Only kind of love is stone blind love.
So I lied.
Once I had this insane love for the boy I call The Artist Formerly Known As The Love of my Life. (Former for short). He was this beautiful thing, androgynous with long, thin fingers and the softest voice. Also, he smelled like vanilla and wood chips, just naturally. I'd known him since we were 13 and he was a foster kid. Back then he smelled like cigarettes and foster home.
After I kicked my husband out of the house, he started coming around and staying late. We'd lie on the floor and talk about movies and philosophy and poetry and listen to music. He wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a writer. We both loved David Lynch. That's pretty much all you need to know to understand what I was like back then, huh?
Three years earlier, when I was 18 we'd had a tiny short thing where we slept together on Water Street. He'd taken me on a walk by the river to tell me that he didn't want to be with me, and I was strangely devastated. Later that night I was invited to dinner at a couple's house, but when I arrived the wife was absent. Husband started making dinner and then disappeared for a moment. He came out of the bedroom naked and I ran out of the house terrified, but still stuttering out a polite excuse. I felt like the world was full of predators, and only boys from school were safe. I started dating my ex-husband, a boy from the same foster home, a couple weeks later. We got married in three months.
But now it was like the beautiful, sweet boy came back to me. We weren't together, he was just there for months. Always. Eventually he became my roommate, and after that we slept together every night in his room after the baby finally fell asleep. I was completely in love with him. The dizzy kind with the vertigo feeling and the bad poetry. (He loved my bad poetry - how could he not? It was all about him.)
We agreed that being together was a secret, no need to torture the ex-husband who still came around asking if he could just be in the same room with me while I slept. And people would not understand. It all seemed reasonable.
A year later we were still sleeping together, still spending all of our time together, and no one knew. It was funny. People thought he was far too beautiful for a girl like me, so they never questioned. Women constantly asked me to introduce them, invite them over, talk them up to him. I watched several friends of mine flat out proposition him in front of me. My best friend didn't even know. She thought I was just hopeless over a boy I could never have.
One weekend we drove down to Portland to visit J., The Former's best friend since childhood and one of my favorite people on the planet. When we got there, The Former slept on the couch and stayed about 3 feet from me at all times. This is how I realized that there was not one person on earth he was willing to have know about me. But he loved me.
The Former is the source of my passion for Tom Waits, and I still can never hear Raindogs without thinking of him, this trip, how he smelled and how completely gone I was over him. He was so damaged, he could not express affection unless he was falling asleep, when he would cling to me like he wanted to crawl in my skin. (He still does this, but not only when he is falling asleep, just randomly when you are alone and talking, talking, talking.) He felt like the first person who had ever forced me to maintain eye contact. Had anyone ever bothered to look me in the eye before? I can't remember.
On the way home from Portland, I was so angry. I was tired of being denied. He talked a long string of things. About how if we were meant to be together, we'd never fight. About how he loved me but there was just something lacking, some connection we should have but didn't. There would be a person someday he'd have the connection with, and he believed (I don't know how such an abused and neglected boy could still be so innocent) that he would feel that connection right from the very moment he met them. He believed Love (with a capital) was perfect from inception. Just total, instant. Bam. We didn't have that.
And right as he finished explaining, while I was just sobbing silently into the passenger side door, Stone Blind Love came on, and after Tom Waits sings the only kind of love is stone blind love, Former says "See, even Tom Waits thinks we shouldn't be together." And then he had to pull over because I started crying so hard I had to run in a diner bathroom and puke. Later I made him buy me a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake, because I was hungry, and because like anyone who has ever broken my heart, he was the one person I wanted to comfort me afterward.
It's funny, because we still love each other in a completely different way. And if I needed him, he'd be there. I'm certain of it, though we rarely see each other or even talk. So, stupid boy, we are just like the song.
(Now, Hunky Dory is playing and suddenly it seems like this whole day is contrived to make me think about him.)
Also: This story reminds me of this Hal Hartley short film, Surviving Desire, where a professor has an affair with his student, and when she wants to keep it all quiet, he goes to class the next day and lectures as usual, but the whole time he is writing "Don't Deny Me" on the chalkboard, and she leaves the room in tears. Has anyone else ever seen that?
ACTUALLY: I got it totally wrong. He wanted people to know she loved him, she said he knew, and she knew and that was all that mattered. He knew she was embarassed to be with him. What he wrote on the board was this:
And then she starts crying and runs out and he trashes the room. He is also the teacher who taught a whole semester on the first paragraph of War and Peace (I think. Oh shit, I have to watch it now) about hypocrisy. Actually he didn't teach it, he just read it. And he is Martin Donovan, and there is a dance sequence.
Which should hook you right there.
And: It also reminds me of cartoon Hedwig writing on the Berlin Wall "Deny me and be doomed"
And: Did I get either of those quotes right?
Once I had this insane love for the boy I call The Artist Formerly Known As The Love of my Life. (Former for short). He was this beautiful thing, androgynous with long, thin fingers and the softest voice. Also, he smelled like vanilla and wood chips, just naturally. I'd known him since we were 13 and he was a foster kid. Back then he smelled like cigarettes and foster home.
After I kicked my husband out of the house, he started coming around and staying late. We'd lie on the floor and talk about movies and philosophy and poetry and listen to music. He wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a writer. We both loved David Lynch. That's pretty much all you need to know to understand what I was like back then, huh?
Three years earlier, when I was 18 we'd had a tiny short thing where we slept together on Water Street. He'd taken me on a walk by the river to tell me that he didn't want to be with me, and I was strangely devastated. Later that night I was invited to dinner at a couple's house, but when I arrived the wife was absent. Husband started making dinner and then disappeared for a moment. He came out of the bedroom naked and I ran out of the house terrified, but still stuttering out a polite excuse. I felt like the world was full of predators, and only boys from school were safe. I started dating my ex-husband, a boy from the same foster home, a couple weeks later. We got married in three months.
But now it was like the beautiful, sweet boy came back to me. We weren't together, he was just there for months. Always. Eventually he became my roommate, and after that we slept together every night in his room after the baby finally fell asleep. I was completely in love with him. The dizzy kind with the vertigo feeling and the bad poetry. (He loved my bad poetry - how could he not? It was all about him.)
We agreed that being together was a secret, no need to torture the ex-husband who still came around asking if he could just be in the same room with me while I slept. And people would not understand. It all seemed reasonable.
A year later we were still sleeping together, still spending all of our time together, and no one knew. It was funny. People thought he was far too beautiful for a girl like me, so they never questioned. Women constantly asked me to introduce them, invite them over, talk them up to him. I watched several friends of mine flat out proposition him in front of me. My best friend didn't even know. She thought I was just hopeless over a boy I could never have.
One weekend we drove down to Portland to visit J., The Former's best friend since childhood and one of my favorite people on the planet. When we got there, The Former slept on the couch and stayed about 3 feet from me at all times. This is how I realized that there was not one person on earth he was willing to have know about me. But he loved me.
The Former is the source of my passion for Tom Waits, and I still can never hear Raindogs without thinking of him, this trip, how he smelled and how completely gone I was over him. He was so damaged, he could not express affection unless he was falling asleep, when he would cling to me like he wanted to crawl in my skin. (He still does this, but not only when he is falling asleep, just randomly when you are alone and talking, talking, talking.) He felt like the first person who had ever forced me to maintain eye contact. Had anyone ever bothered to look me in the eye before? I can't remember.
On the way home from Portland, I was so angry. I was tired of being denied. He talked a long string of things. About how if we were meant to be together, we'd never fight. About how he loved me but there was just something lacking, some connection we should have but didn't. There would be a person someday he'd have the connection with, and he believed (I don't know how such an abused and neglected boy could still be so innocent) that he would feel that connection right from the very moment he met them. He believed Love (with a capital) was perfect from inception. Just total, instant. Bam. We didn't have that.
And right as he finished explaining, while I was just sobbing silently into the passenger side door, Stone Blind Love came on, and after Tom Waits sings the only kind of love is stone blind love, Former says "See, even Tom Waits thinks we shouldn't be together." And then he had to pull over because I started crying so hard I had to run in a diner bathroom and puke. Later I made him buy me a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake, because I was hungry, and because like anyone who has ever broken my heart, he was the one person I wanted to comfort me afterward.
It's funny, because we still love each other in a completely different way. And if I needed him, he'd be there. I'm certain of it, though we rarely see each other or even talk. So, stupid boy, we are just like the song.
(Now, Hunky Dory is playing and suddenly it seems like this whole day is contrived to make me think about him.)
Also: This story reminds me of this Hal Hartley short film, Surviving Desire, where a professor has an affair with his student, and when she wants to keep it all quiet, he goes to class the next day and lectures as usual, but the whole time he is writing "Don't Deny Me" on the chalkboard, and she leaves the room in tears. Has anyone else ever seen that?
ACTUALLY: I got it totally wrong. He wanted people to know she loved him, she said he knew, and she knew and that was all that mattered. He knew she was embarassed to be with him. What he wrote on the board was this:
And then she starts crying and runs out and he trashes the room. He is also the teacher who taught a whole semester on the first paragraph of War and Peace (I think. Oh shit, I have to watch it now) about hypocrisy. Actually he didn't teach it, he just read it. And he is Martin Donovan, and there is a dance sequence.
Which should hook you right there.
And: It also reminds me of cartoon Hedwig writing on the Berlin Wall "Deny me and be doomed"
And: Did I get either of those quotes right?