OMG These Presents.

Please note that this box was sealed with red heart stickers.

The last time I had a boyfriend, (“Fiancé” actually, but that just seems bananas.) I’d just turned twenty-one. That’s twenty-six years ago and even then, it felt unreal. When girls-then-women liked me, that made sense, but I had a deep down understanding that a guy would never like me romantically. In fact, my mom, during my teenage years or maybe early adulthood told me “I guess no one will ever love us.” when I was fretting about some unrequited thing or other. I don’t know why my brain A. Took this pronouncement as irrefutably true and B. Decided she just meant men. Trauma? Abuse? Some warped loyalty to mom? Bi erasure? All of those things?

So it was easy to believe it when my first girlfriend and I got close, and my marriage to BFF-Formerly-Sweetie made all the sense in the world, except when it didn’t. The three young men who various-amounts-of-loved-me in my teen years felt a universe away almost immediately, framed in my mind as important but always destined to be lost. (Two of the three were very not gone, it turned out, until stupid jerk covid took Pagan Boy away last year.)

This persistent disbelief about male attraction wasn’t about fat. I’ve always (well, mostly always) seen myself as beautiful. It just felt like other women knew how to be with men, the secret code words or something. As you know by now, I’ve evolved unrequited affection into one of my most central art mediums, at least as formative to my soul as watercolors or photography.

In eighth grade, the school sold carnations for Valentine’s Day, pink, red, and white. (I am Tina Belcher, hear me roar.) I so much wanted to be a getter-of-flowers, to be seen by a crush or by anybody. I mooned and cried at the lunch table. Then a guy at the next table, an acquaintance’s big brother, gave me one pink carnation, stemless and clearly regifted. I don’t know if it was a kindness or a low-key prank, but either way he never talked to me again.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was incredibly generous. Perfectly 1993 Guy and Pagan Boy sent mixtapes long after we weren’t together. Oh boy the late nights up late with the Stone Roses and that Jane’s Addiction b-side, like, how is this an EX’s mixtape, with all the “I wanna be adored” and “I would for you…”

Before I get derailed looking up more Nineties deep cuts, let me finally get to the point:

Last Monday, The Shy One showed up for our immediately-post-Ramadan date beautiful and a little nervous-seeming and still masked from the Uber-ride. With a gift bag that said “Enjoy every moment!” on it. Flowery lotions and perfume. Bright, perfectly-fruit-scented candles. An electric wine opener I absolutely did not need but will now keep forever. And this cup and spoon:

I can't even.

Seriously, DO YOU SEE THE SPOON?! That’s what I’ve been picturing this week as I gently guide my mind away from Gilead-themed draft opinion panic. That spoon just exists a little more than other objects do, like the Hope Diamond does, like my magenta ropes do.

It’s not just the presents, of course, that inspired me to ask him to be my boyfriend by the end of the night. I’m feeling private for now about all the superhot parts, but maybe I’ll get them down sometime soon. Like the meditation-inspiring spoon, all the gifts felt grounding, somehow both lavishly romantic and straightforwardly attuned to what’s real. Like him. There’s such a solidity to his affection, an uncomplicated generosity, an ease. The Shy One does for my spirit what the ropes do for my body. I don’t really know how to be a boyfriend’s girlfriend, but he makes me feel brave enough to try.

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.

More Nineties! Pagan Boy Part One

Word choice note! I’m usually only comfortable describing myself as “fat”, meaning it in the most up-to-date, celebratory, body-positive way. (For very good writing about body positivity, see The Body Is Not an Apology: https://thebodyisnotanapology.com Sonya Renee Taylor is such a treasure.) I don’t think Pagan Boy would mind me calling him a hot fat man, so I’m going to learn to write that way. Wish me luck!

 

A draft of this entry has been in the to-type pile for a couple of weeks. I lost Pagan Boy to Covid at the beginning of this year, so every sentence, no matter how cheery, is a little molasses-step through grief. I hope I can do justice to this miraculous on-again-off-again friend and the lust for life (and pop culture!) he helped me to cultivate. In my own, snotty, irritable way, I loved him, and I hope to make that clear.

 

After Perfectly 1993 Guy broke up with me, I had even more room in my working-at-Burger-King-and-getting-ready-for-photography-school life for…something? That roller coaster summer, I’d started making poems in a black-and-white speckled notebook with doodle-y lilies drawn all over it. I don’t remember anything except one of the poems had a reference to Blondie’s Heart of Glass. (#onbrand)

 

I fully fancied myself a beatnik, so the early-Nineties coffeehouse craze was EXACTLY the thing for me, even pre-Friends! So I dressed in a polyester turtleneck day-glo psychedelic maxi-dress and headed to the newly minted Cake Place (not its real name) with my no-doubt melodramatic poems. (Side note: The featured poet that night became my mentor ten years later post-California. Magic night! Synchronicity!)

 

I sat down next to Pagan Boy after my poem and he said something catty-complimentary, reminding me of Perfectly 1993 Guy’s best friend. I looked at him and my heart said OF COURSE.

 

Fat, expansive, queerish, a little goth. So. Much. MAN. Plus, these really fluffy dark eyelashes. Pretty and handsome and musky in a way that went perfectly with the buckets of patchouli I used to wear. (Okay I bought some a few weeks ago. Still smells SO GOOD. Gonna put some on now.)

 

Jeez I really miss him. I always wondered if we should be together and kinda took our friendship for granted, even let him become a Bernie-bro facebook casualty through most of the Trump years, but he came back. (The ONLY man in my life who apologized for Bernie-and-Russia-fueled madness! He gets all the stars,)  It was like he never left, and right before he died we were texting through bad movies together. I miss him so much, and I hope I can make these paragraphs the reunion we deserve. Of heart, wish me luck.

 

 

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Ten: The Long Goodbye

 

After I put him on that birthday afterglow bus, I lived in the glow for a few days or a few weeks. I sat in my post-high-school job at Burger King (I would pretty much do anything to avoid a challenging job interview. Plus I’ve always loved tedium and discounted snacks!) daydreaming about his warm skin and soft hair and to-be-continued mixtape, looking out the drive thru window in a happy haze between customers. But then, just as the word “temporary” had derailed a lovely afternoon of our visit, three little words out of my face closed off whatever I thought might come next with him.

 

“I need you,” I found myself saying into my yellow landline phone. I would very much like to go back and unsay it, even if the results would still have been the same.

 

“You need me?” he wasn’t being harsh, just a little incredulous. “I can’t be…needed right now.”

 

His reasons were sound and to be expected, but that didn’t make the conversation any less devastating. He had just started college. There were girls there with purple hair and he wanted to be free to live his college life. Totally valid! But my heart both deflated and exploded into a fine, sad, messy mist.

 

For some reason, his guilt or my sentiment or both or just love, we decided to keep my planned visit a couple weeks after the breakup. To say goodbye I guess. I met the purple-haired girl there—I remember her name being Sloane but it’s possible she had only recommended the BAND Sloane to him. (“She was underwhelmed if that’s a word, I know it’s not ‘cause I looked it up, that’s one of the skills I learned in my schoooooool.”) She left Perfectly 1993 Guy and me alone to lay in his tiny dorm room, on a pleasingly narrow twin bed.

 

We stayed spooned up in that bed for a long time. I looked out the window at the pretty campus feeling romantically achey. The Get Up Kids wouldn’t be invented for two more years, but it was maybe the most emo weekend of my life. That is REALLY saying something.

 

We decided to go see a Dead Milkmen show a couple of hours away from campus by train. The club was at the beach so things did NOT get less emo despite the very silly music. As we walked from train to club to beach, he got grumbly because I was walking too close and kept walking into him. Nonetheless, I put my head in his lap and rested on the train ride back. I wanted him to be hard beneath my sleepy cheek so I would know his desire for me had been real. I was vigilant for it but don’t remember the results being decisive. What a sign to look for.

 

In his dorm room he had a childhood teddy bear named Clyde and I decided to take him home with me for consolation. He was a pretty big bear, dark brown with one of those really sincere faces that stuffed animals sometimes have. Perfectly 1993 Guy told me years later that he hadn’t wanted me to take Clyde, he just hadn’t known what to say. I feel such a longing to know what happened to Clyde, to hug him tight. (Confession: For the past few months I’ve slept with a stuffed peacock named Nancy, a platonic I-was-having-a-hard-day-post-attempted-coup gift from Sweetie.)

 

We tried to be friends, especially when I came that winter to a school a few hours away from his. I knew every day of my short photography school life (With darkrooms! And chemicals! Glad I tried it while I still could.) how close Perfectly 1993 Guy was by train. My first night at school, I used a big handful of change to call and let him know I had arrived. After a couple of will-we-or-won’t-we visits (More chaste, longing spooning with a little wrestling thrown in? Odd.) things got too snitty and he stopped taking my calls.

 

I called him a truly reprehensible number of times for a couple of months, including on Valentine’s night surrounded by the mylar balloons of my roommates’ more successful relationships. I imagined the phone ringing and ringing and ringing in that tiny room, knowing purple-haired girl would think I was pathetic. I definitely was.

 

Aside from nicely saucy letters from Pagan Boy, (RIP) my loneliness that winter and spring was abject. Eventually, by some miracle, Perfectly 1993 Guy did pick up the phone and we went comfily to a fantastic King Missile show where I got to hug John S. Hall and accidentally poke him with my spiky bracelet. (Another object I’s just LOVE to have today. Wonder how it’s doing?) We saw each other a few more friendly times but he was one of the few old friends/flames who didn’t make the real-life-to-MySpace-etc transition. I looked him up on LinkedIn a couple years ago. Without his Eddie Vedder hair he looks like a regular person, a regular BEAUTIFUL person.

 

I never won’t miss him. I’ll never forget that Bee Girl moment of being loved by him, of being wanted. It both went by so fast and lasted my whole life, like so many of the stories I tell you here. Thanks for listening dears, I’m all wistful and grateful.

Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part Nine

Someday maybe this blog will stop being a weird time loop, but for now we’re back in the late summer of 1993. Perfectly 1993 Guy and I had been fragmented all afternoon, ever since I accidentally used the word “temporary.” Still, we were back in my room, snuggled into the waterbed with its goldenrod yellow sheets. He had started making a mixtape for me before the trip, so he moodily clunked it into the tape player. The first notes of Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” not particularly our song but EXACTLY the song of that summer, made us both lose our defenses at once, made us melt into a heap of sweet sentimental slackerness, Slow kisses and maybe a few tears.

We lay there listening to what he had so far of the mixtape. It was…uneven. I was mystified by the inclusion of Nine Inch Nails’s “Head Like a Hole,”—I guess maybe he saw me as the one he served? There was nothing about that in either of us, so probably he just really liked the song. I still have it in semi-heavy rotation, so it’s not like he was wrong. I was tickled by Living Color singing “Everybody loves you when you’re bi,” assuming that the “everybody” in the song included him.

I don’t remember the auspicious, his-first-time, midnight-between-our-birthdays sex in detail, (sadly!) but I know it was sweet, kind, and halting, the first go-around endearingly teenage-brief. The second and third times, we found a quiet rhythm. I remember feeling a spark, a little asterisk of sure pleasure the last time he came inside me, less an orgasm than a…togetherness. A confirmation that I could be loved. A Bee-Girl-Finding-Her-Bee-People relief. A warm little flame of home in a body that often felt everywhere but.

Broke or modest that we were, we had only invested in a three-pack of condoms, so when we woke up the next morning with some exact small number of hours and minutes until his bus left, he wondered if we should go out and get some more. We didn’t. We stayed in each other’s arms until the last possible minute, until it was time for my dad to drive us to the bus station. Perfectly 1993 Guy had to get back to campus, and I had to figure out what my back-home life would be.

We promised to call and write, and we certainly did, glowing and fresh and sad as a not-yet-existent Get Up Kids song. I missed him SO much after he got on that Greyhound, and I a little bit pine for him still.

Rest in Snuggles, Pagan Boy

 

I so, so wish I’d written him his High Fidelity paragraphs before he passed away from Covid-19 two weekends ago. I think he’d have liked them, especially the smutty parts. More than anything, he deserved to know how important he was to me, how he has built and structured my life since I was 19. I miss him so, SO much. I’m having a rare moment of not knowing what to say.

 

Pagan Boy and I dated (though I don’t know if we’d have called it that) on and off from roughly (ha) 1993 to 1995. I think? I met him during the Perfectly 1993 Guy months and he gorgeously helped me to pick up the pieces after Perfectly 1993 Guy was gone. (Well not all the way gone. They seldom are.)

 

Some decade-plus amount of time later, Pagan Boy moved to the same town as my sister, so he and I sometimes got to have flirty coffee when Sweetie and I were visiting the family. I was delighted to learn we had both grown up to be poly, though I think it stuck a little better for him. He was always the same, so giant, so warm, such a twinkle in his eye—it’s no wonder his pagan friends called him “Pan.” He was like a walking Tom Robbins novel but without all the pesky gender essentialism. Or something like that.

 

I love(d) him so, so much, that slightly sparky friend-love that has run through so many of my friendships with guys.  When we dated, the connection was undressing-each-other-on-the-way-up-the-stairs-to-his-apartment passionate, but the connection between us could never quite gel, could never really decide what it was. I realized years later that we’d both been navigating depression brains, without the words or resources to deal with depression that we would both eventually find. We were both so sad and so in love with life at the same time—what if we’d found a way to lean on each other? I guess we sort of did.

 

Anyway back then, we’d spend lighthearted hours having sex or watching Mystery Science Theater, but also so much time in a semi-stupor wrapped in blankets on the living room floor in front of the TV. The curtains were so often drawn against some sunny day I felt like we should be out in. We were the living enactment of what The Smiths meant when they sang about “spending warm summer days indoors,” and you know I’ve been known to commit some frightening verse.

 

As lovers (sorry, there’s not a better word) we were (comet) Pluto-a slanted orbit out off kilter with each other, emotionally and physically in the same solar system but also not. I wanted to be a real girlfriend, I did try, but something always held us both back. He broke things off with me the same day I painted him The Moon Card. We were The Moon Card. When I’m done writing this I’ll Google and remind myself what that means.

 

It’s weird (or not, see also: Sweetie) to begin with such a sense of naked, confusing turmoil and end in such a place of certainty and grace. Here in 2021, we were texting through bad movies together. I was wondering if I could also ask if he’d like to sext. (A fellow switch, I know he’d have been GOOD at it.) The last thing he sent me, after rescheduling a movie plan during his Covid treatment, was one of those Messenger heart things that explodes into a bunch of floaty hearts when you open it. It was exactly perfect, exactly him.

 

I have this picture, a selfie of him and me at my mom’s Christmas party in 2014. You can see the warmth and softness pouring off of him, the calm happiness in both of our faces, maybe partly because we were both full of my mom’s Christmas toffee. (It’s a lot of loss in one selfie, a lot that the last six years have taken away.) Toffee or no, you can see the warmth in his eyes, a love that wasn’t just for me or my family but for everyone and everything in the world. Outside our mopey post-teenage years, I’ve never seen him look at me any other way.

 

He is SO handsome in the picture that I wonder a little what kept me from being with him. We weren’t good for each other, but also, we were. I love and miss him so, so much and I know I’ll have a lot more to say.

 

 

Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part Eight

 

 

Okay I’m writing three different stories at once right now but that’s gonna have to be okay. I think this story might shine some light on the like story I’m currently living about The Drummer.

 

So Perfectly 1993 Guy had started college and I had gone home to live with my dad. We were a six-hour Greyhound trip apart. In those days, well before I could capably drive and when EVER owning a car seemed like a crazy dream, the Greyhound was the route to all things meaningful. Standing at the bus station that Friday night/Saturday early morning waiting for him would’ve felt like I was cracked open and shining love everywhere. That’s a big feeling given that, in this case, my dad must’ve driven me there to pick up my long-distance love, possibly in the middle of the night. It seems to my memory that most Greyhound things in Small Hometown City happened at about 3 AM.

 

Whatever the hour, my blank canvas of a bedroom felt golden with Perfectly 1993 Guy in it. In my arms, kissing and cuddling, he felt so warm but also so evanescent. I’ve never been more aware in my life of how many hours were left until Sunday at 1 PM, when I’d have to say goodbye again.

 

That Saturday night, the midnight between our two birthdays, felt incredibly momentous, sacred, solemn. He had told me a few weeks before that, aside from a just-the-tip occasion with his previous (regular  normal fancy rich person) girlfriend, Perfectly 1993 Guy considered himself a virgin. His first time felt like such a huge deal to him, and I was honored and daunted to be chosen. I felt a little unworthy, given how experimental, reckless, and haphazard I’d been just a few years before. Before my heart pendulum had swung wildly back to the chastity of the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow.

 

Before that, though, all afternoon on his birthday, we walked and walked all around Small Hometown City. I showed him a couple of the coffeeshops that I had become completely obsessed with, and which would become my home-away-from-home in years to come. I ordered jasmine tea, which tastes not-great but feels very fancy.

 

We walked and walked and walked. Somewhere in all that love-and-anticipating-goodbyes glow and idle chitchat, I (accidentally?) said “This just feels so temporary.” I don’t think I’d ever seen a man so affected by my careless words, and I maybe haven’t since. He slipped into a silent funk, closing his shoulders off and walking a few feet ahead of me. I remember him (in those dreamy green Docs) climbing up onto the not-very-high ledge of the art museum’s planters, now walking ahead AND above me. He was hurting and escaping, and I didn’t know how to get him back. And we had so, SO little time.

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Seven

 

 

So, just like at the beginning of summer, I was in waiting-for-letters mode as I settled into my Dad’s apartment in a suburb of Small Hometown City. His was a quintessential divorced-guy apartment, rent-to-own cream-colored furniture and nondescript lamps. Where were vertical blinds on every window. There were pretty pine trees around the front balcony though!  Dad was (and is) a man of routine and coffee, as I eventually grew up to be. (Coffee always, but the routine part of my heart took a while.) It was comforting and monotonous there, great for feeling safe and figuring out what was next.

 

During the intermittent times I lived with Dad, my bed was a waterbed, sheeted with mustard-colored cloths from my Grandpa’s restaurant days. It was heated and welcoming. There was a nice big closet for my not-many clothes and a yellow landline phone perched on top of a moving box. There was room on the windowsill for my thrift store tchotchkes.

 

The immediate challenge as my long-distance relationship with Perfectly 1993 Guy began was having anything to say in my letters. The main emotion of my early adulthood was exquisite boredom, still one of my very favorites. (These days, on the rare occasions when I’m called in to my college bookstore job, the boss saves the most tedious tasks for me and I’m grateful!)

 

But I could put off the letter writing troubles, because Perfectly 1993 Guy planned a visit almost right away. He and I had consecutive birthdays, though he was a year younger than me, so we planned for him to visit me at my Dad’s on the weekend of both birthdays. It was truly one of the top two most adorable weekends of my young life. It might take me a while to get my head around it but I’ll do my best to not take a million years.

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Six: Learning to Love a Blowjob

Eventually, it became clear that I was gonna have to go home. The guys were starting college and Last Bitchy Gay Guy’s dad wasn’t renewing the lease on the spare apartment. In the last days before I went back home, Perfectly 1993 Guy and I decided to tackle another block of mine: blowjobs.

 

I’d done a couple that didn’t feel too onerous, but a particularly harsh night of casual sex when I was younger had made me associate going down on a guy with contempt, with being treated harshly. Nothing in the universe was harsh about this guy though, so why not give it a whirl?

 

He stood to the side of the couch arm while I sat looking up at him. His face was beatific, he looked so vulnerable and patient. Kind. His penis was truly the most lovable of all, medium-sized and always friendly, just a perfect companion.

 

It didn’t take too long! Just a few minutes of tentative, teeth-minding learning on my part and he was groan-whispering “I’m gonna come.” And he did. It was another in a series of momentous exchanges of love and warmth.

 

Swallowing was then, and for some reason remains, a point of pride for me. We had planned out that part in advance, so he had a Peppermint Patty ready to counteract the taste. (Which wasn’t so bad of course!) So lovely, so thoughtful.

 

We literally brushed each other’s hair after that. I explained, in the way that one explains something one knows absolutely nothing about, that this was “a lesbian thing.” I think I got the idea from “artistic” nudes in my dad’s photography books that I used to sneak (lengthy) peeks at when I was little. Whatever the inspiration, the mutual hair-brushing was very nice.

 

In the parental back-and-forth of those years, it was arbitrarily my dad’s turn to house me. I packed almost everything I had into dad’s small car, heartbreakingly leaving behind the Popples knapsack that contained (Among, I assume, other treasures) my senior year book, never to be seen again. (Remind me to borrow my sister’s copy  sometime for that pic of me and my friends’ legs, all in black and white striped stockings and lug-soled Mary Janes.)

 

I don’t remember the ride home with dad, aside from the relief of being on the way home and the hope for future mail. I had to get some kind of job to pay for the long-distance phone calls. I had to figure out my post-graduation life. I felt loved, wistful, dreamy. I knew I would miss Perfectly 1993 Guy so much, and that our story wasn’t over yet.

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Five: The Quest for an Orgasm!

 

It’s taking me a long time to write these days, because Sweetie bought me a Switch and I don’t spend very much time not on Animal Crossing! The upside is, all of the imaginary flower-watering seems to have cut my anxiety score exactly in half! Hooray! I’ve missed writing to you, though—how have you been? I hope you’re well, happy, and registered to vote! Maybe you already voted!

 

Anyway, so. At some point that summer, I moved out of Beach Aunt’s beach house without even saying goodbye. She left me a modest bill of 170$ which I didn’t try to pay back until ten years later—by then she wouldn’t even cash the check! Beach Aunt was so kind before her Flat Earth/Anti-Mask/Openly White Supremacist phase kicked in! I miss her.

 

I ended up moving into First Bitchy Gay Guy’s apartment with him. Not too long after that I quit Great Adventure too. I’m pretty good at stretching a last paycheck (See also: shoplifting.) but I don’t know how I paid for my life that August! I sure didn’t quit smoking or diner-ing! Maybe the guys took care of me, who knows.

 

The apartment was nice, with pretty hardwood floors and wide windows overlooking a stone courtyard. It was sparsely furnished, though, and the toilet was perpetually clogging. FBGG and I had sort of a George and Martha vibe, part put-on and part real nastiness. It was both agitating and familiar, having come from such a fighty home. We had quite the snit one night when I spattered the pretty white patterned linoleum in the kitchen with RIT Dye red during a painful and harrowing hair-dying incident!

 

The kitchen was maybe only stocked with ramen, cereal, and pilfered diner coffee creams and sugars. Presumably also coffee?

 

So the stage wasn’t perfectly set for romance, but romance happened anyway. FBGG switched rooms with me so Perfectly 1993 Guy and I could have a little more snuggle room. The bed was a mattress on the floor, with bright yellow sheets. The walls were wood-paneled and unadorned. The rooms was warm and sparkly with love. He and and I didn’t know what we were doing in the very best of ways, and he was unerringly loving and sweet.

 

My body was cooperative in all the ways except that one. After years of indifferent/violent/cruel partners, I was really only able to come by myself, and not always that! Perfectly 1993 Guy was fiercely (But also somehow non-pressuringly) determined.

 

No one had ever gone down on me before, let alone someone so beautiful, let alone someone with whom I was so thoroughly smitten! Tenderly, kindly, with a gentle tongue and just the right amount of stubble, he made love to me with his whole cute face.

 

I so much wanted to let go for him, but I would feel the warmth and shudder recede almost as soon as it arrived. No matter how steadfast of tongue he was, I couldn’t convince my body to trust him all the way, to trust myself. I sure did love all the trying, though.

 

“Are you okay?” I asked. He seemed a little sad when he came up for kisses and air.

 

He sighed. ”I just want to be able to do this for you.”

 

Of all the parts of this story, that line makes me the most wistful. Will I ever hear that unconditional, sweet generosity from a partner again? I hope so.

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.

Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Three

Other than the shoes, I don’t remember much of that first Great Adventure visit together. EXCEPT THIS: We went on The Enterprise (no relation), one of those Space Shuttle looking rides that rocks back and forth, higher and higher, until it finally flips over. LOVE an upside-down ride, especially with, thrill of thrills, Perfectly 1993 Guy locked in beside me.

 

And, he was… talk-singing.  I can’t overstate how low-key this guy was overall—even though he looked like a rock star, he was the quintessential nice boy. Except in this moment, when, inexplicably and delightfully, he decided to blurt out the entirety of “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine (Pause to Google “Zack De La Rocha problematic” and then remember I’m supposed to be typing…) As the ride started rocking its way up, he started with “Some of those that work forces/are the same that burn crosses” and got all the way to “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” by the time the ride got to the upside down part and the rest of the riders were screaming. I was laughing my head off in eye-rolling disbelief. It was the perfect, most ridiculous love-moment for a sort-of-punk-rock eighteen-year-old girl in 1993. It made me so happy (and still does!) because it made all of the sense and none of it at once.

 

Aside from the ride/smitten tummy flips and cotton candy romantic nighttime amusement part colors (Us was so many, many year in the future. But also, things can be romantic and Jordan Peele-y at the same time…) nothing particularly sexy happened while we were at the park, just the spark of possibility and the THIS ONE IS FOR ME certainty that paradoxically made me believe I could never have him. (Wow I’m exactly the same forever.)

 

We left pretty late and made the hour’s drive back to First Bitchy Gay Guy’s apartment, (It was  a family extra, something having to do with divorce I think, pretty sure that’s why this just-out-of-high-school kid already had a pretty nice apartment…) stopping along the way to shoplift some Marlboro Reds from the Acme. I usually smoked Camel Lights but shoplifters can’t always be choosers. Sometimes I even resorted to ew/gasp menthols. All of it seems gross now but also dirty-nostalgic, like cigarettes are a fun old bad influence friend I’m glad to be rid of.

 

It was (Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!) decided that Perfectly 1993 Guy would share the foldout couch with me while FBGG would take the bedroom. The living room had the stereo (Pause to sigh over the existence of stereos that were actual physical things…) so I put on a mix I’d made for me and FBGG, a mix of the dance-y, dreamy, and the absurd, culminating for reasons I can’t quite explain in Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” Kind of world-weary for where I was at in my life, but I found it romantic. Quick search—yep, I still do. Possibly I’ve always been an almost-46-year-old divorcee?

 

Anyway, INSOMNIA. The best kind, full of diner coffee and cigarettes, curiosity and happy, wholesome lust. He lay just outside my zone of touch at first, occasionally brushing my arm with a warm elbow. He smelled like sun and clean sweat and life. I was perfectly restless, almost holding my breath. What was I wearing, asked no one? I’ll tell you!

 

A coral slip I’d swiped during my BFF’s Thrifty Shopper job back home. It had a sheer frill of ruffle around the fitted top, soft coral lace along the bottom. I’m surprised I never just went ahead and wore it as a dress, I think I would, now! It was a little big on me, but skimmed my hips in a very satisfying way. The slip felt like silk to my naïve skin, but was most likely some flavor of polyester. Best of all, I don’t think I was wearing it to be seductive! That’s just what I slept in. Teenage me rules a lot of the time!

 

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo gradually (a tape-flip, getting up to smoke a few times, always in sparky semi-silence) our bodies edged themselves closer. Softly, tentatively, he took my hand. Let’s let that last another lifetime, another frozen-in-amber moment to clone or treasure on the shelf.

 

“Are you SURE you’re a lesbian?” He finally (FINALLY, FINALLY!) asked.

 

“Actually I’m feeling pretty bi right now,” I sigh/said, and then we kissed. It was a soft, playful, hopeful kiss of people who are learning how. The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow helped me to learn that I kissed too hard and too thrustingly (Probably influenced by the bad, lazy teen boys of pre-BWSMAP days) and Perfectly 1993 Guy continued that lesson. He taught me to probe and play sweetly instead of just devouring his face the way instinct and experience told me to.

 

There must not have been much night left, but we kissed and cuddled through it. His soft, perfect hands caressed me with respectful, tentative curiosity. It was the first time I’d felt both wanted and honored, both horny-as-fuck and patient, both cared for and fully embodied. It’s hard to process the pace and tenderness of that first, sexy-nightgowned night, but there it was.

 

I started this No Contact High Fidelity project first and foremost to think about touch and give myself something low-stakes to work on during quarantine, but I think I’m learning stuff too, just like Girl Rob does in the vastly-vastly-superior-to-the-book new High Fidelity show. (On Hulu. Seriously the best writing friend a person could have.) Typing my way though this, I started to understand why my standards remain so (sometimes vexingly) high, why I’m willing to wait out so much time alone until the right person arrives: I’ve already experienced so many beautiful, ideal, fateful, hot romantic moments in my life. If no more come along, I’ve already been quite thorough. I feel so grateful right now to Perfectly 1993 Guy and almost all of the other Kitten Calendar characters.

 

Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part Two

 

Of course I found my 1993 Docs available online in my size when I Googled them for this picture. My birthday IS coming up! 

 

I’ve been realizing that this story has a LOT of me just being a terrible person, I’m sorry! Thinking about First Bitchy Gay Guy really opened a can of horrified-with-myself, not just because it’s when I first learned and applied the term “f** hag”. It’s also dawning on me that every relationship in this no-contact High Fidelity has more than two people involved, though not sexually—I guess that really shouldn’t be a surprise.

 

Anyway, the general bad-personing. In high school, I’d cultivated a shoplifting habit. Just little stuff: cigarettes, nail polish, a small mountain of Easter candy to support a VERY brief flirtation with bulimia, etc.

 

But with FBGG, things really escalated. I don’t really understand why he liked goading me into theft—he certainly didn’t want for anything. He and Perfectly 1993 Guy were the first rich friends I ever made, at least they seemed rich to me! Even so, remember when ATMs had envelopes for deposits? Using his bank card, we would make fake deposits and then withdraw as much cash as we could from each one—usually around 300$.

 

That’s how I afforded my first pair of Docs. Though I understand now that they are just kind of ordinary well-made shoes, they seemed like impossible treasures. We took the PATH train and the subway all the way from New Jersey to St. Mark’s Place to get them, a momentous experience I remember as vividly as any love scene. Those shoes were beautiful. (Just a heads-up, this story has a LOT of the word beautiful in it! It was my favorite word then and probably is now too.)

 

The ATMs at least have the air of the impersonal to them. BUT. Just once, FBGG and I dined and dashed. I think every hard waitressing day I ever had later on (There weren’t as many as I deserve, I was a TERRIBLE waitress but it was so much fun. But that’s another chapter.) was a repayment of Karmic debt. Even though I don’t believe in Karmic debt!

 

Maybe even worse, when we DID pay for our coffee and pie, I remember us leaving mere pennies as tips, justifying it as “Well, they already get paid.” !!!!!!!!!!! I should devote the rest of my life to One Fair Wage. One night, on a roadtrip to my hometown, the waitress asked if we had meant to leave just eleven cents and we said yes. She said that she would rather we leave nothing. I SWEAR TO GOD, years later, that waitress became my kind, wonderful, perfect-to-share-a-smoke-with boss at another diner. I truly do not deserve the blessings in my life.

 

Okay, enough confessing for now.

One more variation-on-a-theme though: I remember calling Favorite Aunt from a payphone to update her on my whirlwind friendship with FBGG. “He’s in love with you, just wait and see!” I guess she was taking a break from shipping me with The Boy Who Sewed Me A Pillow.

 

Although I’d resolved at the beginning of the summer to get more serious about being a lesbian (Doing my own bi-erasure but also just wanting to satisfy the urge…) My First Bitchy Gay Guy kept insisting I’d like his best friend. So, on my day off from the Six Flags, I got the two of them in for free.

 

If I  had invented a fictional boyfriend for myself, it would have been this guy. He had soft, curly brown hair that went past his shoulders Eddie Vedderishly. He was softly fit and had a rich-boy’s late summer tan. He had an adorably crooked nose and sweet brown eyes framed in beautiful fluffy eyelashes. He had on some band t-shirt and green Doc Martens. I made way too big a deal about how we all had Docs on: Everyone’s looking at us! No they’re not, he said, so blasé about the magic shoes.

 

I could NOT believe I was about to ride roller coasters with him! It seemed and seems impossibly romantic. The three of us went to get in line.

 

Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part One

 

 

OMG! I’ve been putting off the brain-treat of writing about requited love all summer! Time to set a timer and start.

 

The day after I graduated, I moved away from my suburban town to go live with Beach Aunt at the shore. She was renting me a room for some insanely cheap price: I think it was 170$ a month. I gave a way lots of my thrift store clothes and most of my high school (sometimes Jane’s Addiction related) art. I kept a lot of the ridiculous tchotchkes I’d looted from a friend’s Thrifty Shopper job: Lots of sincere-looking animal figurines in Seventies colors. It might be my overly poetic memory, but I think I carried a (Little) birdhouse (In My Soul) on my lap in Beach Aunt’s overstuffed-with-everything-I-owned compact car.

 

I left behind Bucky Fellini, the rabbit I’d purchased at the State Fair the summer before and named after a Dead Milkmen album. Don’t worry, we will eventually be reunited! And I think the Dead Milkmen are still together!

 

I had 300$ in graduation money, a dozen white roses from my mom, and a new set of oil paints I would (spoiler alert) never be unlazy enough to learn how to use properly. I had a tape from the coolest girl in the school: Mary’s Danish on one side, mix after the album ran out on the other. Push th’ Little Daisies by Ween. Sensitive Artist by King Missile. Nineties AF. I had candles and incense that had been too stinky to burn in mom’s house. I had a floral vintage suitcase filled with thrift store lingerie. I was ready for nothing.

 

The strongest emotion of living in Beach Aunt’s house was the feeling of WAITING FOR LETTERS TO COME. Come to think of it, that defined part of my California time too, and even now, a little bit.

 

There was a bus that carried workers from Beach Aunt’s town to Great Adventure, so she helped me to get a job there. Not ambitious enough to wait for a spot to open up in the old-time photo studio or something else nominally creative, I took the easiest job to get: Maintenance. They gave me Smurf-blue shorts, a bright yellow shirt, and a visor. Not exactly a look to look for love in.

(Serendipity side-note: The Mayor of Kittentown worked there that summer too! We never met, but I think I probably flirted with him on the ride he operated, which, after several enjoyable minutes of Googling, I’ve deduced was just prosaically called the Giant Drop. Love a big drop ride!)

 

Aside from some one-night concert friends I’d made at a Dead Milkmen show when I first got to the beach (“If you don’t have Ween, then we’re gonna raise a scene!” the band sang, paraphrasing an important plot point of Punk Rock Girl.) I was essentially friendless for the first month of the summer. On days off, I would either float on my own in the pretty blue waves or take the bus to the park to rise the roller coasters for free. It never got old!

 

During one particularly tedious shift clearing tables and sweeping up cigarette butts in the 1950’s-themed area of the park (They only had about 10 songs in rotation. One can only take so much “Leader of the Pack.”) I met My First Bitchy Gay Guy, my literal partner -in-crime for the rest of the summer. He would be the one to introduce me to the very most Nineties-dreamy guy in the universe, who would be my first sex-with-love around midnight between our two early-September birthdays. Oh swoon swoon swoon.