the Frenemy is up to his old tricks – literally. While he is no longer buying things without telling me by way of my eBay account, a package came to my father’s house just the other day. Without telling me, and even though he has a post office box, Steven shipped his most recent eBay find to my front porch. And what was it? A very large, very short, black leather mini-skirt – from Old Navy. Clearly, the self-proclaimed “transexite” is ready to ride again.
Given that months ago, in an attempt to bury his slutty female alter-ego, he deposited the wig, the dresses, the size 12 heels and innumerable giant pairs of panties in my antique armoire, it somehow only seems fitting that additional accoutrement wind up at my house as well.
As usual, the Frenemy, proved to be the very picture of social (dis)grace. It started – as things so often do among the people I know – with drinks at a bar, Pegasus, I believe. Steven met up with an old friend, we shall call him “Piggy,” Piggy’s boyfriend, and new friends of theirs for a social evening. Apparently, the new couple were not exactly evenly matched – one being a 10 and the other somewhere around 6 ½ - and this fact prompted the Frenemy to comment, rather jealously – to the 6 ½, of course, “Wow … you’re really lucky to have him.” The offended 6 ½ asked him to repeat what he said, to clarify. Surely, no one would be so rude as to voice such a thing – although, in truth, the 6 ½ probably thinks this very thing himself on a regular basis. Steven repeated it, and the guy got upset. He went to Piggy, the Frenemy’s oldest (and dearest) friend, and Piggy then confronted the Frenemy on the subject of his frequent and recurring rudeness.
When the Frenemy called me to seek my opinion, I reminded him that some things are better left unsaid. I would have gone on to make a much bigger stink of it, but frankly – who cares? Steven was – at one point, for quite some time – my everyday. We spoke 10 or more times a day. We ran errands together groceries, laundry, the whole bit. I was thinking to myself that I did not recall when the shift occurred, when it was I reached the point where his very manner of speaking started leaving me cold, but that’s not true at all. I recall exactly.
It was some years ago, when the Frenemy wound up dating and (within 2 weeks) moving in with, the guy I was dating - Daniel. I am to this day sickened by the phrase both he and Daniel threw my way as some form of justification, “The heart knows no reason.” We started speaking again – after a year or two of comfortable silence – and I still hear the echo of that betrayal – and that wretched aphorism – in his voice in every call.
It is comforting – if you find comfort in such things – that some things never really change. And then, of course, some things do. the guy I’m seeing and I are no longer seeing each other … in any sense of the word. I ran into him yesterday when he stopped by Web House, which has for some time been the only way I ever saw him. That I had not been to Web in weeks accounted for the distance – at least the physical distance. He greeted me easily; we shared a tacit kiss, and there was a brief semblance of the old ‘us.’ It was short-lived. At some point in the course of the three or four drinks I served him while I was briefly tending bar, he opened up about his new ‘us.’
I should preface what I am about to say by noting that among the things not changed or changing is my uncanny ability to not only choose guys who have no interest in me, but who also unfortunately often become quite fond of each other. Thus, I have been damned on many, many, many occasions to standing on the side of the dance floor (or bath-house bunk bed, or my own bedroom – in one particularly unpleasant instance) watching while two (or more) of the men I’ve wanted suddenly very much want each other. It was one thing when Sean and Ova the Top threw me out of my own bed so that they could continue, uninterrupted, a marathon oral sex weekend. It was something else entirely when I learned yesterday that the guy I’m seeing is now involved with the guy I intended to go for next.
That the guy is openly crazy, a brilliant artist, well-endowed to apparently legendary proportions, and resembles Vincent Perez makes him endlessly desirable, at least in the sense that we all want the mysterious, artsy guy at one point or another. And he wants us all – the artsy guy in this case is bisexual, and the guy I’m seeing lamented that as he freely discussed his new love, and I poured another cocktail.
And sometimes things change and then go back from whence they came. the Straight Boyfriend returned to Web. He stormed out – dramatically – pulling his paintings off the wall and, defeated, spoke of absconding to Europe, away from the drama and trouble, the stress and difficulty. He may still go to Europe, but for now he is tending bar at my once and future favorite hipster haven.
the Crazy Russian is back as well. When last I heard, he was barred from entering his own bar, but he was there in all of his glory, still beleaguered – plagued by the dual dramas of his lover and his bad habit(s). He seems to have both in some sort of balance these days. the Mad Man kvetches but also manages to look the other way at all the right times.
It so often seems that the lies we tell ourselves are the only thing keeping so many of us at all sane.
The lies … and the laughter.
The other day, when the Czarina began a phone call by saying, “I was in the bedroom, and I heard my husband say ‘I need you downstairs … and bring the gun …’ ” I was halfway out the door before the next word.
the Czarina and the Great Prince, while not especially dramatic themselves, do tend to have occasional drama. And when a good Texas man calls for his gun, somethin’ is up. Or rather down. the Czarina Warrenina grabbed the .22 by the bedside table and descended the formal staircase loading a rifle. She met her husband on the back patio where he, a cigarette held in his lips and smoke curling near his eyes, put down his cocktail, picked up the gun, took aim, and fired. He fired again. And then again.
A ‘coon fell gracelessly (and dead) from a mile high Oak – landing not with a thud but a smash – annihilating a heavy, clay pot. Many amusing (and horrid) jokes were made about shooting a ‘coon – including having to clarify, in the second or third retelling of the tall tale, that the Great Prince shot a ‘coon, and no it was not the black guy next door.
The royals – the Czarina Warrenina Joskes (Empress of all the Russias, Queen of the Steppes, Keeper of the Faith, a Living and Breathing Deity who Has Deigned to Walk Among Us to Bring Us Grace and Beauty), the Great Prince, their tenant – the Viscount of the Car-port, and the Stable Boy – have been busy. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, the Czarina and her husband operate a landscaping company, a home repairs company, auto sales, auto repair, a garden planning and maintenance business, a tax prep business, bookkeeping, and they provide maintenance and management service to a number of duplexes and quad-plexes in and around the gayborhood. She and I also have a few money-making schemes in mind – schemes designed to extricate me from the cruel world of temp work, cubicles, and fluorescent lights.
While my weekends are oft spent relaxing at the Winter Palace, luxuriating in the hot tub and smoking meat on the bathtub sized pit in the backyard, I did not visit the palace this weekend.
Always on the cutting edge of fashion and disease trends, I operated under the impression this weekend that I contracted Swine Flu. It may have been the fever. Or the sweating. The cold sweats. The stomach aches. The shaking. And let’s not even get into how I finished a book – the last 50 pages of a book, mind you – while perched on the toilet. I am still having trouble speaking – my throat sufficiently sore that my already quiet voice has just today reached a level above whisper. I have consumed no solid food in three days, and only today actually feel what resembles hunger. I used the box of Kleenex in my cubicle and the boxes in three cubicles nearby.
In short, I am illin’. Blinding poverty prevents me from staying home to sleep this away, and while I am not exactly looking for a disease, it is occasionally nice to be in exclusive clubs … and a little pampering wouldn’t be so bad either.
It occurs to me that for better or worse, the light in my romantic darkness lies within the bird-like chest of an 18 year old high school senior, a mega-twink, who adores me … but is taken … and who lives in Massachusetts. The fabulous fairy is 6’4,” has a throaty voice not unlike Lauren Bacall’s and though he refuses to smell like patchouli, skips home-room and stays up past his bed-time to call me and smoke a blunt. Our conversations – peppered as they tend to be with cooing and adoration – happen most often while he is holding his breath.
Some men do tend to inspire that. the Czarina once said, of the Great Prince, “when he smiles, it lights up my whole world …” I can only hope – as I have, admittedly, always hoped – that one of these odd, busy days, in the midst of all my drama and problems, that a little light will stumble into my world.
Mark
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