billion people to choose from, I can imagine loving no other. Suddenly everything that was out of sync with the men I’ve been dating is apparent: they weren’t he. He’s happy and sweet and smart and beautiful. My sense of irony is gone. Sincerity and cliché have settled over me. Meaning is different, it suddenly has location and focus. I’m dancing en pointe through a Botticelli landscape strewn with flowers and prancing putti, my pudgy paramour reaching to me from the clouds, my naked and suddenly slim again quattrocento body warmed by the light emanating from his divine stubbled face.
Davide is visiting from NYC. As he might have to move back to Italy next month, he’s boinking all of the guys he lusted after when he lived here, and annoyingly, they’re all totally my type and have made themselves completely accessible to him. And not me. Of course, my pearl-beyond-all-price is collecting dust while my Palestinian paramour is hashing out his visa issues in Arabia, so I shouldn’t be jealous, I mean annoyed, okay I mean jealous, but still, I’m annoyed. I mean jealous.
Last night we had pizza and then a mini experimental homo film-fest at the CocoPlex. We started with Dean Smith’s beguiling thought forms, then Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, and then finally James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus. It was a thrilling evening of visually and conceptually stimulating flickers of light, ideas, and flesh. If you haven’t seen Pink Narcisssus, and you’re a baby gay, or a baby art fag, see it today. It was filmed over seven years in Bidgood’s tiny apartment on 8mm, an orgy of color and form and homo-erotic desire and fantasy, with dizzying dissolves and the tightest pants you’ll ever see.
Sheesh, I just looked at this blog and realized I have written hardly anything this year. What’s the deal? Well, the turns that life has taken this year resemble a bit too closely the turns taken last year, and the year before. And probably the year before; trips to the south, the midwest, dates with all the wrong but-incredibly-sexy guys, Big Chrissy, Dean, the theater, opera, movies, expensive restaurants, visiting europeans, art… I’m clinging to the tail end of my mid-life crisis, the point where resignation and contentment are supposed to align and the new era begins. I see myself teetering, ready to roll into new experience, but held back by the comfort of the familiar and the dogged determination to not let go, not just yet. I might be consoled by the cyclical nature of my unfulfilled desires and experiences, but writing about them again and again is just going to be boring for you, gentle readers.
Yesterday was my 43rd birthday. The weekend was pretty fabulous, with many dinners, a carrot cake (like last year), a chocolate raspberry mousse cake, loved ones, barbequed oysters, the Sonoma Coast, movies, the Legion of Honor… Big Chrissy surprised me by purchasing most of the books on cooking that I don’t yet have that were mentioned in the recent article in The Art of Eating titled “Throw the Rest Out.” Tonight Bob’s taking me to the Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant to continue the birthday season. Imagine Mandarin Chinese food, but with lamb and middle eastern spices.
I want there to be more films by Fatih Akin. They’re about how life is, not how we want it to be.
Doug swam from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park this morning. Along with several hundred other clearly insane people, as part of the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon. Dean, BC and I dragged ourselves out of our respective beds and converged at the shore to cheer him on, or to bury him. Doug emerged from the water to experience the city’s enveloping fogginess as something actually warm. Hugging him, his body temperature seemed somewhere between a shaken martini and a stirred one. Dean brought along a thermos of warm water and dumped it on him, to help the warming process along. Or is this the kind of thing that induces heart attacks? Whatever, it worked, and Doug’s emersion from the frigid bay proved to us all that even Alcatraz couldn’t have contained Dean’s he-man husband. That is, if he had been a high-security prisoner and the year was 1936 and he figured out how to escape somehow and got down to the water and swam to the city.
Saturday, BC and I high-tailed it over to SFMoMA to see the Lee Miller retrospective. I was very moved by her sensibility, and how her sexuality dovetailed so nicely into her imagery. She captured her interests with a seemingly casual immediacy but framed with a rigorous formal elegance and precision. This image could be her bending towards or away from the lens, fitting for one who moved so effortlessly between the front and back of the camera.
This morning I had breakfast with a guy who stirred that stupid part of me that I’ve been trying to calm since age 8. I was so overwhelmed by hormones and endorphins that I consciously had to not say “I’ve fallen in love with you” as we got up to settle the check. We’ve been chatting online for a few months now, he’s up from southern California for the weekend. (Yes, another one.) This morning’s breakfast was our first contact without computer screens between us. I’m salivating as I write this, a sudden hunger for his flesh, to lick the nape of his neck… I feel so victimized by evolution, by the years and years of subtle mutations that have resulted in the synaptic and hormonal storm that is raging in my body right now–and just to produce a few involuntary muscular contractions. Did anyone see La Grande Bouffe? It’s a story about several men who get together for a weekend to eat themselves to death. I could imagine our relationship following a similar narrative trajectory, the two of us collapsing from our inability to quell our insatiable hunger for each other. Despite my attempts at restraint I blurted out, “I think you’re just adorable” as I hugged him goodbye. For one second I didn’t feel in my life anymore, but in the big-budget romantic comedy version of it and I was Meg Ryan and the camera was circling around us as we kissed and I had finally arrived in the scene that I’d been preparing for all my life. I didn’t kiss him, the world stopped spinning, he walked off toward his destination without uttering “Coco, I think you’re adorable, too!” and I got in the CocoMobile and sped off into the gray day.
Other than meeting the Man of My Dreams, the weekend has been busy with visiting parents and sisters, my brother’s turducken, chipped dishes, Grace Cathedral, butter, a really good turkey pot pie last night, and Bob’s mom’s visit–all the exes giggling and hunkered down with Bob’s tarte tatin. I’ve had a birthday since my last entry. I’m now 42. Gloeden came to town from Chicago and charmed us with his intelligence and wit–Resse, especially. Reese told me later that he wanted him to move to San Francisco and go to his school and be his best friend. My show closes on Friday. No reviews, no sales. My next show will be in a padded cell with me the only audience.
My soon-to-be 80-year old mom asked the now 14-year old Reese if he had any girlfriends. “It’s complicated,” Reese replied. He went on to tell my mom about a schoolmate who had recently asked if he was interested in being her “friend-with-benefits” which segued into a conversation about how his friend could only be bisexual if she had produced orgasms with another girl. Reese insists on specificity in sexual matters.
Maybe when they release Max Ophüls on dvd will I find true happiness. Or if some money gets dumped in my lap–I know what to buy to make me happy. You’re all wrong and so are all of my therapists: I’m not the only person who can make me happy. It’s that guy from Southern California.
My breakfast date was sent straight from Central Casting—“Coco’s Dreamboat.” He lives in Southern California and came up to SF for a few days. We had met and chatted online only a few weeks prior to his trek northward. He stopped by my opening Thursday night and while smushing me between himself and Abearius in a Coco Sandwich, asked me to breakfast Saturday. He reminds me of the giant stuffed teddy bear that my kindergarten teacher let us all play on during recess—only he was all mine and I didn’t have to share him with all of those squealing tots. I fell in love. Really, I would have married him. Right then and there. We talked and talked, of ideas and music and art and infectious disease. I giggled like a girl, sappy music played in the background, the world was in soft focus, we embraced… and then off he drove to San Jose for his lunch date.
My lunch date was the terrorist that I told you guys about a few weeks ago—the one whom I thought had read Naguib Mahfooz and seemed to have a good head on his furry shoulders? Well, he not only adores Edina Monsoon, he aspires, unironically, to be her. He picked me up at lunch time to grab a bite before heading out to see my show. He had led me to believe that he was interested in buying my work. In the car, he asked me for a recommendation for his new car—a Maserati or a BMW? “I can spend up to a hundred.” I assumed that he didn’t mean $100, which is closer to what friends of mine have to spend on cars. He said that since his brother-in-law has a Hummer and his sister a BMW, and in his business he needs to drive something appropriate for his position, he needed to buy a gas-guzzling power symbol to display his status. I had thought he was just a bottom.
I was still trying tactfully to educate him on the great opportunity to educate his own circle about our responsibility to our environment and ending our dependence on foreign oil when he blurted out excitedly that he was about to set up production in China on a product that he was getting made for a fraction of the price that it would cost to be made here, “Dahling.” My mouth just dropped to the floor. Here I was with this person who represented everything that is wrong with the world. “Do you know what the real cost of production is in getting something made cheaply in China,” I asked? “I can just replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, ride the streetcar downtown, and recycle, but you, you can make a real difference….” but I was cut off again. “Dahling, look at that gorgeous little converrrrtible over therrrrre.” I gave up.
At my show, he basically said that he didn’t understand it. He even pointed to the pretty paintings in the back room, “Now that’s art!” He actually said that. On the way back to the car, we walked by one of those dreadful 3-story antique emporiums on Grant Street. A few days ago, Big Chris had asked me, “Could you imagine anyone actually buying anything there?” Well, my little terrorist pulled me over to the window to show me a giant carved quartz eagle, wings spread over a cloisonne globe. “I bought a much larger verrrrsion of this a few years ago. Don’t you love it?” “Well, there is a place for it.”
Finally on the road back to my house, he said, “Dahling, I know something’s wrrrong, what is it? Arrre you okay?” I was thinking “How did I get to this place in my life, with this wretched person? How can humanity be saved?” Instead I smiled and said, “Oh, it’s just having my show up and having worked so hard on it, I’m just a bit exhausted…” blah blah blah. He touched my hand and squeezed it. “I really like spending time with you, Chrrrris.” My “goodbye” has never held such finality.
I had but a few hours to recuperate before dinner with my third date of the day, my Paris Hilton. Seeing his hybrid pull up to my house set my mind at ease, and we motored with a minimal impact on San Francisco’s fragile ecosystem to catch Dan in Real Life. Mick Lasalle, the Chronicle critic–whom he knows, of course–had raved about how inventive the film was, but at every inventive moment, the film steered right back into familiar territory and ended exactly as it was supposed to and the way we all figured it would. It was a fun film, sure, and well-acted, but inventive?
We held hands in the movie, had sushi afterward, and then made out back at the Coco Pad, but I was still too emotionally exhausted from my show opening and my lunch date with the eco-terrorist to let lips or hands stray too haphazardly into any belted or zippered erogenous zones from which there would be no return. We chatted and kissed, chatted and kissed, chatted and kissed. Famous locals kept slipping off his tongue. I’m usually so compelled towards completing a pass that I had to keep thinking up new ways to avoid going to second base. “I’m thirsty, would you like anything to drink?” “I have to pee.” “Is Steve Carell just really good at being depressed or is he a truly versatile actor?” “Are Anna Paquin and Alison Pill the same person?” “Have you packed for your trip yet?” …”Um, Chris, do you realized that you’re talking to me while my tongue is in your mouth?” Finally, he got it and left, his shirt untucked and covering any embarrassing displays of intention as he lumbered down the stairs, and I fell onto my bed… zzzzz.
Abearius treated me to The Magic Flute last night. Not his–Mozart’s. It was the first live opera that I attended, back when I was but a wee gay, in 1986 or so. I had so much fun revisiting it, but got a little too involved in the narrative, and wanted to know what was going to happen to the Queen of the Night and her daughter when they got together for dinner the next time. “Hey, Pamina, remember that guy I told you to stab–the one who finally brought you and your husband together??” I was chirpily singing my rendition of the Queen of the Night’s “The vengeance of hell boils in my heart” in the shower this morning. Love does indeed conquer all in this wonderful opera, even narrative and character inconsistencies. The rational and irrational boil down to enlightened male vs. hysterical female. I see a great neo-noir remake.
Thanks Jeff!