Though neither I nor Pagan Boy would have used the word “polyamory,” there was sort of another presence in our relationship. Pagan Boy’s Crush was one of his cool friends who sometimes met us at Basement Rave Place. I looked up to her so much—in my memory, she-of-then is kind of a goddess sculpture, dressed in fitted silver or coral dresses as opposed to my grubby goth slips and too-short polyester dresses. Her boyfriend was a hippie-cute straight boy with glossy blond curls. He seemed a little out of place at the club, but maybe I was just biased in Pagan Boy’s favor.
One night,
after we said goodbye to them outside the diner and started off on the long
drive to PB’s, he said the most magical five words in my then-as-now love
lexicon:
“I made
you a mix tape.”
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
In some ways,
the mix was totally us: “Let’s Go to Bed” by the Cure! (Robert Smith is a
milkshake! We always said.) Sound bites from MST3K (“Mike! Mike!” from Manos,
our fave.) and the campy pornos PB favored.
But a lot
of the tape was…bitter. Crush bitter:
“Tempted”-Squeeze
“Wave of
Mutilation” –The Pixies
“Boy”—Book
of Love
(OMG I need to make a Crush Bitter playlist
from the nowtimes ASAP!) (I’m not really feeling like that but the songs would
be treasures.)
I
meeeeeeaaaaaan it was a good mix, but as he drove us through the early morning,
he said sheepishly:
“I was
thinking about (crush) when I made this.”
I really
don’t remember his pining for her feeling like a problem, don’t remember being
annoyed about my mixtape being a proxy bitter-love note. I was kinda like,
yeah, I get it.
Pagan Boy’s
Crush and I had our own thing going on—is there such a thing as platonic
grinding? (If so, it would be a good name for my entire memoir.) She was the first
girl I danced with in kind of a sexy way. I want to stress how much this wasn’t
a for-his-gaze (only) Girls Gone Wild kind of thing. When we danced
together, we were whole, and joyful, transcendent and so perfectly ourselves.
We were beautiful and free on the checkered dance floor, definitely not giving
the faintest fuck about anyone else.
Chaste
though we (mostly) were, “our song” was all the raunch:
“You Suck”—Consolidated
(feat. Yeastie Girls)
Mostly,
Pagan Boy’s Crush seemed like a sophisticated dream, someone I wouldn’t have
known how to really connect with because I was such a mess and she was so…her!
But then!
Almost 30 years later! She reached out to me in a side-chat at Pagan Boy’s Zoom
funeral! And it turns out we’re like emotional sisters. Our lives all these
years have been so different, but it felt like we got each other’s whole deal
right away. Now we talk once a month or so and I tell her my homebody
adventures, she tells me what things look like in whatever state she’s
traveling through (Very Nomadland but without the bucket situation!) and we
compare notes on what hijinks our brains are up to lately.
I don’t
believe in the afterlife or “divinely ordained” but it’s hard to not feel like
Pagan Boy made us into a friend match. It makes me feel magical and hopeful
about what other unexpected connections might be waiting out in the world for
me, hopefully not just on Zoom.
No comments:
Post a Comment