Honest Conversation Is Overrated
Actual Human Interactions Witnessed Or Overheard
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
While on my way to work, a young woman working for one of those environmental/social change companies that gives young people aprons and clipboards and asks them to harass people on the street for signatures waved her hands in my face and said “Prove you like women. Talk to me for thirty seconds.”
Me: “Sorry, I’m on my way to work.” Canvasser: “What’s the matter, you don’t like women?” Me: “No, I just don’t like you.”
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Any date scheduled to start at a place called Pinkberry, is liable to end up in a very specific way.
I want my excuse to be that I was still in my single digit years, and therefore more vulnerable to the Disney like nature of musical theater. But I distinctly remember living in the Lakeview house, and we didn't move there until I was eleven. One of those friends of the family that my parents had me call Uncle was on the outs with his wife. While I was shipped off to summer camp, he stayed in my room. He brought with him clothes, a stack of magazines ranging from The Weekly World News to Newsweek, and a small beige briefcase full of cassettes.
My parents listened to oldies, classic radio shows, and country music. When I was six, I told my grandmother that I didn't like any music made after 1967. That Christmas, my parents gave me a copy of Michael Jackson's Thriller, and an incredibly premature Best Of The 1980s collection. Tony Basil and Donna Summer became my favorite contemporary artists, and my favorite song on the Elks Club jukebox was Kool & The Gang's Celebration. So maybe the whole musical thing shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise. Still, I'm thirty-four now, and much more comfortable talking about that hilarious time I ejaculated into a man's anus, then I am talking about the first time I listened to Cats. Of course it was Cats. The green eyes on the black background, the catchy poems that Andrew Lloyd Webber set to saccharine music, the obligatory tacked on diva belted ballad. If you're going to leave a copy of Cats in an eleven year old's boombox the same week he gets the lead part in a play about fairy tales, you should go the extra centimeter and paper his bedroom's wall with pictures of greased up men with little or no clothing. It's never been discussed why Uncle Mo spent two weeks living in my room while I slept in leaky cabins, and on the beach, but I suspect it had something to do with marital problems stemming from his pronounced lisp, gravity defying hands, and bright floral print blousy shirts. Or possibly he just needed a break from his own pre-teen boys who, the next year, would introduce me to ACDC, A Clockwork Orange, and the curious site of a twelve year old boy shoving a harmonica up his ten year old brother's ass. Whenever I start to think my own childhood was perversely gay, I think back on Cousin Bruce and Darren's oddly incestual Truth Or Dare games, and a wave of heteronormalcy washes over me. It feels like the opposite of a facial. Once I'd memorized the lyrics to Cats, I moved on to Phantom Of The Opera, Les Miserables, A Chorus Line, and Hello Dolly. Later that fall, I grew tired of the weirdly homosexual overtones of Boy Scouts, and quit the troop to be in a production of Bye Bye Birdie. When you grow up knowing all the lyrics to An English Teacher and Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend, you have two choices: be a debonair straight boy who spends his teens and early twenties training to be a professional cunnilinguist, or be a fat homo with body issues and a fake girlfriend. All my exes describe me as "charming". Even at eleven, I knew that liking musicals was, like waking up hard with your arms wrapped around your tentmate in Webelo camp, something you kept to yourself as long as possible. His future boyfriends would call him "charming" too. His ex-wife has other adjectives. Very few thesauruses connect her descriptions to "charming". When Queen Sarah The Formerly Popular had her parents turn their loft into her Phantom Of The Opera style bedroom, I was the only one who described it as "cool". A week later, we sang a thirty second variation of All I Ask Of You on my answering machine, recording over my auspicious hip-hop debut. "You have reached 428-1383, we're not home right now, as you can see. Leave your name and your number right after the tone cause right now we can't be reached by telephone right now right now right now." I was born a decade too late to be a Beastie Boy. Our recording caught the attention of precisely no one except for my parents who erased it because it was "too long". The first musical I was in was You're A Good Man Charlie Brown. I played Linus. I had a crush on Schroeder, and rat tailed Lucy with my blanket on opening night because she decided to improv and kiss him on the lips. That the actor playing Schroeder was hopelessly straight, or that the actress playing Lucy was his sister didn't cross my mind until I was in my twenties. That there was a disturbing amount of vaguely incestual sibling activity on Cape Cod didn't occur to me until I started writing this paragraph. I'd like to thank my parents for making me an only child. The closest I had to a brother, growing up, was Kevin Harris, a professional wrestling fan who used to Weird Al Yankovic lyrics to pop songs, and expose himself to passing traffic. But if we were brothers, then our relationship was aggressively incestual. Cats led me to try out for musicals. Phantom Of The Opera influenced my outgoing message recordings. Les Miserables enticed me to read the unabridged Victor Hugo novel when I was twelve. It wasn't for another decade, when I was playing Eddie and Dr. Scott in The Rocky Horror Show, that I started connecting the dots between my affinity for musicals and long showers after gym class. Last week, I found myself at a party with Wiz, Emily, and an assorted mix of poetry friends and strangers, when a girl pulled a eukalale out of her backpack, and began playing songs from The Jungle Book, The Lion King, and Evita with honest to tone deaf sincerity. A group of lispers and belters joined in. I knew all the words but had no desire to sing them. This is what I call Gay Pride. Unfuck parades, drag shows, quilts, and rainbow glow sticks. I am proud every time someone shouts "One!" and I don't reply with "Singular sensation!" That's what I call progress. I’ve decided to write a book about lesbian jerks. I’m going to call it Sappholes.
Ben: “See that guy over there?”
Me: “The one crying, and singing Strong Enough by Cher?” Ben: “Isn’t he cute?” Me: “Well…not right now.” Yesterday, I received an e-mail requesting that I be a part of one of the nationwide rallies to let the world know how upset we are that Americans were open-minded enough to elect a partially African-American president, but not open-minded enough to let gay people marry. While I would certainly love to support the event, I have to work.
Upon learning that I was skipping the event to sell comics, I received an e-mail from Well-Dressed Steve, calling me out for being a bad homo (it should be pointed out that Well-Dressed Steve, though a very dapper dresser, is 100% non-cock sucker): Pshaw! If California had voted to outlaw comic book stores, I'll bet you the gays would have come to the rally to support you. Fairweather friend. Gay people rarely support comic books, literature in general, their friends getting married, and me. Granted, the same goes for straight people. Having worked in seven different comic book stores (all part of the same chain) for the last year and a halfish, I can tell you, there aren't a lot of gay comic book readers in New England. And I know why. There are very few gay male characters in comic books. Plenty of lesbians, and bisexual women (even if you don't count porno comics), but, with the exception of yaoi, not a lot of gay men. I don't read yaoi. It's mostly two-dimensional, black-and-white cheesefests about older men "mentoring" then seducing and fucking younger men. And, being Japanese, these stories often involve giant squids, sentient vibrators, and thirty-seven kilometer cocks. Why would I want to read such drivel? I mean, I already live this kind of drivel. Mainstream American comics, however, don't have a lot of gay characters. In the Marvel Universe (the one I obsessively read/collect) the few gay characters are all drama, no plot. Northstar, a member of the little read/respected Canadian super team, Alpha Flight, infamously came out in issue 106 (1992) while rescuing an HIV positive baby, which may sound like a good story, but it wasn't. Ultimate Colossus's coming out was handled a little better. As opposed to Northstar's homosexuality coming out of left-field, there were many hints an innuendos in the sixty-four issued before he decloseted. I won't even mention the fact that two of the three male gay teens in the Marvel Universe were originally named Anole (hasn't changed), and Assgardian (renamed Wiccan) {I've got no beef with Hulkling as a name). Now, there are some specifically gay, all-gay, oh-so-gay comics out there. The problem is, I haven't found any that I've liked. Someone recommended Stuck Rubber Baby to me about a year ago, and I picked it up, and just didn't care. I find it really difficult to get into biopic comics, unless they're really well-written, like Maus and Persepolis. Which got me thinking that I only really like biopics about people surviving genocide. Two weeks ago, I was reading Dave Eggers's non-comic novel, What Is The What, as well as a new anthology of illustrated journals of real-life refugees (mixed in with a few fictional ones) called I Live Here. I was getting incredibly depressed, and not just because of the quality of Eggers's writing. Too. Much. Suffering. Luckily, right next to I Live Here on the new arrival shelf was Bottoms In Love, an anthology of gay comics by gay writers. Man, that comic needed more genocide. The art was cool, but the writing was hideous. Awful. Bad. Gay. Like the books you find in the LGBTA secton of Borders. Too trite for the literature shelf. If I want to see vapid, shallow, attractive men whining about how hard it is to find another vapid, shallow, attractive man, or how hard it is to be faithful to their vapid, shallow, attractive boyfriends, I'll get a gym membership. Stay the hell out of my comic books. Ummm...way sidetracked. What I meant to say was Penguin Lust. So, I don't see gay people flocking to my rescue, should they vote to ban comic book stores. But being gay hasn't been banned either, just gays being married. And while I certainly support gay marriage rights (and gay divorce rights), and while I have already petitioned the IRS to remove the Church Of Latter Day Saints from their religious exemption status, since those M-holes have spent 14 million dollars influencing the government, ignoring the whole "separation of church and state" thing, which reminds me that hey, marriage is a religious institution, anyway, why is the government involved to begin with? Ahem, Penguin Lust. I will, unfortunately, not be present at any of the rallies this Saturday. But Asterisk will be one of the speakers at the Boston rally. And, I suspect, Ben will be speaking in Northhampton. These are just two of the rallies taking place in Massachusetts. I would now like to devolve myself to toilet humor, and let you know that one of the other MA rallies is taking place at *giggle* The Old *snerk* Creamery in *snort* Cummington, MA. Thanks to Well-Dressed Steve for the heads up on that one. I have never been able to take journalists seriously. I know that not all of them are misinformed sensationalists who flunked out of their community college's liberal arts bachelor's programs, but most of them appear to be. I used to think The Boston Herald was the absolute worst newspaper in the country, even after the creation of Boston's version of the international free daily, The Metro. The Metro, however, is often subversively funny. For instance, they did a story on famous beards, and the photographs included Abraham Lincoln, a guy from ZZ Top, Fidel Castro, and Liza Minella. That's funny. However, without a doubt the worst paper in Boston right now is Boston NOW. On a day when the Metro's cover story was about increasing violence on the streets of Boston, Boston NOW's cover was about how celebrity golf scores are available to the public. The front page story was on how Joe Public had the freedom to look up Tom Brady's golf score. I mean who cares about racial tensions in Louisiana, the war in Iraq, or the fact that Boston is seeing its first rise in crime related violence in over a decade, Tom Brady's golf scores are available at your local golf course. That's not even an important enough story to warrant the cover of the sports page. Are they not aware of the Red Sox threatening to flop out of their division championship? Didn't they hear about the whole video camera/Patriots scandal? Fuck how Tom Brady's golfing is going, he appears to be ready to lead the Patriots to another Super Bowl.
Headlines like this are why most people think the Jena Six are a cover band that play only songs by Janet and The Jackson Five. During tonight's Writing But Mostly Drinking Group (which was more eating and shit talking than anything else tonight), we were discussing the Jena Six, and the the recent hubbub over a local school putting on the "pro-gay propaganda" play, The Laramie Project, when the term ex-gay came up. Apparently the straight white Emerson student population (who makes up 2/3rds of the writers' group) was unaware of recent reports on the "effectiveness" of the Ex-Gay movement (I know there are more recent reports on The Internet but, being as this entry is sort of an homage to "journalism", I'm not going to use more than one source). Basically, one recent study of two hundred and two Ex-Gays found that only twenty-six considered the program a success. Of those twenty-six, eight claimed to not have any "slip-ups". Of those eight people, seven worked for the Ex-Gay movement. The head of an Ex-Gay group called Exodus International in Orlando, said the report presented "opinion and certainly not fact." It should also be mentioned that ninety percent of those interviewed reported long term harm, and feelings of deep depression and the desire to commit suicide. This says nothing of the dozes of "Ex-Gay counselors" sued and/or arrested for molesting the people they're supposed to be counseling. I think a complete guide to the history of The Ex-Gay movement would read like an article from The Onion. I mean, Ex-Gay leaders have molested more children than priests and Republican Senators combined. During the Ex-Gay discussion, someone brought up a possible alternative to the Ex-Gay movement: Cock Suckers Anonymous. So I present The 12 Steps of Cocksuckers Anonymous (with the understanding that this is for male cocksuckers, not females who are welcome to suck cock whenever they please): 1. We admitted we were powerless over cock – that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a vagina greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of vagina as we understood it. 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5. Admitted to vagina, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6. Were entirely ready to have vagina remove all these defects of character. 7. Humbly asked vagina to remove our shortcomings. 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.* 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with vagina as we understood it, praying only for knowledge of vagina's will for us and the power to carry that out. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other cocksuckers, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. *- "Hey Steve, this is Larry. You may not remember me, I met you in an alley in Manhattan, I was looking for crack, you had a couple rocks. I didn't have any money, so you suggested I suck your cock and...yea...yea, the senator. Anyway...no, no, no, the crack was great, I just wanted to apologize for sucking your cock. Really? Well, I'm flattered and everything but it was wrong of me. Wrong. See I'm in a group, it's kind of like AA, and I'm supposed to make this list and call and make amends to...Oh, no, I still smoke crack all the time. It's the cock I've given up smoking. Which reminds me, I came into a little money recently...no, not literally. Anyway, I can't suck your cock, but I could really go for some crack right now, do you think you could hook me up?" I'm trying to think of some way to wrap this entry up in a nice little bow, but really all I can come up with is that so called journalists are really just a bunch of cocksuckers who refuse to apologize for the current state of The American Media, but that seems cruel. I mean, sure, there are a lot of cocksuckers who will lie to your face (or crotch), but at least they have the decency not to write their opinions about your cock and call them news stories. Jim, my roommate Byrne, and several other people in the poetry community seem to have the mistaken impression that I hate all Gay People. "And I don't mean you're self-loathing. It's just other Gay People you hate. I mean, if I were to make a pie chart of The Gay Community where the red part was people you hated, and the black part was people you liked, it'd look like a watermelon."
"To be fair," I replied, "the chart would look exactly the same were you to divvy up the straight people I did and didn't like." But it's Pride Week, and most of the people annoying me are Gay. Here's the thing, I don't like PDA, even when it's hot gay guys groping each other and doing the type of kiss that surrenders to Germans. I don't like the huge rainbows, the Madonna karaoke or the horrible fashion shows with clothes designed by people who should never be given scissors within a hundred yards of curtains or bathmats. When I was invited me to read for Coming Out Day, rather than Pride, at a local spoken word venue, I knew the organizer understood me. Ryan and I had a couple of hilarious conversations about how we hated melodramatic gay people. Which made his choice to kill himself rather than come out to his parents all the funnier. Ok, I didn't find it funny at the time, but it makes me giggle now. Ben and I used to riff on hating stereotypical Gays, too. And that was funny because Ben is as stereotypically Gay as you can get without bursting into Flamer (note, I am not calling him a Flamer...he's just sort of sparky). But it was Sora that I really bonded with on the loving homosexual men, and disliking Gays. And while I may joke about not liking Gays because of their fashion sense, their musical taste, their propensity for PDAs, their coifs, their deliberately screechy octavoices, or their gonorrhea; the truth is none of them seem to know how to kiss properly. Trey kisses like a damp sponge being pressed against your lips and slightly squeezed into your mouth. I met him, as I'm sure you're shocked to know, over The Internet. And his kissing was the only thing I could fault him on, but I haven't called him back. Breezy uses his tongue like a woodpecker searching for ants at the back of my throat. I wouldn't have called him back either, but the thing is, he has this great apartment. I mean, the apartment itself is average. Not furnished very well, devoid of any art, but it's on the water, meaning bay breeze, which, given the current heatwave, is good enough reason for me to continue seeing him. "So you're dating a guy for his apartment." Asterisk said. "I've done worse. I've dated people because I've liked their dog." And while I've never dated someone for their dog (and I do love dogs), I did threaten to break up with someone when their ex-roommate got custody of their awesome cat. But it's not just the apartment. Despite his being the sort of Gay you can see from space even when your eyes are closed and you're facing in the opposite direction, staring into the sun, he looks really good naked, and since he has no roommates, we spend a lot of time naked in various rooms. But we're not dating. I know we're not dating because both of us had sex a few hours before we met up (with other people, natch), and then a few hours after we parted ways. Clem was the guy a few hours earlier, and he received kisses exactly the way a closet case kisses back when they're about to freak out. Our sex didn't really last long. We'd been trying to meet for months. And by we, I mean he. I gave up on him after the first night of his utter wishy-washiness. He wanted to meet. He wanted to bottom. He had the night off, but, horrors, what if someone saw me go into his house and knew I was A Homosexual? What would the neighbors say? (I surmise they'd say "Yawn. He could do better.") Three months and eleven potential meet-ups later, he sent me his address, and I hopped on a bus that connected with another bus, and yet another bus that dropped me off in his neighborhood. We made very small talk before we went into his bedroom, where he closed his shades, turned off all the lights, and took off his clothes. When I tell you he had the tiniest penis I've ever seen, I'm not trying to insult him. As much as I can appreciate a good looking penis, it's not the part of the body I'm most looking for. His ass was assdequate. But barely had he slid his skivvies around his ankles, when he started stuttering. He had one hand on my cock, and said "Your c-c-cock is so big. I can not b-b-bottom for you." Which is flattering, but not at all true. Not even remotely true. So I started putting my clothes back on. "I can jerk you..." "No." "You can't." "You've got a car, right?" In the movie version of my life, I'm smoking a cigarette. Perhaps two cigarettes. "Yes. I have car." Apparently, my cock was also so big he forgot how to use articles in his sentences. "You're giving me a ride home then." And he did, without question. And as soon as he dropped me off at the house, I e-mailed Breezy, and he took care of my Indigo Testicles. And I took care of his. And he took care of mine. And I took care of...you get the idea. When it was finally well past time for sleep, Breezy plopped down beside me on his bed, and grabbed my arms around him. Which is fine. I can be rather cuddly when the mood strikes, much to the chagrin of Sora, and the amusement of Zach. The latter referring to me as a Reverse Teddy Bear. "A big furry thing that never lets go." Breezy was the first guy I've ever thought of as aggressively huggable. Every time I was certain he was asleep, and I tried to move to a more comfortable position, he would wait for me to adjust, and then commandeer both my arms, roll his neck under my chin, and slide his butt up against my cock, which is a pretty surefire way to get me to not move too much for a while. "Where are you going?" He asked when it was time for me to head home, shower, and consider going to work. "Home." "Not yet you're not." And he was correct. Three times. When I got the e-mail from Diego, telling me he would die without a sperm transfusion, I wondered if meeting him was a bit over the top. True, I hadn't been laid since Wednesday afternoon, but it was only Friday afternoon, and I had a show to go to Friday night. But he was insistent that he come over. he was insistent about everything. Kissing too desperate. Mashing of mouths, yanking of head. It was like kissing a fish that kept flopping around to different sides of your face. "Am I too rough?" He asked. "No." You just suck at this. "I am ready to be-" don't say it, don't say it, don't say it "taken by you, Big Boy." Sora developed a sense of dirty talk sometime after the first year or so of our on/off/on/off/off/off/on/whatever dating cycle. I think this goes back to a conversation we had where I mentioned liking when a guy was vocal in bed. But what I meant was guttural, or pleasured, not loquacious and porn talky. But Sora gets away with it because I like him & he has a sexy voice. Diego...Diego doesn't fall into either category. It's not just the bad kissing, the bad porn talk, or the everything else. Diego proved something I suspected, but didn't know for sure. I'm not into black dudes. It's not a racist thing. I cold surely fall in love with someone black, and I can damn sure realize when someone black is hot, but I'm just not into them, precisely the same way I'm not into women. They can get me hard, they can get me interested, but they can't make me come. Diego tried and tried and tried and tried, until Byrne knocked on my door to let me know it was time to go to the show. I don't think he heard what we were doing (and if he's read this far, I'm sure he now regrets it). "What do we do?" Diego asked. "You have not--" "We've got to go." I said. "Sorry, I didn't realize this would take so" epically "long." "I will call you later." He, I hope, lied. "You are such a whore. Again." Dmitri said, when I relayed the stories to him. "Who killed himself this time?" "Ouch. No one. I mean, I'm sure someone, but nobody I know. It's just..." Oh shit. Trey kisses sponge, Breezy woodpecker, Diego cinder block, Clem like a terrified mannequin. Diego is too needy armed, Trey too non-existent. Diego too existent. Clem not enough anything. These ass shaped men trying to fit themselves in my heart slot. And, in theory, the piece should fit. Not perfectly, or even well. But they should drop into the too big space for them, and slide around like the last pretzel in a kiddie pool sized bowl. Everything about Breezy is nearly acceptable except that he isn't Sora. And, fuck. The best thing about having your perfect boyfriend commit suicide a month into your relationship is that you realize pretty quickly that there's no way you can improve upon your relationship or bring things back to the way they were. He's never going to be nearly as responsive, even if you dig him up and put a tape recorder in his chest. He's never going to kiss back, or silently judge you for your horrible necrophilia jokes. Ok, he will always silently judge you for your necrophilia jokes, because silent judgment is one of the few things corpses are good at. But, I digress. Sora is, thank everything, in no way shape or form dead. Nor is he, nor has he ever been perfect, as my friends frequently remind me. But he kisses properly, which is sometimes enough. And we've become accustomed to our cycle of whatever it is we do or don't. And Zach was right about me. I'm just this big, furry thing that never lets go. It's summery, and the geese are honking in the park. I am in a park. It's summery and I'm outdoors in the morning, and I swear this time, mom, I'm not even close to homeless.
The geese are honking, not at me, but at each other. Mating and flying and hissing and swimming and eating the plant life in this unswimmable water. These black capped, white chin-strapped loud beaks breaking the silence of a Tuesday morning bagel. They will not get the bagel. I remember being three or four, sitting on the pondfront in front of my cousins' house in Atasmansit, with various members of my mother's side of the family. There was a family of geese that owned their quarter of Lawrence Pond. We called the alpha female, Big Hiss, because she was big. And hissy. I remember feeding her bits of bagel, and turning to my Aunt Maggie, a laughful Canadian woman with fluffy black hair and a ten mile smile. "Canadian geese are funny." I said. She crossed her arms. "They aren't Canadian geese, Adam, they're Canada Geese." Now I understand why they honk and hiss so much. These beautiful vegetarians named for a country that refuses to claim them. The nation that births them, but does not allow them to call their birthplace home. I get it. When the article in the paper announced my upcoming show, I was disheartened to see that they'd labeled me a Gay Poet. Sure, I've been sleeping predominantly with men for the last decade or so, but more often I've been sleeping alone, and nobody labels me an Asexual Poet. I'm not sure why the Gay distinction makes me any angrier than the poetry distinction. After all, I've been writing more prose than poetry these days. I suppose I'm more forgiving of the poet because I'm doing the show to perform poetry. I'm not going there to recruit gays, pick up guys, or pass along any agenda associated with who I sleep with. Will I be reading some poems about men I've slept with? Probably. But I'll also be reading some surrealist shit, and some a bunch of persona poems. I'd probably be just as angry if I'd been listed as a Surrealist Poet or a Persona Poet, because, while they're things I do write about, I rarely fill a set with them. Still, the whole being a Gay Poet thing annoys me. Not just because I don't often identify with the Stereotype Gay Poets. Those who only write about being Gay. Those who go out of their way to be self-parody or walking political campaigns. When I think of my favorite poets who are gay, I don't think of them as gay poets. Who gives an unfuck who Daphne Gottleib sleeps with? Justin Chin? What part of Morris Stegosaurus's "Clockwork" is enhanced by the fact that he's a gay babyfur? And what does giving the occasional blowjob have to do with Buddy Wakefield's "Pretend"? I'm getting ranty. And Rant Poet isn't a title anyone should be reaching for, so I'll just fold this little article up into my poetry scrapbook, pick up the copy of Blues For All The Changes, that I hope will get me to remember what it was about Nikki Giovanni that made me love her work, and start reading again. I'll try and relax while the joggers and dog walkers dance around me to the beat of the geese, who skim the water in front of me, honking "Fuck Canada" over and over again in their beautifully raspy voices. Dmitri wears Diesel shoes. His shoes match his outfits flawlessly. Not in that pink shirt, pink sweatpants, pink shoes sort of way. His outfits are often from different stores, are different colors, and different styles, but they are, unquestionably, matching styles. They're unquestionably hot.
Having left a majority of my clothes in Pieceofshitdeserttown, my outfits are uhh...well, not outfits. And my shoes? During the last snowstorm my shoes got the toes kicked out of them. My feet didn't actually stick out of the toes, but I did look like a homeless person from the ankles down. I wasn't completely aware of this until I was actually on my way into Logan airport to pick Dmitri up. What I did know was that one of my many unreliable friends had flaked out and, as a result, my hair cut had never happened. I was a long-haired, homeless shoed freak in a non-matching outfit when I arrived at Logan. Late. I buzzarded around Baggage Claim and the arrival gates about four times. His flight arrived at 10:45, and I had arrived at Logan at 10:47. I am tempted to blame this one Unreliable Friend #1, but I should have known that she wasn't going to show up or even bother to call me to let me know she wasn't going to show up, because she is one of my friends, and as I have learned this week, my friends are unreliable. If they say they're going to meet me somewhere at 6:30, they may or may not be there by 8:00, and odds are, they won't call to let me know they're running behind. I've been moderately aware of this for a few years now. In fact, I've caught some of their unreliableness. This is what happens when you belong to a community of people who advertise events starting at 7:30, but don't actually show up until 9:00. I was cursing Unreliable Friend #1 for not giving me a ride to Logan (she was catching a flight there an hour after I was to pick up Dmitri, so I wasn't asking her to go out of her way) while I buzzarded. I was on pass number five, when I turned around. Dmitri was behind me. Apparently, he'd been following me for a turn or two. I'll probably want to kick myself for using Elvis's word, but the only thing I can think of to describe Dmitri is kyoooooot. We took a bus, then the T, then a bus back to my place. Most of the trip home we followed/were followed by The Man in The Red Jacket. a mysterious stranger who had apparently been staring at Dmitri from the time he left Chicago. Creeeeeeepy. We ended up losing him when I got on the train going in the wrong direction. He did not follow us when we got off, and switched to a train going the right way. Once Dmitri was unpacked, we went out for Indian food. On our trek to the restaurant, Dmitri began his one man show. I don't want to bore you with all the details, but I'm going to. When he was done berating me for not bringing a granola bar with me when I met him at the airport, he began making fun of my shoes. He then made several attempts to kick pigeons who had the misfortune to cross his path. When I crossed the street at places that were clearly not crosswalks, he let out a high pitched squeal, and ran across the street like a Muppet with its fur on fire. If he hadn't told me about his Mutually Exclusive Hookup Partner, I would have taken him right there in the street. Our conversations deserve a post of their own, a la Drunken Conversations at Hampshire College. Dmitri is easily the Most Interesting Conversationalist I've ever met. He talks in and out of Gay so effortlessly, unlike most of our contemporaries. While Dmitri was on his cell, chatting with a Gay friend about dancing plans, I was on the phone with the guy who created the PE(s)T exhibit, a giant gerbil cage. The person sounded incredibly Gay. He expressed an interest in being at the exhibit when Dmitri and I arrived. I imagined him spending an infinite amount of time explaining"his vision" and the "metaphorical ramifications of a gigantic gerbil cage". This was not something I looked forward to. Dmitri and I were discussing how Gay our phone partners had sounded when we arrived at the address of the exhibit. It didn't look like any art gallery I'd ever seen. In fact, it looked like exactly like the sort of vacant warehouse where serial killers rape, torture, and kill young art patrons and grind their bodies and incorporate them in their next "project". I sensed we would be the basis for an upcoming "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit". Dmitri vocally agreed with my inner-monologue, as we opened the heavy wooden door that led into the obvious trap art gallery. The stairway was filled with face shots of all the other unsuspecting people murdered on their way into the gallery. Over the phone, The Artiste had said that his exhibit was on the third floor, the sign said it was on the fourth floor. I made the mistake of believing the artist over the sign (I spend lots of time with artists, I should have known to follow the sign), and Dmitri and I got out at the third floor. Someone in one of the little cubicles was either pureeing a human flesh smoothie, or vacuuming up the clues from the last murder. We quietly returned to the staircase and made our way to the fourth floor. At the end of the long hallway was a set of bars that could only signify a gigantic gerbil cage, the place you lock up prisoners, or both. |
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