Kissing Oscar Wilde
Page 13
21.Caleb has often made sly references to the fact that I tend to exclusively date and be interested in notably physically attractive people. I did not realize or acknowledge this was true until I was twenty-eight and found myself following Leigh back to her apartment under the pretense of songwriting two days after she’d smoked crack and gotten a matching tattoo that said Badville on her inner thigh with a bearded, bike-riding bass-player whom she’d dated and broken up with in four separate explosions of dishonesty in the past six months. This woman is insane, I thought as she shooed her roommate’s puggle off her frameless twin mattress and peeled off her pants. She was, but she also looked like Arwen the Elf Princess as played by the impossible brunette lovechild of Edie Sedgwick and Brigitte Bardot.
22.This was the height of my femmiest phase, when I would regularly do full makeup and put on heels to do things like go to the drugstore or catch a 7AM flight.
23.My first book of poetry was published in 2009. Shortly after, I began touring some of the nation’s biggest poetry venues, and I became instantly cool. As this happened, Caleb told me I was famous, and I told him I wasn’t.
24.Even with European notions of personal space, this was not quite an achievable task.
25.French pen/stage names were way cooler than American. Other favorites were (in translation): Molotov Cocteau, Mister Lady, and Spring 2004.
26.This pattern was easy to recognize because these were the same two interpersonal states my father had oscillated between my whole life.
27.I wasn’t sure if I believed him. It was almost impossible for me to understand any of the French poetry I heard. In conversation, I could piece together most exchanges from context, but when words started playing around with expectations and connotations and metaphor, I found myself quickly in the dark. Add to that the undying French poetic affinity for surrealistic imagery, and it was hopeless.
28.When we first arrived in Barcelona and Julian had declared to our host that he was “ecstatic” to perform at Poetry Slam Barcelona at Tinta Roja, Dareka rolled his eyes and remarked† that he was acting like a “typical American.” One European stereotype about Americans was apparently that we were wide-eyed, emotionally hyperbolic, and somewhat naïve.
† Ecstatic? Why are you ecstatic? Do you even know what that word means? You win one billion euros, then you are ecstatic. You fall into a swimming pool full with naked movie stars dipped in butter, then you are ecstatic. You find the cure for AIDS, then you are ecstatic. You perform at Tinta Roja, you are pleased, and you say, ‘Thank you, I am going to perform,’ and you do it.
29.I found it strange that this was the first time I’d thought about Louis since I’d arrived in Europe, especially since just two weeks prior I was certain I was in love with him. I made a mental note to consider what this might mean about him and me or me and love.
30.My go-to question at an event like this.
31.I learned that this was not rosé wine but rather white wine mixed with cassis, which was a common Bourgogne drink.
32.A Kurt Vonnegut reference I was pretty sure he didn’t catch.
33.He’d been on a bewildering Mariah Carey kick the entire tour.
34.It had apparently only recently become illegal in France to smoke indoors, and one of the things I remembered most vividly from my trip in 2006 was the thick smoky air in every single bar and café. The new law was evidently a point of much grumbling among the young, artistic, and beautiful French.
35.I was reading De Profundis at the time, which I’d downloaded on the iPad a friend and patron had given me before this tour.
36.The final stanza, which I didn’t know at the time, is And all men kill the thing they love,/ By all let this be heard,/ Some do it with a bitter look,/ Some with a flattering word,/ The coward does it with a kiss,/ The brave man with a sword!
37.This view, he told us with a grin, had led to many a first kiss with many a young lady.
38.This detail may be an apocrypha of memory.
39.Valentine, not anatomical.
40.As long as we’ve been friends, whenever Caleb and I go places together, it seems like I’m always getting yelled at by someone for doing something I oughtn’t. Caleb hates getting yelled at, and so rarely does things he’s afraid he oughtn’t. One of the reasons he mostly shoots self-portraits and portraits of me, in fact, is because he hates asking permission and hates being reprimanded for not asking permission.
41.Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were acquaintances of Jacob Epstein and saw him when he came to Paris to place his angel on Oscar Wilde’s grave.
42.I noticed that Louis had paraphrased the line he told me was Wilde’s epitaph.
43.Epstein’s angel originally included a penis, which was so badly vandalized it was removed.
44.Later, when a Dylan-obsessed friend saw the photos Caleb took from this evening, she made several rapid succession Don’t Look Back jokes.
45.Incidentally, Dareka did not drink alcohol at all, or do any drugs. At bars he ordered Coca-Cola, which came in 330ml woman-shaped glass bottles.
46.I had been trying to cut down on my drinking for about a year. By “trying to,” I might mean, “thinking about.” Sometimes, while drinking, I talked about quitting drinking entirely. It wasn’t good for a body, and I didn’t want to go out like Kerouac after all. When I mentioned this intention to Louis, he expressed his disapproval. It’s not that I like drinking, he said, drinking. I belieeeeeeve in drinking. Eye flash. Grin.
47.When I’d said this to Louis, he’d said, Well, that’s some philosophical garbage. That all sounds rhetorically enlightened and all, but the reality is, you have a Self. You know that.
48.In Amsterdam, before Caleb joined us, Julian and I had spent an evening drinking Grolsch and eating sausages and potatoes in a pot-smoke-filled living room where our three white Dutch hosts repeatedly said the N word just to watch the two Americans jump and blanche
49.I remember when I was nine† and realized I had consciousness. I remember vividly remembering just a couple years earlier when I had merely existed without being able to self-reflect. This terrified me. The ability to self-reflect I assumed was my soul. I assumed this meant that my soul had a beginning and therefore would have an end.
† See footnote 8.
50.The purchase of the blazer, and the exchange with Caleb, actually happened earlier at a thrift store in Reims, but it fit better into the narrative here. The account of the purchase of Shiva takes no license.
51.I’m ninety percent positive that the restaurant, just down the hill from the band’s practice space, was one I’d gone to with Thade in 2006. Multiple landmarks, a memorably awkward building shape, and uniquely tasty pommes frites corroborate this belief.
52.It is quite true that I have worshiped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. From the moment we met, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you, you were still present in my art. —O.W., The Picture of Dorian Gray
53.The day before, in the Pompidou, I’d put the heel of my left cowboy boot up on a chair to try to readjust my bones’ alignment and the guard reprimanded me in four languages, much to Caleb’s mortification.
54.The fact that Gertrude Stein associated genius with masculinity, and that Alice was largely relegated to the role of hostess at the couple’s famous salons, entertaining the wives in the next room while the “men” debated, is sometimes difficult for me to reconcile and at other times makes perfect sense.
55.This notebook is where I started to draft many of the words that became this book.
56.Of course, the “you” in the poem was Louis, originally, though I had barely thought about him in weeks. Now here I was, giving it to Adélaïde, intending it to be for Adélaïde. It was weird for a moment, then I decided to let it
not be weird.
57.Or what if circumstances (money, work, etc.) kept us tragically apart? What if all we had was that/this one night in Paris?
58.In the picture, I’m conspicuously leering at Adélaïde. Caleb is out of focus behind me, though bright-eyed and actually smiling.