Friday, January 02, 2004

 

ENTRY 069: DON'T EVEN GO THERE


I'm fairly certain that olfactory memory is stronger than aural; even if that isn't the case, I know both kinds trump traditional memory capacity. But it was a combination of smell and music that reminded me of Neil this morning while I was at the laundromat lugubriously performing my biweekly chore.


There must be some faint stirring that comes from the scent of Tide. Neil used to bury his face in my shirt and tell me the scent reminded him of home because it was the detergent his mother always used. I should be more explicit and specify it was his adoptive mother; Neil never knew his biological parents, and it has always seemed to me that this loss on his part couldn't help compromising our relationship. Certainly there were good things about the relationship, but I never felt I was able to bridge that gap between us; he always seemed to have to justify his own existence by gaining everyone's approval, even if it meant being everything to everybody--and that's simply not sustainable. Perhaps it's a common thing with adoptees, but I'm not qualified to say. Regardless, it always pained me that my assurances to him--that he was worthy just as he was--never really sank in.


It wasn't until I began flipping through a magazine, though, that Neil entered my conscious thoughts this morning. I saw a mention of Shirley Bassey, and that was the trigger. For my twenty-second birthday, Neil had burned me a CD of songs that reminded him of us. One of the tracks was a cover of "History Repeating" by the Propellerheads, with Shirley vocalizing. My relationship with Neil was very much about history repeating; we first met five years previously, when I was beginning my senior year of high school. On a visit with my grandparents in San Antonio, I dropped into an independent music store that had a great techno selection (I was quite the clubber at the time). One of the first things that met my eye was an incredibly cute salesguy, and when he came up to offer his assistance we struck up a conversation. I was living in Corpus Christi at the time, and it turned out that he was from Orange Grove, a small farming community in the general vicinity. It emerged that one of his friends was dating one of my friends, and we exchanged numbers. To use the hackneyed unsuspensefully suspenseful literary convention--the salesguy, of course, was Neil.


I was completely infatuated with this intensely blue-eyed bundle of energy, and thus commenced an epic schoolboy crush that yielded a few admiring letters on my part. When Neil came down for Thanksgiving that year, he telephoned and we met up at his friend's house one evening. Eventually I enlisted that friend in an effort to figure out whether Neil had any interest in me romantically, and, as it turned out, he didn't; the attraction was unrequited, he entered into a relationship with a disgustingly attractive mortician he met at an ATM, and, after the requisite and very high-school period of intense mourning, I forgot about Neil, struggled through a last year at home that was haunted by cancer, moved to Austin to go to university, completely changed my life, and graduated from college after much sweat and toil.


It was in a lonely nocturnal moment that June that I logged onto Gay.com for a bit of online chatting. I was on the verge of signing off in uninterest when a message window popped up, with a very nice photo in the accompanying user profile. The guy was very charming and funny, and I developed that very odd feeling in the pit of my stomach with which most all of you are doubtless familiar. He said, "I never do this, but I feel like I want to call you. Can I?" I said, "I never give out my number, but okay."


We talked for ten or fifteen smooth, wonderful minutes before I realized it was Neil. Neil who had quit the music store and gone to college and broken up with the corpse-cutter months before after a five-year relationship. And upon that realization I was dreadfully disappointed, because I had sensed potential with this guy, but it was Neil. Neil who had been absolutely not interested in me five years before.


But I took heart. It had been a solitary summer thus far, and Neil was loveable and infectiously energetic and the perfect person to hang out with during the hot months. I needed that kind of friend to help dissipate my post-college ennui. We met for coffee the next day and totally hit it off. I had changed so much since high school--Neil embarrassingly recalled my youthful morbidity and dramatic tendencies--and he seemed to have grown up a bit himself, although to this day he reminds me of nothing so much as a latter-day Peter Pan. He said that we would hang out lots that summer, and I was elated. The only hint of cloudiness was my swift realization that I was still attracted to him.


The next day we went to the lake and bummed around town and had dinner, which stretched into movie-watching and then mutual yawning, and when he invited me to spend the night I said anything but no. Then came the moment when we were laying there side by side, me stiff as a papoose bundle (don't you dare misinterpret that description) and staying very respectably on my side of the bed. I reposed wakefully, the eye on his side closed but the other one open, until I heard the bedclothes rustle and saw him move toward me in the milky moonlight over the clean white sheets. It was the very fantasy I'd had so many times all those years ago, when I lay in my squeaky twin bed in Corpus Christi as my brother suffered and my parents wept and I wished a stranger from San Antonio would come to rescue me and love me and pay attention to me. But in the end I'd had to rescue myself before any of it could happen.


Neil and I kissed, perfectly and sweetly and surreally.


And that was that. History had looped back on itself, Neil and I met once again, only this time the elements experienced different chemical reactions and the constellations were aligned another way. He wanted me and he did something about it, and as I kissed him back my mind flashed on Sabrina, the old Audrey Hepburn film I'd just seen for the first time a week or two before. She's an awkward little thing with a hopeless crush on the beautiful boy who doesn't realize she exists, and then she goes off to Paris and comes back a lady that the boy recognizes as if for the first time.


My life had finally transcended into the movies that had always creaked gloriously through the projector in my head.


I recount all this not only because I love that story, but because I am newly reminded in recent days of the relentlessness of the past, of the way in which it has always seemed to me a palpable entity that sits waiting for me in my room every night. Sometimes it troubles my dreams, as with my recent and now ended nightmares, and sometimes it's just part of my physical self, as in the way I wake with a start every single night and sit up in bed, for a second imagining someone standing at the door, ever since Bertha, on that night so many months ago, disturbed my sleep in the wee hours.


But the past is especially strong every time I go home to my family and am reminded yet again how different I am from all of them. Now that Marc and Cleo are married, they and my parents do all sorts of married-couple things and I tag along, a constant fifth wheel forcibly reminded of my bachelorhood and placed in the odd position of asexuality in which I am always the baby of the family.


It was a surprise, then, when I sat idling at the kitchen table and warming my hands on a mug of hot chocolate, and my mother asked me if I was interested in anyone right now. Even as I looked up I tried to squelch the mild surprise that had come to my eyes, to act as though I were not aware of the way in which she and my father often seem to pretend, with me as silent co-conspirator, that I lack a certain type of emotional life.


"Yes," I said, and launched into the whole Date Bait story and a casual mention of the ensuing drinks date, without a description of the accompanying neurotic behavior. She even asked what kind of law Edward practiced, after she'd inquired what his name is, as though she wanted to be able to recall it for later.


And I found myself wishing that these were the sorts of questions she could have asked when I was with Neil, during those days when I was so happy and open to life and wanted to share it with everyone I could, but any mention of Neil during those times was met with an awkward silence. But that, of course, is the past.


I have always found great difficulty in distinguishing what belongs where, in figuring out what should be archived inaccessibly in my memory, what needs to be placed in a convenient front drawer, what should be burned with the leaves in the yard every autumn. Where do all these things belong? My mother's face when I told her I wasn't sure if I loved her. The sound of Neil crying, the feel of him shivering in my arms over an old hurt that had resurrected itself early in our relationship. The citric pungency of sunscreen that day at the lake before Neil and I changed our own history. Isaac's solemn declaration that I had renamed him, and my realization that I had a greater effect on people than I knew, that his very obituary would forever reflect what I had unknowingly done. The clipped, soft beep as I hung up on Jane after what would be our last conversation.


These are old passions, dusty, brittle, but they bring tears to my eyes even now. How does one move forward from all this? Roger told me months ago that I needed to be in love with someone or something, and he is right, but, as I've contemplated before, so much that I might want to love seems to be unworthy of the effort.


What has stuck in my head for days is the end of that conversation with Mom in the kitchen, after I finished telling her about Edward. In a sudden movement she put her arms around me and leaned her little head against my chest and said, "Your dad has a hard time with all this, but I don't want you to be lonely."


A lump came into my throat and I was deeply touched, far too touched and tender-feeling to let my lips speak the clipped, soft words that had welled up inside me in response: "Too late."

1:30 PM

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Monday, December 29, 2003

 

ENTRY 068


Miss me? Hope everyone is enjoying a lovely holiday season. Everything was madness last week in the run-up to Christmas, so I had zero time for blogging, and my Internet access is severely limited now that I'm staying at Marc and Cleo's in Houston.


At the moment, though, Marc is at work and everyone else is off running an errand (with Cleo, my parents, and my grandparents in the car, there's no room, alas, for me), so I'm sneaking in an entry on the Blog My Mother Must Never Know About.


It's good to be away from work and New York and all of that stress, although I must admit that I always romanticize those golden-hued family holidays and forget the moments in which I am firmly convinced that as a baby I was abandoned on the doorstep by a destitute couple, that my real father would never have listened to Kenny G or Celine Dion, and that my birth mother is, however counterintuitive it might seem, pro-choice.


There have been good moments. The other night Dad told me how to make his famous chicken soup, and even bought me some of the special bouillon cubes that he uses. I saw Cleo with child for the first time, and got to ask her how weird it felt to be expecting. Mom spoke very candidly about her own parents growing old. We played Scrabble. I am getting sufficient sleep for the first time in months. I haven't seen a single roach since my arrival.


And we have eaten. A lot. The climax was reached last night, when Dad took us to dinner at Fogo de Chão. We're talking obscene orgiastic eating, folks. Commence with the big salad bar with uncommonly good smoked salmon. Then there are the magically replenished baskets of airy cheese rolls. But the real reason for coming is the Meat, cooked in the Gaúcho tradition of Brazil. Check out the website for all the details. Essentially, servers wander around the dining room bearing huge slabs of dead animal--pork, bacon-wrapped filet mignon, chicken, prime rib, garlic sirloin, ad nauseaum--and offer some to you if your "feeding token" is turned to the "Serve me, wench" side instead of the "Not right now, I'm strangely fond of my intestines" side. It is mud-wallowing, gastronomic excess epitomized. And yes, it is good. And yes, we had dessert. (Cleo was disappointed about her pregnancy-caused reduced stomach capacity. The womb takes up room.)


No wonder I'm the only skinny one in the family.


I received some nice gifts on the 25th, although there is never much that I really seem to want. But I have fun giving things. It's just nice to be around the fam for a bit, although sometimes it's a bit much, such as when we spent two hours at two incredibly dull discount stores yesterday going through heavily discounted holiday crap. I half-heartedly glanced through such treasures as a memory game oh-so-PCly called "Senior Moments" and a collection of Kenny Rogers love songs before finally resorting to the desperate entertainment of admiring the models on discounted CK underwear boxes.


But there are worse things. Like being married to a woman and having to endure that every single weekend. No offense to the ladies, of course, but if I have to do that sort of thing I should at least be getting laid.


I should really give a British lawyer update, but it will have to wait until next time; the car just pulled into the driveway. Ah, I feel like a surreptitious teenager again. (Just a quick shout-out to a fellow blogger from the UK for the info on gay-Brit cheek-kissing; again, more on that later.)


Hi, Mom.

1:24 PM

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