86: syndrome
When I am twenty-three, I would prefer to spend my birthday alone, but Rocky and his mate won't hear of it. I want to drink alone in my apartment, and make art or write stories, but Rocky is convinced that I need to be introduced to a larger circle of friends, namely his. I've seen them and they don't amount to much, but I don't judge him for it: Loneliness is the first thing I lost, I say to myself. He shouldn't be held to that standard. But there's a transitive judgment in my head that says if I am his friend, and they are his friends, a terrible miscalculation must have been made at some point, because that makes me less.
The night is a disaster. Not for any real reason, not that we're not all very friendly and they don't bring wonderful gifts for the man none of them have met. I'm touched, truly, and more than a little encouraged to see the brighter parts of their lives, their minds. Rocky's relief is a palpable thing, and I see myself through his eyes for a moment: Cerebral, lonely, eccentric. All the things I've been trying not to be. It puts a fear in my heart that, hours into the night, is given a face and a name:
A friend of Rocky's ten years our senior, bleached streaks in his hair, long eyelashes and tight jeans, a gap in the teeth and an unmistakable lilt hovering over his grammatical errors and southern drawl, as he drops names and leers unequivocally. Jaime. I feel sacrificed to some kind of terrible god.
We spend the evening in stilted conversation -- he's brought me yet another copy of This Side Of Paradise, my favorite book, which awkwardly joins the other three copies brought to the party -- about Jaime's likes (big guys, Broadway musicals), dislikes (mean people, racism), favorite movies (oh, anything with Bette Davis is fine by him, not that he can name more than three of her movies), favorite books (some fat British woman has written a diary about being a fat British woman that is just hilarious), favorite TV shows.
TV shows. When I am twenty-three, even admitting to me that you own a television is like saying you prefer a front-row seat at cockfights: Less distasteful than it is bewildering.
I try to come up with a better list of authors, people he might know, but suddenly I panic and can only think of the Latino authors that line one shelf when I am twenty-three: Neruda, Marquez, Allende. Is Calvino safe? Lots of people who think they're educated love him, including myself, and it's possible somebody gave him a copy of that one time. I think he's Italian, but that could just be because of his name, and anyway, I know I read other authors that won't immediately label me as some kind of pandering racist liberal.
Nothing. All I can see is the cover of my favorite book of the week: The Declension Of Pleasure Through Time, by Ernesto Puente, which is so new and so lauded I'm sure nobody in this town has ever heard of it, so it's back to kiddie cartoons and what I can remember from last fall's TV billboard ads.
We get about ten minutes out of Watcher In The Woods, which is where his Bette Davis obsession and mine intersect, before moving on to the music of Madonna. Time for the strange faces aimed at Rocky, who has been watching this bloodbath go down like a proud father at his son's first Little League game. Have I honestly made such an ass of myself that he thinks I can't get a date? I don't want a date, I want a friend: Him. And I already have him. I don't want more, I just want better.
Perhaps the girlfriend is a symptom of a deeper syndrome, then. Maybe he just thinks you're supposed to date people, and that this "dating" means something more than what we do, together, plus sex. Maybe it's about showing people what you're capable of getting: Maybe he's one of those guys (which, when I'm thirty, I will finally admit is all guys), I don't know, but for this bullshit I did not sign up.
It's not, I think, as though I wanted anything in particular to happen with this party. I didn't even want the fucking party. I wanted an hour alone with my friend Rocky. I wanted a bottle of tequila, to turn twenty-three with Rocky, getting bleary and then weird and then morose and then declaratively passionate about each other, and then for him to do what boys always do, and neither of us could be blamed in the morning. But that was an outside, outside possibility and certainly not my main aim. My main aim is to get out alive.
Which I now can't do, because he's staring at me, and making it clear that I have to be nice to this chucker, because he's Rocky's friend. Specifically Rocky's one, like, gay friend. So now it's everybody's birthday but mine, and the gift is my soul. And the only proper punishment I can think of -- I'm like this when I'm twenty-three, every time -- is to break my rule about not jerking off to Rocky ASAP. That'll show him, I think blearily, and laugh at myself.
But there was something nice that... Right, the girlfriend-as-disease. We all have to fit into our little boxes, don't we Rocky? Everybody hooked up and laid down safe at night. Trapped, caged, in some kind of rat experiment to see how long it takes to gnaw each other apart. Because that's safer than actually wanting things. Or being things. What's the point of clearing the decks, if you're not going to do something remarkable with all that space? You might as well die. Therefore, Rocky wants me to die. Just like him.
And the worst part is that he'd be destroyed to find out how upset I am by all of this, and oh, wouldn't he like to assume that it's because I'm secretly in love with him, dying on the vine, unable to stomach any male companionship but his. And there's no way around that mistaken assumption, since having taken sex off the table I can't account to him all the creepy, random sex I've been having since we met, with all kinds of guys. Which would just push him the other way, which is also unacceptable, which is why I don't do it. But it would really come in handy this time, to say: I'm covered, there are men I like more than you, and we do the most terrible things. And nobody has to know!
Fucking Jaime, I think. And then: Ah! Eureka, because the key to the treasure is the treasure, I think, so I take Jaime home and fuck him. It's only fair.
Happy birthday to me.