I've been lucky enough to know and love just a few people over the course of my 26 years. My pal Stephen is at the top of that very short list. And this muddled collection of flowery words is all about him. So, if you're at all squeamish about hot man-on-man action, now's the time to click back over to Youtube to watch dogs riding skateboards or people getting hit in the nuts with all manner of objects, cause it's about to get filthy up in this bitch.
Stephen's been a member of my "family" for going on 15 years now. We grew up at opposite ends of the same street. A snaking little suburban road that followed alongside the Mississippi river and connected our homes by the front doors. For the remaining pre-driver's license years of our youth, the trip could be made in under a minute with a pair of rubber tires and a set of handlebars.
Since our first meeting, we've had ups and downs (and ins and outs. See? Told you it would get dirty) and extended periods of estrangement, but Stephen is the one guy in my life who I know will always be there. And when we get together, we always pick up right where we left off.
He's one of only maybe two people on this planet that I can do absolutely nothing with and still call the time well-spent. He's an endlessly fascinating human being and not a minute passes between us that isn't well-populated by deep laughs, good conversation (sometimes intelligent, most times not so), and a subtle awareness that the good old days are in the here and now.
We can talk about anything, the two of us. Movies, music, and money (our lack of it) are the usual hot topics, but we're just as likely to riff for an hour on foreign policy as we are to scrutinize the decision-making process that went in to designing a bag of potato chips. Or dissect string theory and time travel for 45-minutes while the movie that spawned the debate sits on pause in the background.
Every conversation has the potential to probe depths of the unknown (dirty) or wallow in the minutia of the mundane, but either way, you know you're in for a challenge. Stephen is one opinionated motherfucker and he'll defend his position with all the conviction and tenacity of an innocent man on trial. I say this, of course, with equal parts admiration and frustration as I've, more often than not, found myself on the losing side of those parleys.
For a guy who holds so dear to his view of right and wrong, truth and fiction, it's absolutely amazing the way he's managed to accept me for who I am no matter which curve ball I lob his way. I was terrified, at 18 years old, that the guy would read me the riot act when he caught me catching a quick smoke outside his apartment. On the contrary, he confessed that he too had enjoyed a cigarette from time to time and I threw myself at him for a big, clumsy hug. Not because I was thrilled by the potential bonding we'd share over lighting up together, but because I had been guilty as fuck about it and, as usual, the guy made me feel better about myself just through his acceptance.
It's not to say that he allows me to stumble through life recklessly, though. He's never been afraid to tell me just how big an asshole I've been and like a disobedient mutt, when he swats me on the nose, I listen up. I listen because I know that with him, there's no ulterior motive. He's looking out for me and sometimes that means an angry e-mail or one of his patented snide comments that stings like a bitch, but makes the point loud and clear. When I confided in him that my relationship with The EX was circling the drain, he hit me with the truth and it sat in my gut for a week. But I knew he was right and when I finally called it off, it was the confidence he had in telling me the truth that comforted me in knowing I was doing the right thing.
Stephen stuck by me through the "Jennie Years." I was shacked up with a woman who had never said a kind word to him over more than 6 years and still he had the strength of character not to dance around in front of me, celebrating his victory when it ended. I still don't think I've heard him speak the words, "I told you so, dumbass," though it's got to be killing him.
Because that's what being a true friend is. A lesson I've learned from the man himself only just recently. He tells me when he sees me headed down the wrong path, then waits for me to choose. Whether I pick the right path or the wrong one, doesn't matter between us because either way we're meeting up on the other side and though I might hear a little grumbling, I know he'll still be there when the next fork in the road starts breaking the horizon.
Really, most of everything I've learned about friendship, I learned from Stephen. And believe me, I've had a lot to learn. Truth be told, I've been a shitty friend. Flaky, unavailable, selfish, lazy...the list could go on. He's taught me the value of friendship at its core through his steadfast honesty and support.
For a guy like me, whose mood turns on a dime between manic restlessness and destructive depression, Stephen keeps me grounded. His relatively calm nature keeps the world from tipping too far in one direction or another. Last week, I dropped in on him after work for a play date. On the way to his apartment, I was neck-deep in the foulest of shit.
The Ex had recently dealt me a staggering blow by talking to our five year-old daughter about our impending "divorce" without first discussing the move with me. I was heartbroken when, during a study session at the kitchen table, the blonde toddler said as matter of factly as toddlers do, "Daddy, what kind of house do you think Mommy and Acey (the beagle from hell) and I will have?" It was like taking the fat end of a Louisville to the chest. When I confronted The Ex about it, she blew up, calling me every four-letter word she knew, attacked my parenting, and did it all at a volume that the kid would had to have crossed state lines to avoid overhearing. The pain was still with me that night on the drive to his house (though another amazing friend helped me through the initial impact with all the beauty and sweetness she displays in everything she does.)
Anyway, on the drive there, I was sick in my gut and strongly considered calling off the man-date and retiring to my basement couch with a bottle of 80 proof whatever. I knew he'd give me a short bit of hell for canceling, but I've got a long history of flaking out and I knew we'd still pal it up later. Maybe it was the dread of walking back in to that house with The Ex still looming over everything or maybe I just couldn't muster up the energy to call him with the negative RSVP, but I showed up at his front door twenty minutes later, still feeling nauseous and all kinds of salty.
We climbed the three flights of steps to his apartment, during which I related the tale of The Ex's offense as well as remarking (unnecessarily) on the poor state of his jeans, shredded and thick with road salt at the ankle. We discussed my pain for as long as it took to breach his door and drop my coat over a chair at his computer desk. That was all it took.
I watched him roll through a video game for about 15 minutes before we launched in to a viewing of a ridiculously bad action movie. We sat in swiveling office chairs as the movie shamelessly exhibited 90 minutes of absolutely abhorrent filmmaking. Anywhere else, I'd have sunk lower and lower in to my putrid mood and gone home feeling worse than ever. But, as I sat there, totally uninterested in the flick, I was happy to be where I was. We quipped about the movie throughout, chain-smoked, and sucked down sodas and that was all I needed to start climbing back out of the trench.
Throughout the years when The Ex was The Current and then The Sorta-Is-But-Really-Not, I missed the dude. The nature of my "relationship" with the Ex prohibited contact with anyone, male or female, of whom The Ex did not approve. Stephen, as you might have guessed, was on that list as well. Sitting in that chair was when it started to hit me, shamefully 6 years late, that I had risked losing someone whose value to me is irreplaceable. I'd forgotten, or perhaps resisted remembering, the joy of bullshitting with my oldest friend.
A guy whose sweetness is usually shrouded beneath a quick-wit and sarcastic streak, but there all the same. A guy who is almost always the first and most enthusiastic audience for anything I write, sketch, or create. A guy who I once kicked out of my house as a child for disagreeing with me over the original color and design of a superhero's costume. A guy who told me, at 17 years old while were sitting in the back of my pick-up truck, that he was expecting the first of his children. A guy who probably wanted to knock my teeth out four years later when I told him I was expecting mine with The Ex, but refrained. A guy who still remembers what "playing Sega with Candy" means.
What I'm trying to say is, if I had to fuck a man. Gun to my head and everything. I'd have to fuck Johnny Depp...or maybe Brad Pitt (what can I say, I like the pretty boys). But when it was all over and it was time to cuddle, I'd have to go with Stephen.
Friday, January 25, 2008
A Totally Gay Love Letter.
The Glorious Wreck.
It’s surprising how easy it can be to lose yourself. At 26 years old now, I’m finding it hard to get a clear picture of myself at 15, at 19, 21, 23. I’ve lost myself, you see. And so I figured the best way to find myself would be to look back and figure out where I was headed back then. What were the motivations? Where was I going? What have I learned over the past decade? And how the fuck did I end up spending the past 5 years sleeping on a half-eaten olive drab couch in the basement of a house I can’t afford?
I suppose, for the uninitiated, a brief re-cap is in order. At 21 years of age, I saw the birth of my one and only child through a pair of gushing eyes. I watched as the nurse carried her to a plastic tub and gave her the once over. For the first time, I saw a placenta, in radioactive shades of purple and blue, splash on to a section of tiled floor I was occupying just an hour earlier. I saw the hands, feet, nose, and chest of the little girl I’d been waiting months to meet. I clumsily snipped away at an umbilical cord at the good doctor’s request and counted the first of my parenting failures when he finished the job.
Ever since that late-evening, everything has been a blur. And not in that romantic, parenting-is-beautiful way. I mean, it’s honestly been a blur. I try to remember specific things. Try to get my brain to focus on an event. Something to get a hold of. But it ends, always, in frustration. Like trying to re-live, just for a moment, the joy of riding bikes with your best elementary-school friend or trying to hear your favorite song again for the first time. You come close. You can almost feel it. You stretch and focus and concentrate all your will on a brief voyage back in time only to be wrestled back to the harsh, violent reality of now. Present day. Where nothing’s romantic in the least. Where looking back should be the least of your worries when you’re having enough trouble keeping up with the here and now.
But that’s the reason for all this, isn’t it? Those who ignore the past are doomed to alcoholism, emphysema, and a table for one at Denny’s, right? So, not yet willing to resign myself to that dismal fate, I close my eyes, take a few deep breaths, and stare as intently as I’m able in to the past to find myself 10 years younger.
Sixteen years old is a pretty good age for a boy. I mean, sure, okay, I hadn’t actually gotten past the heavy petting stage with a member of the fairer sex yet, with the exception of a few (very brief) blowjobs, but as long as we’re being candid, the following ten years wouldn’t bring a bounty full of booty my way anyway. And as long as we’re being painfully candid, I’ve never been much good at the actual act itself, so it was at least a blissfully ignorant period. But I could drive, buy myself lunch on the meager wage I made delivering flowers after school, and spend the rest of my time lazily dreaming about the fabulously wealthy, ultra famous, sex-god I was sure to be as soon as that high-school diploma was signed and sealed.
We’re not here to lament days gone by, though. Oh, no. We’re here to figure out where we’re going. Our little trip back in time is just an unfortunate necessity. To figure out how to move forward, we have to remember where our destination was in the first place, remember?
So, besides bodily contact from the opposite sex, what did 16-year old me want? The easy answer. The simplest answer, I guess, is to do something great. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for validation. For someone to say that what I’ve done is valuable, unique, or at the very least worth the effort. Which isn’t to say that I’ve been neglected that. My mother has always been a booster. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the very idea of being “great”, of doing something truly special, came from the woman herself. She never allowed my sister, or me, to accept failure for lack of trying. She’s a psychology nut, my mom. Big in to the self-love. She analyzes everyone. Tries to break them down in to chapters from her community college psychology textbook. God bless her, the woman loves a good diagnosis. Uncle Dave is autistic. The Ex is bi-polar. I’m a garden-variety manic-depressive with abandonment issues and an addictive personality.
Anyway, when we were kids, mom was riding a serious guilt trip over the divorce and thought she’d head off the emotional distress by involving my sister and me in her psychoanalytical voodoo. We sat at the foot of her bed and were encouraged to look in to a vanity mirror that spun on an axis like the chalkboards you see in movies where you can flip it over at the center. Mom, she’d have us look in to the mirror and repeat, three times, “I love myself. I love myself. I love myself.” It was only by sheer luck that we avoided being hooked from behind by Bloody Mary or the Candyman. I have to think that was the genesis of it all though. Some kids, they grow up not expecting much out of themselves because no one ever expected anything out of them in the first place. Me? Shit. On a daily basis, between waffles and hopping on the bus, Mom would say, “You can be anything you want to be.” A nice sentiment, but after too long it starts to sound more like an obligation than a suggestion. It starts to sound a lot more like, “You’d better be everything you want to be.”
And look. I know how this is all coming off. I know we’re all thinking the same thing. “Oh, boo-hoo. Your mommy loved you, encouraged you, cared for you. What a rough life you’ve had.” That’s not the point of all this. I love Mom. Who knows what kind of wreck I’d be without her guidance and support and I’m thankful every day for what she’s given me. We’re just looking for clues, all right? We’re just trying to figure out where I am. Where I was then and where I’m going.
Let’s jump back to the nearly-present for a few minutes. I’m thinking now that maybe where I was then maybe isn’t as important as where I’ve been recently. So, we covered the birth of my child. What we haven’t covered yet is THE EX! Capitalized for dramatic impact.
The Ex is like… well, metaphors elude me. Let’s put it out there, plain and simple, out on front street where it might as well just be. The Ex was a fucking band-aid. All that validation we talked about earlier? That was The Ex. That’s what I got out of the relationship, as long as we’re being honest. You take a 19 year old kid with abandonment issues and crippling self-esteem problems and give him his first apartment and his first real sex partner and you’re building a bomb, brother. If it weren’t for my uncharacteristic fear of drugs and alcohol at the time, there’s every chance I’d be reduced to giving tug-jobs in an alley for coke-money right about now. So, that was it. There I was. A 19-year old kid, living in my first apartment in the city, still quietly dealing with all that “why did Daddy leave us” bullshit and along comes a little, fake-blonde firecracker with a nice body and no hesitation for bedroom dirtiness and all of a sudden, our hero feels like, finally, someone appreciates him. Doesn’t matter that he hasn’t done shit yet. It’s easier to find someone who’ll settle for your meager accomplishments than actually work towards accomplishing something.
So, that’s how it began, I suppose. The relationship itself is a topic for a whole other story, but here’s the gist of it.
I’ve learned that losing someone from my life is a big problem for me. Not because of the loss itself, but the implications involved. Implications that, I imagine, only someone afflicted with my particular brand of abandonment-phobia would understand fully. You see, the end of a relationship isn’t a parting of two individuals who just don’t connect. It’s a direct affront to your character. It’s the harshest of all judgments. It’s a public declaration that proclaims your inadequacy. Because two people don’t separate for any other reason than that Participant B (The Ex) has found a more suitable companion than Participant A (yours truly.) The only logical explanation for the dissolution of the union is that Participant C (heretofore referred to as, Fuck-Ass) is a better lay, pulls a heftier salary, makes with funnier jokes, has a bigger dick and knows how to rock it, etc. Up here in Crazy-Town, that’s how it is. It’s barbaric, infantile, and embarrassing, but that’s it.
And the point of all that is, of course, why we’re here right now. Why I’ve spent the last 7 years with a woman I never loved, really. In that, “we’re family now” way, sure. But not real love. Not the, “I can just sit quietly with you in a car for 6 hours while we drive cross-country and hold your hand, perfectly happy,” kind of love. The reason we’re discussing any of this is to focus on how I got here. And the answer, I think we’ll all have to agree, at least for now, is fear.
What a pathetic, fucking schmuck. What a wretch. What a weak, scared, despicable fuck. Who spends years, fucking years, sleeping on a couch in the basement just to avoid the pain of abandonment? Who convinces himself that 18 years of dysfunction is preferable to one minute of isolation? Who justifies it all with the righteousness of martyrdom?
So, we’ve got the diagnosis. Mom would be proud. We’ve evaluated the symptoms and identified the affliction. All we need now is the prescription. What drug could possibly cure this ill? Let me tell ya, right now…a mirror and a catch-phrase from a community college text-book isn’t going to cover this one. Right now, a liter of rum is doing its part. A pack of Camel Lights every 24 hours fills in the gaps. That can’t last forever though. Eventually, I’ve got to figure out which direction I was headed 10 years ago and make a decision. Can I be anything I want to be? Must I be everything I’d dreamed? Or is it too late? Maybe the cure will be the end. The impressive failure. The glorious wreck. I guess time, as they say, will tell.
As for me, right now, my fingers are getting hard to control and my face is numb. My legs feel unusually warm and my whole head is tingling, feeling full and solid. I need a cigarette and a good night’s sleep.
Til next time.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
15408 Miles and Counting… PART 1
The first road trip was during Spring Break '96. We sat side-by-side in a pair of bucket seats, black cloth upholstery that was really more of an ashy gray in direct sunlight. A white '91 Thunderbird took us from Champlin, Minnesota down the I35 through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, up and down Pike's Peak. We were exhausted by the time we drove through the painted desert in Utah and finally parked the car in front of a single-story bungalow in the shadow of a mesa in Snowflake, Arizona.
My dad never really said much. As long as I can remember. He'd crack an off-color joke when the right one struck him. He'd mutter a few words about Minnesota winters or the child support he signed over to my mom once a month. We'd spend every other weekend and Wednesday evenings in silence. We filled our mouths with cheeseburgers and soda instead of conversation. Movies and television kept our ears from atrophy.
When it was time to go home, I'd crawl off the center hump of his work van, across the passenger seat that I reluctantly gave up to my sister, and collect a whiskery peck from a mouth that hadn't formed a honest-to-god word all weekend.
That was my Dad's thing. The thing my friends would later mock cautiously with my tacet acceptance. The thing my Mother would lament every so often to us between guilty apologies for the life she'd never wanted for us, but handed us all the same. The thing my sister would scream about from behind her closet door when she'd just had enough of everything. His thing was silence. Or mumblings that no one could quite decode until it was too late to respond. His thing was distance. An emotional embargo.
He got by on the few words he used, though. If you paid attention, you'd know exactly what he was thinking. What he was feeling, he could express in a deep sigh with more clarity than most people could muster with a megaphone and a soapbox.
When he arched his back against the driver's seat and pushed his arms out straight against the steering wheel, that meant, "Son, today was a long day. I climbed the same ladder 35 times up and 35 times down. Every step was agony. I'm really happy to see you kids, but Christ, I could use a beer and a good long nap."
When we got to the two-bedroom trailer with warped paneling that made the place just a shade lighter than a dark room, he'd fold himself in to a sitting position on the couch and twirl a patch of dark hair between his fingers. When he did that, it meant, "When you're my age, boy, you'll understand. God forbid."
He slept on the living room couch, relinquishing the master bedroom and its water-bed to my sister, while I slept in a small second bedroom that, now that I think about it, might have been a large storage area that he managed to squeeze a twin bed in to.
I look at him now and I wonder if sleeping on that couch didn't shave more than a few years off the old man's clock. I've spent more than my share of nights on a couch of my own and I sometimes wonder the same about myself, but we'll get to that a little later on.
When I say he was quiet, silent even, it's an exaggeration, but not by much. Like I said, he'd mumble and mutter under his breath. He'd sigh and groan like he was just another loose board beneath the old couch he slept on. But he'd laugh too and it was a good laugh. Not from the belly or even from the chest. I wouldn't call it mirthless, but it did have a certain ethereal quality to it. Like there was no air to it. No breath. It was all in the head and a smile that you'd have to be quick to get a good look at. It was in the eyes and the cheeks.
The way our faces are built in this family, there's a lot there. A lot of mountains and valleys and shadows. Big, flat noses and plump bottom lips. Broad foreheads and round chins. I can't say for sure, but that socks-on-the-ears thing, I gotta believe that one of my ancestors was responsible for that the first time.
Our eyes seem out of place though. Someone called them upside-down smiles once. "You mean, frowns?" I asked. When we smile, those upside-down frowns almost disappear altogether. We squint up so tight; the world goes dark every time we hear a really good joke. If you were me and you were watching that part in Tommy Boy where the deer wakes up in the back seat and tears the car apart, you’d laugh and your eyes would squint up tight, but then you wouldn’t see it anymore, so you’d stop laughing and your eyes would open, then you’d see it again, you’d laugh, and the world would go dark. So, if you were me, every time you saw that part, it’d be like a strobe light. You’d be watching every 6th frame. If you were me and you saw a really funny movie in the theater and you laughed the whole way though, you could ask for your money back.
But that was my dad’s laugh. It was crow’s feet that stretched from closed eyes all the way back to big, flat ears. It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-em row of wheat-colored teeth behind a clown’s nose and rubber-tire lips. It was silent, but if you paid attention, if you watched him the way I did, you could see him laugh and that was all the validation a kid could ask for.
To be continued…