It was finally revealed to me after doing some research that this Cogswell fellow was a total prude. The fountain itself was installed during a time in New York when the East Side was rampant with what Cogswell thought were derelicts. Much like today, everyone was running around all drunk and careening through their wild lives. Nothing much has changed since then. Perhaps the costumes. Cogswell wanted to preach the gospel of restraint and thought that installing a drinking fountain would provide clean water to the masses that most of the time opted for beer as their drink of choice. Imagine those times—no clean water so you had to resort to beer. Maybe Cogswell was doing the right thing, but he sounded like kind of a bummer to me.
Perhaps temperance was what I had needed. I think I learned a lot about restraint from you. I was on a fast train to nowhere before I met you, and I was totally happy being a hedonistic wild child with no goals and no hesitation. Being with you made me want to change, and that was one of the reasons why I loved you so much. You made me want to be a better person, and I was. In fact, I was the best version of myself that I had ever known. Certainly the happiest person I had ever been. I had hoped, foolishly, that maybe some of that temperance would rub off on you. The dictionary definition of temperance describes it as a virtue and refers to humility, self-restraint, and mercy. Each of these involves restraining some impulse, such as sexual desire, vanity, or anger. My, what a lovely thought it was that perhaps I could teach you how to do that. Perhaps if I could, we would be together. If I could teach you temperance, then we could be together forever and happily ever after.
Maybe it did sound like a total bummer. But what is wrong with not being the wild animal I thought I had wanted to be in my early 20s? I desperately needed temperance. My time had been wasted getting drunk and fucking anybody I saw fit. I’ve lived more than enough wild nights. I’ve drunk enough beer. I’ve fucked enough guys. I’ve had enough. All I wanted was for my life to go on and finally have some meaning. I wanted you. I wanted to be your champion, and I wanted to take care of you and make your life beautiful and fulfilling. I wanted to (attempt to) cook you dinner and keep you healthy in mind, body, and soul. I wanted to be your biggest fan, even when your ideas weren’t so great. Most of all, I just wanted someone on my side. I know you have always felt incredibly lonely, and you may be surprised to find out that I have always felt very much the same. None of my so-called friends know the person that I really am, and it is completely my fault that I have put up the façade of an epic hedonistic mess. I let you see a side of me that no one gets to see, and that is the side that just wants to belong to someone completely. To hell with my freedom to do as I like—it was not good for me anyway.
I’ve always dreamed of leaving my mark on this city in some way. It has always terrified me that I’d just slip through the cracks and into obscurity. I wanted to write books that spoke of my most ardent passions and my lowest lows. I wanted people to be able to see that I WAS HERE. This is my city, and my fountain, and my memories. I will always return to the Temperance Fountain and think of myself and how I used to be. Now I will always think of you.
Never forget that you were here. Never forget that you came into my life and made me feel more in love than I have ever felt in my entire life.
The tile I commissioned to be made for you will be placed at the foot of the Temperance Fountain by the East Village Parks Conservancy. Although I had it made before Christmas, it won’t be installed until the spring. I found this to be terribly fitting as the springtime was when I met you and you changed my life forever. The springtime symbolizes rebirth and the return of all of that beautiful whimsy that we used to revel in. My donation to the conservancy will see that flowers are planted in the spring so that all may enjoy them. It is with the most honest heart that I can say that all I want is to make this park, which has meant so much to me for so long, an even more beautiful place. I hope that when my flowers bloom, two young men who are freshly in love can look at them and feel the happiness that I once felt. I want to fix it. I want things to be beautiful again the way they were when I first fell in love with you.
Now you have a place here for the rest of your life. You are a part of this city. You will always be set in stone, both physically and metaphorically in my heart. Please take the time to come and visit this sacred place. Please come and just think about temperance and all that could have been if we had just had a little restraint. When you see the tulips next spring, know that I put them there for you. No matter how cold the winter gets, the spring will come, and the flowers will bloom. You meant so much to me. I’m so sorry you weren’t ready.
I’ll be visiting the fountain a lot, too, this spring, if this godforsaken winter ever ends. It brings me such joy to know that my love will be there set in stone forever. For as long as New York City exists, and even after we have passed from this world. I’m so glad I finally left my mark. This will be a constant reminder that I know the true meaning of love. This is my jellyfish tattoo, like the penny, and it can never be removed or forgotten. I promise I will be good and I will observe temperance. As you know, a promise is a promise.
I hope you like it. I know you were hoping for a new wallet or an iPad, and I suppose it’s a little selfish of me to get you this, being as how it’s kind of for me, too. I hope the weather is warm, and I find it so funny that we are both 3,000 miles away from what is now our real home. I pray that you are happy and that your mom is happy and that you feel better. I know your mom probably doesn’t even know who I am, but please tell her that I want to thank her for taking care of you. I know how much she means to you. I hope the two of you can go to the Goodwill together and you can show her how it’s really done. I would give anything to see that happen.
Merry Christmas, (Him). I will always miss you.
Chapter Five
I RETURNED TO CALIFORNIA AGAIN TO SPEND CHRISTMAS with my family. Although I had just been there after the Thanksgiving meltdown, I knew I had to be around my family for the holidays if I didn’t want to lose my mind in Manhattan spending Christmas completely alone. I didn’t have a choice. I just had to get out of New York and out of my own head.
My parents knew to handle me with the right amount of coddling. They had tried to lift my spirits the month prior by taking me on hikes in Malibu and making sure I was eating properly. Surely they had noticed that I was having a hard time feeding myself because of my new skeletal frame. Although I couldn’t taste a thing, I forced my mother’s amazing home-cooked meals down my throat and attempted to feign satisfaction.
Mom put up a record five Christmas trees in the house that year. There was a great big one in the vestibule and several small ones scattered throughout the other rooms. Cautiously, she asked me to come help her decorate them and put up the ornaments that had been mine from childhood. It was very clear that she was putting forth extra effort into making the house as festive as possible to try and lift my spirits. I grumbled and muttered from my post on the couch wrapped in blankets like a crazy person before burying my head in the cushions. Playing all around me was the meanest, cruelest, most sickening Christmas carols ever sang.
“I’ll Be Home for Christmas”
“Last Christmas” (I gave you my heart, but the very next day you gave it away).
“All I Want for Christmas Is You”
Bah humbug, Mariah. Bah fucking humbug.
I watched local news and tried to eat as many cookies as I could force myself to eat. In between visits from my extended family and outings to the grocery store to stock up on tequila for the margaritas I was living on, I wrote. I sat at my laptop and began to write out the story of how I had come to the place I was now in. It felt like an exorcism, and as I recounted all of the time and places we had been together, I began to feel a lightness form in my heart.
These were the stories that would eventually come to smear the Internet with the tale of a love gone terribly wrong. I didn’t know it at the time, but eventually these vignettes of heartbreak would be read by
strangers all over the country and the world at large. Once I put these tales out into the great beyond of the world wide web, it didn’t even occur to me that people might actually see them. What’s more, people would respond.
I didn’t even think that anyone in the world could ever relate to having their hearts broken as hard as mine had been. I thought that I was special—I was the only man in the world to have ever been wronged by that fat little Cupid asshole. When I started to post my stories on Yelp, I felt like a graffiti artist. I was tagging up a wall where people were trying to find a good cheeseburger with the musings of my innermost personal baggage. In time, people began to stumble upon the story. When in search of the best crème brûlée in the city, people began to stumble upon my “review” of the night my world came crashing down around me at the French Roast. Eventually, people would stumble across my broken heart while on a search for good pierogies and be directed to my review of Veselka.
After I returned home from my Christmas in California, things began to get a little strange. I had started to post my stories on Yelp regularly, and, to my surprise, I began to get responses from people. Being that my email address was listed on the homepage of my Yelp profile, I started to get emails from complete strangers from all over the world. As corny as it sounded, the Internet had made it possible for me to achieve a sense of community with a group of people whom I hadn’t known even existed: The Community of The Heartbroken.
Every morning when I awoke and went to check my email, I would have emails sent to me from people who were dealing with the same exact problems I was dealing with. Well—perhaps not exactly the same, but at least similar. There was a heartbroken mother of two from somewhere in the Midwest who told me to hold on because it was going to get better. There was a man in Rome who told me that he knew exactly how I had felt because he had just gone through a terrible breakup himself. There was even a young woman in Manhattan who wrote me a letter that changed the course of my intent forever. I began to realize that my story wasn’t special at all: heartbreak was a universal thing, and it happened (hopefully) to every person to ever live.
I thought about Irwin, the young woman who wrote to me from Manhattan. She was on the very same island I was on, somewhere out there in the maze of people and lives, and she felt the same way I did. Perhaps I had crossed her on the street. If it weren’t for sharing my story with the Internet, I’d never have received an email from her that put my problems into very real perspective.
Part of her message read:
My boyfriend of a year and a half (whom I met on OKCupid, of course) broke up with me two weeks ago out of the blue, and reading your words were so devastatingly on point.
I’ve been alternating between wandering the city and buying myself absurdly lavish single dinners (book in hand), to weeping in my nail salon mid-pedicure on 1st and Ave A. Everywhere I go I’m reminded of him, of something we did together, of a place we ate or a time we spent, and I am so afraid there isn’t a place in Manhattan left where my heart won’t break, or I won’t sadistically order his favorite meal to savor what was. I’m a girl broken, still in the ashes, and I’m not totally sure I’ll ever be a phoenix.
Particularly this paragraph stopped me cold, as she quoted my own words back to me:
‘I thought long and hard about the rut I was in, and why I was in it to begin with. I was downtrodden and broken, homesick, and ill at ease. I was bruised, and battered, and withering like a grape into a raisin, and this made me realize that all I ever wanted was … someone to just do something. All I ever wanted was someone to say that they saw me and cared about me and wanted to help. This city chews boys like me up and spits them out every day, and without a little help from the rest of the world (friends, lovers, strangers on the street) it can be unbearably lonely.’
Just wanted to let you know you’re not the only one. This weekend I held a woman I didn’t know as she cried next to the napkins in the Five Guys on 55th. Her partner had said something that hurt her feelings, and she had gotten up from her table across from me, tears bulging out of her eyes, to go hide next to the concessions around the corner so their four kids wouldn’t see.
I’m so lonely. I’m so devastatingly beaten up and broken and sad and missing the sunny South I came from and doubting I’ll ever feel as happy or as in love as I was a month ago. A good friend of mine keeps telling me ‘this is not forever.’ I want to believe her, but it’s hard.
Please don’t feel pressured to respond. I’m sure you’re being flooded by every lonely heart in the city! I just wanted to let you know I’ve got a fortune cookie slip I’ll keep forever too. I see you. I care about you. And I’m not sure I can help, as I can’t really help myself. But I want to anyway.
Sending you all the healing energy I can muster, Irwin
It knocked me off of my feet.
I couldn’t believe that there were people out there who were as desperate and lonely as I was. I mean … I could believe it, if I really thought about it. When faced with such a situation, naturally all one could ever ask for is for someone to say “I see you. I care about you.” This made me want to start an army. I wanted to march triumphantly down 5th Avenue with my army of heartbroken lepers hoisting big picket signs that read “Broken but Not Beaten” and chanting “We’re here! We’re heartbroken! We’re getting used to it, although it’s not easy and sometimes we want to crawl into a hole and die!”
Hearing that I was not alone in my pain gave me a burning desire to continue to tell my story. I wanted to capture every detail, every restaurant, and every memory that had brought me to the lonely place I resided in. I had found my way to tell my story in the strangest, most unassuming and abstract way possible. I continued to Yelp as my story continued, and I was hopeful that eventually the story would take a happy turn and see me fully recovered from my ground-zero status. I wanted to share with the world that maybe, just maybe, there was light at the end of the tunnel.
I continued to Yelp. It was all I knew how to do.
7A - CLOSED
Categories: Bars, Burgers
Neighborhoods: East Village, Alphabet City
I think Joni Mitchell said it best when she sang, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got til it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
As real estate goes in New York City, they were always tearing down things that had been a place of consequence and putting up a big dumb bank or chain restaurant in its place. I had watched for almost fourteen years as the places I once held memorable were razed and replaced with inauthentic, boring dumps that you could find anywhere else in America. In a world where we are taught not to be afraid of change, sometimes it can be hard to realize that maybe it’s all a bunch of bullshit. Maybe things should just stay the way they are, for fear of turning into something that could never think to compare to the original luster of its initial conception.
I had tried my hardest to make my relationship with Him something that would always be set in stone and impossible to replace. When I bought him a memorial tile that would be engraved in his honor and placed at the foot of the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park, I knew that it would be something that could never be torn down and turned into a CitiBank or Starbucks. It was just a little piece of stone, but it would be there forever, long after all of the East Village was turned into Middle America. In this regard, I would always have the memory of how ardently I had cared for Him. Despite that, everything else would change and perhaps that memory would be lost in the mire of “progress.”
7A was closing down, and it was another one of those places that I had spent much of my youth in. Back when I first moved to New York, I had fancied myself to be the mayor of the gay East Village. Self-important and decked out in safety-pin laden rags and a rock-hard Mohawk haircut, I had poured myself into booths at 7A and gorged happily on gigantic salads and French fries. It was a place where I drank black coffees at three in the morning and mimosas at noon. It was alwa
ys the place that came after a night out drinking where I could sit down and regain my bearings by sustaining myself with a delicious sandwich and try to return to the land of the conscious. I began to think about the time not long ago when I went there with Him, and we sat in a booth side by side and shared a meal as we curled up into each other. It can be so hard to sit across the table from someone you just want to live inside of. We were honestly attached at the hip.
As the couple across the room from us got up to leave after paying their bill, the woman stopped and interrupted our feeding frenzy. She said how happy we looked and that we were a perfect couple. She was right, you know. Back then we were both so happy, before all of the shit hit the fan. People like that woman used to stop us on the street wherever we went and tell us what a gorgeous couple we were—mostly because we were always smiling and laughing and basking in each other’s general merriment. It was hard not to believe that we were destined to be together: if everyone else in the world knew it, then why shouldn’t we?
It’s all perspective, in the end. The glorious times in my youth that I spent avoiding my life’s progression in a mire of beer and cheeseburgers at 7A were perhaps not the days of glory I seemed to remember. Maybe it was all just something that needed to be let go of, even if the future was such a scary and unforgiving place. Maybe the place deserved to be shut down and turned into a CitiBank. Even since when I had been there last, with Him, I had become a new person. The future—and change—was coming whether I liked it or not. People come and people go, and if it’s not set in stone, then it will probably just rust and fade away. Who’s to say this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be?
There comes a time when you just have to let go, and move forward. Nothing in this world lasts forever, and if it did, the world would probably be a lot less exciting. 7A should be burnt to the ground. Start from scratch. If it’s going to be rebuilt as a Gap clothing store, then I hope it is the best Gap clothing store that has ever been built. I had come so far from my days as a rebel youth meandering through the East Village and crushing beers at dumps like 7A with boys who never even cared about me. I had even come so far from Him as it finally clicked in my head that I would never be enough for Him.
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