Thursday, May 15, 2003

 

ENTRY 018


Back in Austin, during my freshman year of college, I met a guy named George online--he was about six years or so older than I--and we hung out once or twice before he revealed that he had a thing for me, which I'd pretty much suspected. I don't recall exactly how, but I found a basically gentle way of telling him that I enjoyed his company but didn't feel the same kind of attraction. It was around the same time that George told me how he didn't feel comfortable with his first name and had been wanting to choose a new one. He asked me for suggestions, and I said the first thing that came to mind: "Well, I named my first car Isaac." Isaac was a 1984 Honda Accord LX, and a really great car: reliable and fuel-economic and smooth-running.


Well, George loved the name, and--God's honest truth--from that day forward he went by Isaac. I would often tell this story to friends of mine, and marvel at how much power a person can yield unwittingly. I guess you should be careful what you name your car. (My former roommate, who has always liked his liquor, calls his F-150 pickup Betty Ford.) In a strange way I think that the incident caused me to feel paternal toward Isaac, as though I'd given him, if not life itself, a new lease on life--a way of helping him get to a point where he could start anew. It reminded me of a favorite book of mine when I was a child, in which a young boy uses a magic powder to bring to life a wooden man with a jack-o'-lantern head that the boy has made. He calls the creature Jack Pumpkinhead, and Jack calls the boy Father, even though he dwarfs the kid physically. That's sort of the way I felt with Isaac--this older guy to whom I had nevertheless become a sort of father figure. We've been in and out of touch over the years, and at some point I became aware that Isaac was HIV-positive.


This evening I received an email informing me that Isaac died this week.


The last time I spoke with him was via AOL Instant Messenger, just a few weeks ago. I asked him how he was doing, and he said he hadn't been in the best of health but that he had been improving lately. I took this information at face value. Certainly I didn't expect him to be gone shortly afterward.


When I heard, I called Jane--I don't really know who else I would have called--and she met me at XL for a drink. I needed to talk about what I was feeling.


What sense can I make of someone dying at the age of 30 or 31? Why is it that in this age of miracle drugs, twenty years into a pandemic, people still die like this? I'm too young for this to be happening to the people around me, and yet this is the fourth young person in my life to die since I turned 18 almost seven years ago. It should not be time for death yet.


Tonight I drank a martini in Isaac's memory. He was always a martini drinker. Let's not mince words: what a fucking lush. Every time he got drunk he'd get very serious and reveal his crush on me, even though he'd already done that several times. It was embarrassing, but also funny. He always seemed to me to be searching for something--maybe it was simply more time, but I guess he didn't find enough of it. He was always an unabashed romantic, but never quite seemed to find what he was looking for. I'd like to think that there is fulfillment enough in the striving for everything to be meaningful. Maybe that's just something I find comforting to tell myself. Maybe it's more than that. I hope so.


I learned in therapy that whenever we cry, we're crying for ourselves. We cry because things aren't what we wish they were, or because someone's mother died and it makes us realize how we'd feel if our mother were dead. In that sense, grief is kind of a selfish thing. Of course my grief does involve Isaac, but just as much his death triggered feelings of loss I've experienced throughout the past year or two. The hardship of moving to New York and what I've had to do to survive, the loneliness, the frustrations. Death is the ultimate solitude, and the supreme abandonment.


There are feelings of guilt that I carry. At times I was too dismissive of Isaac, even though he could drive a person up the wall sometimes. I'd be shorter with him than I really needed to be. But I guess it's just as wrong to treat people like you're expecting them to die as to treat them like you're taking for granted their being alive.


We seem to have odd thoughts associated with death, things that prompt guilt: the idea that if one were really a good person one would have paid more attention to the person who died, would have shown a better side of oneself, would have made more of a difference. But that strikes me, in the end, as hubris. What is, is: we play the parts we play in people's lives, and those parts are determined as much by the dead as by the living. Each person has a role in determining what part the other person will play in his or her life. Isaac allowed me to play that certain role, allowed me to have an effect. And that's what makes me grateful and regretful, sad and comforted, blank and pondering.


I'm sorrier than I can say that he didn't have the chance to do more, to begin yet again, and again. He should have had that right. There should have been all the time in the world to make mistakes and to unmake them and to figure and refigure until something made more sense. Because this death, now, does not. But in the end, he is the only person who could ever begin to have those answers. It's selfish of me to want them. They don't belong to me.


I don't know that I'm saying what I really want to say, but there's only one thing I really need to.


Goodbye, Isaac.

11:38 PM

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Monday, May 12, 2003

 

ENTRY 017


I made it through the end of the week feeling sort of blank and tired. On Friday night I rang up my casual friend Phil; we get together perhaps once or twice a month and have a drink or something to eat. He's a dancer and grad student, and a bit younger than I. This particular evening we met down in the West Village and ended up at this über-gay bar Pieces. I'm talking rainbow colors all over the place, Bette Midler videos...and they were playing stuff from years ago, like the "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" dance remix and "Barbie Girl." Phil and I got fairly drunk--we're both complete lightweights--and to make things worse, the bartender decided to buy us a round. We ended up in this odd discussion about New York/single/poor angst, and Phil decided he wanted to get me high (he smokes pot every single night--I never have). We made what you might call a tentative pot date, I guess, if there is such a thing.


The next day I had a mission: shoes. For some strange reason, I thought it might be a good idea to go shopping in SoHo on Saturday. Actually, it's not a great idea to go shopping anywhere in NYC on a Saturday. Well, I'm sort of kidding, but it's a touristy mob scene in shopping districts on weekends, especially in the spring. I was in search of a pair of Campers, so I headed to the Camper store on Prince Street. They had quite a nice selection, but there weren't prices on anything, which I took as a bad sign. I decided to look elsewhere, but didn't find anything. In the evening I met up with Hamilton for dinner and a movie. I hadn't seen him, or talked to him much, in several weeks. I suppose in one sense I'd been avoiding him, although it's true that I've been sort of snowed under lately. Part of it was that I was giving him some time to actually fucking do something with his life, which ain't really been happening for a good long while now. He's living in the West Village, so we had dinner at a little Asian place near his apartment. While we were eating I asked him if he'd been getting out. He said no. But I think he's at least moving in what seems a positive direction. He showed me his rooftop terrace, where he's doing a little gardening, and that should be good for him.


The movie we saw after dinner was a documentary called Spellbound, about eight kids who compete in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. The film was fantastic. The audience was cracking up--funny as hell. There are some very strange people in this subculture, especially the parents. Then when the kids were competing at the national level, the audience was on the edge of their seats and alternately cheering and ooohing. The film was nominated for an Oscar at the latest Academy Awards ceremony. It's astonishingly engrossing, surprisingly moving, and has been sold out consistently since it opened week before last. Everybody even clapped at the end--what does that tell you?


I was actually in that subculture as a kid. I won the school bee three separate times (in 5th, 6th, and 8th grades--in 7th grade I was too cool to compete, but I got over it). I never went past the district level, although I got as high as fourth place there one year. You never forget the words that you miss. In 8th grade it was fernbrake. (I'd link to the definition, but it isn't even on dictionary.com.) I spelled it "fernbreak," which is certainly logical given the definition. (You're allowed to ask for language of origin, definition, and a couple of other helpful tidbits.)


After the movie, Ham decided he wanted to go home, so I called Jane. She and her friend Holly were on their way to the East Village, so I met up with them at Lakeside Lounge on Avenue B. I had to take the frigging L train to get there. I hate the L because it takes forever to come, even though it just goes back and forth between 8th Avenue and Brooklyn. On weekends it's under construction and split into two different sections, which makes it worse. The train on one track goes back and forth between 8th Avenue and Union Square. If you want to go farther east than that, you have to transfer at Union Square to the train on the opposite track, which goes between Union Square and Brooklyn. I had to do that, since I was going over to the 1st Avenue stop. Pain in the ass! Somehow I still arrived at the bar at the same time as Jane and Holly, even though they were driving in Jane's car. (Jane's tardiness is practically legend. This is a girl who thinks a meal at 2:30 PM qualifies as "brunch." Even by NYC standards, that's a stretch.)


Lakeside Lounge was fairly dead, although an interesting bar--very relaxed and East Village-y. We had one or two drinks there before heading to Avenue A, where we dropped in at good old Starlight so I could scope out some boys of my own persuasion. Jane and Holly were trying to decide which boys I should talk to, and one of them actually came up to us, but he turned out to be a little too odd. Finally the two of them went off to find someone they could drag over to me, but when they returned at last they admitted they'd been in the restroom that whole time trying to identify an image on a poster. I went in for thirty seconds and determined it was a bar of soap, which meant that Jane and I spent the rest of the night arguing over whether it was indeed soap or whether, as she claimed, it was a shrimp(!). Whatfuckingever! Thanks for finding a boy for me. NOT!


Since they had no further bar ideas, other than a distasteful but (thankfully) short stop at Doc Holliday's Saloon (it's reputed to be a Texas expatriate hangout, but I don't recall the guys in Texas being quite so...unattractive, or Texas smelling quite so much like vomit, for that matter), we headed to Benny's Burritos. Holly had the munchies, and I hadn't eaten a huge dinner, so we chowed down on some huge burritos. It wasn't up to Texas standards, by any means, but as far as NYC goes I've certainly had worse. We were drinking margaritas, too, as though we hadn't had enough alcohol by then. Holly decided she was too tired to venture further, so we dropped her off. Then Jane and I headed over to my neighborhood and dropped into a bar for yet another drink. After that, since it was 3 AM, we called it a night.


I don't know what to think about the status of my friendship with Jane. We used to be thick as thieves, but lately it seems that she's always off with Holly somewhere, and it takes her a couple of days to even return a phone call, if she actually does. I'm going to bide my time and see how this plays out, but I'm afraid that things might be unraveling here. Jane's pretty prominent in my social network, so this is not a minor issue. But I guess it forces me to branch out. Not that I haven't tried, but, well, you know. Sigh.


These issues, along with my hangover, were plaguing me on Sunday, which turned out to be rainy and foggy and dreary. After calling my mom for Mother's Day I decided I'd try for some shoes again, so this time I went to Macy's. I scored a pair of Kenneth Coles that were already on sale and then marked down another 10%. That was almost enough to cheer me up a little.


Random sightings in the past few days:


--a pair of perfectly good shoes abandoned in the subway
--a boy and girl practicing the tango on a street corner
--a guy across the street from my office who smoked a cigarette, finished it, and then flicked it away, nearly hitting me
--two mothers at the 23rd Street stop who wished each other Happy Mother's Day
--a dog wearing a sweatsuit (with a hole in the pants for his tail) and little tennis shoes

12:56 AM

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