We sat at the kitchen table, which was a new woodstock where everyone’s belongings had gathered for music and mellowing. We moved recently. Everything had to find its place or be disposed of. Nick was removing a slice of pizza from the box, and I was imagining the hydrogenated fat just fighting to get into that slice; there must be a waiting list, you must have to know someone at the door.

He explained how he and Toby tell each other things and how they both knew I valued my “alone” time. Which means most of the time I’m alone, even when I’m not. It’s how you can tell the wildly egotistical from the domestically. The wild ones, we feel our personality as some oversized camel hair coat with anvils sewed in the lining, weighing us down like wet grief. Yet all the while we’re doing jumping jacks, trying to have the most spirit. To cope with the triviality we become it.

It sounds like a cheerleader syndrome. And at some point the water has to break. We’ll be like Jessie in Saved By The Bell, screaming out song lyrics and becoming the laughing stock of an entire generation.

Because we don’t have a problem with pills. We don’t have a problem with anything, except ourselves.

I used to be irritated when people would say things like,”God and I are on our second honeymoon.”  (Actually, no one’s ever said anything like that to me, but they’ve said similar things.) We’re usually irritated by things we don’t understand.

For the first time I am treating Him like a partner rather than a consultant.  I am realizing that faith is the gravy in a plastic plate without compartments – it should run into everything.  In general, I feel lighter than ever before.  He hasn’t changed.  But He has changed me.

At first the invitation was tempting: “Come dressed as your complete opposite!  Bring your favorite liquor!”  But the party approached, then passed.  I felt that if I went it would be like Patty Duke reprising her role in The Valley of the Dolls.  It was bad the first time around, why would it be any different the second?

What I mean is I’m just realizing (keep in mind my physical reflexes have always been faster than my mental ones) that this whole last year I’ve been playing my opposite, and badly. Why would I want to go through it again, at a party of all places?  For heaven’s sake, I may be an exhibitionist, but I’m not an entire gallery.

I came to New York and pretended I had no goals.  It was easier to fail.  Then I came to Wisconsin and realized I still had goals but had no clue of how to achieve them.  Then I came back to New York and gave them to Him.  And now He’s showing them to me, opening his fist one finger at a time, so I see just enough to move a little forward.

I was fantasizing about the lecherously organic delights in my two Whole Foods bags when I realized I’d missed my stop.  Half stumbling half running like Jessica Tandy in The Birds, I screamed something incomprehensible – “Shit!  I missed my – could – shit!” “Do you need to get off here?”  The driver helpfully offered. “Yes, could I?  Thank you, I was in a totally different world.” He gestured toward my neighborhood.  “I don’t blame you.”

I have to get out of Staten Island.

There is only a month or so left on the lease, but I am certain it will either be rewritten to include “until tenant(s) die(s)”, or we will be imprisoned in the landlady’s basement and kept in cages.  Now you know why Myron Breckinridge committed suicide on the ferry.  It’s just that suffocating.  One could say I’m just mad because I’m unemployed; that it has nothing to do with the harmless island.  But one wouldn’t live for long.
    
Pause for sigh.

The fact of the matter is, friends, I’m afraid.  I have so many stipulations, excuses, expectations for my future.  I completely trust Him, but I don’t trust myself.  It seems like I’m constantly looking for Bill Cosby and settling for Richard Pryor.  But what’s so bad about Richard Pryor?

It’s like today at Subway.  No, it really is, listen.  I had a $5 gift card from my grandparents that I planned on using for a 6″ classic B.M.T. on Italian Herbs and Cheese bread.  The woman at the counter ran it through five times, with no result.  I very easily could have said, “I’m not going to pay.  This is a valid card and just because you’re machine isn’t working doesn’t mean I have to hand over an Abe.”  But I didn’t.  I just paid for it, because it looked delicious and why cause problems?  Does this mean a lack of assertiveness, ambition, courage?  I don’t know.  Will this have any impact on my future?  I don’t know.
    
What I do know is this: God loves Richard Pryor just as much as Bill Cosby.
    
And I’m out of milk.

“I don’t have the patience to be a professor.  I wouldn’t want to grade papers, prepare for classes, etc.  I would rather become renowned and envied in a certain field and then guest lecture.”

“What would you be an expert in?”

“Androgynous glamour.”

“What?  What does that mean?”

“Unisex appeal.”

I will never understand how my mother manages to smile after one of these exchanges.  Or how my sister can listen to a revue of metaphors (“I feel like Carrot-top playing Hamlet…the anesthesia before the operation…the Easter bunny on call for every holiday”) and not slug me like any self-respecting Lucy would.  They both somehow balance being guardians and audience members.

One day transition will no longer be normalcy, I will stun the artistic and Christian community with style and excellence, and Molly Ringwald will finally get an Oscar.

Until then, it’s just another manic Monday.

At this point, it qualifies as a two night stand.  Both of them on Sunday, incidentally – one of them Easter Sunday.  Oh yes, I’ve still got the chastity belt – they just jiggled the lock (for the less coquettish: shirts on, over the underwear, no orgasms).

But does any of this change the fact that this is not me?  That the only reason I maintain the semi-pure virginal standard (according to my statements) is because of my “asexual mystique”?  That I “do not desire intercourse with either gender”?  Of course these are included for variety, but shouldn’t the first be “because God’s protecting me, and I don’t want to defy that protection”?  Didn’t I, I don’t know, rather do that this evening?

“It’s like it wasn’t even me.  It was a cinematic me.”

I said this a little while afterward, aware of its inaccuracy.  It’s much more like a TV character based on a movie character – not the same actor, not as good.  Pointless, in fact.

Let it be known that I am an ass.  Or at least slightly bourgeois.

For the past six months, I have been promoted, listless and ungrateful.  I have devoted great sums of money towards the appearance of success, and have created conflict for the illusion of progress.  I do ninety-five sit-ups a night now.  I squeeze the miniscule amount of fat together, hoping that one day I will weigh nothing, I will be a mannequin in the window of Bloomingdale’s, observed and without potential.  I read book after book, attend every essential event, amuse anyone who will stand still long enough.  It is my own Dostoyevskian underground, populated with apathy, rage and embarrassment.  Perhaps I am a little godless, I do not know. 

I think I am just stirring from the capitalistic catnap, and realizing I have done so little of what I came here to do the only logical response is to sit alone in a room with a bottle of vodka listening to a Scott Joplin record until I can’t see, or hear, or both.

Ready…set…wallow!

Last night I:

Ate my first seafood ravioli.

Escorted a Belle/’80s prom queen hybrid named Megan to a dance at the New School.

Wore a turqoise short-sleeved sweater, white Givenchy coat, flare jeans, white velcro shoes and white rhinestone sunglasses.

Introduced myself to everyone as a “the male prop.”

Drank an undisclosed amount of wine.

Flirted with a grimy green puppet that was identified by its owner as “my inner self.”

Danced so fiendishly that Megan said, “Stop it!  You’re too good!  Let me catch up!”

Hashed out organized religion with a disillusioned Jew.

Dipped a tortilla chip in the hot salsa three times because I couldn’t remember which was which.

Peed on the corner of Benziger and Sherman Aves. because I just couldn’t wait five minutes until I got home.

Woke up at 4:30 am to find my stereo remote in the middle of the floor with the batteries removed and my beeping alarm clock under a pile of ten pillows.

Sweet Fridays are made of this.

The champagne lumberjacks were at it again. Hacking my poor brain like a redwood. I mean it was righteously splitting, not enough so I could star on one of those migraine commercials, but close enough. Naturally it was all the waitress’s fault – I wouldn’t even finish a glass and she’d appear, fill it to brimming, and tango back into the kitchen.

I cut the muffins in misdirected revenge and stared at Megan, who was half-smiling, like she had just sneaked into a midnight showing of The Muppet Movie on a school night. “I like this place,” she said. I nodded, mentioning that members of the waitstaff are always introducing themselves because they’ve seen me here so often and want to know who I am (in actuality it happened once, but how many times has it happened to you?) She was either impressed or doing a good impression of it. We slaughtered the small talk and closed in on my favorite conversational prey: dysfunctional relationships, with a side of sexual deviancy.

I blamed it all on Nabokov, citing both of my quasi-sexual experiences with a forty-two year old and an eighteen-year-old as evidence. She laughed – the way someone laughs when they haven’t read Nabokov and don’t understand just how devastating it can all be – but I didn’t mind. It felt like we were David Niven and Kim Hunter in the opening scene of A Matter of Life and Death – when she’s on the radio with him as his plane is going down and they experience this gorgeously spontaneous connection. By the time we were done she’d massacred the muffins and I’d had even more bubbly thanks to that damned dancing waitress. I realized I’d reached “the moment” of the conversation when I either mystify the participant with glamorous ambiguity or intrigue them with contradictory complexity. I remember picking a tactic, then saying something altogether different. It went something like this:

“My pelvis wants a man and my mind wants a woman.”

Her gaze was fixed, as if through intensity she could lift the hood of my head and see if the oil needed changing or if the transmission was toast.

Then she said: “Really.” just like that, just like you’re thinking she did, because there’s only one way to say really after a comment like that. I didn’t panic for a moment.

“Yes,” I said, “and I know I’m right, because just now, I want you in the worst way. I mean, in the way that I can.”

She put a different smile on now. It said, “you’re lucky you’re a Christian boy with androgyny to spare otherwise I might be offended.” Even though we both knew she couldn’t be offended, or embarrassed, for that matter.

“That’s fairly straightforward,” she said unironically.

I found myself agreeing with her.

I was something of a drug lord as I stuffed $140 in twenties in the small blank envelope.  Of course, drug lords don’t refer to themselves as drug lords, and I wasn’t passing it through a car window in a dodgy neighborhood, so I probably should have italicized something just then.  But the sentence has been written and I don’t believe in editing except in excess, so enough.

I stuffed it in.  And addressed the envelope Mosaic Manhattan Church P.O. Box 3485 New York, NY 10008-3485.

This is a way that I trust and test God.  Will the envelope reach the church?  Will someone steal the money?  How will I know if they received it?  How will God direct this envelope’s journey?  I don’t know, I won’t know, I don’t know.  Fuck it makes me feel good.  Toes-in-the-sand-margarita-in-my-hand good.

I hope you love the same God I do.  He created my petty but important preferences (example: no to Miracle Whip, yes to Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise). Or maybe he created me important and I created me petty.

It feels perfect.

My emotions are the consistency of pulled pork without the benefit of barbeque sauce.  A little dry?  Naturally.  Flavorless?  That goes without saying.

The metaphor police should have arrested me ages ago.

It feels like it will take weeks before I’ve left this weekend.  I hopped on a plane, struggled into a suit, stumbled into a funeral service, then reversed and ended up back where I started, all in three days.  Herein lies the lesson: you can’t treat grief like a quickie in a public restroom; it’s a prolonged and painful affair.  I am wide awake, but I have such a restless exhaustion that I’m not content moving or staying.  “I’m so sorry about your grandfather,” the president of the company saccharinely sympathized over the phone Sunday.  “Oh!  You know!  These things are inevitable,” I intoned like a mezzo-soprano on uppers.  “Were you close?”  He probed, checking off my #1 pet peeve of post-death queries.  I would not be thrown.  “Well, I felt closer to their basement, truthfully, because I cleaned it out.”

That must be true, because with every mention of their names, two images come to mind: the ’50’s lounge museum that was their basement and their rigid, makeup-smeared wax figure corpses straight from a Vincent Price film (and, thanks to the immortal remake, Paris Hilton pops to mind as well).  In actuality, my grandfather and I communicated through smiles, chuckles and handshakes.  Of the three best conversations I had with my grandmother, she was only coherent in one (the other two she was drunk and delirious with medication – not at the same time, mind).  And yet I’m as empty as a carved pumpkin when I think about them.

But none of that explains the way I felt at the reception, when everyone had an endless stream of questions about “my adventures in New York.”  Despite being visibly irritated at their verbal poking and prodding, on they went.  So, in between plates and plates of roast beef, salad, rolls and glasses of Pinot Noir (nasty) I stacked up the last six months of my life and declared it the new centerpiece of the table.  I felt really terrible then, because it just was not sufficient, as a life or as a centerpiece.

That night, as my sister, father and I went to Pick’n’Save for Peanut Butter Cup ice cream, I stomped on myself with a newfound furor.  “Did you see their faces?  They were severely disappointed and blatantly disapproving.  I suppose I am a failure.  I suppose I am.”  They did their best to temporarily console me, considering we were just trying to get ice cream, for god’s sake, but the whole thing really threw me off – and I didn’t want to get on again – up until early this afternoon.  My father, who is seriously the most complete version of God in man I have ever seen, sent me this:

It is so tempting to think that things going on in our lives are about us, and undoubtedly, some are. But probably less than we think and their significance or “purpose” is misinterpreted or misunderstood…In my opinion, you are doing exactly what God wants you to do… at this time. Your unrest should be examined to see if it is ego, envy or something else negative. If it is, shake it off and go forward to do what God has given you to do today. If you are being compelled to make a change or to do something to move toward change of some kind, for the right reason, then take the next step or look at alternative steps or read something related or talk to your old and wise father whose ramblings have some truth mixed with pointless and irrelevant stories. But be careful not to try to please people.

You are an incredible inspiration to so many just being who you are and letting God use you. He will never leave you, nor forsake you and will give you what you need to get you through those challenging times. Control what you can, examine your motives. Mother Theresa changed the world by picking up dying people from the streets of Calcutta. You can change the world by walking dogs if… thats what God has given you to do.

Your forever fan and ardent admirer,
dad