Two icy cold hands conducting the way--it's the Eskimo blood in my veins
Warm thoughts for cold nights, Part II:
The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side was one of those paradoxically reckless neurotics--a substance-abusing hypochondriac who'd pop Vitamin C tablets after spending a night snorting heroin with his loathsome Dee Dee Ramone-ish crony (who had what TBWATIMS once called "the worst hair in the East Village"). Since virtually everything else in his first published novel is autobiography veiled gossamer-thin, I gather he gives himself enemas to detox the mornings after tooth-gnashing benders with the likes of Courtney Love or the Strokes. He'd venture down to Alphabet City to cop while it was still a drug-addled war zone and not an enclave of chichi bistros and boutiques, yet was reluctant to wear his glasses on the streets of New York for fear that they would make him "look too bookish" and make him "a target" (disregarding the fact that the black leather-blazer'd Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side is close to 6'2" and was at that time a bit underweight for his seemingly monstrous frame, with linebacker shoulders over gangly inked-up arms; I doubt he said "Milquetoast" to your average perp).
In line with these other idiosyncrasies, he never seemed to be wearing a hat and coat at the same time. The last time I bumped into him outside his old Brooklyn apartment, he was running errands in a woolen ski cap and a Morrisseyesque semi-sheer glittery shirt unbuttoned to reveal a partial thicket of chest hair. It was a mid-afternoon in early March.
And back in December of 1995, he only had this thin brown thriftstore topcoat as protection from what was already proving to be a harsh winter. It was so decrepit that I don't think it even had one button left. I was in a similar predicament--that year I wore a beautiful faux fur vintage coat in velvety midnight blue with a big fluffy grey collar and cuffs that cost only $10 at the Salvation Army (within my means, since I was living on $5.50 an hour at the time). The downside was that it was comically too big for me and also very thin, so I was forced to trudge through the windchill wrapping the coat tightly around myself with one hand & bundling the collar under my throat with the other. I felt glamorous in a Julie-Christie-from-Dr. Zhivago kind of way when I wore it. But unlike The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side, I at least had other armaments from the cold; namely the ratty grey muffler my mother crocheted when I was in kindergarten. It was longer than me when she first made it.
One night while he and I were still operating under the brief delusion of happiness, we threw back a few rounds at our favourite haunt, the sordid Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Marks Place. The Holiday was the site of our dubious first date and many more nights of self-consciously bohemian romantic torment, where you could get blackout-drunk on $2.25 vodka grapefruits sullenly poured by its wizened and perpetually sloshed Germanic proprietor (whose activities in Europe circa 1942 were rumoured to be highly suspect) as you sat on duct-taped vinyl booth seats and gazed woozily at the paltry string of Christmas lights over the bar that served as the sole thematic item in the ironically-named but authentic dive, while The Cure's "A Night Like This" enveloped you in its epic swirl.
[Coincidentally I took the HOT GEEK! there the night we met, after I retrieved his errant glove from the tiki bar's photo booth floor, and in return got to stroll hand-in-hand with him through the East Village like the enviable teens smugly sauntering down the high school halls that we never were. I hadn't set foot in the bar in nearly ten years, and although everything else in the place appeared to be fossilized, my gin & tonic had gone up to an exorbitant $4.00. But I digress...]
Afterward, I walked The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side to the train station at Astor Place. He was technically homeless at that point [a long story involving a girl who was pissed at him, of course] and sleeping at his mother's house on Long Island. Despite his vagrancy, he only stayed at my place a few times. I was a somewhat more regular visitor at the Oedipally adorned hovel [see "Peep-Hole" Part 3] he moved into shortly thereafter; even though my apartment was far more, uh, furnished and warm and I had a bedroom with an actual door, beggars CAN be choosers--or in his case, chauvinistic control freaks--sometimes. Also, despite his affinity for cats he had severe allergies, and my big ol' dearly departed black & white beast made him violently ill. Maybe Jelly was something of a feline oracle, impelling him to stay away. Oh, would that I have paid heed....
He fixed his characteristically mournful, unflinching gaze on me as we stood at Cooper Square. It was past eleven and snowing. I was at that elusive point of tipsiness when one is just feeling emboldened and amorous and alive but not likely to do or say anything regrettable. The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side and I embraced goodbye, and just before turning away he shivered and clutched his threadbare coat around himself. Impulsively I unwound my old grey scarf and wrapped it around his neck, pulling him toward me with its fraying tasseled ends until our lips met. After that dizzying moment with the flurries falling all around us, I stood on tiptoe and lowered his big, bare head in my hands and I kissed his ears, which were red and cold to the touch. We parted breathlessly and he ran down the subway steps but I lingered, feeling too intoxicated to move.
Epilogue: Sorry to break the reverie, but....About a month later The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side gave me The Talk about how he was "too damaged" and I was "too good for him" (he'd turn around and tell people the exact opposite later, but that's another story), etc., and he returned the scarf despite my insistence that he keep it. I didn't want any reminders of that beautiful night--probably one of the most cinematic moments of my life up to now--so I gave it to a homeless person asleep on the subway steps the following day.
The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side was one of those paradoxically reckless neurotics--a substance-abusing hypochondriac who'd pop Vitamin C tablets after spending a night snorting heroin with his loathsome Dee Dee Ramone-ish crony (who had what TBWATIMS once called "the worst hair in the East Village"). Since virtually everything else in his first published novel is autobiography veiled gossamer-thin, I gather he gives himself enemas to detox the mornings after tooth-gnashing benders with the likes of Courtney Love or the Strokes. He'd venture down to Alphabet City to cop while it was still a drug-addled war zone and not an enclave of chichi bistros and boutiques, yet was reluctant to wear his glasses on the streets of New York for fear that they would make him "look too bookish" and make him "a target" (disregarding the fact that the black leather-blazer'd Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side is close to 6'2" and was at that time a bit underweight for his seemingly monstrous frame, with linebacker shoulders over gangly inked-up arms; I doubt he said "Milquetoast" to your average perp).
In line with these other idiosyncrasies, he never seemed to be wearing a hat and coat at the same time. The last time I bumped into him outside his old Brooklyn apartment, he was running errands in a woolen ski cap and a Morrisseyesque semi-sheer glittery shirt unbuttoned to reveal a partial thicket of chest hair. It was a mid-afternoon in early March.
And back in December of 1995, he only had this thin brown thriftstore topcoat as protection from what was already proving to be a harsh winter. It was so decrepit that I don't think it even had one button left. I was in a similar predicament--that year I wore a beautiful faux fur vintage coat in velvety midnight blue with a big fluffy grey collar and cuffs that cost only $10 at the Salvation Army (within my means, since I was living on $5.50 an hour at the time). The downside was that it was comically too big for me and also very thin, so I was forced to trudge through the windchill wrapping the coat tightly around myself with one hand & bundling the collar under my throat with the other. I felt glamorous in a Julie-Christie-from-Dr. Zhivago kind of way when I wore it. But unlike The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side, I at least had other armaments from the cold; namely the ratty grey muffler my mother crocheted when I was in kindergarten. It was longer than me when she first made it.
One night while he and I were still operating under the brief delusion of happiness, we threw back a few rounds at our favourite haunt, the sordid Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Marks Place. The Holiday was the site of our dubious first date and many more nights of self-consciously bohemian romantic torment, where you could get blackout-drunk on $2.25 vodka grapefruits sullenly poured by its wizened and perpetually sloshed Germanic proprietor (whose activities in Europe circa 1942 were rumoured to be highly suspect) as you sat on duct-taped vinyl booth seats and gazed woozily at the paltry string of Christmas lights over the bar that served as the sole thematic item in the ironically-named but authentic dive, while The Cure's "A Night Like This" enveloped you in its epic swirl.
[Coincidentally I took the HOT GEEK! there the night we met, after I retrieved his errant glove from the tiki bar's photo booth floor, and in return got to stroll hand-in-hand with him through the East Village like the enviable teens smugly sauntering down the high school halls that we never were. I hadn't set foot in the bar in nearly ten years, and although everything else in the place appeared to be fossilized, my gin & tonic had gone up to an exorbitant $4.00. But I digress...]
Afterward, I walked The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side to the train station at Astor Place. He was technically homeless at that point [a long story involving a girl who was pissed at him, of course] and sleeping at his mother's house on Long Island. Despite his vagrancy, he only stayed at my place a few times. I was a somewhat more regular visitor at the Oedipally adorned hovel [see "Peep-Hole" Part 3] he moved into shortly thereafter; even though my apartment was far more, uh, furnished and warm and I had a bedroom with an actual door, beggars CAN be choosers--or in his case, chauvinistic control freaks--sometimes. Also, despite his affinity for cats he had severe allergies, and my big ol' dearly departed black & white beast made him violently ill. Maybe Jelly was something of a feline oracle, impelling him to stay away. Oh, would that I have paid heed....
He fixed his characteristically mournful, unflinching gaze on me as we stood at Cooper Square. It was past eleven and snowing. I was at that elusive point of tipsiness when one is just feeling emboldened and amorous and alive but not likely to do or say anything regrettable. The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side and I embraced goodbye, and just before turning away he shivered and clutched his threadbare coat around himself. Impulsively I unwound my old grey scarf and wrapped it around his neck, pulling him toward me with its fraying tasseled ends until our lips met. After that dizzying moment with the flurries falling all around us, I stood on tiptoe and lowered his big, bare head in my hands and I kissed his ears, which were red and cold to the touch. We parted breathlessly and he ran down the subway steps but I lingered, feeling too intoxicated to move.
Epilogue: Sorry to break the reverie, but....About a month later The Boy Who's a Thorn In My Side gave me The Talk about how he was "too damaged" and I was "too good for him" (he'd turn around and tell people the exact opposite later, but that's another story), etc., and he returned the scarf despite my insistence that he keep it. I didn't want any reminders of that beautiful night--probably one of the most cinematic moments of my life up to now--so I gave it to a homeless person asleep on the subway steps the following day.