The Yelp

by Chase Compton

  I knew he was going to leave me for good eventually, despite all of these dramatic eleventh-hour breakups that never quite seemed to stick. I knew that all that I had come to adore was too good to be true. I could tell that it was going to happen even before I left. It had made the sting even more painful. It was not Him leaving me that hurt the worst, but that he had really and truly wanted me a matter of days before. As he lay asleep in my arms on that beautiful day on the pier, I held Him close to my chest as if he would suddenly wake and sprint away. I kissed his forehead as he slept and prayed that it could stay like this. Just for a little longer. I knew as it was happening that I wanted Him to stay.

  He had told me over and over again that he could never be with me, and I had not believed Him. I thought surely something so perfect and so rare would not be crushed beneath the weight of … nothing. In truth, there was nothing wrong with the way things were progressing. It was just us being us. Me wanting too much, Him wanting too little—the classic relationship that was built to be razed. I couldn’t have imagined it any other way, and it seemed that things were happening almost as if predicted by prophecy.

  My life is a fucking tragic comedy, I thought to myself. I began to laugh as I cried. It was hilarious. I never thought I would be crushed so deeply while basking in the shade of the Eiffel Tower. Heartbroken in Paris. I laughed more, which only caused me to cry harder. By continuing to laugh at how much my life sucked, I hoped to distract any passersby from the tears that were falling from beneath my fake Ray Bans—I looked so fucking cool.

  I had initially believed that Paris was the capital of romance, and that my whimsical heart would find comfort in her arms. I believed that the crows the size of cats that haunted every park were simply laughing and not as threatening as they appeared. But I had to convince myself it was all a movie set. The façade of romance was not real life. The crows weren’t laughing—they were ugly and sinister. Paris would not make a romantic of me. Heartbreak was the new black in Paris, and I decided that if I must, I was going to rock it.

  He would have left me in New York anyhow. I felt that maybe he had never truly wanted me in the first place. It was all a fluke, just another one of those strange and beautiful things that happens in the summer when the mind becomes too clouded with humidity and lust. I wished that he could only have had the courtesy to destroy me within the comfort of Lady Liberty. I wished that I could have finished writing my first novel in Montmartre while sipping a cappuccino instead of writing sad emails of resignation.

  Most of all, I wished that he hadn’t been so perfect. I wished that he hadn’t come into my life and filled me with inspiration. If I knew that my ambition would have come at the price of my heart, I would have never accepted it. I would have turned, walked away, and went on with my sad and pathetic life of doing nothing but drinking myself to death and waiting tables. He had made me crave more—a happy life with love and peace and direction.

  I had loved Him. I loved every crazy thing he did, even when it pissed me off. When he told me to slow down, I loved Him even more, because in my head, this meant that he actually wanted to be with me for the long haul. Ha.

  So I sat there with the crows, and I smoked my delicious Lucky Strike Lights on the Champ de Mars and realized that I had to quit them upon my return. I had to savor every last drop of this moment frozen in time. I would never have my heart broken this hard again in Paris. I would never return here. I would never smoke these filthy cigarettes again if I wanted to prove to myself that I could move on. Never again would I be crying over a love that was so beautiful but so unattainable with the tears staining my black Helmut Lang shirt. I was killing it—I really was. This season’s looks on all of the Paris runways would be Crushing Despair. Haute Heartbreak. Devastation Couture.

  Heartbroken in Paris was the beginning of a real love story that I would one day write. I knew it could only get better from there. I was lower than I had ever been in my entire life, a sunken shell of my former adventuresome self. I would carry this with me for the rest of my life, always remembering the time when I started to take care of myself again. I would return to New York broken, a homeless vagabond in need of a new direction. I would write the next chapter of my life through different eyes.

  How I wished that I could have taken Him with me. But then again, he was the catalyst for it all in the first place.

  I hated it when stories had unhappy endings, so I decided to not let the story end. This chapter sure sucked, and I hated it, and I had never felt so lost and alone in my entire life, but I knew that there was still an epilogue to be had. That’s the funny part about all of this mess—I already knew how it all would end. And it broke my heart.

  Chapter One

  I LAY ON THE FLOOR AND STARED at the ceiling. It was cold in my room, and I was only wearing one sock. I wasn’t exactly sure how this had happened, but then again, I wasn’t exactly sure if I cared. Outside, snow was coming down in buckets. It had been like this for weeks now, and much to my dismay, it showed no sign of stopping. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my forehead to the cold wooden floor.

  This wasn’t the first time we had broken up. This was months after I returned from Paris, where he “officially” broke up with me over an email on my birthday. Heartbreak is a place we’ve all been to; I knew I wasn’t special or anything. This was just a thing that happened. People’s hearts get broken, and everyone feels like it has never happened to anyone else before in history like it is happening to them in that moment. But for a second I selfishly slipped and let myself believe that no Capulet nor Montague had ever felt the anguish that I now had pressing down on my chest. The devastation of the ages was now my best friend, and it felt like New York City was the perfect place to be if I wanted to wither away into a tiny ball of heartbreak and depression. I was the mayor of Heartbreak. I was the crown prince of Despair. I owned it, and I wore it like a straightjacket.

  What a drama queen.

  I had just returned to the arctic tundra once known as Manhattan after an unexpected trip to California. I had escaped the East Coast two days after Thanksgiving, and for that I was thankful. I can say, without hesitation, that Thanksgiving 2013 was the worst day of my entire life. On a day that was supposed to be about family and friends and (most importantly) binge eating turkey, I had found myself curled up in fetal position on my couch, sobbing hysterically and unable to move. I was completely paralyzed, and the only thing I could do was cry. It didn’t help that every half hour or so I would get festive text messages and pictures of grandiose dinner tables with little blurbs saying things like “Happy Thanksgiving! Wish you were here! So much turkey!”

  Meanwhile, I craved a swift and painless death. I would gobble-gobble alright … a fistful of Valium, if I didn’t know any better.

  And I did know better, most of the time, but I just dug the hole even deeper. I met up with Him (who shall forever remain nameless) and tried to figure out what was going on. The thing is, I knew what was going on: our relationship was coming to an ugly end. He had betrayed me and shattered my trust, and there was nothing that was going to change that. A matter of days prior, we still had the intentions of moving in together and starting what I had hoped would be a “real adult relationship.”

  I had so many feelings and so few places to put them anymore. It boiled over in me like a pot simmering too high, and every once in a while it would get the best of me and completely incapacitate me. I felt wretched and sad and completely defeated. I thought long and hard about what had happened to me and tried to think of a way to fix the entire situation. Naturally, there was only one thing I could think to do that would make the feelings any less pungent.

  I began to write letters to Him every morning when I awoke from my fitful slumber. I’d crawl out of bed looking like the Crypt Keeper and sulk my way over to my laptop by the couch. For minutes, I’d sit there and stare at the screen, wondering what I could say that would make any of this cruel plot twist any different. It wasn’t so m
uch about begging and pleading for Him to reconsider his sadistic actions and come back to me, but more about trying to get Him to remember all of the good stuff that he threw away when he decided that I wasn’t enough. The letters I wrote Him were long and detailed, usually reminiscing about how happy we were together as we walked through the Village hand in hand on our way to breakfast or lunch. After I’d finish a letter I would sign it always the same way:

  I love you. And I miss you.

  Then I’d delete the entire thing.

  The entire time we knew each other, he was constantly trying to escape. Then he’d come crawling back once he had successfully fled. Men in Manhattan were so typical at times, and I’d known them all. He had cut me loose—on my birthday—when I went to Paris. I received an email from Him telling me to drown in the Seine. Upon return, he had sought me out again and asked for forgiveness, which I was happy to extend. Weeks went by, and we had resumed our role as the happiest couple in all of New York, but eventually he came to meltdown again. It happened on Thanksgiving. I knew it would never be the same after that.

  People deal with heartbreak in a myriad of different ways, but most of the time they are just a variation on the same general idea. The monologue by Julie Delpy from the last scene in the film “2 Days in Paris” came to mind, where Julie calmly states:

  Always the same for me: Break up, break down. Drink up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another, fuck around. Forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness start again to look for true love, desperately look everywhere. And after two years of loneliness, meet a new love and swear it is the one, until that one is gone as well.

  Ouch.

  I wondered if it was happening again, just as it always had. I’d been in love a few times before, and I honestly felt that I had a pretty firm grasp on what all that business was about. Stars get in your eyes, and every song is about them. Eyes lock during sex for a change, and you honestly see the person instead of just looking at them. You remember that suns set, and you notice them as if they are suddenly filled with meaning—even though they’ve been there, silent and unnoticed, all along. All of these were the things I had come to know about the nature of love, but for some reason this one felt different. I wondered if I thought this way about each new love at first, and then upon ending those trysts, erased that general knowledge like a dry-erase board crammed with fruitless equations.

  If it all sounds very grim, that is not the intention. I am a rational man with a strong head on his shoulders, and I wouldn’t have stuck around if my entire relationship with Him was a never-ending nightmare of deceit, lies, and sadness. That wasn’t the way it always was, and to fully explain why I loved Him so dearly, one must know that to be the truth. As much as I had wanted to spread the gospel of what an evil monster he was, it would not be the full story. Being with Him made me the happiest person I’d ever been in my entire life.

  Before Him, I always thought that the things I wanted out of life were “corny.” At thirty years of age, I used to sit in the park and long for the storybook love that one usually only read about in a sixteen-year-old girl’s diary. I wanted sunsets and sunrises on the beach, embracing each other curled up in an abandoned lifeguard tower. I wanted trips to get ice cream in the dead of winter, in the middle of the night, and sharing said ice cream with one spoon. I wanted a man to take my last name and sleep in bed with me in my parent’s home back in California when we took vacations there. I was dog-crazy, even though I’d previously never even wanted one to call my own. Suddenly, every time a cute little Italian Greyhound pranced by me on the street, I nearly dropped to my knees with a swoon as I imagined what it would be like to own a dog with my partner.

  I’d always been “that way.” It was as if finding my soulmate was the most important thing in the world to me. Most gay men my age had different drives. Most of my peers made the gym their soulmate (I both envied and despised the lousy fucks) or made a career their life’s calling. People in the city were married to their work and to their futures. Sure—I had a job and paid my bills and took decent care of myself, but taking care of myself wasn’t enough for me. I wanted with all my heart to find someone who I could take care of and who would in turn take care of me and perhaps propel me into … I don’t know. Adulthood? Happiness? Wholeness?

  If you’ve ever lived in Manhattan, you’ll know what it is like to be the loneliest person in the entire world even when you are surrounded by millions of people: screaming cab drivers, ranting hobos, fighting children, chanting Hare Krishnas, clucking queens on 8th Avenue, growling punks on St. Mark’s Place. There’s always an ambulance, street performers, psychics, fanatics, and people, people everywhere. It’s maddening to feel like, in the midst of all of the buzz, there isn’t a single person on your team.

  When I first met Him, I felt like I had finally found a teammate. He was a needle in a gaystack, everything I had ever wanted and more. He lived in Manhattan on the very same street I did, just across the length of the island. It was a straight shot from the West Village to the East on 4th, and I convinced myself that surely this must have been fate. He wore the same clothes as me—that sort of disheveled chic that was so au courant and involved a lot of black blousy things and painted on skinny jeans that we’d bought from Oak. He even had a job, too. Much like myself, he was a waiter. This made me feel better about life in general because I felt like he was in the same boat that I was in: trying to stay afloat while trying to pursue dreams by serving the masses. I was a failed artist and a would-be writer, and he was interested in pursuing a career in fashion. I could imagine the beautiful day when my fashion mogul boyfriend would attend my book signings draped in exquisite Rick Owens and smiling at me because we no longer had to wear aprons or ask anyone ever again “how would you like that cooked?”

  And the sex? Forget about it.

  He knew what he was doing. He held out for a month when we first started dating. Although we were attached at the lips and getting off every other way we could manage, he didn’t actually fully give up the goods until I was completely enraptured with Him as a person. After we made love that first time, we couldn’t stop. We fucked every day, sometimes twice or three times. It would be easy for me to say that I was obsessed with his physical beauty and sexual prowess, but that wasn’t the case in the slightest. When he lay before me naked, sometimes I would just stare at Him, unable to move. His body was the most gorgeous I’d ever had the pleasure of seeing. Sure, I’d dated a muscle queen or two in my day, and one of my last loves had the body of a Greek god. His wasn’t like that—it was the little things that turned me on with a passion I’d never known before. Besides his rippling muscles and his perfect ass, he was littered with imperfections. These were my favorite parts.

  His feet were disgusting dinosaur claws with big chunks of blister peeling off of the heels. A scar from a hernia ran across his stomach. He had scars on his back from minor surgery to remove what could have become cancer, and his balls … his balls were a nightmare. He never trimmed his pubes, and it was a jungle down there. The talons, the scars, the jungle balls—these were my favorite things. His imperfections showed me that he wasn’t the kind of guy you saw photoshopped to hell in a magazine or filtered out in the shimmery studio light of a porno set. He was real. He had lived. And his realness made Him the most extraordinary thing I’d ever been with.

  I could wax poetic about how perfect he was to me for days. But that wouldn’t change anything, and I had to find that out the hard way, because that was exactly what I did after Thanksgiving when everything fell apart. I waxed. Hard.

  Chapter Two

  THE CITY THAT WAS ONCE THE SCENE for what I considered to be my dream come true soon became my nightmare. On every street corner, I saw phantom images of the two of us in full swoon, dancing hand in hand. Every cup of coffee I attempted to take in was a war zone flashback set directly in the trenches that jolted me from my momentary reverie and sent me scurrying like a frightened animal. I m
ust have looked positively feral as I darted in and out of every single café or restaurant in the West Village just trying to find myself breakfast. As a result of this, I quickly became very skinny. I’d always been a thin man, but this new inability to eat made me positively gaunt.

  Because I couldn’t eat, food of course became the one thing I wanted the most. Eating was what we had done best together in our short time. He was a big boy with a big appetite, and he always wore a smile from ear to ear when presented with a delicious meal. Because he spent time in the military, he ate like a wild animal. Watching him eat a pastrami sandwich was like watching the Tazmanian Devil whirl into a frenzy of swirling fury. It was insane. I loved it. No tablecloth was safe from Him, and by the end of a meal he always left the table looking like a battlefield.

  I was sinking into a morbid depression and wasting away, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t talk to my friends about it because they were sick and tired of the same old sob story. They all told me the same thing, anyhow: “He warned you he didn’t want to be in a relationship. You did this to yourself.” It pissed me off to no end.

  “How can you not see that we conquered that?” I’d yell in retort. “We fixed it! He fell in love with me! He got a tattoo for me on his arm! He told me he wanted to move in, and start our lives together! Coney Island … Montauk … Central Park … The Temperance Fountain … All of those delicious dinners holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes for hours …”