Dear Sierra Leone, Part Two

 

Sometimes when I have a hard time getting a feeling into words, it helps to cut up a pop song. This used to be Robyn's Dancing on My Own.

Oh my dear. There was a place for us and it was WhatsApp.

I liked spending New Years with you and not with you. I was with Rainbow Pal, both of us sparkling and dancing to brass bands playing pop songs. It was Dancing on My Own when midnight came, our midnight, five hours after yours. Everything was silver and spangled and I was wearing the purple princess dress from my birthday. My synchronicity necklace from the flea market in Famous Art Town.

Rainbow Pal and I hugged and bopped silver balloons around the dance floor. No one really knew the words to Auld Lang Syne but we sang it anyway. I love, love, LOVE the sound of strangers happy together and muddling through a song.

Rainbow Pal wanted to stay late—brass is their great love and they knew eventually the band would be playing in the crowd and all would be right with the world. They gave me maybe the best gift a younger friend can give an older friend—the dispensation to go home at 12:30.

As I walked out to the car, a perfect golden firework popped in the sky over the parking lot, and I read it as a message from you. This year would be for me. It would be golden. I held it in my heart as a way of taking a picture, and I told him about it first thing in the morning. My morning, your late afternoon.

Oh Salone, I know I shouldn’t have gone back to him last summer. I saw the not-cute future of self-erasure and control and heteronormative bullshit. (Rainbow Pal has a shirt that says “Heteronormativity is a cult” and they wore it for me the day I was over at their place painting about our breakup, crying watercolor tears and maybe making them a little bit uncomfortable.)

But what if I hadn’t met YOU? What if I hadn’t woken up to your pink-sky beaches and your bright patterned fabrics and intricate tiles? What if I’d missed our New Years?

I wanted to cross the ocean between us. The Atlantic between us is as big as the gulf between me and my post-insurrection family. I don’t know how to be family-real the way he does, but I have other reals, I guess.

I only know how to shift and flow and get stuck on a rock sometimes until the water rises and takes me forward. Okay, that’s not the ocean, it’s the local creek I walk by whenever I’m confused or lost or it’s Friday.

I’m impatient to get unstuck, dear Sierra Leone, dear Atlantic Ocean, dear beloved local creek. Some days I can feel the current carrying me away from him, and therefore, safely, closer, the memory restored, the love affair done. Other days I’m stranded creek debris, waiting for rain, for the water to rise and carry me home, which is everywhere and nowhere.

Pagan Boy’s Crush: A (’93-Present) Friend Story

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.

More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part Three

 

This poster was at the top of the stairs to his apartment and is probably why the whole ribbons thing. 

At the Basement Rave Place, there was a long grimy beige couch across from the unisex (that’s Nineties for all-gender) bathroom where we’d go to recover after we danced too much. I remember it as sort of a heap of dance-tired limbs, four to seven people on the couch at any given time. He reminded me way later that once on said couch I handed him my underwear, no doubt soaked with sweat and excitement. (Gotta hand it to nineteen-year old me for the brazenness! Love it so much!) With a deliciously smug nod, he balled them up and put them in his shirt pocket and patted his chest happily. Ohboy that smile.

(Sidenote: Dear Pagan Boy, can you dirty-haunt me ASAP? If anyone can, it’s you. I don’t really believe in an afterlife but you’d be a makeout king there.)

I named him Pagan Boy, but really he was the first one to properly touch me like a MAN. Plus, my love of fat fingers has been well documented. (Are you there, Fireguy? It’s me, nostalgic!) Almost thirty years later, I can feel the warm confidence of his hand as he not-subtle-at-all pushed up my pink polyester dress. (Whenever I wasn’t wearing a black vintage slip, I was wearing something a diner waitress might wear in an indie movie. This dress had such a cute pointy white collar and little pearly buttons.)

I lay toward him across his lap as he slipped his fingers lazily up and down, sometimes thumbing my clit but mostly just meandering, leisurely. Absolutely no one around us cared, if they even noticed. Around us was a blur of fake fur and glitter and hot androgynous hairstyles—sort of a Bladerunner aesthetic except cuddly. The rhythm of his slippery fingers was tuned to the constant pulse of techno, mostly house. I don’t think it ever really left my ears from about ’93 to ’96.

He pushed his fingers inside me and I kissed him to quiet myself, though any sound I would’ve made would have been swallowed up by, I don’t know, the Mortal Kombat theme song.

The kissing was urgent, like we might accidentally devour each other down to the bones, but his hands stayed slow.

The drive from the club to his house was at least an hour long, but he was an expert at driving one-handed. In the 3am dark, I sat in the passenger seat with my legs spread and my sweaty, be-glittered head on his shoulder, breathing in his ears or just breathing in the smell of him—earth, beer, testosterone, cigarettes—a smell you could lay down and cozily die in.

We stumbled up the steps of his apartment, tangled in each other and losing clothes as we went. The sun was coming. As we cuddled into his too-small bed, he held my face, stared into my eyes, and kissed me some more. There wouldn’t be sleep.

More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part Two

 

This story does have some looooovely humans in it, but I think it’ll be mostly a love letter to Basement Rave Place (Not its real name! The real name was like something a sitcom would name a gay bar, and I loved the name a lot!) As soon as Pagan Boy and I hooked up, the club (and the classically-decorated Greek diner across the way) was like our whole thing. (I mean, besides making out on his living room floor in front of Mystery Science Theater 3000) The dance floor (and couches, and stairwell, etc) at Basement Rave Place was where we were most beautifully, sexily, ridiculously ourselves.

As I flailed about (How to dance to techno, if you’re not a skilled pop-and-lock kind of person? It’s sort of a cross of aerobics, hippie dancing, and the Running Man. Above all, one always must move as though waving a glowstick, even (especially?!) when you don’t have one) and Pagan Boy gothed around, (See: dancing to techno except slower and slinkier and probably more dignified.) our relationship was the exact opposite of my (not so) dance-y night with Perfectly 1993 Guy—no frozen-with-self-consciousness anywhere for miles!

When I talk about being a raver, you might assume ecstasy, acid, shrooms. I WAS very good at acid, but not until years later. But every time I went to Basement Rave Place with Pagan Boy, and this will be the corniest thing I’ve ever said a million times, I was only ever high on dancing. I’ll never be anything like a good dancer in any other context (Okay except maybe in general ass-shaking terms.) but my body was absolutely MADE for dancing to techno. The only things I ever ingested there (broke as I always was) were little clear plastic cups of ice water, the most delicious and life-saving things in the world.

Or sometimes, okay juice. And my BELOVED Camel Lights, god rest their (Quit in 2003) souls. I was 19, the place was all-ages after eleven. Pagan Boy and his friends were all early-to-mid twenties, they could’ve bought me drinks, but I don’t think they did.

The club was small but it was everything I wanted in the whole world. Above all, it was SO SEXY in a queer, liberated way I’d rarely ever seen before. (It was temperature hot too. I sweat SO MUCH into my chokers and Thrifty Shopper polyester minidresses.) Statuesque, androgynous women danced on platforms wearing only teensy shorts and X-es over their nipples. (Oh boob tape, I do love and miss you so! Maybe someday I’ll be almost naked in semipublic again…)

The dance floor was checkered and the walls were doodled-upon psychedelically. Blacklight lit up everyone’s teeth, the occasional rogue piece of non-black clothing. It’s a tribute to how in love with the place I was that I wasn’t put off by the presence of blacklit dandruff. Maybe it just registered as so much more glitter?

In the club light, even more than he’d been in the coffeehouse, Pagan Boy was just the dreamiest of dreamy goth dreamboats. To my love-dazzled eyes he looked like a plush version of Robert Smith from The Cure but with better-kempt hair and naturally fluffy eyelashes. He looked even better with my blackberry lipstick constantly smeared all over his mouth.

I don’t remember when the first kiss was with Pagan Boy. I think there was a brief moment when I wanted to be just friends, but it was pretty quick that I shrugged and submitted to his kind and all-encompassing embrace. Our bodies, our mouths, fit so perfectly together. He could hold ALL of me, no problem. Every one of our showoffy dramatic kisses felt like a fully-formed work of art.

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Four: Limelight

 

 

Ohboy The Limelight. First Bitchy Gay Guy said it was the coolest club in New York City, so we had to go. The three of us drove to Hoboken and took the PATH train in. It cost *gasp* eighteen dollars to get in, but I think gay (This was before I knew about all the letters to use.) folks could go in the back door and get some kind of deal.

 

It was one of the few non- Great-Adventure-or-just-bed dates I remember having with Perfectly 1993 Guy. I was sooooooo excited! TO SEE HIM! To GO DANCING! To go be in cool New York City! It all seemed impossibly exotic and thrilling, like a really zeitgeisty dream.

 

(Pop culture sidenote: I can’t think about The Limelight without picturing Michael Alig lurking past the couch where the first season cast of The Real World were sitting and being not-awesome at clubbing. I’m re-resolving not to watch Party Monster but I may need to rewatch that episode and also consume a bunch of Club Kid content on YouTube. My quar hobbies are weird.)

 

Anyway, the outfit! Not even a little bit Club-Kid-like, but maybe the coolest I’ve ever felt in clothes. My favorite thrift store minidress was the exact same navy as my aforementioned (And afore-swooned-about!) Docs. No hose or socks. The dress was thick polyester with a sort of lacy texture. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more beautiful or perfectly dressed, but that feels like something I might’ve typed on this blog before.

 

Once inside, we stood in line again for like EVER to get onto the “gay floor” with FBGG. I remember that hallway SO VIVIDLY—wallpapered in garish orange and gold patterns—actual church meets Dee-Lite. The real sex shows were all the way on the top floor, FBGG explained—I couldn’t even imagine what that might mean.

 

Once inside the “gay floor,” FBGG sort of winked out of existence, just melted away into the scene. I was a little overwhelmed (but trying diligently not to show it) by the sight of a naked Howard-Stern-looking guy crawling around with a saddle on his back. It’s alarming, the first time you see the back of somebody’s balls in a public place! For me at least.

 

With FBGG off cavorting, Perfectly 1993 Guy and I were on our own. I was THRILLED to be holding hands with someone so beautiful and new. We decided to check out the Disco/Eighties Room, where I was certain I would know what to do! My all-the-way-raver years were a little ways off, but I’d been going to clubs since I was fifteen. Being carefree and slutty and ridiculous on a dance floor was practically my superpower.

 

And yet. The main property of Perfectly 1993 Guy was stillness. He grew up to be a psychologist, and I’ll bet he’s a good one. I don’t know if it was the pleasant inertia of him or the self-consciousness of being in such a big cool place, but I felt frozen. Even when Groove Is in the Heart came on! I just couldn’t make my body move in any kind of dancelike way. With him watching me, I forgot how to have LIMBS. I was tranced into statuary by lust, by his beauty, by being in the presence of so many people who seemed so cool as to not even be human. So we gave up on the dance floor.

 

We found and sunk all the way into a midnight-blue C-shaped couch situated in semidarkness but lofted above the main (techno even more tuneless than the kind I knew and loved) dance floor. All the while we were snuggled up kissing, I kept thinking I should make myself get up and go dance, but I never did. I’m so glad.

 

It was too loud for us to say much more to each other than briefly hollered words between kisses. We were curled up side by side, his hands on my face, in my hair. Outside of time and space, completely free from the *ahem* real world, from any kind of context at all. His very-gently-stubbled chin. His warm cheek against mine.

 

Being so innocently and mutually enjoyed felt new and strange—I’d almost felt with Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, but that was in Perfect Aunt’s living room, that was two sweet children. This was happening in a dark house-musicy Eden where somewhere was Saddle Man.

 

My feel were up on the edge of a big industrial coffee table that was strewn with votive candles. I’m not sure where I got the idea that pouring wax on people was sexy, probably from Madonna. Perfectly 1993 Guy picked up one of the votives and dripped wax lightly onto my upper thigh. Kiss, gentle pain, kiss. With the next candle, he moved further up my thigh, closer and closer to the edge of my underwear. His hands wandered the bottom of my skirt, just grazing the most sensitive places, then more wax, and more kissing.

 

It was probably four in the morning when we left this candleglow lust-haze and dragged ourselves downstairs to wait for FBGG. We lay on a giant round red velvet pouf under chandelier light and Baroque wallpaper, tired, so tired. So ready for bed. So many trains and Hoboken between us and sleep. I was so thoroughly sated, and greeting the grey dawn completely in love.

Quarantine Crush Part Seven

Just a few weeks of poems and songs. Writing with QC was amazing, a reunion with him and with California and with myself. I’d given up poetry for all kids of good and bad reasons, and it felt so good for my brain to start working in those patterns again. The joy of taking a heap of disparate images apart and putting them back together again into something that makes, if not sense, then its own version of sense.

With the poetry and the songs and the chitchat and the Zoom came the LONGING, powerful enough to make me sob, and the grief. The pain of leaving my friends twenty years ago felt fresh  and as I waited for the next text or poem, the missing him, the missing ALL of them but especially him, almost physically hurt. Okay, it did, a little bit, physically hurt.

I wanted us never to have been apart, or to catch up all at once, or for us to keep writing together forever (not just til quarantine ended and we went back to our lives) or to toss all of the metaphors out the window and just say stuff. Like Carly Rae, I wanted to cut to the feeling. I guess that’s what I’m doing now.

I thought, in those dreamy, jangled, waiting-for-the-phone-to-buzz nights (better than thinking about death tolls or presidential gaslighting or maternal gaslighting or the fact that I’m going to gave to canvass for Joe Biden or that there’s always a new how-many-fingers to know…) about dancing with QC at my wedding way back when. It was the only few minutes of my life I can honestly think of as getting “swept off my feet,” a surprise jolt of happiness as clear as any of the best naked adventures. QC was the only man every to truly LEAD me on the dance floor or anyplace, for that matter. The giddy delight of letting his arms guide me. Feeling like…whoa. I mean, WHOA and laughing in glittery delight. (Yep just gonna say delight too many times.)

Truly a moment that made me realize, both in 2003 and in 2020, what I’d missed in not at least having tried to claim him. Most of my Sliding-Doorsiness has worn off by now, but ohboy. I know (partly) missed out on someone so special and super, super hot. All of the Doms and Masters and Tops in this blog so far (Still so much thanks guys!) had a tenuous, theatrical command, just playacting compared to that dance. I wonder if I’ll ever feel led like that again, if I’ll ever let anyone. I hope so.

(The writing side of this being led, the part where my brain tried to make me think I needed his permission to write poems, that part wasn’t so fun. But that’s on me.)

The longing, the time-slip, the time-travel wishes were all too much after a while, but it felt too gorgeously life-affirming to give up. Mixed in with the dreaminess was the covid fear making everything so much more fraught—if he wasn’t writing back, did that mean he was dead? There wasn’t really any way for me to know, and I was sure no one would think to tell me. I wished I could ask for all of his emergency contacts, and all of THEIR emergency contacts, and so on. It wasn’t making the normal serotonin-drop of crushes any easier to navigate.

Sometimes I thought I knew what was going on for a second. Some of the songs that he sent were so explicitly romantic that I would hold out my phone to no one or to the cats and ask “Are you HEARING this?” Where is a slumber party when you need it?

Then, he wrote a very good poem wherein he was in a lot of danger, past and present, and I felt heart-wrenched and helpless toward those dangers. For some reason, that meant it was time to ask if he meant the songs. I told him I DID mean the songs, then tried to sleep while I waited to hear back.