Filed under: Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: homophobia, men, minus ned, straight, the boys in the band, white
Straight white men were never been my target audience. Before this blog goes any further, I understand that I just alluded to myself as if I was a soft drink or television program – but those analogies aren’t too far removed from the truth. How many of us, myself included, change the way we behave in certain instances to be liked more, to make friends? In high school, the only time where I had considerable one-on-one interaction with groups of white males, I feared their presence. The white girls found me adorable and the black kids didn’t pay me any attention, but the white boys were the ones who commented on the nascent swish in my walk. They whispered “Faggot” in the hallways, and tried to pick fights with me in class. During one particularly traumatic lunch period, three white men stole my book bag and spun it over their heads, tossing its contents onto the ground, while everyone else laughed. While I’ve managed to forget most of high school, no doubt as a defense mechanism against a therapy bill I am too poor to afford, I have never managed to forget my distrust of straight white males. This all changed recently when I managed to befriend the Boys in the Band.
These boys are not to be confused with the bitchy queens from the camp-tastic 1970s movie. They are straight and white and border, occasionally, on the frat-ish. They all went to school together, or knew people who went to school with the others, or simply were from the same town – in all honesty, their connection has never really mattered that much to me, as their connection to one another seems as divinely ordained as if they were brothers. They finish each other’s sentences, order for each other in restaurants, bum cigarettes from each other’s packs, and live in what should be a pool house together, except for the fact that there is no pool. They spend their days working regular jobs around Los Angeles, and their nights and weekends as members of an up-in-coming blues, pop rock band.
We met months ago in the front apartment, spent some time drinking together, and somehow (against all odds) I managed to make friends with them. I write about it now only because I am surprised at how easy the entire thing went. Our mutual friends fostered our friendship, praising each other’s virtues as if willing us to be friends. From the first moment there was none of that “fear-the-queer” shit that you usually get with straight white men, nor were they the lease bit curious about my being gay. More importantly, I didn’t find any of them personally attractive, which has been the doom of so many possible friendships. Instead, we talked about music, went drinking, and I hung out at their place. They became fans of the blog, with one of the guitar players (at a friend’s birthday party) reciting his favorite lines between cigarette drags. In return, I went to one of their shows, preparing myself for a horrid lie that I never had to tell. They were actually talented, and I bought their CD the next day – the first time I’ve bought music in the last decade.
I don’t know if this post has a point, besides my own curiosity about my own shift. Had I become more palatable, or had there been some change in the personalities of straight white men that I had failed to notice. Sitting across from them this weekend at a bar in Hollywood, I couldn’t help but feel relaxed in a way that high school Stefan would have marveled at. In between cigarettes and beers, we talked about movies and music and I managed a clever sports reference that didn’t make me seem horribly out of the loop. In short, we hung out, and (not for the first time) I realized how far I had actually come.
S/Alexander
Filed under: Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: free love, marriage, open marriage, racialized, sex, threesomes
“Wait, she invited you into her marriage?”
It all seemed entirely too surreal. She met my roommate through the mutual experience of being a person of color in a graduate program at USC – something which has tended to bind all of us together this year. They met in coffee shops and outdoor patios, chatting about race and writing and Robin Kelley and the Harlem Renaissance. Their interactions, from my stand point, resembled the making of some Nicholas Sparks monstrosity. Two minorities on the come-up meet in graduate school, become friends, start dating, get married, pop out some children who get raised in the suburbs while their parents teach rich, white kids about race at the local University. However, all of this seemed a bit too premature. During one of their lunches together, she casually mentioned that she was married, and that her marriage was open – whatever the hell that meant. Her husband opposed this set-up at first, but eventually gave in to her demands and, she told my roommate over drinks, she had chosen him to be her first lover. They spent the day feeling each other up in his car outside the home she shared with her husband, and then returned to tell me the tale. But the adrenaline of the forbidden had slowly started to wear off, and the entire thing became a series of questions. Was he going to have to meet the husband to get final approval before he fucked her? Was he going to have to host all of their trysts? Did the husband want to watch? Was he going to have to play with her and the husband? What were the rules associated with guest-starring in somebody’s relationship?
For my friend Annie, there doesn’t seem to be any rules at all. A few weeks ago I was chatting up a gorgeous “straight” man at a party hosted Hollywood’s latest up-and-coming band. The boy, a comedian claiming to have a dick as thick as a coke can and a tounge that could reach a woman’s g-spot, was entertaining me with crude jokes and stories when Annie ambled towards us in the living room. Unfiltered by the alcohol, Annie proceeded to declare, with absolute certainty, that she wanted to have a threesome with two men before the guy she was sorta/kinda seeing returned from Europe. The boy, whom I had met at a party I hosted at my house, was wonderful and incredibly attractive, but apparently distance had may the girl grow hornier and she wanted two dicks before he returned in December. The comedian made a clever quip and I laughed along, but for the rest of the night I couldn’t help but dwell on the randomness of Annie’s statement. I remember feeling embarrassed – not because she had said what she did, but because there was so much honesty behind it. In a room filled with strangers, she had no problem announcing her willingness to take two cocks at the same time – something which I had assumed was still taboo. I waited for the eventually joke or quip from the comedian but it never happened – making me think that the concept of a girl with a boy abroad seeking a MMF threesome was somehow becoming the ordinary.
My own experience guest-starring in somebody’s relationship had been anything besides ordinary. It was accidental and unexpected, and tinged with a sort of racialized objectification that I had forgotten could still exist. I met him at the Los Angeles Public Library a few months ago, and we hit it off instantly. He was smooth, blonde, tan, and a bottom. After an hour of casual chatting about anything and everything he casually mentioned his boyfriend – and I relegated him to the island of unattainable men. But, a few days later, while working from home, I saw that he had texted me a very sexually suggestive message. After a few volleys back and forth he casually mentioned that his boyfriend was at work, and that he was lonely in their apartment without him. I am sure I made some nervous joke, but when he pressed me to come by I couldn’t help but oblige – even if it meant driving to the Valley. Seeing him again, I was completely enraptured. Naked on his living room floor, I was too busy exploring every inch of his body to hear the key turn in the front door. What would plague me afterward was the realization that I was more than willing to be one man’s mistress, but less willing to be two men’s stud.
In my ear I heard the boy whisper, “Keep going! Play with my cock! He has always wanted to walk in on me with a black guy.” Confused, I gave the boy the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps this was just the heat of the moment. I know from experience that things said in the bedroom (or in the case – on the floor of the living room) didn’t always directly correlate to reality. But over the next two hours I was subjected to objectification after objectification. Laying on my back, the bottom’s ass on my face and his boyfriend sucking my dick, I heard them whispering about me as if I weren’t there. They commented on how thick my dick was, how big it was, how large the head was – the accolades reaching the point of fetish. When the bottom announced that he wouldn’t let me fuck him I left. He thought my dick was too big to fit in his “white ass,” and I refused to let his Latino boyfriend fuck me – knowing from experience that his dick was too small to bring me any sort of pleasure. We had reached a sexual impasse. When I got back to my car I put my lube and condoms in the glove compartment and headed home feeling as if I had been duped somehow. What had been advertised as cheating had become a threesome, with me playing the part of the black stud brought in to spice things up.
In all honesty, I don’t know why Annie wants to fuck two men before her boyfriend returns from Europe, and I don’t know why my roommate has been invited into an allegedly open marriage. I didn’t know why I was invited to what turned into my first threesome, but I know it was fun for everybody except me. I know it wasn’t easy. I know that guest-starring in somebody else’s relationship means you abdicate control of the situation. It stops being your sexual needs, and it starts being about their’s. I do not mean to cast judgement on anybody. Everyone is different, and everyone is into different things, but what does it mean when one person is no longer enough? What does it mean to take a lover, and is that different from a mistress? When does the line between “free love” and whore get crossed, and how do you find your way back? Can you get back? I don’t know the right way to counsel my roommate, and I don’t know what to say to Annie – but I do know that feeling I had driving back from the Valley was one I had rarely felt before – shame.
S/Alexander
Momma,
It is Autumn.
How strange is that? How strange is it that I am only now feeling the change in seasons here? It’s different on the West Coast this year. Last year it stayed warmer, longer and we didn’t get the weeks of rain until January. Now, we are getting the rain here everyday. Obviously, I don’t mind the rain. I’ve always loved the rain and you used to feel the rain coming in your knees. Don’t worry, there isn’t really thunder or lightening here. Remember when I was a kid I wanted to sit on the front porch during thunder storms and watch the lightening and the thunder? You’d yell from your bedroom for me to get into the house. After we got Chrysler you’d make me come inside because the dog was afraid of the loud noises, but I knew it was really because you were afraid I’d be struck by lightening one day. You always tried to protect me, even from the improbable.
I guess I’m writing because I’m lonely – and this is a lot better than holding it all inside. I think that is the biggest problem with you not being with me anymore. When you were a phone call away, a plane ride away, in the next bedroom – then I knew I had an instant ally. You were my person and now I have no person. And while I am slowly learning to be on my person, to be my own friend, to support myself and believe in myself as fiercely as you did – it’s just not the same as having someone else believe in you. I hate to say it – and I know it sounds codependent as Hell, but Momma, I need someone more than myself to be amazing for – to perform for, live for. I know that I need to keep going. I know that I am supposed to want to do these great things. But the truth is that I love myself, but I loved you more, and I’m not sure that I am enough of a motivation to do for.
But it’s too late for sadness. I wanted to let you know that I gave my first lecture last Monday and it was great and I felt great. I got rave reviews and I am really, really happy about it in after thought. I met one of my academic idols on Friday, and she loves my project and wants to stay in touch with me. My advisor approved my applying to the big conference this year, so I am going to give my first, official paper in March. My students didn’t do their reading last week and it hurt my feelings, and I know it shouldn’t have but it did – and so now I have to be stricter with them because I think they think I’m an “easy” TA and I don’t want that. I don’t want to get taken advantage of that way. My roommate and I are fine; getting along fine. He is sort of a space cadet though and I have to keep reminding him when bills are due and what his portion is – and I know what you’d think but it’s not like that. He is genuinely not effected by things like that, and he used to live in an apartment where all of those things were taken care of in the rent – so this is a new situation for him.
Today the Cousins are organizing a group 3-way which will, if everything goes correctly, include 7 different people. We have decided that we want to talk with one another – be more in contact. I told Jane on the phone last week that you are the only person who maintained close contact with all of the cousins, and without you the adults have retreated. Mema is dealing with Pepa being sick and Phyllis is – well – being Phyllis and Jane has done so much I think she deserves a break from playing hall monitor in everybody’s lives. And Karen, well, you know. There are no more adults in this family – just children. So I think we cousins are going to start talking to one another and organizing family activities for the next generation (Aiden, Eli, Ethan, and Wes). For instance, Sara is having Thanksgiving at the house. You always wanted that, but you were so ashamed and so proud and it just, it just never happened. But it is happening this year. I won’t be there but I hope it goes well.
And I know what you’d say, you’d accuse me of “running away,” but it’s not like that. I just loved you so much, and there is so much there that I am feeling, that I can’t go back to the house and eat Thanksgiving and see my dog and see my family and have the day that you always wanted but never got. I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough. So, instead, I’m throwing a “Friends-giving” and cooking at my apartment. I think it will be nice. I hope it will be nice.
Alright Momma, I have to go because I need to print some things out. But let me say this before I go: I love you. I love you more than the air I breathe. I love you so much. Please, give me the strength to get through this.
Stefan
Filed under: Music, Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: death, friends, keane, somewhere only we know
Oh simple thing, where have you gone
I’m getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you’re gonna let me in
I’m getting tired and I need somewhere to begin
- Keane, “Somewhere Only We Know”
Time keeps marching forward. The day after my mother died, I remember laying on her bed with the dog. I had come home from the hospital the day before and fallen asleep in the bedroom where my mother had spent the last five years of her life confined. I could still smell her on the sheets, on the pillows. The cup beside her bed had a layer of water at the top from where the ice had melted in her sweet tea. Her computer chair was piled high with papers and yellow legal pads. Her ash tray was overflowing with cigarette butts, because towards the end her hand shook too badly for her to finish an entire cigarette in one sitting. But, most of all, I remember that the television in her room was still on. I remember hearing about Obama and the deficit and the Tea Party movement and a million other news stories that did nothing more than confirm for me that the world had kept turning. Somehow, people had gotten out of bed. Somehow, people had gone to work or dropped their kids off at daycare or gone shopping or a thousand other things that had nothing to do with the grief I was feeling. My mother was dead, why wasn’t that on the news?
But time soldiers on.
This week was the three-month anniversary, and the shock and grief of it all has, for the most part, passed. I know now that I am strong enough to do it on my own, even if I don’t believe that any twenty-three year old should have to do it that way. I am an adult, and while I am still young, experience has made me old. I know enough to get myself out of most situations. But there are still moments when my carefully constructed house of cards begins to sway and I start to panic, thinking that everything I’ve built is about to collapse, and I realize that – in the grand scheme of things – I have very few people I could call for help.
That is not to deride or dismiss my friends. I have a lot of them, and they are caring, smart, funny people. They are capable, and I imagine that they are going to do amazing things with their lives. But, with the odd exception, my friends and I have led radically different lives. They feel younger than me – less jaded, more hopeful for the future. They lack a certain amount of lived experience. Ask them to go shopping or explain a primary source or about a relationship, and they are amazing. But ask them the best place to bounce a check in order to get the $25 cash back (non-chain grocery stores) – or how long it would take for that check to post to your account (2-3 business days) – and they are stupefied. None of my friends know that the power company cannot disconnect your power, no matter how late your bill is, so long as you have a medical necessity for keeping the power on. This isn’t something I judge them for, and I wish I had grown up in a house where I didn’t know that the best way to steal from a grocery store was through the self-check out line, or that PayDay Loan places don’t check your credit report when you apply for a loan, and that the maximum loan amount in the state of California is $300. When you are staring down the barrel of a gun, and you need someone to pick up the phone at 1:21am on an idle Tuesday night, you don’t call your friends – you call your mother. When financial aid is trying to screw you over and you don’t remember if you had to file taxes or not and the Bank is trying to take money out of your account and the landlords are upset that you’re a smoker and the car is making a fucked up noise and you have to choose between buying $536 worth of books for school or buying groceries – you don’t want to call your friends; you want to call your mother.
But I can’t.
My mother has been dead for three months now, and I have never felt older in my life. Why have I not gone gray? Why don’t I have wrinkles yet? Why isn’t this aging, which feel so all encompassing, not visible to anyone other than me? “I’m getting old, and I need something to rely on.” It is a simple line from a song released years and years ago, but it gets me every time. That line, that one expression of defeated hope, of silent prayers expressed, of genuine hurt and need is enough to send me over the edge. From the first moment I heard the song, I have always teared up at that line. “I’m getting old, and I need something to rely on.” It has meant different things at different moments in my life. It was about my fear of being single. It was about my lack of close friends. It was about a forgotten birthday. It was about every unmet or failed expectation. And while none of these are wrong, I think what I think about it today is closer to the truth. It is about the sinking feeling that comes when you feel time moving on without you; when every thing and every one is changing, and you witness it only from a distance. I am getting older; every day, every minute, every second I feel myself aging. Not just my body, but my spirit. “I’m getting old and I need something to rely on.” I feel myself getting weary. Every set back, every hussle, every lie I have to tell myself only adds to the weight on my shoulders; I’m slouching towards something that I’m sure I’ll ever get to.
Something I’m not sure I can get to by myself.
S/Alexander
When I was fifteen I went on a church camp outing to the caves in Virgina.
The tour guide gave each of us harnesses and headlamps before leading us through the cave’s labyrinth. Eventually we reached an enormous cavern, and the leader of the group had us sit on the cave’s damp rocks. He then asked us to turn off our headlamps. In the pitch black the leader asked us to stick out our hands and wiggle them in front of our face for twenty seconds. Afterward, after we turned on our headlamps, he asked the group to raise our hands if we had been able to see our hands in front of our faces. When the vast majority of the group, myself included, raised our hands the leader laughed at us. He claimed that the dark of the cavern was so pervasive that it was impossible for us to have seen our hands, and that the shock of the darkness had tricked our minds into believing we could still see them. He then had us stand up, our backsides wet from the sides of cave, and he led us to the back exit from the cavern.
There, barely visible with my headlamp, was the crevice that would lead us back to the main trail and out of the cave. He wanted us to squeeze ourselves through the crack in the walls and head back to the tour bus.
As each of my camp friends easily slid between the space, I started to panic. I was not skinny. I was not athletic. I have never, in my life, been described as flexible. I positioned myself at the back of the cavern and waited as they each crawled through the space until eventually the only people remaining were the instructor, a camp counselor, and myself. I remember pleading with the tour guide to take me back the way we came in, but they insisted that I attempt to squeeze through. My friends on the other side, poking their head through the walls, promised to help me as much as they could. Sensing that it would be worse for me to make a scene, I made a go for it. The camp counselor supporting me as I rotated onto my side and my friends grabbing my feet and pulling me through. The headlamp fell and busted on the cavern side of the crack, and the rocks on either side lifted my shirt and scratched my stomach and back to the point where I began to bleed. I was uncomfortable and in pain, but, worst of all for a fifteen year old, I was embarrassed. No one else had had to go through this indignity, just me. Just the poor little fat kid.
Kate Moss once quipped to a reporter that “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
I wouldn’t know, but I can imagine. While I may have lost more than thirty pounds since Freshman year of college, I am never going to be ripped. I am never going to be cut. I am never going to be the boy in the bar casually dressed in the muscle-t, and I still not okay with that idea. Twenty-three years of living on this planet, and more than eight years since I left the caves in Virginia covered in scratches, bleeding, and embarrassed as Hell, I still occasionally see myself as the poor little fat kid. It has become the loudest voice in the back of my head during moments of turmoil or unmet expectations. More than a decade of diets and treadmills and ellipticals, as well as a three-day experiment as a bulimic, has left me with the knowledge that I am, and will probably always be, fat.
For the most part, my weight hasn’t stopped me from doing whatever I put my mind towards. I have amassed a close group of friends who are supportive and wonderful, even if they are all skinny and gorgeous. I have gotten scholarships and fell in and out of love. My weight didn’t stop me from dancing atop the spiral staircase during parties at Brown, nor did it stop me from hoisting boys up against a wall and slow-grinding the night away. But that success can’t always beat the voice in the back of my head; the voice which questions whether or not everything would have been different, better if I were twenty, thirty, fifty pounds lighter. Did he not call me because he lost my number, or because he thought I was too fat to take seriously as a potential boyfriend? Did they not ask me to go with them because they didn’t think I was skinny enough, cute enough to meet their friends and family? When you’ve spent an entire morning trying to find an outfit in your closet that doesn’t make you feel like a beached whale, it’s easy to imagine that all of life’s troubles could be solves by a smaller waist or a six-pack. When you are stranded in the dressing room for ten minutes trying to get the largest jean size the store carries to fit over your hips, the defeat is enough to leave you crippled. I don’t even allow my friends to see the photographs of me on Facebook that I have left de-tagged, and at parties it is easier to just avoid the camera rather than specifically explain the angle and direction the camera should face when pointed in my direction. There is constant need on my part to stage manage my weight at every opportunity.
I don’t wear sweatpants in public because they make my ass look massive. I have never worn a t-shirt outside my house, because there isn’t enough structure in the fabric to hide my stomach or flabby pecs. I don’t wear sweatshirts because I don’t want to be THAT fat person who couldn’t be bothered to put together a decent outfit. It was only recently that I stopped slouching, a horrible habit that I thought hid my weight a bit better when I was in high school. I quit going to the gym in January because my personal trainer forced me to work out in the mornings, at peak hours, in front of all the hard bodied wannabe actresses and actors – and I couldn’t stand struggling that hard in front of people who were (in my mind) so obviously judging. Last week my friends and I went to Malibu. While they pealed off their clothes – exposing cute bathing suits which revealed their asses, thighs, and stomachs – I stayed dressed in a pair of khaki cut off shorts and a Banana Republic button-up. Looking at the men on the beach, with their perfect tans, visible abs, and muscled arms, I couldn’t step outside of myself long enough to loosen anything other than the top button of my shirt. This, of course, doesn’t touch upon the bedroom – and all the anxieties that come with being bigger than the person you’re fucking/getting fucked by.
All of this is for naught, and I know this. The people that love me, that care about me as a friend and confidant, don’t care about my size or weight. But I do it anyway, because I care about it – because I care too much about it – because I know that all it takes is one argument or incident for my weight to be flung at me. Even at my age I still try and make some joke or clever quip about my weight in order to diffuse the (admittedly) non-existent tension I feel over the subject. It’s stereotypical and its trite and I don’t doubt that most people see right past it – but old defense mechanisms are hard to kill. Last year, someone, speaking to a good friend of mine, called me “mean and delusional,” and then proclaimed that he was so much better looking, referring to me as an “ugly, fat motherfucker.” In Middle School, the only slur I heard more often then faggot or nigger was “fat,” and it was the latter which impacted my self-esteem the most. Fat-ass. Lardo. Bitch-tits. Growing up is hard enough without knowing that any failure to conform on your part will open you up to these words – these hateful, mean words. My response was to shut down. I stopped responding. I was the “Ice-Man,” and I perpetrated the falsehood that none of it could effect me – that I was above the insults, all the while feeling the sting of every word, every glance, and every insult – real or imagined.
It’s something that hasn’t gone away.
Even now, in the dark of my bedroom, when nobody in my apartment is awake and the only sound is the sound of my own breathing, I lay in bed and, without the harnesses or headlamps, I conjure an image of myself. I strain and I struggle, just like I did in the cave eight years ago. I panic, certain that, even in the darkness of my own bedroom, I can still see the rolls of fat creeping over the waist of my jeans, the stretch marks crisscrossing my love handles, or the scarred over scratches that come with growing up the poor, little fat kid.
S/Alexander
Filed under: Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: closet, eeyore, phd, sex, summer, USC
Eeyore was not my typical fare.
Alright, that’s a lie. Eeyore may have held none of the physical features of my previous converts, but he was (and still is) closeted – a situation that I am all to familiar with. Our last interaction consisted of him attempting to explain how “flattered” he was that I found him attractive, but that he was “girl crazy” and that I had failed to “convince” him. I am not sure that anyone who feels the need to attest their heterosexuality by proclaiming that they are “girl crazy” is as crazy about the opposite gender as the wish, but that is neither here nor there. He had a girlfriend whom he spent most of our six-week long “courtship” explaining away as inconsequential. She was a child, some eight years younger than him, and the first thing he said to me was that he “had a hard time maintaining relationships.” He was only interested in sex, and that was all he needed. When he wasn’t having sex he was playing computer games - World of Warcraft or Starcraft or whatever other multiplayer game allowed for the creation of a second life. He did karate, smoked his prescription marijuana, and went to heavy metal concerts.
In my mind, all of these characteristics were common traits of the closeted. The younger girlfriend is less likely to question or interrogate anything that may or may not be happening in the bedroom (and Eeyore made it clear during one of our extended smoking breaks that he was into some very kinky shit.) The focus on sexual release, regardless of the individual was a clear invitation for me to pursue, and the kinky sexual traits suggested that he held no real aversion for the deviant sodomitical behaviour I was planning in my head. Hell, even the gamer persona was less about the game, in my mind, and more about the appropriation of an alternative persona – a clear indiciation of some disatisfaction with his own life. All the signals were there, and his intense focus on our friendship made me suspect that he was more than interested.
But as I already mentioned; I was apparently wrong.
What makes this post different than the one’s that I’ve written about the Toddler or the Anonymous Gay Sex Addict, or even the married man I hooked up with the alleyway beside the bar, is that there was never a moment of physical intimacy. He and I never so much as kissed, let alone held hands. I honestly can’t remember if we ever touched at all, except for a few moments of “dap” at the end of a conversation. There was no grand moment of revelation with Eeyore – he never dropped the facade and allowed me entrance into what lay underneath. There was no moment of actual or metaphysical penetration. He didn’t break my heart – or come anywhere close to getting through the barriers I had erected to protect it. There was only the thinly-veiled possibility of sex; the thrill that accompanies the chase – and that is what makes this blog harder to write than the others.
We met during a summer program which kept me trapped in a room once-a-week for nine hours with other PhD candidates from different departments. Eeyore was not the most attractive man in the room, although he was most definitely attractive. He was not the tallest or most outspoken or even the man with the most questionable sexuality. But looking at him from across the conference table there was something in his carriage and demeanor that suggested something dark and twisty, and I am someone who is perpetually drawn to the emotionally damaged. He had the far-away gaze of someone who had seen something horrific, experienced something unspeakable, and lived to tell the tale. His cavalier attitude was simultaneously enthralling and infuriating. Nothing drew his attention. Nothing pulled him, even for a moment, outside of his doom-and-gloom attitude. His fatalist attitude was appealing and, coming right after the death of my mother, was something that I desperately needed. The idea of something easy and uncomplicated was not an option. I needed a distraction, a challenge. In Eeyore I found someone as detached and diffuse as I imagined myself to be.
We spent weeks talking. Clever anecdotes and carefully timed text messages became the norm of our relationship. We G-chatted about which girls he thought was attractive, always with a wink-wink towards whatever was bubbling below the surface of our interaction. He would text me at 2pm, telling me that he had just woken up for the day – and asking what I had been up to. I would text him late at night, certain that he was the only one in my phonebook up at 3am on an idle Wednesday night. Our insomnia meshed in creative and interesting ways, and I couldn’t help but remember the winter I had spent with Blaine, and how much our bonding centered around this fact. Our entire interaction was filled with a sexual subtext that would never have been admissible in court of law, but only further proved my suspicions. Eventually, I began pushing for an invite to his place, or for him to come back with me to mine. He rejected every attempt, but I realized quickly that our game would never progress pass the digital realm unless I got him alone. Only then would I be able to break through his closet door and close the deal. The challenge of it all had made him interesting, but the game had begun to bore me. I’m twenty-three years old, and I don’t have the stamina for these cat-and-mouse games with men of questionable sexuality – - – at least, not the stamina I used to have. It was only after much cajoling that I convinced him to join me and my friends for an episode of True Blood and a smoke.
It wasn’t long though before we were both alone in my apartment.
“I should probably get home and do a bit of work,” he said. “That is, unless you can think of something more interesting for us to do.”
This was it. This was the moment. The sad, lonely boy had opened his closet door just wide enough for me to walk inside. Standing in my living room, his comment had squarely placed the ball in my court. This had happened before, and there is no clever innuendo with which to respond to this sort of provocation. My choices were limited. I could move forward and accept his comment as an invitation to play – which opened me up to being rejected. Or, I could shut it down. Standing in my kitchen, I looked at him through the hazy eyes of someone who had smoked a bit too much weed and knew it. The script for this encounter had already been written. I should put my glass of water on the counter, and saunter towards him. In my best Lauren Bacall voice I should have asked him, “What do have in mind?” while slowly reaching down to the crotch of his jeans. He had opened the door to his closet, and the only thing left for me to do was to crawl inside it with him.
But I stumbled over myself. Looking at him, with all of his issues and problems, I realized that I didn’t want to put myself out there for him – not like this. I didn’t want some marijuana-fueled hook-up in my apartment with a guy who wouldn’t even admit his attraction for me. I didn’t want the possibility of rejection. I wanted someone who wanted me enough to be open about it, sans games and innuendo. Eeyore would never be able to give that to me, and standing in my apartment I recognized that as much as I wanted him – I wouldn’t degrade myself for him. I liked him; but I liked myself more.
Instead, I quipped that I had left my Parcheesi in Providence, and he begrudgingly walked towards the door. He lingered in my doorway for a bit, postulating as to whether or not he was too high to drive the six minutes it would take for him to get home. I offered him my couch, but it was clear this was done as a customary gesture and not a real invitation. The moment had passed. I had drawn my line in the sand, and I knew Eeyore enough to know that he would never take the extra step of admitting that anything was there besides friendship. The texts he sent me a week ago only served to prove this.
He wasn’t going to come out for me. He wasn’t going to do anything for me. I hadn’t “convinced” him yet.
The subtext suggesting that I never could.
S/Alexander
“And in the spring, I shed my skin / And it blows away with the changing wind”
- Florence + The Machines, “Rabbit Heart”
I can’t cry in open spaces. I don’t know where it came from; this aversion to public displays of emotion. Perhaps it is because I didn’t come from a crying family, at least not until the last few years. When things got rocky growing up, and life was kicking our ass, there didn’t seem much use in crying. There were things that needed to be done. There were calls that needed to be made and reservations that had be canceled and bill collectors that had to be cajoled. This ability to push emotion to the back burner and deal with the immediate crisis has always been my greatest skill. Joan Didion once wrote that her migraine headaches never came during moments of impending doom. Tell her that her husband was leaving her, the democracy was failing, and that her house was on fire and she wouldn’t get a migraine. But on those days when the phone rang too much and deadlines began to pile atop one another, and carelessness forced her to retrace her steps because she had misplaced her keys or wallet her headaches would appear. The banalities associated with everyday life was what brought on her headaches, which is how I feel about my tears. They will never come in the moment of a crisis, only afterward.
During a brief session with my (now former) psychiatrist, he explained to me how this works. He claimed that ADHD was, in actuality, an inability of the brain to send emotional signals to the brain at a normal pace. Apparently, people suffering from ADHD receive emotions such as anger, panic, or fear at a diminished rate due to some (seemingly unknown) mental defect. If a “normal” person’s home was on fire, they might receive a panic signal at a rate of 10 out of 10. However, someone suffering from ADHD would get that signal at a 6 or 7. Because emotions travel slower in the ADHD brain, fear and panic don’t hit me at a noticeable level until much later.
Because of this mental defect, my ability to (re)act to a provocation or incident will never be in question. In fact, more often then not I will respond better in a crisis then a person NOT suffering from ADHD. I was, and still am, the person my friends and family call during an emergency.
Eventually, however, I have the time to process everything that happened, and the gravity of the situation hits me – leaving me paralyzed for brief amounts of time. It is never expected, and it can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to a few days. The best thing I can do is get myself alone and ride out the storm. Because I can’t cry, for whatever reason, in public – this usually necessitates a quick move to an isolated, confined place. My sister calls this place “The Congo.” My friends refer to these feelings as “The Dark and Twisties.” When my best friend came out of the closet, I handled the conversation in the car well. I expressed myself cogently, and when he offered his rationale for keeping me in the dark I somehow managed to keep a straight face. It wasn’t until the drive home that I broke down and cried on the side of the road. Later on, the same friend would send me to my walk-in closet for two hours in a crying jag. When the Toddler destroyed my sense of self, I managed to keep the breakdown at bay until Christmas Break – when I would get home and have the privacy of my own bathroom to cry in. In January, I was pulled over outside Oklahoma City with an expired license and an unpaid parking ticket, in a car that wasn’t registered in my name, and I managed to make it Amarillo, TX before I broke down in shear relief. When my mother was put on her ventilator and my sister started screaming in the waiting room of the ICU – I managed to find a bathroom to cry inside.
I mention this because I woke up in the Congo today; but I couldn’t for the life of me understand which crisis had been averted. Nothing had changed from the day before. My mother was still dead, and the politics and poverty which has accompanied her death are still being dealt with. USC is still claiming that I owe them nearly $200, and are threatening to withhold my stipend check until I pay them their money. Bank of America and I are still fighting over $250 they took out of my account to pay part of my mother’s debt. There is, quite possibly, an injunction being issued in South Carolina against me for a personal loan that I didn’t know existed, let alone authorize. I still have a broken back molar because I can’t afford the dental surgery. This is, of course, on top of the bills that I have pushed into deferment because instead of saving my summer stipend I used the money to cremate my mother, fix my brother’s truck, pay a portion of my sister’s rent, pay the power bill for my cousin, and help my aunt buy herself a car so she could move out of my grandparent’s house. The same problems that existed the night before, the week before, the month before were all still there. Nothing had changed, and yet, I woke up feeling the same crushing weight on my chest that I felt before my sojourns in my car, closet, and bathroom – after a crisis had been diffused.
I’ve experienced this enough times to know that once the tears start there is no way to stop them, that my only choice was to find myself a spot to ride the emotional wave back to shore. So I grabbed my keys and a fresh pack of cigarettes before running down to the parking lot of my building. I cranked up the car and turned on the air conditioner, but before I could light my first cigarette I started to wail. I cried because I found friends, but somehow lost my sister as my confidant and moral center. I cried because I had a job, but had spent the last week wondering if it was for me. I cried because I was no longer alone but the feeling of loneliness hadn’t abated. I cried because I had done my best and it still didn’t seem good enough. I cried my ugliest tears and I screamed and sobbed and lost my breath and somehow still kept going.
—
I stayed in the Congo for about forty-five minutes before escaping. I lit a cigarette, turned off the car, and climbed the twenty-two steps to the apartment.
Nothing had changed, but everything was somehow different.
Nothing had changed, but somehow I was different.
The strife and the tears and the crisis of the last three months were still there, but I was now different because of them. Like the song lyrics at the beginning of this post, the winds had changed for me. This, I felt, was my moment of glorious, painful transformation. It was my own, private Spring. I am still me – I will still love and laugh and lie and cry, but my body is building a new skin for me the dwell within. I am slowly loosening myself from the past, casting my old self into the wind, and I am preparing for something new and scary and entirely self-made. Nothing had changed between last night and today, except everything.
S/Alexander
Filed under: Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: alan, arab, fuck, gay, made love, make love, revelation, sex
The motherfucker had the audacity to make love to me!
No, seriously, the motherfucker made love to me without any warning! While I thought we were rendez-vousing for a quick and thoughtless hook-up, he single-handedly decided to up the ante. Thinking back on the night, I can’t quite pinpoint the moment when I realized that something was amiss. Perhaps it was his attention to my neck and shoulders during our first round of foreplay. It could have been the longing gaze from between my legs as he gave me head. His attention to my ass or his warm hands on my back or the nibbles on my ears – all of these things could have served as warnings. But it wasn’t until he penetrated me while in missionary position, while french kissing, that I knew that this was not just another random sexual encounter. This man did not fuck me. We did not have sex with one another. He didn’t ‘tap dat ass” or “superman a hoe” or “lay da pipe” or anthing else connoting a quick fuck. He didn’t call me a single dirty name the entire time. There was no attempt to spank my ass. He never once tried to gag me on his cock. More importantly, he didn’t attempt to leave immediately after cumming. This man was, for all intents and purposes, a complete and total gentleman; a man who had made it his sexual mission to ensure my pleasure and happiness above his own. A man that had never held my hand, and yet wanted to lay, post-coital, naked, exchanging life stories in my bed.
Seriously?!
While he made love to me, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had missed a step. I started to blame myself, thinking that I must have led him on. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want the emotional baggage that came with being made love to. There was something so foreign about the experience that it felt dreamlike. We had never exchanged anything other than text messages. We weren’t dating under any reasonable definition of the word. We had never held hands in public, and, yet, he was making love to me – a rare first in my storied sexual past. Perhaps if this had been our first romp in the sheets I would not have been so surprised, but this was our third. During my first time with Alan I had dressed in a hoodie and basketball shorts – clothing which was immediatly ripped from my body during our session. He had been rough, loud. Afterwards my leg shook so badly that I could barely stand and he had to show himself out. Our second meeting was just as remarkable; I achieved orgasm without touching myself and he shot his load so hard I had to windex the window behind my bed. It had been passionate without being sappy; it had been personal without being meaningful. The sex was amazing, and I was more than willing to meet again. But this third time was different. His behavior was different. It was as if he actually cared.
As I wrote in another blog post; I don’t have boyfriends, I have stories. My year long sojourn in Los Angeles has only confirmed this about me. I’ve had passionate sessions of mutual masturbation in the backseats of taxis, and I have had hurrried sex in the laundry froom of a closeted boy while his roommates slept soundly above us. I have both fucked and been fucked in my bedroom, in my car, and on the floor of my bathroom. I have even hooked-up in the alleyway beside a bar. While some of the sex was amazing, most has been average and none of it was ever done with love. I have had a threesome so awkward that I left without even cumming, and I have had sex so astonishing that I practically begged for a replay. But I have never had anyone make love to me. I have never had anyone in my bed that I didn’t want to immediatly leave afterwards. I have never had the sort of adoration I recieved from Alan, and the feeling, for some reason, made me a bit sick to my stomache. Why him, and why now, after I had given up any belief that men were decent and good? Why now, when I was looking for meaningless sex? Why him, a man I barely knew and didn’t know if I particularlly liked?
Alan and I laid in bed together for fifteen, twenty minutes just talking. He wanted to know about my research and my family and my interests. He asked me point-blank if I thought his penis was too small or not. He wanted to know if I prefered men that were smaller than me, or whether I preferred men who were bigger, more muscular. He kissed my eyelids and told me that I had a gorgeous face. He traced his fingers along my arms and legs and told me that I had beautiful, even skin. I let the compliments flow over me, not believing any of them because I couldn’t understand why they were being said. He had already made love to me; why would he compliment me after he had already gotten what he wanted? I eventually made up a reason and asked him to leave. I then sent him a text message telling him that I wasn’t looking for anything serious, and that I wished him luck “in all his endeavors.” Chainsmoking afterward, I kept recalling the encounter – trying to decode its meanings. I just couldn’t put him in an easily classifiable box. Who was he? Why this time? It wasn’t until the next day that I realized how jaded life had made me.
All the men and all the alcohol and all the drugs and condoms and lube had made me suspicious of men, regardless of their motives. I had lowered my expectations to the point where even the lowest of the low were still better than my worst nightmare. Broken hearts and broken promises and unmet expectations had become the norm, and my behavior with Alan only proved how distanced I had become from healthy ideals surrounding happiness, sex, and relationships. Perhaps he had had a bad day, and wanted to do something, be with someone in a beautiful way. Perhaps he was starting to like me, and that was his way of showing it. There are a million different reasons for his behavior, and I can’t think of a single one which would have warranted my reaction. I’ve considered biting the bullet and giving him a call, but I am too ashamed to put myself out there like that.
Instead, I have chosen to see this as a sign. Maybe this was God or Allah or Buddha showing me that I deserved better than my usual fare – that standards had to apply to everyone, even my hook-ups. It was a reminder that I was never going to get what I wanted, if the only thing I ever asked for was sex. This was my wake-up call from the front desk, reminding me that I am not eighteen years old anymore, and that I needed, craved something more than the lowest common denominator. More importantly, it was a reminder that I deserved more. The entire experience awoke the shielded optimist inside me; the part of myself that used to long for someone, anyone to lay in bed beside me. The part of myself which used to pray for a man who would kiss my eyelids and nibble my earlobes and tell me, even after he had taken everything he wanted from me, that I had pretty skin and a gorgeous face.
The part of myself that wanted so desperately to be loved.
S/Alexander
Filed under: Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: death, depression, loss, melancholia, melancholy, mother, sadness
My friend Cassie once tried to explain to me the difference between depression and melancholia. That there was a difference there seemed to be no doubt, but the key seemed to lie in the separation between the tangible and the intangible. According to my memory, depression was the sadness that accompanied the loss of something tangible. When your cat died or your car was totaled or your lucky baseball hat was lost – you were depressed about it. Of the two emotions, depression is the one most easily explained to friends and family. Humanity, for all its flaws, at least acknowledges that the loss of something can make someone unhappy – mostly because we have all lost something at one point or another. This is not true for melancholy, which is the exact opposite. Melancholia is the sadness that accompanies the loss of something intangible. Failed expectations, lost hope, a dream deferred can only lead to melancholia, because the sadness you feel is over something tangible only to you, and only in the most ephemeral of ways.
My mother died two months ago today and I am still not certain whether or not her death has left me depressed or suffering from melancholy. Beth Ann Cox was a person. She existed. She put lotion on my elbows before school because she didn’t want kids to make fun of my sister and I for being ashy. She spanked me when I was misbehaving. She doted on me more than my siblings. I have no doubt that she existed. But is that what has made me so sad tonight? Am I sad at the loss of this woman in my life, or am I sad at the intangible benefits her existence brought me? How do I classify love? How do I classify companionship? Am I depressed that she won’t see me graduate, or am I suffering from melancholia because her praise and adoration is what will make that achievement possible? Is it the person or the feelings or some weird, amalgamation of both that defies any attempt at definition?
I think of things like this because I am living at a weird moment in my Los Angeles life. My old roommate, my pre-death roommate, has moved out of the apartment. My new roommate has not yet moved in; meaning I am now allowed to roam the house feeling whatever I want to feel without the fear of being discovered and glared at. When I walk down the halls I feel the floors shift under my feet, and I hear the echoes of my steps bounce off the walls. I feel alone.
During my freshman year of college I couldn’t afford to fly home for Thanksgiving Break. More specifically, my mother couldn’t afford to fly me home for break. I didn’t want her to have to beg my Aunts or my Grandparents to make it happen so I proclaimed that I wanted to stay in Providence, and that I would be perfectly fine getting my work done up there alone. But two days into the holiday, without any of my friends around, I began to feel the crunch of loneliness. I heard those same echoes in the halls of my dorm, and saw the same shadows playing tricks on the bathroom mirror, and I realized then that my deepest fear was not darkness or rodents or birds or whatever else I might have feared – but loneliness. I was not then, nor am I now, comfortable enough with myself to live, even momentarily, without stimuli to bounce myself off of. I started to cry. I started to cry those tears that come when you know nobody else is around to judge your wails. I cried so hard I could barely breathe and I called my mother, and I made her listen to me – her eighteen year old son – cry, thousands of miles away from her, alone on a holiday, and she comforted me. She made it feel better. She made me feel less alone.
At this moment, I have more friends in Los Angeles then I had during my entire time in South Carolina. I have a car and job security and an apartment. I have restaurants that I frequent and people who know that I like a large mixed-ice coffee with no lid and room for milk. If I wanted, I could drive to Santa Monica or Downtown or San Diego or even Oregon or Nevada or Colorado and have people there who would be glad to put me up for a few nights. But, at this moment, sans Mother, I have never felt more alone in my life.
I have lost my backbone. I have lost my pillar of strength. I lost the woman who raised me, but I have also lost my 3am infomercial watching buddy. I lost the woman who would sing me to sleep with the theme from the Band-Aid commercial, and the woman who convinced me, even at my fattest and most acne ridden, that I was the most handsome boy on the planet. I lost my best friend, my worst enemy, my champion, and my sparring partner. I lost the smartest person I ever knew. I have lost the one person who could remind me, in the middle of winter, that no matter where I was – or what I was doing – that I was never alone.
But is that depression, or melancholia?
S/Alexander
Filed under: Musings, Random YouTube, S/Alexander | Tags: movies, scary movie, spoofs, trailers, twilight, vampires suck
I usually can’t stand spoof movies. Even the really good ones (i.e. Airplane or Space Balls) seem a bit too self-aware for me to take seriously. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a genuine attempt at social commentary through satire since Scary Movie 1. Oh what? You don’t believe me? Are you seriously doubting me? Alright fine. Watch the link below. No seriously, watch it. I’ll wait
Scary Movie 1: Shorty’s Interview
Are you seriously telling me that didn’t hit like, seven different universal truths? Fake bitches who pretend to care about the homeless but don’t? The homeless who don’t give a fuck about food and just want money? Reporters trying to make a buck on other people’s tragedy? The (genius) explanation for the lack of black reporting/reporters in white murder investigations? The presense of (dumbass) black men when the cameras cut on? I could seriously go on and on and on. Anyway, there’s a new spoof coming out that, based on the trailer, I don’t immediatly hate. Click the link below and then leave me a message in the comments. Don’t give up on the clip though, there’s an AMAZING part towards the end that makes it worth it – even if the movie totally sucks!
Vampires Suck:
S/Alexander
