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.

 

 

Fell in Like with The Drummer, Part Five: Still Holding Hands

(Still on the same hike, sorry everything takes 5,000 years for me to type through!)

 

“Your hand is tiny.” He said.

 

(Ha. Nothing about me is tiny, but he made me feel precious.)

 

“You’ve got REALLY nice hands,” I sighed, I’ll bet you could really hit somebody! In the good way, I mean!”

 

He deftly steered the conversation away from spanking and back onto all things pop culture. He said Howard Stern was one of his favorite podcasts and I tried not to give up on him just like that. Readers, can Howard Stern please just be a dealbreaker? I really hate to see the world in terms of dealbreakers, but how could the Drummer spend that much time with misogyny and contempt in his ears and still want anything to do with me? Which I guess he didn’t, eventually.

 

Anyway, aside from the Stern disappointment, which isn’t nothing, it was so, SO lovely talking to someone my age who was also (SWOON) an artist. Having the same reference points can make a guy feel like he’s the boyfriend for every stage of life, past and present. We were talking about how much we both love Rothko paintings and I said “Yeah, take that, Kurt Vonnegut” and he knew I was shorthanding to Bluebeard, kind of a Vonnegut deep cut if you ask me!

 

(I didn’t talk about that time Kurt Vonnegut was really awful to Jennifer Weiner, but I wanted to. Look it up, it’s vile.)

 

He shared the same uber-Nineties affinity for J.R. Bob Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius (I watched a documentary about them recently and it looked like the same soulless meme nihilism that got Trump elected. But also, Slacker is my favorite movie so who knows.) as the fiancée I had when I was twenty, with whom The Drummer shared a first name. “Yeah, that was me!” He laughed. I’m him!”

 

In some ways, talking with The Drummer made me feel like I had a place in the world, like I just fit. Almost to the car, we talked about how amazing Jane’s Addition are and it was the sensation of unlocking a puzzle box: Yes. This. Him.

 

When we got to my little red car and hugged goodbye, he took off his mask, I think to kiss me. I deftly hugged my face to his chest instead and joked about how he could save up some (many) makeout IOUs. With his mask back on, he looked a little bashful and said “I don’t really know how to end things,” but he was perfect and glowing when he brought his fingers to his masked lips and blew a kiss. So cute. So seemingly full of promise.