by Joel Derfner
This was not the speech that I, bookish and abstruse, had been expected to make. I heard later that the school priest had called it shameful, but his name was Chaplain Lent, so it was hard to take him seriously. In my farewell I did not play the role I had allowed myself to be assigned; I was no longer the outsider peering forlornly through the window. Instead, I turned my back on a community that had never known how to welcome me and left in search of one that would. And as I glanced over my shoulder, I felt for the first time that in fact my classmates were the ones behind the gate, and that I had the wide world before me. In my heart of hearts I knew also that, though the network of older gay men and women that had sustained me through high school—and, more importantly, introduced me to The Women—had probably saved my life, my true place was no more with them than it was with my classmates. It was somewhere Out There, and I was On My Way.
But that was fifteen years ago, and what I believe now is that no one really belongs anywhere. People aren’t tidy creations to be stacked neatly in the Tupperware or poured in pre-measured quantities from a box into the Cuisinart with no spills; everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess. I may not have felt that I belonged among my classmates, but neither did Theo Moore and neither, I am astonished to find myself thinking, did Suzanne Hutchinson. The scattered moments of kinship we feel with others are, when reduced to their most basic elements, accidental discoveries of kinship with ourselves. And that, I suspect, is what happened that night in Martina Navratilova: my laughter grew and grew until it was finally loud enough for me to follow it to its source, which was the community that fills everybody everywhere.
On the final day of Camp, all two hundred of us gathered to spend an hour doing the Walk of Angels. It took me so long to bubble-wrap the fabulous purple-and-green stained-glass tulip window I had finally finished that I worried I would miss Camp’s last official activity, but I came running up to the group just as Bill started explaining the rules. We stood in two lines facing one another a few feet apart. As Campers from the heads of the lines walked slowly one by one down the middle, eyes shut, arms folded across the chest, the people standing on either side reached out to guide them, until they got to the end safely and rejoined the lines.
As the first person came down the line toward me, I touched her shoulder tentatively. Hunky David, next in line, touched her arm with one hand and cradled her head briefly with the other. I instantly began using this gesture for the next several Campers but then I worried that if David saw that I’d stolen his idea he would stop liking me so I went back to the tentative shoulder touching.
And they kept coming, men, women, timid, bold, tall, short, in between. Some people wept as they walked; others smiled almost beatifically; still others wore expressions that defied classification but that were clearly woven from a deep inner peace. And in the moment of contact I communed with every one of them, protecting them in concert with a host of others. When Joey passed me I gave his shoulder a little squeeze. His eyes were closed so he couldn’t see it was me but perhaps he knew anyway. Perhaps he didn’t feel the need to know.
Then it was my turn to take the walk. Just before I started, Char—the grandmother who stood before the head of the line—hugged me and whispered in my ear, “Safe journey, angel,” just as she had whispered, she told me later, to each Camper who passed. I closed my eyes and remembered her laughing during the panty raid and began the walk.
And with my eyes shut, it was impossible to tell whether any given person reaching for me was cool or a misfit, impossible to long for approval or for distance. All I could do was accept the grace flowing from each hand that touched me. I had planned to smile almost beatifically as I walked but I forgot, so I ended up with an expression that defied classification but that was clearly woven from a deep inner peace.
The strangest thing about the walk was that it seemed to go on forever. The two lines were each only a hundred people long, but as I walked farther and farther the hands I felt became the hands not just of the people around me but of everyone I had ever known, of Mark and Suzanne and Julie and Stacey and Kathy and Chaplain Lent and Luke and Chip and even people I had never met, Bianca who was hot sex in a bottle and her bunkmates Ashley and Jenny and Emily and Bill Cole’s father’s friend beaten to death with a baseball bat and Martina Navratilova and Barney Frank and Dorothy Parker and Castarède and Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman and Hesse and Auntie Mame; they were all reaching for me, and infinity was in the palms of their hands, and I thought I held eternity in that hour. And every time I thought I was coming to the end one of them grasped my arm or my head or my back and together we took another step forward.
ON DATING
In the last month I have gone on dates with nine different men. They have all been either cute and smart but not funny, cute and funny but not smart, or funny and smart but not cute. Or cute and smart and funny but not attracted to me. Those are the ones I hate the most. My unfavorite quote from an e-mail: “i should admit that my attraction to you is purely platonic, but that needn’t hinder us from pursuing a friendship, if that is not outside your agenda.” Outside my agenda, indeed. I hate you and will laugh and laugh when you arrive in the special circle of hell reserved for people who don’t capitalize the first-person singular pronoun. Ha, ha, ha. That’s me laughing.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 8:07 a.m., February 10, 2002*1
One day shortly after Tom and I broke up, my friend Rob and I were eating lunch at Café 82, discussing my apparently doomed search for my soul mate, and I realized that a handsome man sitting alone at a nearby table was staring at us. Except that Rob was facing away from him, so it was very possible that he was staring at me. I mentioned this to Rob, and we spent the rest of lunch deep in conjecture about the handsome man’s motives. After we left the restaurant, I hemmed and hawed on the sidewalk outside for five minutes and then ran back in, wrote my name and phone number on the handsome man’s napkin, and fled before he could tell me he had been looking at me because I had a bug in my hair.
A few hours later, after I had gotten home, he called and asked whether I wanted to go out with him that evening. We met outside his apartment; as we walked, he asked me what I’d thought of the State of the Union address a couple weeks before, and I told him that I hadn’t seen it because I was depressed enough by the state of the union without having to watch the president lie about it. He said he’d seen it on CNN and asked what TV I watched and I told him Alias and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I could actually see him deciding that I was a moron. He kept talking and talking about news media and I wanted to interrupt him and say, Excuse me, I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, so why don’t you just shut the fuck up? but I thought that if I did he might not love me so instead I kept quiet.
He led us to a bar where there was a dance party in full swing. I’m not sure how we got in, since the bouncers were clearly under orders not to allow anyone to walk through the door who was capable of growing facial hair, but there we were, shrieking in each other’s ears and looking ghastly under the unflattering neon lights. At one point I tried to get a little familiar and he demurred, explaining that this was not a date—perhaps he believed I had given him my number because I longed to hear his thoughts about Frida Kahlo?—and then he exchanged e-mail addresses with two other guys in the bar. He spent the entire cab ride back to his place alternately tweaking my nipples and squeezing my crotch, before refusing to invite me into his apartment because it was a mess.
After I regaled Rob and his boyfriend David with the tale of this latest in the string of awful dates through which I had recently suffered, Rob said, “You should start a blog for all these stories.”
“What’s a blog?” I asked.
“It’s like an online diary.”
I was dubious. “What if people found it and hated me for writing about them?”
“Just use initials instead of people’s names,” suggested David. “But not their real initials.”
“What would
I call it?”
“The Search for Love in Manhattan,” said Rob.
“Or I Hate Everyone I Go on a Date With,” offered David.
“Potato, potahto,” I said.
My ex-boyfriend M.T., who moved out in December, came over tonight to play with our dog A. She danced around him with uncontrollable joy at seeing him again and then peed on the floor.
I wish I could believe that this wasn’t in some way a metaphor for my life.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 11:35 p.m., February 13, 2002
Tom and I started out as a terrific couple. On our second date, buying snacks before watching our movie rental, we had the following exchange:
TOM: How about these salt-and-vinegar potato chips?
JOEL (his voice full of wonder): Oh, my God, I love salt-and-vinegar potato chips!
TOM (his voice also full of wonder): Really? Me too!
and I knew I had found The One. This was very convenient, as Tom lived four blocks away from me, which, given the lake of fire that is the New York public transportation system, is more than reason enough to date anybody; his being handsome and talented was just icing on the cake.
“I’ve never felt this good in a relationship,” I told Rob.
“But you’ve never been in a relationship,” he responded.
“You are a bad person,” I said.
Two years later, Tom and I were living in a huge apartment so far north of central Manhattan that no one ever visited us. We painted the front hall with a faux finish so it looked like sandstone blocks from an Egyptian pyramid; we bought an aquarium coffee table and brightly colored fish to swim around in it; we made each other profoundly unhappy. We had moved in together despite both being bottoms and both wanting to be the one who got taken care of. We never fought. Instead, when we disagreed about anything, we started crying, and whoever cried harder won. We dealt with everything this way: our sexual incompatibility, our finances, our bathroom towels (I had to cry particularly hard to win that one, but in the end all my friends agreed with me that the purple towels looked much better than blue ones would have). Neither of us had a job to speak of, with the exception of Tom’s brief stint as a dog walker that paid almost nothing and cracked the skin on the soles of his feet so severely that they bled. I became increasingly controlling and he became increasingly helpless until finally we were more parent and child than anything else. He cheated, I watched The Golden Girls all day and got fat, and when he broke up with me he tricked me into keeping the dog even though I told him I wanted never to be responsible for another living thing again. Luckily, she has turned out to be the light of my life, so I figure I came out ahead in that one.
Last night I was at E.S.’s apartment and we were making out and all I wanted was to get the sex over with so that we could eat the cookie dough I’d brought.
I worry that my priorities are misplaced.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 6:03 p.m., March 2, 2002
At first the only people who read my blog were friends to whom I sent the Web address. But then I learned that if I went to other people’s blogs and left comments, they would come to my blog, and sometimes they would link to it from their blogs, which would in turn direct their readers to me, or at least those among their readers who had taste. The instant I realized this I became a shameless sycophant, leaving unctuous comments on every blog I visited, even the ones I loathed because their authors misused apostrophes or were more attractive than me. More people started reading my blog, and even more people started reading it when I started writing about all the casual sex I was having in between dates. I was glad I had decided to post under a pen name—a play on the name of the eponymous hero of Marlowe’s Tragedie of Doctor Faustus, about a learned man who sells his soul to the devil for a stick of gum—because Faustus, M.D., was able to write all sorts of things about the men I was going out with that I could never have allowed myself to say.
I blogged about L., for example, whom I adored before I met him because his online profile used the word “trendmongering” and referred favorably to television psychic Miss Cleo. His e-mails were charming and funny and had the panache that I knew would be the hallmark of my future husband’s every communication. Then I met him and he was so prissy I wanted to shove him into the Hudson River. “I don’t think anyone has felt such disappointment,” I wrote, “since Madame Curie realized that radium wasn’t all fun and games.”
I blogged about the above-mentioned E.S., with whom I ate cookie dough and had spectacular sex but who ruined everything one morning by calling me his boyfriend. I shut my eyes, hoping that he would vanish into thin air while I wasn’t looking, but when I opened them again he was still there, so I gave him a sickly smile and pretended I hadn’t noticed. I worried that he would figure out I was actually sleeping with every third man in Manhattan (and every fifth man in Queens), and, indeed, after one particularly active weekend, he got a funny look on his face when he saw how far the pile of condoms in my drawer had dwindled, but luckily I was able to distract him by baking him a strawberry-rhubarb pie. E.S. was cute and funny and smart but ultimately kind of boring and therefore ineligible to be my soul mate. I realized that the reason I kept telling him the same stories over and over again was that I had nothing else to say to him, so I added “stimulating” to the “cute, smart, and funny” checklist and kept looking. I didn’t mention any of this to E.S., as I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or cut off my access to the spectacular sex.
I blogged about K.T., with whom I had a fabulous lunch date and who then revealed that he was a sex addict. It was unclear to me whether he wanted to date me or not, but I gushed on my blog about how not only was he handsome but he also knew when to use the three-period ellipsis and when to use the four-period ellipsis and about how his failure to ask me for my hand in marriage on the spot obviously meant that no one would ever love me. I left out the part about his being a sex addict because I was ashamed that he was hooked on the stuff and still didn’t go to bed with me. In the end it turned out that he did not want to date me, although that was okay, as by the time he told me this he had gained twenty pounds, every one of which he wore badly.
This afternoon I went on a date with a guy I met through planetout.com. He sent me a charming e-mail that contained no grammatical errors, so I had high hopes. The first several minutes went well; he was cute and smart and possibly funny (I couldn’t quite tell but there were promising glimmers). Then he mispronounced the word “cache.”
I wish I could let it not matter. But I also wish I had telekinetic powers and were best friends with Queen Noor of Jordan, and I don’t seem to have gotten very far with those. I left as soon as I could.
—The Search for Love in Manhattan, 12:47 a.m., June 10, 2002
What is wrong with these men? I asked the universe silently. All I wanted was somebody who was gorgeous, hysterically funny, a towering genius, a master of sparkling repartee, fabulously wealthy, blond, multilingual (my dream was that he would speak eight languages but I was willing to settle for five, as long as he could punctuate correctly in all of them), and possessed of beautifully shaped teeth. I wouldn’t even have to trick him into thinking that I was just as perfect as he was, because simply being with him would wipe out my faults as utterly as if they were the city of Carthage or Jennifer Grey’s old nose. Was that so much to ask?
It is easy to see in retrospect that what I longed for was not a boyfriend but a version of me without my defects—a man in whom I could see myself as flawless, a man whose jokes always caused riotous laughter instead of sometimes falling flat, whose German was fluent instead of passable, who actually knew everything instead of pretending to and then Googling it when he got home. He would make no mistakes and he would not hate himself.
But at the time none of this was apparent to me; all I knew was that everyone I went out with was catastrophically deficient in some fundamental way—his personality, his politics, his shoes. I began to think that the man I was looking fo
r didn’t exist.
And then I met H.N.
Tonight I have a date with a fellow named H.N., who got in touch with me after reading my blog. We have been IMing over the last few days and I have been so charmed and delighted that I know I am in real trouble. We discussed the fact that we were trying to manage our expectations of each other and failing miserably. He gallantly volunteered not to bathe for two days before our first meeting, so as to put some disappointment into the mix right from the beginning; I said in turn that I would pick my nose and be rude to the waitstaff. Still, even with those controls in place, I’m not sure either of us will be able to handle realizing that the other is actually mortal.
The reason I am able to blog about him now is that he volunteered to stop reading my blog because, he said, he didn’t want me to have to censor myself.
Who could not love this man? I mean, to deny himself what must surely be one of the greatest joys available to humankind—reading my pathetically neurotic account of my pathetically neurotic life—so as to allow me to express myself freely—that’s true kindness.