Wednesday, September 28, 2005

 

Last night's sold-out WYSIWYG show (the theme: "First, Last, and Insecurity: The World's Worst Roommates") was a blast. There is always a generally high quality to the pieces at WYSIWYG, but everybody was consistently funny, and I wouldn't have wanted to follow any of the performers. At least I was only the second one in the lineup. We performed on the set for a play currently running at P.S. 122. You can see our interesting backdrop in the photo above.


I had the privilege of sitting next to Carolyn Castiglia and her eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus. Between us, I think we managed to tell about every "Am I going to slip on the water you broke on my way to the stage?" and "Did you kick me, or was that the baby?" joke that exists.


Chris began the show with a hilarious piece about her Domino's-loving, loud Lean-Cuisine-preparing, potentially scabies-carrying roommate. Carolyn's horrific roomie had a drug-dealing boyfriend with a gold tooth. Jon Collins had sex in his dorm room and watched homoerotic water fights among scantily clad athletes (where did he go to college?). Dashiell's roommate was God Himself (this trumps my most impressive roommate, who once appeared in a Mariah Carey video). David Hauslaib witnessed the unraveling heterosexuality of one roommate in a mere two days, and also roomed with two guys on a cruise ship where there was a whole lotta defecatin' goin' on. Rachel Sklar had some less-than-stellar roomies (including one who bade her farewell with a touching "BYE, JEW!"), but ended her piece and the show on a lovely note by talking about her gay lawyer roommate who is considerate and a fabulous cook (taken, natch).


Apparently, something I said is in slight danger of becoming a catchphrase in the sex lives of New York City bloggers, as today's WYSIWYG blog post may imply, *but* you should probably read my piece first so as not to ruin the surprise. With that warning, here's the link to click on later.


And here's what I read last night.


ENTRY 193: ROOMMATING


The summer before I started college at the University of Texas in Austin, I joked with my friends that my roommate in the dorm would probably be homophobic and listen to gangsta rap.


Can you guess what kind of person I ended up with?


If you’ve read my blog, you know I assign a pseudonym to everybody I talk about. We’ll call my college roommate…Richard. Actually, let’s call him Dick for short.


It didn’t take long for me to figure out that Dick and I had wildly different tastes in music. After a few days I was already tired of Dick’s relentlessly booming stereo. Maybe some of you remember these lyrics from a classic tune that Dick seemed particularly enamored with:


Bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks
Lick on deez nuts and suck the dick
Gets the fuck out after you’re done
And I hops in my ride to make a quick run


The loud repetition of words like “nigga,” “bitch,” and “faggot” in Dick’s limited musical repertoire was both irritating and profoundly depressing.


But I was determined to make the best of my situation. After all, I had to spend the next nine months with this person in a 10 by 12 foot dorm room. Whenever his music bothered me, I’d go down to the basement to use one of the study rooms rather than complain to him about it. And that wasn’t a big deal.


What was a big deal was that I broke a promise I’d made to myself. After the hell I’d gone through in high school not to hide my own identity, I’d sworn that I’d never go back into the closet. But faced with someone like Dick, I decided to be pragmatic rather than principled. After all, he was much bigger than I was.


A week or two into the semester, I was studying one night when the phone rang. It was Dick’s friend Lisa. I told her that Dick wasn’t there.


“Oh, no,” said Lisa. “I have a survey for my psychology class that’s due tomorrow, and I need one more person to answer the questions. Hey, do you think you could help me out?”


“Okay,” I said, already seeing the writing on the wall.


“It’s about sexuality. I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable,” she said.


“Oh, no,” I said. “That’s fine.”


You had to give the girl credit. She asked for my name, age, hometown, major, height and weight, career goals, and relationship status before it got interesting.


“And what’s your sexual orientation?” she asked.


“Gay,” I said, as something went very dead inside me.


About 12:30 that night, I woke up to the sound of Dick slamming the door and throwing things around. The next morning, he took a shower in the bathroom on the other side of our floor, even though all the showers were individual stalls with curtains. Dick didn’t say a word to me for two days.


As soon as possible, I called in the resident assistant. The R.A. came to our room to talk to both of us. Dick said that he was having trouble sleeping because he thought I might make a pass at him in the middle of the night, and he didn’t want that stress to prevent him from getting a 4.0 that semester.


When it was my turn to talk, I calmly explained what had happened and that I wanted to make things as civil as possible until other living arrangements could be made.


At this point Dick said, “I think Frank should be the one to move out, because he’s the one who’s not normal. I don’t want my friends to think I condone this kind of thing.”


I practically glared a hole through Dick’s head while the R.A. pulled him out of the room for a private conversation. When they returned, the R.A. told me that Dick had agreed to move out, but that couldn’t happen until the housing office generated a list of vacancies.


Things just got worse after that. My friends, even my own parents had to email me to get hold of me because Dick would hang up on anyone who called. He’d talk shit about me on the phone to his own friends when I was in the room. Even worse, a friend of mine came to our room when I wasn’t there. Dick answered the door while holding his baseball bat, and, when my friend turned to leave, Dick swung the bat and nearly hit him in the head.


I was on the phone with my mom one particular night when Dick walked in and started blasting his music over my conversation. I hung up the phone, looked at him, and said, “When did I ever show you disrespect?”


He laughed, but didn’t look at me. “You don’t deserve my respect,” he said, “because you’re not normal.”


“Well, I don’t think you’re normal,” I said, “because I try to be a good person, and I don’t think you’re a good person at all.”


Dick laughed again.


I looked him right in his cold face, because I knew even then that this was probably the closest and most prolonged exposure I’d ever have to this kind of hate. At least, I hope so.


“Well, you know what?” I said. “I’m going to continue to treat you with respect.”


“I’m not going to do the same for you,” he said.


I shook my head at him.


Dick laughed again. I was really tired of that laugh.


“You should consider yourself lucky,” he said. “I’m usually pretty violent.”


I knew by looking at him that if he could have gotten away with killing me, he wouldn’t have hesitated to do it. We never really spoke again.


I didn’t sleep very well after that conversation, because I was afraid that Dick might harm me in the middle of the night. I didn’t feel safe anywhere.


And the housing office kept delaying and delaying Dick’s new room assignment. They’d tell me it would be Friday, then next Tuesday, then the following Monday, and by now it had been more than a month of this agony.


Finally, I’d had enough. I went to the head of the dorm and told him the whole story. I must have made an impression on him, because the next morning the R.A. hand-delivered Dick’s new room assignment, and he was gone that weekend. I would still run into him in the cafeteria sometimes, and he’d always cough “homo” or “faggot” as he passed. But at the least the worst was over.


Dick’s replacement was this gay guy named Kelly, who lived across the hall and had wanted to switch rooms anyway.


Now, when I say that Kelly was gay, I mean he was gay. He didn’t have to move or talk or even breathe for you to know that. And that’s totally fine. He actually made me feel pretty butch, like when he’d scream and jump on top of a chair after seeing a spider, and I’d have to kill it. We became pretty good friends that year, before he flunked out of school and moved back home.


For the rest of college I lived in my own apartment. After graduation, I started to look for a bigger and better place. By coincidence, Kelly had moved back to Austin and was also looking for an apartment. We’d lived together in that tiny room freshman year without much incident, so I figured things would turn out fine.


Apartment vacancies were so scarce that it took us three months to find a place. In the meantime, I got really sick of sleeping on futons and couches as I wore out various welcomes.


The icing on the cake was that, on the day that Kelly and I were scheduled to sign the lease and start moving into the new apartment, I was on the verge of getting dumped by my boyfriend, Neil. But I put on a brave face, loaded my car with boxes, and drove over to the leasing office.


I waited until 15 or 20 minutes past the hour before I called Kelly to see where he was. I left a polite message to let him know I was there waiting for him, and to remind him that we both needed to be there to sign the forms before either of us could get a key.


The experience was sheer torture. The two female leasing agents were straight out of the trailer park, and they snapped their gum at each other while they gossiped about the cute maintenance guy (who, for the record, was not cute). The cross-eyed one who had her tits popping out of her shirt said to me, “Your roommate’s really late now, huh? That’s not a good way to start out, is it?”


“No,” I said, not quite sure if I was making direct eye contact with her--because, you know…cross-eyed.


Over the next three hours, my voicemails to Kelly got progressively less polite. The last one went something like this: “Kelly, it’s Frank again. I am going to fucking kill you. Bye.”


At last Kelly showed up, wearing these big Jackie O sunglasses indoors. We sat down with the cross-eyed woman, and she started to explain the huge pile of forms we had to sign.


Kelly removed his sunglasses, and I did a double-take. His eyes were puffy and red and black and blue--almost patriotic. Had someone beaten him up?


Then I noticed the other leasing agent looking at the two of us kind of funny, and I suddenly saw the big picture. She probably thought that we were this dysfunctional gay couple and that I beat Kelly up at home every night, especially since she must have heard me telling him on his voicemail that I was going to fucking kill him.


Finally, it was over. When we got outside, I asked him what the hell had happened. He told me that he’d gotten depressed the night before and had had twelve mixed drinks before passing out. That’s when I said to myself, “Oh, yeah. When I lived with him before, we were under 21.” The worst I could have said about him back then was that he listened to the song “Vogue” by Madonna every fucking morning.


So we moved in, and Neil dumped me the very next day, and life went on. Things were quiet for a while, because, as it turned out, Kelly was a binge drinker, not a constant drinker.


But he was constant about other things, like his movies. He watched certain ones over and over and over: 9 to 5, Death Becomes Her, Bring It On, Misery. He would stand in front of the TV while he was ironing, watching one of his videos, and literally quoting entire scenes word for word as they happened. Misery was always pretty creepy. Kelly got really excited whenever Kathy Bates was terrorizing the writer played by James Caan, and he’d speak along with her:


“What’s the matter? WHAT’S THE MATTER? I will tell you ‘what’s the matter’! I go out of my way for you! I do everything to try and make you happy. I feed you, I clean you, I dress you, and what thanks do I get? ‘Oh, you bought the wrong paper, Annie, I can't write on this paper, Annie!’ Well, I'll get your stupid paper, but you just better start showing me a little appreciation around here, Mr. MAN!”


Then Kelly would turn to me and smile this maniacal smile as he reached for the spray starch, and I’d leave quickly, before the hobbling scene came on. After all, I’m a writer, too.


But even more unsettling than the idea of Kathy Bates smashing someone’s ankles with a sledgehammer is an incident that happened toward the end of our time in that apartment.


Kelly’s friends used to say to me, “You know he’s in love with you, right?” I’d shrug and say, “I kind of wondered about it, yeah.” But you couldn’t have an honest conversation about feelings with Kelly.


When he’d been drinking, though, he’d say things that he never would have when he was sober. One time I actually had to help him walk from my car to our front door, and he didn’t even know where we were, even though we’d lived there for over a year.


“You know,” he said, “you’d make the perfect boyfriend.”


“Well, thanks,” I said, and paused. But he remained silent, so I didn’t press the issue.


The incident that disturbed me happened some time later, when I came home one night to find Kelly nude in the kitchen, hiding his lower half behind the refrigerator door. I looked at him, and then down the hall at the open door of his dark room. He had “company.”


The next day he told me how this guy had fucked him and fucked him for hours, and just wouldn’t come. By this time I was used to all the loud sex that Kelly had. Our bedrooms shared a wall--a thin wall. I heard lots of things I would have preferred not to. One of my favorites was the phrase, “Make a mess for Daddy.”


So this latest sexcapade was real amusing until a few days later, when I opened my bedside drawer to get my bottle of personal lubricant. Strangely enough, the bottle was practically empty, even though last time I’d looked there’d been a substantial amount left. I looked more closely, then dropped the bottle in horror.


There was a big brown smear on the cap.


I sat there in shock, which slowly melted into anger. Kelly had looked through my room, found one of the most private things in it, used it all up, and put it back with his fecal matter on it. I’d read articles about how to deal with roommates who pile up dishes or forget to vacuum, but what were you supposed to do when the guy you live with gets the contents of his ass all over your own bottle of K-Y?


Some people wouldn’t have confronted their roommate about a thing like that. But I couldn’t let it go. I had to call him out on this one.


I decided I’d write him a note, and I tried to make it as sensitive as possible, although I did write the phrase BIG BROWN SMEAR in capital letters and underline it three times. He sent me an email apologizing and begging me never to mention the incident to him in person.


Later on, I analyzed what had happened with my therapist, and I came to realize that on a subconscious level Kelly might have done what he did to achieve some kind of strange intimacy with me, or to express his latent anger that I didn’t reciprocate his feelings. But I’ll never know any of that for sure.


What I do know is that, despite what Dick and Kelly both put me through, I grew a lot through those experiences. I saw that it’s possible to become good friends with someone totally and bizarrely different, but also that some people are too warped and sick inside for you to ever reach them.


There are unsettling complications I haven’t even touched on, like when I was in the midst of my hell with Dick and my dad said to me on the phone, “He isn’t just against gay people. He’s also racist, listening to that music that says the N word.”


“But Dad,” I said. “Dick is black.”


“What?” said my mom, who was on the other extension. “You never told us he was black.”


“Why?” I said. “Does it matter?” There was just silence on their end.


Maybe it did matter. Maybe a minority harassing another minority simply for being different is worse than the same actions from a straight white male. Or maybe hate is simply hate, and no kind is better or worse than any other.


And there are moments with Kelly that are burned into my memory, like the night I came home and found him sobbing on the floor. I didn’t know what his tears were about--maybe about his cold and dismissive mother, or his inability to express his own feelings without resorting to alcohol. I simply leaned down and cradled his head in my arms, and he wrapped his arms around my knees and cried some more. It was this strange and tender and disturbing moment in which my dick suddenly got hard, even though I’d never wanted to sleep with Kelly. Maybe it was just the physiological side effect of two people touching each other out of need. Nothing sexual happened between us that night. Nothing ever did.


But there were many other ways in which we were intimate. He was the first person I told when I found out my first book was being published, and I sobbed uncontrollably right in front of him the day that my boyfriend broke up with me. I was the one who talked him through his regular Sunday-night panic attacks, and danced with him on the coffee table whenever “Get the Party Started” was playing on the radio. Despite some bad moments, we were fortunate enough to establish a genuine mutual trust.


But even so, I did find a much better place to hide my bottle of lube.

12:28 PM

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Sunday, September 25, 2005

 

BRIEFLY


Last reminder (general applause): I'm performing Tuesday evening. The info is here. The show will have only 60% of the usual number of seats available. You can buy tickets online here.


Also, I just want to say that, after more than a decade of devout fandom, I will finally get the opportunity to see Front 242 in concert when they come to New York in November, which means that I can then die happy. Well... happier.

11:35 PM

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ENTRY 192: WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IS INVISIBLE TO THE EYE


Thus began our longest journey together.

--from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee


It had been a fairly innocent suggestion on my part. But what resulted from that suggestion quickly descended into a sick, hellish game. It brought to harsh light certain secret and twisted proclivities whose revelation would forever alter my relationship with Peter, my best friend.


"I have an interesting idea," I said to Peter on the phone last Friday night. "Are you up for a challenge?"


"Um...okay," he said cautiously. "What are you talking about?"


"Let's play 'My MP3 Collection is More Appalling Than Yours,'" I said. "I bet I can win."


This was a huge leap forward in the trust that Peter and I share, because many of the music files on my hard drive remain a secret shame in which I indulge only in my room, with the door closed and the volume bashfully low.


Such a stark game of digital brinkmanship is not something for the faint of heart, but I was feeling depraved that night. Yet even I quickly realized that our fiendish exercise was spinning sickeningly out of control.


"Early Olivia Newton-John?" I scoffed. "That's nothing! Take this!" I held my cell phone up to my laptop and blasted him with El DeBarge.


"OH MY GOD!" he screamed, so loud that I could hear him clearly from a foot away and over the opening chords of "Who's Johnny?" "YOU DO NOT! YOU DO NOT!"


"Oh, but I do," I said icily.


The next thing I knew, he had fired back with a popular Hilary Duff single.


"HOLY SHIT! YOU ARE FUCKING KIDDING ME!"


I don't know how many of you can stomach much more of this kind of gory detail. An early Britney Spears ballad was countered with Ace of Base, bad Backstreet Boys was met with worse *NSYNC, and that Kelly Clarkson song from the Princess Diaries 2 soundtrack was answered with the Steve Miller Band. But it went too far when we pulled out the WMDs: a crippling onslaught of "Sussudio" prompted a blistering attack of Amy Grant, and it was mutually assured destruction.


The point of the exercise, at least for me, was to get Peter's mind off his boy troubles. He'd been unceremoniously dumped via email by the guy he'd been dating for a while, and the specific circumstances are bound to have hurt his pride some. I think my distraction was successful. Since I can't even count the number of times Peter has talked me through my own dark spots, it seemed the least I could do.


But he will never let me live down the fact that I love listening to... never mind.


###


Phil and I are semi-regulars at the gay soiree on Sunday nights at the Maritime Hotel. I figure it's good to get out and see the gym bunnies in their natural habitat every once in a while, although I couldn't tell you why. Maybe because it does wonders for my ego to stroll invisibly in Phil's wake as all eyes rivet themselves on his bulging pecs and various other accoutrements.


Well, let's be fair. Someone did ask me once if I had a cigarette.


Actually, Phil and I had a conversation a while back in which he insisted that guys do check me out all the time, but I never notice.


"Do you notice the guys who check you out?" I said.


"Not really," he replied.


"When we were on our way to the bar just now, didn't you hear the guy saying to his friend, 'Wow, check out that guy in the red T-shirt! How much do you think he works out?'"


"No, he didn't," said Phil.


Perhaps, then, Phil was telling the truth after all.


Last Sunday I was standing around, waiting for Phil to return from the bathroom, and observing the crowds around me. Tight T-shirt here, wife-beater there, more spikes on the tops of heads than on the average golf course. I tried to see them as regular people, to discern some kind of humanity underneath the thin veneer, but I was having trouble.


Phil ambled back over to me, parting swooning homos as though he were Moses striding through the Red Sea.


"Anyone you have your eye on?" I asked, half-juggling my empty beer bottle.


"Naw," he shrugged. "You?"


"Not really," I said. "This guy did come up to me and ask me to tell his friend Bambi that I was in love with her."


"Was she pretty?" he asked.


"Very," I said.


"Did you shoot her mother?"


"Bang bang," I said, à la Nancy Sinatra.


###


Recently it was James's birthday, and, since we had gotten together to celebrate mine, I suggested that we do the same for his one afternoon last week. I was very mysterious about it, and told him nothing more than that he should meet me on a certain corner in Midtown and wear a sports coat. James, being a snappy dresser, was perfectly willing to comply.


"Have you seen this block before?" I asked. He said he hadn't.


"Good," I said, and led him to the entrance of a certain French restaurant. Pointing up, I said, "Read that plaque." So James did, and discovered that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written parts of The Little Prince in the upstairs apartment he had shared there with the artist Bernard Lamotte.


James was visibly thrilled; he often talks of his fervent admiration of The Little Prince and of James Dean, who loved the book more than any other. I share both of those affinities, and it is a significant part of my connection with James.


"Let's go in," I said, and I told the hostess near the entrance that I'd called ahead to ask about seeing the private room upstairs that had once been Saint-Exupéry's living quarters.


She disappeared, returning in a minute with a darling, short young woman who spoke with a pronounced French accent. I explained our purpose, slightly worried she would be unhappy that I wasn't there to see about actually renting the private room, but with cheerful acquiescence she led us up the steep stairs to the second floor.


A man busily setting a table looked up inquiringly. "Friends of Le Petit Prince," said our guide with a smile.


The multi-level room was beautifully furnished, with giant and ornate sprays of flowers and a piano nestled in an upper alcove. Skylights flooded the room with natural light. The French woman told us about the history of the space, about famous visitors like Chaplin and Garbo, and indicated where there was once an actual hayloft in the room.


"I can feel the creative energy in here," murmured James to me, and so did I. I wandered around, looking at the tall wooden cabinets of wine bottles, the bookshelves, the original Lamottes on the walls.


It was all perfect.


Later James and I took the subway downtown and wandered over to Pier 45 near the end of Christopher Street. It was dusk over the Hudson, and lights glimmered like embers across the water.


"Have you ever smoked a Chesterfield?" I asked, as we leaned on the rail at the end of the pier and looked at the navy and mauve horizon.


"No," said James.


"That was the brand of cigarette that James Dean always smoked," I said, "and I made it a little project last week to find some and try them out."


"And did you find them?" he said.


"Yeah. I had to call around until I found a specialty smoke shop in Midtown that carried them. They're not easy to get these days. And I could only find unfiltered. But that's what he would have smoked anyway. I don't think filtered cigarettes became common, or at least acceptable for men, until sometime around 1960, after he died."


"Do you have them with you?" said James, intrigued.


"Let's have one," I said, digging in my messenger bag.


I held one side of my coat over the match I had struck, guarding the flame from the steady breeze, then lit the Chesterfield I'd placed between my lips and handed it to James. I lit the end of another cigarette from his, and we sat on a bench and exhaled toward the black lapping water.


"Do you like it?" I asked. "I didn't know you were a smoker."


"I'm not," he said. "But sometimes I'll have a cigarette here and there. Sometimes when I'm writing a song or out on a certain occasion."


"Me, too," I said. And we talked about writing, and chain-smoked for a bit (I was nearly out of matches, and the wind kept blowing them out, and I told James that I felt like Prometheus trying to guard the only fire on Earth, so we kept lighting a new Chesterfield from the dying embers of the old). Then we strolled back through the Village in the cool evening, quietly smoking in our formal jackets, like transplants from the 1950s--which, in a way, we were.


It was romantic in the platonic sense, the kind of thing that may yet keep my own embers alive in this tumultuous and windy city. And, sauntering side by side with him in the narrow, once-bohemian streets, I was content in James's company and in the moment, and with the knowledge that we could be this close but no closer.

11:15 PM

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