No, I didn't win. Nobody ever wins, I know that, but that knowledge did not prevent me from laying sleepless next to CH's perfectly inert sleeping body on Friday - thanks for being the best, most motionless sleepover companion ever, CH! - and daydreaming for long hours about what I would do with $120 million. I decided that I would take care of my parents and brother, of course, then set aside 98% of the income for future security and for cloning myself and piano/dance/fine arts lessons and midsection liposuction for the clones, but then with the discretionary 2% I would start some sort of farm or colony that produced just enough income through beets or alfalfa or chickens etc. to pay for property taxes, WiFi, instant ramen, and peanut M&Ms, the things one cannot grow. There would be plenty of land for my friends to build huts on when they wanted to abscond from their incomes and careers and join me in scratching out a safe little life of good hard labor and nice people. It would be good for snowy walks in cold weather and swimming holes in warm, and everyone would play a percussion instrument and smell like the first day of summer all the year round. I guess what I really want to do is start a community center? I kept myself sleepless thinking about this next to inert CH for maybe five hours, before finally shutting off my brain near 5 a.m.
What did I do? On Thursday, I flew into DC for my seasonal board meeting for the nonprofit board that I (accidentally, through no merit of my own) sit on. MM met me for drinks at the Fox and Hounds on P Street, and she told me how her boyfriend narrowly escaped death this year, after three heart surgeries, and she advised me on how to turn to friends for banter/wit when one's partner is stoic, Germanic, older, and perfectly content to not talk at all. The television alternated between images from the Tour de California ("Excuse me," MM said when her attention lapsed, "But I cannot resist men in spandex.") and stories about Octomom and the chimpanzee that had torn a Connecticut woman's face off. Friday I attended my meeting and learned what happens to organizations during economic depressions. (Furloughs.) The chair of the meeting thanked the outgoing student members for their contributions while everyone else, including the student members, grinned through that bald lie. My only contribution to this board thus far has been my boundless appetite for miniature croissants.
I took a nauseating Peter Pan bus up to Port Authority in time for dinner with CH and SL at a Vietnamese restaurant. We talked about how I would beat SL by six minutes at the next day's 5k race, CH's fondness for plain white rice, and the optimal number of traveling companions (one or three, since two just encourages 2-on-1 bullying). CH was leaving in the morning for a weekend getaway to the Baseball Hall of Fame, because she is just that awesome. SL encouraged me to eat more of my pho even as she pecked at her bird's meal, which I correctly saw as her effort to sabotage my race time. CH and I retired to CH's apartment to play several rounds of Rock Band. She played guitar at the "Expert" level; I played the drums on "Medium." She insisted I not bring my dirty clothes into her bed, so I changed into freshly laundered running clothes and then lay next to her inert sleeping body for five hours daydreaming about winning the lottery and feeling anxious about my bizarre and unfulfilling yet still romantic intercontinental flight of fantasy. The poster of George Washington that CH keeps on her bedroom wall (!) looked down upon me with disappointment.
I was such a wreck in the morning that I left a bunch of important possessions, including my glasses, on CH's nightstand. I worried that I would be too dizzy to demolish SL in the 5k.
My worries were unfounded, because I demolished SL in the 5k. It was 28 painful degrees on the walk over to Prospect Park, but at least we had the companionship of SL's hilarious round co-clerk, his custom designed running shoes, his tall deadpan boyfriend and his friendly Midwestern friends. At the starting line, as a cloud of dust obscured my already blurry form, I pointedly shouted over my shoulder to SL that the weak suffer what they must. And then I creamed her, finishing at 23:59, or a 7:44 mins/mile pace. Not too shabby, all things considered. SL finished only three minutes later. I didn't tell her this at the time (because CH had told us about the Obama Effect the night before, where visualizing your success actually helps you become successful, and I didn't want SL to be successful at beating me), but SL's speed was totally astounding given that she has been jogging only five months. I am secretly afraid of a rematch because I think she's going to win. But this time around, I demolished her, then stood waiting for her at the finish line and feeling my sweat evaporate into hypothermia while watching the crowds of trotters, now gnawing cold bagels, file by. SL and I were only reunited with the unexpected assistance of our most beloved clinic professor, who was there to cheer on her teenage daughter.
We ran from the chill back to SL’s Park Slop apartment. All I wanted to do was inspect every decoration, design decision, consumable object, storage system, secret space, and book that she kept in her tidy leasehold estate for one. How was the face soap chosen? Is the toothbrush always laid at that angle, on top of that thing? If only one half of a lemon is only used for the veggie roast, does the other half shrivel dry in the dry goods bowl before there is another chance to use it? What is the ugly framed beach scene doing hidden behind the bed? What holds the other curtain back, if there is only one blue sash? Why these photography books, and not others? What is in the “IMPORTANT” file? Does one memorize the capital of Burundi while on the toilet? There was not enough time for these questions to be answered. Why is it so gratifying to know a person down to her fillings? I fell asleep as a tidy tray of vegetables roasted in butter and honey in a tidy little toaster box.
In short, awesomeness. We decided to cut through Prospect Park to BFF’s apartment. She repeatedly tried to carry my duffle bag for me, but my grip on my butch identity is already so tenuous, given recent events in Bavaria, that I couldn’t bring myself to allow it. We walked to the Audubon Center, by the lake, which BFF said had recently spearheaded an effort to count all the birds in Prospect Park in one particular moment, employing hundreds of volunteers with binoculars. BFF speculated that the only way to get an accurate count of the birds would be to kill them all. In the Audubon Center, we bought hot beverages and walked around trying out all the kid's exhibits - the child-sized bat and mourning dove wings, the 15' "nest" in which BFF pretended to bite the head off a stuffed bat - generally preventing kids from trying them, went upstairs for a screening of the Planet Earth series but did not even stay long enough even for the DVD to load, and then left to sit (BFF) and accidentally sit in mud puddles (me) by the lake sipping our teas and ciders.
At BFF's apartment, fifteen minutes later, I was too much of a zombie to do anything except toast her wheat-and-spelt free rice flour bread five times in sequence (rice flour bread does not toast! and has the consistency of tamales!) while BFF sloughed off her Bikram grime in the bathtub and BFF's roommate compared people we knew in common who had attended Stanford between 1995 and 2000. (Answer: none.) I heated and ate six vegetarian chicken-like nuggets and then BFF served us heaped up lentils in tiny bowls the size of maybe dollhouse satellite dishes. BFF's roommate told us about a sale at Duane Reade on Valentine's Day peanut M&Ms, $.59 for a big bag. We could not resist this, so after lunch we went shopping. The first stop was the finest $.99 store in Windsor Terrace, where the floor-to-ceiling merchandise almost convinced me, in a consumerist tear, to buy a completely useless tube of cocoa butter. BFF saved me from this purchase, although I did buy the $1.99 set of dominos and almost bought the 18" pen that was shaped like Disney's Cinderella, a $3.99 wisely saved. At nearby Duane Reade, we bought M&Ms and earplugs. On impulse, I bought a brown sugar and almond face mask that later caused me to break out into cauliflower face everywhere it had touched. The M&Ms, being not $.59, and not peanut, and pink and white, were likewise disappointing, but BFF forced me to bring them to the bar later and they were devoured by the end of the night. BFF showed me all the weird and wonderful knick-knacks she had collected in her thirty years of being a crazy lady, but even miniature Japanese living room sets and plastic axes ("It's a LABRYS! What kind of a dyke are you?" she admonished) could not keep my eyes open. I napped.
At 6:30 it was time for BFF to go off to work and for me to walk the 2.2 miles to RK's house. I circled the word "gay" in BFF's dictionary and left her apartment. My walk through the park was chilly, brisk, dark, quiet, and laden with luggage, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I was late to meet RK. We walked over to Flatbush Barn with RK telling me how a cost-benefit analysis had led him to choose the cheaper, worse, and more enthusiastic banjo teacher over the more expensive, more professional one. RK is very analytical like this. We met IB, his girlfriend C, and SL at Flatbush Barn. C and IB were panicking because C's wallet was missing, and it looked like they were so anxious that they might not be able to join for dinner, but they soldiered on and ordered beers. SL and I enjoyed weighty burgers - eat more, SL, eat until you are too fat to outroll me! - but RK mistakenly ordered a $9 platter of birdseed and pecked unhappily and hungrily at it with his aquiline nose and handsome Groucho Marx mustache.
Some folks joined up with us after dinner. AO showed up and told amazing stories of moving to Colombia to do research for her dissertation and instantly becoming a "social node" in that country's community of hip young things. CY and AY came, and CY got deeply involved in a conversation about graphic novels with RK, and then told me how having a dishwasher and washer/dryer in the house has dramatically changed the way he lives. LL broke off the firm manacles for a few precious hours and brought his talent for talking about everything. I learned that TF and LL and SD are too immoral to pass their upcoming moral fitness evaluations, and then I lectured them senselessly about bar exam preparation techniques. It does not seem possible but TG's cheekbones were even higher and more stunning than I recalled them to be. BFF came around midnight and endeared herself immediately to my friends, pounded three glasses of white wines and took forty pictures of the inside of her pocket, the ceiling, or her index finger while attempting to take pictures of the pushup contest that RK won by a landslide. DR succeeded in doing only three, but excused her feeble attempt by saying that she had only done enough to sucker the rest of us into getting on our hands and toes on the filthy floor. C announced with delight that her wallet had been found and turned over to NYU. People came, and then they left, and then it was just me and RK and BFF in the bar taking photographs of RK's chest hair while BFF lolled her drunk head on his shoulder. I looked up and noticed suddenly that all the chairs had been stacked on the tables around us, and then it was time to go.
I stayed the night at RK's - I mean, of course I did, we are bed brothers, I bought the exact same bed that he bought - and in the morning I said goodbye even as RK half-dozed on. Then I caught the G to the 7 to the Q33 to LaGuardia to O'Hare to the Blue Line back to Division and Milwaukee, and walked the last four blocks to Cleaver Street.
Oh, I miss all you lovely brilliant weirdos, and wish you were all with me at all times. I have a nice new concrete-hard bed that fits at least forty. Please come, and come quick! That is all.
1 comment:
You are the weirdest of us all!
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